Beebe at Gal

An archipelago where no human beings live but a small colony of convicts; where only pirates, adventurers, and scientific expeditions have sojourned, where flora and fauna of vanished geological ages flourish in greater abundance and variety than in any other spot on the earth's surface--that describes the Galapagos, locale of William Beebe's latest scientific and literary exploits. His new book* issued under the auspices of the New York Zooelogical Society, is a saga of man, the ever-curious, in a garb that fits the tale, replete with gorgeous color plates, beautiful photography, 12 point Scotch Roman type, and a style that would make scientists of morons. One of the publishing triumphs of the decade!

The Expedition. The book is a chronicle of the Harrison Williams Expedition in the Spring of 1923. Williams is the Cleveland -New York public utilities capitalist who financed the expedition and donated the Noma, his luxurious 250-foot steam yacht. He went along. Beebe was director of scientific work. Dr. William Morton Wheeler, distinguished Harvard entomologist, was a member of the party. There was also a physician and a surgeon, a game-fisher, a curator of dredging and diving, a chief hunter, a marine artist, a photographer and cinematographer (John Tee-Van) a preparateur, a taxidermist, a scientific artist and a historian, the last two of whom were women, Isabel Cooper and Ruth Rose. A few of the chapters are by Miss Rose, but the bulk of the volume is Beebe's.

They left New York March 1, 1923, and returned May 16, having steamed nine thousand miles, and crossed the Equator eight times. Actually less than 100 hours was spent on the islands themselves. It may seem absurd that a scientific expedition should spend so limited a time at its objective. The reader soon learns why. The Galapagos are all but uninhabitable. There is little or no water to be had on the islands. Water both for the boilers and for drinking and personal use had to be carried along. The Noma watered and coaled at Panama, sailed for the Galapagos, 800 miles away, and was able to stay only three weeks. It had to return to Panama for the essentials, and then came back for another nine days.

But though brief, the expedition realized all its objectives. For the Zooelogical Park and Museum of Natural History it collected 150 reptiles, 200 fish, 3,000 insects, hundreds of jars, vials and slides of specimens, and a most complete record of the expedition by watercolor, oil, pen and ink, photograph, film and notes. Many of the living species brought home have never been in captivity before, and many were entirely new to science.

The Islands. The Galapagos (Spanish for turtles) are a group of some 60 islands, directly on the equator, 700 miles west of the coast of Ecuador, to which they belong. They vary in size from Albemarle, 75 miles long, to tiny nameless rocks. Most of them contain the craters of extinct volcanoes, and on one or two, eruptions occasionally occur. There is almost no arable land. They are mainly covered with lava and cinders, and the typical vegetation is cacti and other spiny plants. No one has ever penetrated to the central crater of Indefatigable, an island only 25 miles in diameter. The lava cuts to pieces any leather, the bushes tear one's clothes and flesh. Five miles is a monumental journey in such terrain. One would think that such deserts offered little invitation to the zooelogist, but not so. The expedition confined its attentions to the smaller islands where more complete surveys could be made. There is a wealth of marine life in the tidewater along the beaches--sea-lions, black marine iguanas (Amblyrhyncus cristatus), a tremendous assortment of highly colored fish, shrimps, crabs, eels, octopi, sea-urchins, etc. The birds are legion--some of the rarest species--flightless cormorants, antarctic penguins even north of the Equator, blue-and green-footed boobies, scarlet-pouched frigate-birds. Scores of varieties of mockingbirds, finches, gulls, hawks, pelicans, herons, shearwaters, tropic-birds. The insect life is also plentiful.

The mammalia are scarcely represented. There are a few wild goats and donkeys, descendants of domestic animals left by various human visitors. But the truly unique and characteristic forms of the islands are reptilian--the present-day representatives of the Cretaceous, perhaps even earlier periods. There is, of course, the giant tortoise, for which the group is named, but it is practically extinct. There were multitudes of them in the 16th and 17th centuries. When Charles Darwin spent his famous month there in the Beagle (1835), he found them plentiful in all the islands. But they have been killed in hundreds by the Ecuadorians for their oil, and carried off by scientists. They were rare in 1906. Beebe's party, though constantly on the lookout, found only one in the whole archipelago--a small one weighing but 42 pounds. It died a week later. In the New York Zooelogical Park there is at present a Galapagos tortoise 2&l/2 inches long, weighing 268 pounds, and estimated to be 500 years old.

The most prominent of the existing Galapagean reptiles is the giant land iguana (Conolophus subscristatus), cousin of the marine iguana. It is brilliantly colored, red and yellow, reaches the length of four feet, with a mouthful of sharp teeth, is more vicious than the Amblyrhyncus. It also is gradually disappearing. Eighteen specimens were brought back alive.

The Galapagos insistently demand speculation about past ages. While all the islands have a superficial resemblance, the species frequently differ widely. Many are unknown outside of one island. There are striking variations in size, musculature, etc., from the nearest mainland relations, caused by the selective influence of this uncanny environment. There are three theories of the origin of the Gaapagos: 1) They were uplifted in recent geologic times as separate volcanic peaks, never connected with each other or the continent. 2) While never joined to the Americas, they were at one time a single island, separated by submergence into separate peaks. 3) They were not only interconnected, but also continuous with the mainland before the subsidence.

The Author. William Beebe is 46 years old, a trained zooelogist, but without higher academic degrees. His special field is ornithology, and since 1899 he has been curator of birds at the New York Zooelogical Park. His voyages have been uncountable. There is no corner of the planet where he has not searched for living treasure. (For a further account of Prof. Beebe--by John Farrar, see Page 15.)

*GALAPAGOS: WORLD'S END--William Beebe--Putnam--($9.00).