Small houses, with thick walls of volcanic stone and roofs fashioned from flattened gasoline cans, are half buried in the cinder slopes overlooking St. Vincent's harbor (see pages 10-11). Thus does the dweller on this desert island escape the full blast of the tropical heat. the blast of wind-driven rain; he lost his head for a moment and put the wheel hard down. The Blossom lay broadside to the gale and the tremendous piling seas. Her lee rail was below the water, and the seas poured over her high weather rail as if over the proverbial half-tide rocks. The ship heeled so far that it seemed for a moment as if she must capsize. Then, wheel over, and away. Navigator Chantre clung to the tilting, sloughing deck and brought the wheel back, inch by inch, until she was hard down; and the Blossom came slowly about to face the gale. took Moses forward with him, and the two of them began taking in headsails. A great sea swept over the starboard bow, poured over them, and beat them about, as they clung to the foreshrouds. Tons on tons of water poured down the forecastle companionway, which had been left open in spite of warning. The boys did not have to be called a second time. They boiled on deck like drowning rats out of a hole and set about to help take in the topsails. For fifteen minutes it was touch and go, whether we should lose our masts or capsize before we could take in the heavy canvas; Cuyler, worth three men in a pinch, but the wind hauled a bit, we headed into PIPE SMOKING IS BECOMING FASHIONABLE AMONG THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS WOMEN These sturdy women porters of Porto Grande carry and balance on their heads all loads except their children, who usually ride astride one hip (see text, page 18). the gale, took in most of the sails, and then raced away before the storm. For days we beat under darkened, angry skies and were buffeted by gale after gale, with the wind howling at 80 miles and huge seas piling up behind and rolling down on us. The ship climbed each mountain of water swiftly and hung precariously for a moment between sea and sky before dropping away into a great yawning valley. At times the Blossom tossed like an eggshell; seas shook and poured over her in cascades. Water ran through the rudder well, worked into the cabin and hull, oozed into bunks, and soaked our clothing. THE FRINGE OF ATLANTIS with portholes closed that we stayed on deck, crawling under piles of sails to sleep fitfully. It is in mid-Atlantic that Atlantis, mythical continent of the sages, is believed by many to lie submerged. Man has not yet plumbed these depths in search for Plato's lost cities. Perhaps Atlantis does lie here, under pressure of the middle deep, with the great current of the Gulf Stream circling about it. We cannot tell, but we are just as much interested in the large, still area of Sargassum weed which lies above it. There had been adventure and romance here. Columbus entered the Sargasso Sea and must have been as perturbed as his crew when he sighted the weird and shifting masses of gulfweed which blanket the ocean in great patches of many acres, stretching beyond the horizon. For centuries this large area was believed to hold, in the center of its great tangle, all the derelicts of the sea, a graveyard of hopes outward bound, a "city of lost ships"! The throbbing of drums on Santiago Island urges supple maidens to undulate their grassy skirts and keep the older people singing the high-pitched "morna" and treading a serpentine dance. We eyed those fields from the quarterdeck of the Blossom on a fair day. Under a blazing sun we dipped rough masses of brown seaweed on to the decks, where it was pawed over for specimens. Hollow floats, or air bladders, hold the small patches of weed close to the surface. It has neither long tentacles nor strong ones with which to entangle passing ships. More than two years later we found, when we entered the corner of the Sargasso Sea in its southwestern area, between eastern Cuba and Bermuda, much thicker areas of the weed, as if it had drifted gradually southwestward before northeast winds, currents, and squalls, which have scattered and spread the main body of the dread sea. Our days we spent dipping, searching, and studying the peculiar fauna of the area. Portuguese men-of-war occasionally floated in clear water between the masses of Sargassum bacciferum, sheltering between their stinging tentacles the queer little Portuguese man-of-war fish.* * See "Interesting Citizens of the Gulf Stream," by John T. Nichols, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for January, 1921. Under the weed itself we found tiny infants of the ocean giants: the sailfish, jackfish, bonitos, and sunfish; and more than a score of species which would never grow larger than a few inches, especially the coral-tailed filefish, trigger-fishes, the burr-fish, the pipefish, and two kinds of porcupine fishes. Most abundant of all, however, and more abundant even than the blue-dragon slugs and the peculiar crabs of the weed, were the little frogfish cannibals with their enormous maws. Several of these were put in a salt-water basin with highly prized specimens, which included a rare little butterfly fish. A moment later the other fishes were gone, and the swollen stomachs of the cannibals told the story. We quickly cut them open, and out swam the little Jonahs, uninjured! WE GET THE NORTHEAST TRADES We could easily understand why the Sargasso Sea is shot with wild tales of windjammer days, for we were held in the weed for more than a week-held not by the weed itself, but by the lack of wind or current to take us elsewhere. A POSSIBLE FUTURE WINTER RESORT FOR AMERICAN VISITORS Well-paved streets, neat and pastel-tinted houses, and the whitest Cape Verdean islanders are found in the chief village of Brava, on the southern edge of Atlantis. Then squalls treaded along the north edge of the Sargasso Sea and soon we were moved out of its influence. Head winds from the east kept the ship beating northeast and southeast in long tacks, a windjammer indeed, making but little progress. But when the northeast trades picked up, once more we sailed, down to the beautiful archipelago of the Cape Verde Islands. The sea became populated with steamers and birds; porpoises played about the ship and were harpooned for our museum collections. The men were hanging from the rigging as we came to anchor in the port of São Vicente after 40 days at sea-hanging by their hands and feet, as they cheered arrival at land, not triced by their thumbs, as in days of yore. BLACKBIRDERS' ISLANDS The Portuguese archipelago of the Cabo Verde, lying several hundred miles out in the Atlantic off the northwest shoulder of Africa, is especially interesting to the zoologist, for here he finds a comparatively little-known Old World group cor responding in size and general position to that of the Galápagos,* mainly on a study of which New World archipelago Darwin based his theory of the origin of species by natural selection. Especially interesting are the Cape Verdes when one learns that Darwin collected there a few specimens at the beginning of his famous voyage on the Beagle. Nearly a century after Darwin and long after the islands had been for decades a clearing house for slave traders, in the days before the Civil War in America and before Great Britain's battle fleet drove blackbirders from the sea, the collectors of the Blossom spent four and a half months gathering specimens about and over the nine larger islands, five islets of considerable size, and many off-lying rocks. There are fishes in abundance about all the islands, and these were sought for in spare moments; but the principal work of the collectors was the search for birds. * See, also, pages 19-30, "The Dream Ship," by Ralph Stock, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for January, 1921. Photographs by Geo. Finlay Simmons The desert surface of Ilha do Sal (Island of Salt), in the Cape Verde THIS WEIRD BIRD COMMEMORATES A DARING DEED BY NOTED AIRMEN As a memorial to the landing of Portuguese pioneer aviators, Admiral |