MOTHER CAREY'S GRAVEYARD ON THE SHIFTING SANDS OF CIMA Unique and uninhabited, the Cape Verde Isle of Cima (see, also, illustration, page 26) is covered with the tiny bones of millions of petrels which in ages past have sought its tiny plateau when it came their time to die. to beat up to the island and its anchorages. "Hard alee!" Time after time came the cry. It was useless, for we lost a little on each tack. "We'll make the island from the east when homeward bound," was the final decision (see, also, text, page 59), and we set our course once more for the south. Day after day we logged 75 to 100 miles, and 13 days after leaving Fernando Noronha we sighted the Martin Vas group one morning in December just before daybreak. AN ISLAND NAMED FOR MAURY, PATHFINDER OF THE SEAS We made ready a whaleboat and sailed on down to spend half a day among the islets. As far as we have been able to tell from hydrographic and admiralty records, no one had ever chronicled a landing on any of these islands; so it was with a great deal of interest that we sailed along the shores through a placid sea. We landed first on the north islet, which we christened Blossom. Small whitecapped black noddies were nesting along its rugged faces, and low on the rocks on one side we found sooty terns also. The tide pools were filled with many brightly colored fish and invertebrates, and a few feet away, in four or five fathoms, the men in the anchored whaleboat were catching larger fish hand over hand. The middle island we called Dom Pedro Segundo, after the last emperor of Brazil. It rises to a height of, perhaps, 600 feet, with steep and practically inaccessible sides. Two kinds of sedge. grew pretty well over the top and down a few of the gentler slopes, and mountain petrels sailed and circled off the cliffs among the soaring men-of-war of two species, Fregata ariel trinitatis and Fre PREPARING SPECIMENS ON THE HIGH SEAS Rockwell, Moses, and Cuyler grew accustomed to such delicate operations as the skinning of Mother Carey's chickens on the decks of a plunging, wind-blown lugger. gata minor nicolli, which we later found toward South Trinidad, which stood on nesting on South Trinidad. We landed on the middle rock, placed a copper plate with an inscription in a conspicuous position, climbed more than half the way up the side, and then returned to the waiting whaleboat. The southern islet we named Maury, after Matthew Fontaine Maury, American naval officer who first charted winds and currents of the ocean, and whose work in this field led to the establishment of our Hydrographic Office, Naval Observatory, and Weather Bureau. He was also the real father of the U. S. Naval Academy. We circled close around it in a whaleboat and ascertained that it is possible on a calm day to land on the southeast side. Afterwards, laden with specimens, we proceeded northward to the waiting Blossom. * The following day we sailed westward *See "The Gem of the Ocean, Our American Navy," by Josephus Daniels, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for April, 1918. the horizon, 25 or 30 miles away. We circled around North Point and anchored on the lee side, in Waterfall Bay. The gigantic mountains of this volcanic island rear their lofty heads 2,000 feet above the sea. Phonolite and coral reefs surround the iron-bound coasts and make landing extremely difficult. TREASURE ISLAND AT LAST We spent a month at the island, circling it in the whaleboat and landing in half a dozen places. We crawled slowly over its ragged sides and searched for the nests of the Trinidad mountain petrel, the red-footed booby, the two species of manof-war birds, the sooty tern and the noddy, and the delicate little fairy love-tern. No other island of its size-less than four miles long and two miles widebears on its surface such interesting features. Discovered by the Portuguese and claimed by the English, it has been the subject of international litigation. Until MERRYMAKERS AT A VILLAGE ON THE ISLE OF BOA VISTA Garbed in their one best dress, Cape Verdeans walk barefooted for miles over a volcanic island to lessen the wear on the only pair of shoes they have ever possessed. Lovers of their morna music, they gave dances at nearly every little town for the footsore bird collectors. A Cape Verdean home can be built for little or nothing; volcanic stones from the front yard are erected without mortar into thick, substantial walls; a roof of thatch from a near-by valley is practically as good as imported shingles, and labor can be had at a few pennies a day. LAND HO! THE "BLOSSOM" APPROACHING AFRICA Cuyler, lured by the mystery enshrouding the Dark Continent, watches the shore line of Senegal slowly materialize in the eastern haze of morning. recent months even temporary settlements have not been maintained here; people refused to live in the middle of the South Atlantic, 700 miles from the nearest point in South America. Pirates once brought their gold to the valleys where we sought giant land-crabs and specimens of the 30 species of plants found on the island. Many treasurehunting expeditions have visited its shores. Some failed to land; others succeeded, and many lives were lost through hardships experienced; but none have. ever found the two lots of buried treasure which certainly still exist on the island (see pages 42, 43, and 44). WRECKED ON PIRATES BEACH We had great difficulty in making landings at times upon the rocky shores. Our dory was battered time and again on the reefs and our whaleboats had to be reenforced. Landing was especially difficult in Prince's Bay, where the striking peak of Sugarloaf rises straight up out of the sea for 1,200 feet, backed by ridges of phonolite and slides of tufa. On one occasion we edged in toward Pirates Beach, dropped out a cage anchor astern, and took in our whaleboat sails. Long John eased the boat slowly in, but before we could make it we saw big seas rolling in toward us. Cuyler and I shucked shoes and some of our garments. The first sea half filled the boat, followed by a deep trough, which dropped her on to pinnacles of a reef submerged off the beach, and the second and third seas filled her, over ON THE WESTERN MOST POINT OF AFRICA Four naturalists from the moored Blossom dicker, in sign language and French, for watermelon with Dakar's pier guards, laborers, and washerwomen. turned her, and battered holes in her thin so-called ferocious land-crabs, while the hull. goats were thin on a diet of hard, grisly plants. We rolled ashore in one grand tangle, José and I swimming with the camera and bedding. Every one set to work salvaging equipment. We drew the boat up on the sands, where we saw at once we could not repair it until we returned to the ship. We were short of food and water and night was falling. We built a campfire against a huge rock and huddled on the sands in gentle drizzles until the following day, when, half in rags, we climbed up toward the top of the island and worked our way down from an 1,800-foot ridge, through magnificent forests of tree ferns, to a cave facing the ship, where a party of our collectors was camping. Day after day we searched the slopes and valleys for earthworms, insects, and animals of all sorts-anything which might throw light on the past history of the island and the development of its life. Wild goats and wild hogs, descendants of animals liberated on the island in 1700 by the astronomer Halley, roamed the ridges; and the hogs grew fat from eating the The waters about the island teemed with fish, and we listed more than threescore kinds, many of which were edible. In fact, we ate fish every day, three meals a day, while we were anchored alongside the island. With the lure of the pirates' island still undimmed, but with a third of our men sick with fevers and incipient pneumonia, we spread sail and made for the port of Rio de Janeiro and a hospital. IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY With nine days of fair sailing over a pleasant sea, we rolled down from Cape Frio to the entrance to the harbor of Rio. We had no sailing directions or charts for this section of the coast, many of our records having been appropriated by one of the men who left the crew in Africa. So we had to feel our way in between the offshore islets until we could pick out the famous landmark of the original Sugarloaf, after which Trinidad's peak had been named. Fortunately, steamers were |