Beebe: W11illi(fbis Galapagos Expedition


    We calculated that with our shortage of supplies it would not
be advisable to stay long at Tagus Cove, but our few hours there
yielded a rich harvest. Some of the party explored the slopes
adjacent to the Cove, finding quantities of nests and eggs of the
black finches (Geospiza), and other indigenous birds, besides insects,
lizards and botanical specimens. Others climbed the steep cliffs
around the Cove, carrying with them, by enormous exertion, motion-
picture and other cameras, plates and equipment up the almost
perpendicular slopes. In this Cove we secured live penguins and
flightless cormorants, as well as the nests and eggs of the latter.
Boobies, pelicans and terns were abundant and nesting.
    We left Tagus and steamed toward Chatham, crossing the
equator four times in twenty-six hours. Early the next morning we
anchored at Wreck Bay which boasts the only lighthouse in the
Archipelago, visible for four miles, which is not bad for a gasoline
light on a long pole. Nothing else is to be seen of human occupancy
in this Bay except a square white shack where the lighthouse keeper
lives, and a very shaky pier. The pipeline of the pilot book did not
exist. The lighthouse keeper, an Ecuadorian who said he was abl.o
Captain of the Port, came aboard with an old Englishmnan, and we
were told that the only way to obtain fresh water was to have it
brought in casks on the back of oxen from a distance of lixvc miles
up in the mountains. As we needed forty tons of water, this was an
impossible way of obtaining it, and the priospct was very gloomy.
The o0d Englishman who told us he was "Johnson of' London"
and
who had Ived so long in Wreck Bay that lie had almost forgotten
his native tongue, volunteered to pilot us around the island to
Fresh Water Bay where he was sure we could get a suficient supply.
So, having stopped hardly long enough to anchor, we got under way
again, and cruised around to the Bay with the pfromising name.
    Here we found two cascades of fresh water, one of good size,
which plunged over high cliffs and poured into the sea. Against thie
foot of the cliffs surged a tremendous surf, which kept all small boats
a hundred feet oil shore. The Bay was such only by courtesy, for
there was almost no incurve to the forbidding coast line and it was
on the weather side of the island. There was no bottom a quarter mile
off shore, and the Captain (lared approach no closer. So we watched
the tantalizing spectacle of quantities of fresh water running to
waste in a spot which for us was utterly inaccessible.


1923]


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