BEARING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN ACROSS DESERT SANDS Donkeys are rare and strong women are numerous; so two of the regular dusky Amazonian porters of the Cape Verde Archipelago accompanied a bird collector of the Blossom and his native guide across St. Vincent (see, also, illustration, page 13). OUT FOR A LARK (AMMOMANES) ON A DESERT ISLE Nearly a century ago Charles Darwin collected rare and strange larks and other birds in the Cape Verde Islands. These are well represented in the Blossom collections. Brown boobies make their home on the top of this tiny sandstone islet, where several members of the expedition almost lost their lives, near Boa Vista, in the Cape Verde Islands (see text, page 18) during the rainy season, we found queer little grebes, long-toed jacanas, herons and egrets. Vultures and hawks loitered about the native slaughter pens. In the bush there were hornbills, weaver birds of many sorts, the bateleur eagle, warblers, titmice, doves, sparrows of many kinds, red-breasted shrikes, parrots, hoopoes, owls and nightjars, and queer kingfishers, from the size of one's thumb to the size of one's shoe. A lowland interior swamp, the Tamna, sheltered tree-ducks, rails, lapwings, coursers, and shore birds of various species. We obtained specimens of the African painted snipe, various species of rollers, cuckoos of many colors, woodpeckers, and brilliantly glittering African sunbirds. A SHEIK OF SENEGAMBIA I made a trip into the interior, where several of our men were collecting birds at Thiès, a village of about 13,000 natives and a few French officials and merchants. The chief of the place arranged native Ouolof and Mauretanian dances for us and gave me much information about native customs (see page 33). "Yes, we are Mohammedans," he said. in his best French, "but only the middle classes have more than one wife. The poor man can support only one, and the upper-class men know that a man can get along with only one woman at a time, but the middle-class men marry several times. If a man has more than one wife, he must have four. Two wives fight; if there be three, two fight the third; and four is the smallest number a man can have and maintain peace in the family!" "How do you choose your wives, and can you get divorces?" I asked "A young man talks to the father of the girl of his choice and pays him a sort of dowry, which consoles the family for the loss of the girl," answered this grizzled old sheik. "An ordinary wife is valued at the equivalent of twelve dollars; but a wife who can read, write, sing and dance, cook, and who has nice clothes, is worth sixty dollars. If a man and his wife want a divorce, they go before the commis A SOLEMN NEPHEW OF THE LAUGHING JACKASS Darwin's kingfisher, one of the rarest birds in the world, "hangs himself on a hickory limb" and spends his days on the desert isles of the Cape Verde group in pursuit of the wily grasshopper. sioner and he grants it; the husband pays the wife an amount equal to that her father received and she goes back to her people." SENEGAMBIAN BIG GAME Cuyler and Robert H. Rockwell, who went back into the interior to hunt big game in the Bondu country, found conditions somewhat different. They traveled inland with equipment and an interpretercook, Sorie Bah; secured a famous old hunter and his assistants as guides, with a couple of Senegalese soldiers to guard their equipment, and started for the banks of the Senegal and Gambia rivers, where camp was established (see page 33). Some of the native Mandingo chiefs and subchiefs here ran to six or seven wives and lived in considerable style in their thatched-roof houses. One chief, a graduate of a French college, had a modern flat-topped desk in his office, with a stenographer, who used the typewriter very efficiently, to handle the French correspondence which piled up regularly on the desk. Even though the game was scattered by the rains, the two hunters bagged some interesting specimens of the hartebeest, roan antelope, water-buck, bush-buck, harnessed antelope, Ward's and the bohor reedbucks, several kinds of the little duiker antelopes, wart-hogs, and other African mammals. Especially fortunate were they late one afternoon in hearing the coughing roar of a big male Gambian lion (Felis leo gambianus), which broke from the bush ahead of them up an open trail. Cuyler gave Rockwell, the more experienced hunter, the shot. The first two attempts, with sights at 300 yards, stirred the dust beyond the lion; the third, with sights slightly lowered and gun resting over Cuyler's powerful shoulders, struck the lion in his left eye, shattered his mastoid, and dropped him in his tracks, at a measured distance of 273 yards-a feat that. when related, impels the listener to tell the story of the lion tamer and the lyin' scoundrel! WE LEAVE AFRICA BEHIND But we have the lion skin-that's what we needed-and it is, we believe, the first of its kind ever brought back to America. THE ELUSIVE MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKEN Astern of the Blossom, this stormy petrel (little Peter) hopped along and walked on the water as successfully as did St. Peter in New Testament days. For centuries mariners believed that the bird never approached iand, and argued that it laid its egg at sea and carried it about under one wing until it hatched (see, also, illustration, page 26). We were sorry to leave the Senegambians at the end of our four and a half months in their territory, but we had interesting islands ahead. Our shipyard work had been slowly completed in Dakar, we had reconditioned the equipment and laid in new stores, and had discharged and sent home our first crew of turbulent college boys. They wrote to their home papers that they had left us "flat" and stranded in Africa. DOWN THE ATLANTIC Our first sailing master, Emery H. Gray, was put in a hospital at Dakar. In his place Capt. John Titta Vanzetti, formerly an officer in the Italian Navy, joined us as executive officer and navigator, and drove staunchly through with us for more than two years, industrious, friendly, companionable, to the end of the voyage. Director Rea, of the Cleveland Museum, had come across by steamer from Newport News to discuss our problems with us and take back to the States our mens. many packing cases and barrels of speciHe left the harbor on the giant collier Kina just as we pushed out from Dakar, late one afternoon. Three days and a fraction it had taken us to make the run from the Cape Verdes across to Africa, but from Africa back to São Vicente it took us a dozen, as we rocked and wallowed with light winds in the Guinea Current. We added three the Guinea Current. Caboverdeans to our crew and spent several weeks collecting on Santo Antão and São Vicente Islands and on the islets of the Rombos group. Down the Atlantic we went in November, eager to land on islands where rare. species of boobies, tropic-birds, terns, and men-of-war were to be found. DISCOMFORTS IN THE DOLDRUMS We were congratulating ourselves on the wonders of life under sail, when the northeast trades died out entirely and left us to be pitched and tossed about by the many counterseas of the doldrums MINING FOR MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS ON CIMA Simmons and Cuyler found this small petrel not carrying its single egg under its wing at sea (see illustration, page 25), but laying it under the soft soil of a sea-torn isle of the Cape Verde Archipelago. that mid-Atlantic area, stretching from South America across to Africa, muchly cursed by sailormen (see map, page 5). Here the warm air moves upward toward the fleecy clouds. Neither the northeast trades nor the southeast trades reach into this belt, and a sailing ship must depend on the occasional squalls which darken the clouds and beat down for a few moments, then pass on. Each of these pushes the ship a few miles, after which she rolls and pitches once more, and the weary mariner clings, sleepyeyed, to the rigging and prays for wind. OUT OF THE DOLDRUMS AND ACROSS THE By watching the direction from which the squalls came, we could usually trim the sails to catch the wind on the right tack, and we slowly circled for a week and eventually crept from the doldrums. The southeast trades now reached us and we sailed southward; but we were swinging so far to the west that we failed to make St. Paul Rocks, a group of islets inhabited by a few sea birds. We came about and beat back on a long tack which took us northeastward toward the edge of the doldrums. Around we came again, but the direction of the winds and the force of the equatorial current were too much for us. We were forced to give up the islets and once more strike southward. We crossed the Line at a merry clip, with the southern heavens bright with constellations new to us. We nursed the ship carefully along. jamming her into the wind as much as we dared; but it looked as if she would never get into the South Atlantic beyond the big eastern shoulder of Brazil. WE FAIL TO MAKE FERNANDO NORONHA We finally sighted the island of Fernando Noronha and slid a few miles past it on the leeward side. The wind, the rolling seas, and the equatorial current that raced for the West Indies were all against us, and we tried for several days |