Part 1

DAVID GOES VOYAGING

BY DAVID BINNEY PUTNAM

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS, AND DECORATIONS BY ISABEL COOPER, DON DICKERMAN AND DWIGHT FRANKLIN

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1925

Copyright, 1925 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

First printing, September, 1925 Second printing, October, 1925 Third printing, November, 1925 Fourth printing, November, 1925 Fifth printing, November, 1925

Made in the United States of America

To GRANDMA AND GRANDPA BUB

A SOLEMN FOREWORD

Mr. George Putnam has asked me to write a solemn foreword to David’s book. An ideal foreword cannot be too brief, should never be in the nature of an apology or a panegyric,—and in fact any direct reference to the subject of the volume in which it is printed is in the nature of redundancy. Its only use, as far as I can see, is a chance to exploit some idea of the foreword’s author which he can find no opportunity to print elsewhere.

Pragmatism alone was the stimulus of my suggestion that eleven-year-old David Putnam go on one leg of the Arcturus expedition—a Squeersian acid test of sorts. Also a selfish desire to see how my blasé enthusiasms had changed since I thrilled at my first palm tree and my first dolphin.

I wanted to see the immediate result of a temporary shift from school to skyline, from books to boobies, of the putting of volcanoes into vacations, and of the working out of a sublimated hooky. Of the immediate personal reactions between David, myself and our gorgeous environment I can speak only with sheer enjoyment. Neither of us ever tired of exeleutherostomizing at every new thrill.

As to the sifting of all these impressions, their reclothing in words and phrases, I am looking forward with keen interest to reading David’s book when it is published, to see what has been gained or lost, in this, one of the most severe tests of the working of a human mind.

William Beebe, Steam Yacht Arcturus.

CONTENTS

PAGE David Goes Voyaging 3 We Start on Our Cruise 13 The Galápagos Islands 23 Tower Island 31 The Volcano 41 A Day Ashore 47 The Diving Helmet 53 The Shipwrecked Man 59 Hood Island 65 A Day on Shipboard 73 Dredging 79 Panama 85 Cocos Island 91 May 20th, 1925 99 Weeks at Sea 105 Tagus Cove 111 The Giant Devil Fish 119 Molten Lava 125 Song to Davie Putnam 131

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE “I Lifted a Frigate Bird Off His Nest” Frontispiece Using a Net from the Boom 4 David and an Albatross 6 In the Pulpit at the Bow 8 These Lizards Bite if They Get a Chance 26 The Frigate Birds are Unbelievably Tame 32 Diving in a Rock Pool at Darwin Bay 36 The First View of the Volcano on Albemarle 42 In the Diving Helmet, Standing in Front of Shark Cage 54 Dwight Franklin’s Pirate Sketch 60 Examining a Haul 74 On Deck with “Pinkie” the Penguin 76 Inspecting a Deep-Sea Haul 86 The Pirate 88 The Arcturus at Cocos Island 92 Ashore at Chatham Bay, Cocos Island 94 The Birthday Party 100 Don’s Birthday Card 102 With “Fury,” Don’s Famous Cutlass 104 Chiriqui, Dyna, the Dog-House and David 108 Reading from Left to Right, David, Don and Bozo, the Young Sea-Lion 112 Entering Tagus Cove, Albemarle Island 114 The 46-Pound Tuna 120 The 18-Foot Devil-Fish on the Deck of the Arcturus 122 Where the Molten Lava Poured into the Sea 128

DAVID GOES VOYAGING

Mr. Beebe lets me call him Uncle Will, even if he is the head of this big expedition. He was awfully nice to let me go on part of it.

I had my twelfth birthday on the Arcturus down on the Equator. And I know how lucky I was to be taken along. It was great fun. And I think I learned a lot, though perhaps it will hurt my school work, being away and everything. Anyway, Mother and I joined the Arcturus—Uncle Will’s ship—at Panama. We spent nearly three months in the Pacific Ocean, studying sea life and visiting seven uninhabited desert islands. And I promised Dad to write a little story about it all. He told me to try to tell what we did and what I saw just like fellows telling each other about their adventures. That’s pretty hard to do.

Then when I got back they let me make this little book out of what I wrote most every day on the boat. It’s meant for boys and girls. Mother helped me fix up the spelling and make the grammar right.

The writing took quite a long time, and I think being a naturalist would be more fun than being a writer. Anyway, my stories help me remember the fun we had on the Arcturus. I don’t see how it could have been much better.

We arrived in Colon from New York and Havana early in the morning of March 27th, and after our inspection, Capt. Lane took us in his own launch over to the Arcturus—a high white ship which was lying across the harbor.

This Arcturus, the boat on which we are to take our trip, is named for the great star which sailors use as a guiding star in sailing strange seas. She was fitted out by men who are interested in the New York Zoological Society, which has the wonderful Zoo in the Bronx. Among the living animals collected for the Zoo are albatrosses, flightless cormorants (a very rare bird), boobies and penguins. A great many specimens were to go to the American Museum of Natural History and fish to the Aquarium at the Battery. She is fitted with a whole outfit for a scientific expedition. At first sight she looked like a freighter, high sided and built for cargo, with many booms and cables and equipment for hoisting and moving things.

There are two laboratories in the forward part, the lower one fitted with bottles, microscopes, modelling clay and all sorts of glass jars in which to preserve specimens. The upper room is more of a library with reference books and text books on all subjects about oceanography, for this is an expedition mostly to study about the sea and the strange creatures in it. Also there is a chemical laboratory so that the blood of fishes can be examined.

The bridge, or main part of the ship, is built up of five decks, and the members of the expedition have cabins here. The crew’s sleeping quarters are in the after part of the ship, and many of the men have hammocks hung up under the awning there, in which they sleep at night, or lie around in the day time.

On the port side of the ship there is a special boom that goes out over the side. On ships the word “port” means left, and “starboard” means right. You never say back or front, but “aft” or “forward.”

This boom has two railings tied to the bottom plank so one can walk out there and fish or haul in nets or go down the rope ladder. Sometimes when the ship rolls a lot the end goes right under the water. And out from the bow a pulpit is hung, a strong wire cage-like thing in which we can stand for harpooning or catching floating objects as we pass. To get down to the pulpit you climb down a rope ladder. When it’s rough it’s pretty exciting.

In the forward part of the ship there are two rooms fitted out as shops, one belonging to Bill Merriam the general handy man, who always mends the nets, shapes a new dredge, puts another seat in one of the rowboats, makes a lobster pot or fixes the motor boats. The other is a workshop for Serge the taxidermist and for Dwight Franklin the sculptor. Dwight makes wax moulds and plaster casts of fishes and preserves them, as well as making drawings and paintings.

Isabel Cooper is the scientific artist. She has been on many other expeditions and made many wonderful pictures. On this trip she did over two hundred water color drawings of fish.

The Arcturus has two huge cables, one seven miles long, for hauling in the big trawls. These are put down over the side and held out while the ship goes slowly along at half speed. Sometimes the cable goes out as much as three miles and often the sea is over a mile deep below us.

There are thirty-eight in the crew and eighteen members of the expedition. Each night and morning the nets are put over, for a surface haul and for a deep one a sounding is taken—a curious lead on a wire, weighted down with an iron weight which forces the sound lead down to the sea bottom and brings up a sample of the bottom, so we can see if it is muddy or rocky or sandy. Each time the weight automatically drops off when the bottom is reached, because the sounding wire isn’t strong enough to pull it up.

After the nets are out for an hour they are hauled in and the contents put into tubs of water. Sometimes the whole net has only a pint glass full of tiny, tiny fish which have been brought up from a depth of over a mile or two miles.

On the boat my room mate was Dr. W. K. Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History, who is also Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Columbia. Pretty nice, I think, for a real professor to let a twelve-year-old boy bunk with him! Everyone called him just “Greg” and liked him a lot because he always is so nice and so interested in his work. I think Greg would rather dissect a fish than do almost anything. I know I’d just about rather catch them!

My bunk was right next to where the smokestack went up from the engine room, and the wall was pretty hot. So most of the time, except when it rained, I slept on deck. Really, although we crossed the Equator twenty-one times it was not so hot while we were at sea. Lots of times, right on the Equator, it was cool enough to be comfortable wearing a sweater.

WE START ON OUR CRUISE

For a day after our arrival on the Arcturus we waited in Colon while the crew shifted coal from one bunker to another because it was getting so hot in the forward one there was fear of its catching on fire.

And on the very first day while the rest of the crowd were ashore seeing the city of Colon, which is at the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal, I went with Serge, the Russian taxidermist to a little beach across the bay. We took nets with us and were lucky to catch some wonderful butterflies, several very bright blue fish and some unusual shells.

Next day we started through the Canal early, and steamed along up to the first lock. This is one of the finest and highest of all the locks, Gatun, and here also is the great spillway, which empties out into the Atlantic Ocean from Gatun Lake. The concrete walls and the little railroad engines which pulled us through the locks all seem so simple and like toys that you can hardly believe they would be able to take a big ship through. For there are only one or two men to be seen the whole time and one in an engine house turns a handle and the locks open, fill with water, take us in, lift us up, and then set us out upon a higher level into another lock, or the lake. The little engines have cogged wheels and run along up and down the grades like tractor engines.

In some of the locks we saw garfish, like eels a little, with long sharp beaks or bills in front of their heads. And at many places along the bank of the river or lake we saw big crocodiles lying out in the sun.

In the afternoon we were in Panama, a city built by the Spaniards when the first city of Old Panama was destroyed by the great English Pirate, Morgan. We drove out to this old city six miles away. There are only ruins there now, but the walls of the old cathedrals still stand, and the square tower can be seen very far away. Morgan attacked the Spaniards here after he had crossed the Isthmus with a few hundred men. His men were nearly starved and were worn out with the hard work to get across but they were determined to take this city for there was much gold and jewels here and the pirates wanted to win it. Also the Spaniards were afraid of them and after a first defeat in the open plains outside the city, they ran away.

In the sea wall around the new city of Panama there is a prison, and at one time there were terrible torture chambers and undersea dungeons there in which the early Spaniards kept their prisoners. It is called Chirique Prison.

Next morning we were sailing along on the calm Pacific Ocean which Balboa discovered in 1513 from a high peak on the Isthmus of Panama. By night time we had put over the big Peterson trawl net and had brought in many small fish ... salpas and many kinds of tiny deep sea fish. Everybody ran to see what was in the net and looked at things through microscopes and immediately sat down to identify them and classify them. One person taking the little fish-like ones, another the jelly fish, another shrimps and Uncle Will, the director, taking anything that was very unusual or a new species.

The next day when the big net was put over, we caught a lot of different things, tiny fish, glacous, salpa and others. At night the deep net again brought in new ones and many of the first ones again except that many of these specimens were bright red. It is queer but many of the deep sea things are red like the shrimps, or else have the power to change to red, like a small squid which was white one minute and bright red the next, when he seemed to get angry and scurry around.

One of these very little fish, named argyropelecus has lovely silver sides, beautiful colors, and small spots which shine and almost sparkle.

Another fish, less than an inch long, oneirodes, is the only specimen ever to have been seen alive. It was still wiggling a little bit when the net was brought up. Most of these fish die when they are brought to the surface, for under the water there is a great pressure on them and when this is released by coming to the surface they explode or all come to pieces.

One night we were on the gangway, Uncle Will, Ruth Rose, Serge and myself and all of a sudden a great big squid came up and made a kind of “Ha—aa.” He tried his best to take hold of the net with which Serge tried to grab at him, and put his huge tentacles out of the water. He was a sickly whitish color. When we brought the smaller ones caught in a trawl net into the aquarium later however they changed color several times, turning from this whitish to a bright red as quick as could be. Squids can squirt out an inky liquid which discolors the water so that they cannot be seen by their enemies. This is used in making sepia ink.

For an hour or two in the afternoon I had my line over and at sunset time it hooked a 32-pound dolphin fish, a coryphinea. He was fifty-six inches long, a lovely bluish green color, yellow tail, green back and blue sides. During the day we had seen many of them swimming two or three feet beneath the surface around our bow, and darting right near under the pulpit. The crew had had one hooked but lost it; and Dr. Cady also had one hooked.

In pulling it up over the boom there was great fun and excitement for it was heavy, slippery and three men helped before landing it.

THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS

These islands were first called the Islands of Tortoises, and they have been known for a hundred years or more. There are about sixty of them and they are located mostly on or south of the equator six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador to which country they belong. They are volcanic islands with lava rock and dry sandy dust. Very little else except cactus or scrubby bushes grows on most of them.

Our first landing was at Seymour Island, April fourth. This is a small flat island just off Indefatigable, one of the bigger islands 3,000 feet high. There is lots of cactus and prickly bushes on the steeper part of Seymour, but near the shore the rocks are bare and black and very hard, where we saw our first sea lions lying about sunning themselves just out of touch of the waves.

In some places on the cliff there are big streaks of reddish color in the rocks, like iron rust. All along these cliffs and at the edge of the water and on the rocks we saw many birds—Galápagos gulls, petrels, shearwaters, boobies, two small green herons, a great blue heron and many little gulls. Pelicans flew about and even tried to land on the rowboat which went ashore.

Of course at first I didn’t know the names of all the birds, but Uncle Will or someone else helped. When they weren’t too busy they would tell me the names and pretty soon I got so I knew most of them. I think by now I know the names of nearly all the birds in that region.

Anyway, I like birds. At home I am trying to learn to know the names and I have a pretty good collection of nests and some eggs. One nest is a camp robber’s nest, which a ranger in Yellowstone Park gave to me. Then I have a weaver bird’s nest from India and a good many others. Dad is letting me have a little room all to myself for my collection. It will be like a little Museum. Things will go in it like my drum from New Guinea, which Frank Hurley gave me, and a head hunter’s sword from Colombo.

Uncle Will told Mother “Look out or he will become a scientist,” pretending he thought that pretty bad.

Well, I’d like to be only Mother says first I must learn a lot at school if I want to take trips. Dad says if I do well he and Carl Dunrud—that is a forest ranger friend of ours in Montana—will take me on a big packhorse trip in British Columbia. I have been on two trips something like that before, and then if I am lucky perhaps I’ll go on a trip on a schooner up to Greenland in a couple of summers.

The dry land is full of big land lizards, four or five feet long called Conolophus. They scurry about over the dry ridges and then run under the queer evergreeny bushes. They try to bite but if you pick them up by their tails they cannot reach your hand and you can carry them all around. They have very bright colors, yellowish underneath, red heads and close to, look like pictures of dragons only smaller. The little black water lizards do not bite and are almost gentle when you catch them.

There is another kind of lizard here, much smaller, with bright red heads and dull gray bodies.

These animals and birds and sea lions have seen so few people that they are not afraid at all and we went right up very close to many of them.

As it is right on the Equator the sun’s glare is very bright and so hot that for the first few days all of us were very badly sunburned and blistered; everybody was going around with sore shoulders and blistered legs and two or three even had their entire backs burned and sore.

The first night here Bill Merriam and Dr. Cady went ashore and caught a big female turtle that was going up the beach maybe to lay her eggs. Sea turtles come ashore, go way up a beach and bury their eggs in the dry sand. They leave them there till it is time for them to hatch. We saw many deep holes in the sand from which piles of eggs had hatched. They lay hundreds of eggs. When we were there the egg season was over. All we saw were shells.

TOWER ISLAND

Tower Island was our second landing. Early in the morning we had sighted a low strip of green, and by the time breakfast was over at half past seven we were already in the most protected little cove or harbor. It was almost closed to the outside ocean and was calm without any surf or big waves. At first when we came in we couldn’t see any beach for landing on or swimming, but pretty soon we saw one, a beautiful one hidden behind a small reef.

When we entered the harbor birds came and rested on the mast heads. Many of them stayed there or came back to it on and off all day. The whole rigging was full of boobies and frigate birds.

We saw three great rays too, at least fifteen feet across. Later on we caught a huge ray. They seem to fly under the water just below the surface. Every once in a while they flip themselves right out of the water and turn a complete somersault. Sometimes they do this three times in succession. One of the biggest ones we struck with our bow and neatly turned it over.

When we landed on the little beach we saw many of these frigate birds on their nests, boobies, gulls, and the cutest little doves. They seemed so tame. They were always fighting for each other’s twigs in their nests and as soon as a bird left her nest another bird came and stole a twig and flew away with it.

I lifted a frigate bird right off his nest, and then put him back and he never seemed to mind at all, just looked surprised. About the next time I picked up a frigate bird, I wasn’t quite so lucky. I wanted to lift him up to have a picture taken and he didn’t seem to like posing much more than I did. Anyway, he pecked me and I suppose that’s why I look so cross in the picture. They have big strong bills and this one got hold right in the lower part of my left leg. All the time, I was barelegged and wore shorts, which is the way everybody aboard dressed.

The frigate birds and boobies weigh about two and a half pounds. The former have not webbed feet like the boobies and therefore they cannot catch fish as easily for they only swoop down and dip them out of the water; but the other dives right in and sometimes out of sight for several feet underneath and swims with his webbed feet. Frigate birds steal the other’s fish. Both birds have tremendously long wings and sail in the sky with a long, long spread.