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 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 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. by Ralph Stock, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC *See, also, pages 19-30. "The Dream Ship," MAGAZINE for January, 1921. Photographs by Geo. Finlay Simmons OF SALT NOTED AIRMEN ་ Photograph by Robert II. Rockwell TUNAS FOR TUMMIES Offshore thoninhas, bonitos, and albacores are landed on the ebony beach of Fogo, in the Cape Verde Islands. Small boys carry the fish across several miles of volcanic stones and dust from port to village. There were adequate landings at only four towns in the archipelago, but hundreds of other landings had to be made on steep volcanic shores of the islands or through roaring breakers onto beaches of ebony and sand. Many of these islands are desert, some rugged, some flat; but there is little vegetation on them and scarcely any water. The men of the islands do little manual work, while women are the beasts of burden. Cuyler, Moses, and our other collectors, with their food and camping equipment carried by sturdy women porters, ranged for miles and miles over desert larks, coursers, waxbills, kingfishers, swifts, hawks, and other birds. Some of the islands rise far above the clouds. There were difficult mountains to climb on Santo Antão, São Nicolao, and Brava; and Fogo, the island of fire, with its smoldering volcano, rose higher still, towering to nearly 10,000 feet (see, also, text, page 19). Most of these islands stand in the open sea, as monstrous monuments to the feverish action of long-dead volcanoes; some of them have become cloaked with vegetation. A TRAGEDY NARROWLY AVERTED Thrills were frequent while we were collecting. On one occasion we had landed with great difficulty on the bare offshore rock of Corral Velho to spend the night with Cape Verde and Boyd Alexander shearwaters, the brown booby, the white-faced and Madeiran petrels, and other queer birds of the sea. Some distance away the Blossom stood off and on, under trimmed sail in the face of the trades, which piled high seas against our little rock. Seas had risen by the following afternoon, when a ship's boat came to take us off. The men at the oars drew near, took one look at the face of the rock, and wanted to turn back to await a better day. We on the rock were without food and water, so we ordered them in close. Then we stripped to the skin and threw our belongings from the top of a cliff, to be |