Chapter II: Part 2

Panama is crowded with Blacks, Indians, Hindus, Spanish, and many Chinese. The streets are narrow and full of people all the time. The stores open right upon the streets, and all the houses are built at the edge of the sidewalk with balconies on the upper stories out over the sidewalk.

Some of the children are terrible beggars and hang onto your coat while you are walking along the street. And many of them run around, without a thing on, stark naked funny little black children.

We drove out to Old Panama one day, and saw the ruins of what used to be the richest city in the New World. All the pirates knew this was a very rich city and full of treasures. Gold was brought there from Peru and then shipped to Spain on Spanish ships.

In 1637 Henry Morgan, a famous English pirate and adventurer, came across the isthmus and attacked the city of Old Panama. The city burned up, almost all of it, and the few people who escaped then made another city which is the present Panama, six miles away. It is a better place, with a better harbor at the mouth of the Boca Grande River.

We went to the top of Ancon Hill in an auto, way up above the City to get the view—way off over the Canal, over the city, far beyond the Old Panama ruins, and of course far out to sea. There are three cannons on this hill, and I could turn one all by myself and see how it works. If Panama should ever be attacked, this would be a wonderful hill for protecting the city. There are fortifications on both sides of the Canal entrance at Balboa. They also have quite a few aeroplanes.

We went swimming at the Balboa Club-house pool, one of the best I have ever seen. Mr. Grieser showed me the proper leg stroke for the crawl, and I met a twelve year old boy there who had gone to New York with a crack team of swimmers. He dived from a sixty-foot board in Madison Square Garden.

Don Dickerman bought three dugouts from a native fisherman in Panama, and he also got two monkeys, a Cebus, a marmoset, and a cunning little monkey-like animal called a kinkaiu, which goes out mostly at night. This last little one was very soft and furry and was very gentle too. He curled himself and tried to keep in the dark all day, sleeping. I hope I can buy one some time for I like him better than the other pets.

Bobbie Fish bought a little pet called a coatamundi. We call him “Snootie” for his upper lip is long and sticks out over his lower. He is little almost as a rat with a furry long tail. Betty has a brown puppy, named Dyna—short, she says, for Dynamite Bill who gave it to her.

Gregory Bateson left at Panama and took many of the live things back with him to New York. The lizards and smaller things died but the pair of lovely albatrosses lived and I hope I shall see them when I go to the Zoo. Bateson is still a student at Cambridge University in England and his father is a famous scientist.

On Saturday night late we pulled out of the dock at Panama, but we had to wait all next day at anchor in the outer harbor for two new firemen. Two of ours had left and not come back to the boat. And as the Captain wanted to keep all the rest of the crew aboard we stayed out there so more couldn’t leave.

COCOS ISLAND

Cocos Island is about five hundred miles from Panama, in the Pacific Ocean, and belongs to the country of Costa Rica. Four times a year it is visited by a government boat from Costa Rica.

It is a steep high island, bright green jungle, with few protected coves or bays. The best anchorage is Chatham Bay which has some shelter with a big high solid rock island to the west and a small rock island to the east side. The only settlement ever made here was around two bends or coves from Chatham Bay, at Wafer Bay. The beach is more beautiful there and the slope behind the beach is easier to climb; there was more level ground to cultivate and plant to trees and vegetables. But this second bay is not a safe harbor for a ship to lie in, open and with squalls and winds blowing all the time and rollers on the beach at nearly every high tide.

For about ten years a Captain Gissler, his wife and servants lived at this Wafer Bay. He spent his time mostly looking for treasure and we saw many deep holes which he probably had dug. As he is not here today and the place is deserted, maybe he found it and moved away to a less lonely place.

Pirates had been here and buried gold, and it is said that some treasure has been found at different times.

There are many beautiful waterfalls. Lots of them tumble right down into the sea from the steep cliffs and for over a hundred years ships have come here for fresh water, whalers and pirates and merchant ships or “tramps.” One stream empties right into the Bay.

There are many beautiful ferns and tree-ferns and tall jungle trees. The tangle of vines is very thick, and the only way to go into the interior of the island at all is to follow along the beds of streams and climb up rocks and waterfalls and around cascades for the sides of the brooks are like solid walls and there are not many places where you can get up.

We went up a lovely stream bed one day from Chatham Bay. We pulled ourselves up rocks and around bad places and stepped into deep pools sometimes up to our necks. We had gone at least a mile and a half up the river, climbing steadily, when we came to a beautiful little cascade that fell down a cliff about seventy feet high. I was catching small blue crayfish in the pool at the foot of it when I lost my balance and fell down onto a jagged rock.

For a time I could hardly bear the pain of it and just sat and cried. Mother and Isabel and Betty were all afraid I might have broken a leg or something. They were awfully worried for we were so far from the shore and had climbed waterfalls all morning to get there. But it was only a terribly bad bruise and I was glad Mother was so strong. She had to practically carry me and lower me down over rocks and waterfalls all the way back. We stopped to eat our lunch on a lovely huge bowlder in the middle of the stream about half way down. After resting a while I felt a little better and could help myself getting down hard places. It would be awful to break an arm or a leg or even to sprain one’s ankle in such a place for even a trail is impossible there and it is very hard to carry anyone down such a place.

Mother was pretty tired, especially as she had a bad sunburn on her back and shoulders and I broke the blisters by putting my arms around her to steady myself, and sometimes I even had to climb down her back to lower myself from one high rock to another six feet below.

The night before this trip up the river, we had a furious gale. The wind blew harder than I ever felt it, and for a time the rain came in a solid mass like a warm wet curtain, streaming across the decks. Everything was soaked, chairs fell over, curtains were tangled up, doors slammed. And then the boobies kept flying right into the ship banging their heads and bodies against things and stunning themselves. They dropped headlong into the “lab” where we were sitting, they fell to the floor in our cabins if the doors were open for a minute, and all over the decks the poor things were crouching around squawking. And they vomited up fish all over the place.

This is a curious habit with some birds; they seem to do it as a forfeit to another bird. They cough up their food which the other bird then takes as payment, leaving the stranded one alone without pecking him. White-headed terns flew aboard too. We were all of us busy throwing them overboard.

In the middle of all the gale and rain and wind, the five rowboats which were over the side tied to the boom by lines, had to be brought on board. A mate stood on the top of the gangway, a life preserver on a long line in the water in case someone fell overboard, and then one by one five men went out on the boom, to the end, down the rope ladder, into a tangled up and bouncing boat, and then rowed it aft to be hoisted up by other men onto the ship. It was all quite exciting and I stood in the rain a long time watching.

The next morning it was all calm again and you couldn’t believe there had been a small hurricane the night before.

MAY 20TH, 1925

May twentieth is my birthday, and Mother had made me a whole pirate outfit—pantaloon trousers, red sash, calico head scarf, a machete, rope soled shoes, and a ragged shirt.

Everybody met at Uncle Will’s cabin just before dinner, and then to the pounding of a big drum we all marched down to the dining saloon, everybody dressed in full pirate costumes, with wild looking wigs and knives and cutlasses of every description.

I got two knives, a jar of jam, a box of sweet crackers, a cocoanut, a fine piece of old Chiriqui Indian Pottery, and a peach of a collecting bag. “Lumpy,” the baker, made me a huge birthday cake.

Then after dinner Shorty took a flashlight picture of the gang against the shrouds down on the hatch deck. We really looked like a pirate crew too, with everyone in costume and apparently on a sailing ship. The steep rocky island near the north point of Chatham Bay showed in the background, and made it seem even more real.

The night of the birthday party Don Dickerman wore his “Marooned man” costume. It is entirely rags and tatters and mended with bits of old string and leather. With a wig of tangled hair all knotted and a bandanna and a cutlass he looks pretty awful. John Tee Van had torn trousers, bare body, a frightful long black wig and he painted on a terrible scar across his face, and slashes of blood on his insteps. Some of the others had fine clothes of velvet with old lace, the rich pirates or those who had stolen booty from some recent captive. And the girls looked like pirates’ wives or sweethearts, except Mother who came as a wild woman, my captive, all bound up with ropes and being dragged along.

About the grandest birthday present one could get was given me by Don. It was his favorite sword, a real old time cutlass which perhaps was used by pirates. He called it “Fury” and got up an awfully funny card to go with it.

And Dwight Franklin made me a lovely drawing of the beach at Cocos back in the old days, with a regular pirate landing on it from his ship. That picture is used at the end of my book.

Cocos Island is really a wonderful place for a pirate party anyway, for real pirates were there many times, and maybe men were marooned there, or left there, and mutinies occurred. Treasure was buried there. Along the beach where ships came for fresh water, there are carvings on the rocks, ship’s names and dates, many of them old and back as far as 1813. There were names of famous whaling ships, and one, The Shrew, was a real pirate ship but the date was not given with that one, probably on purpose.

There is a fine tunnel right through the rock in one place, going fully a hundred yards through a point of land to another bay quite round the corner. Don went through it in his little dugout canoe which he bought in Panama and Tamms, the third mate, went in his motor skiff with the Johnson engine.

In one little bay beyond the settlement we found a hole twenty feet deep where Captain Gissler or someone else had dug for treasure. Don and Dwight went down it on a rope and only found a board and a piece of rope there.

WEEKS AT SEA

For two weeks after leaving Cocos Island we were at sea again. The daily soundings were taken, the temperatures of the water and samples, and then there were the nets. We had out the big otter trawl net to go to the bottom every day until we lost it by getting it tangled in the propeller over the stern. And the long eight-foot net to go to bottom we also lost, probably because it hit a submerged mountain peak or a huge rock.

But there were always other nets, the one metre net, the half metre and the Blake dredge. A metre is a little over three feet. Once in the morning and once every afternoon these went over, and there was always great excitement about it. There were some fine rich hauls.

In about the best haul there were two tubs of deep sea fish from bottom—black and queer looking, some with long pointed tails without a tail fin, some eels, black with pointed heads, and a lot of funny little fish like sharks only with bright green eyes. Many of these come to the surface with the scales all torn off or soft and peeling.

There were light pink starfish, very brittle, a few sea cucumbers, some living sponges, crabs, bright red shrimps and two or three very queer looking fish with faces like demons or bogeys with funny little electric light things sticking out in front of them on long barbels, which is what they call the long whisker-like thing.

I brought home for my collection a few specimens of this rare deep sea life. Starfish, shrimp and cyclothone, which is a small deep sea fish.

Apparently there is a great undersea plateau around Cocos. It is about six hundred fathoms deep. Just off the edge of this it is thirteen to sixteen hundred fathoms deep.

For days we saw many ocean tunnie fish jumping near the ship, and we tried all kinds of baits and different spoons and squids to catch them. One day Mother finally got four of them by jerking a squid up and down from off the boom. They weighed from ten to fourteen pounds and it certainly was very good to have fresh fish for breakfast next morning. They are a beautiful fish, like a torpedo, or bullet shaped with lovely dark blue backs and pinkish silvery sides with four stripes below the middle line and they are very swift swimmers, moving as fast or faster than the ship, for hours at a time.

One day I was sitting on the rail preparing a fish skeleton, and suddenly there was a loud “Pwishshsh” right near me. Mack, the first mate, called out “Whale!” and I jumped up and saw him not fifteen feet away. A big black body about forty feet long.

Another day we saw a whole school of big blackfish, a kind of small whale, and they also were right near the boat for an hour. They first look like huge slow porpoises coming slowly to the surface to breathe. They are black, with rounded snouts and a big huge, fin, something like a shark’s, on the back.

During this time at sea, Shorty and I made a cute little dog house for Betty’s puppy, Dyna. It is white, with a red roof and a little gable over the door with a sign, “Beware of the Dog.” Shorty Schoedsack is the photographer who went with my friend Colonel Cooper to Persia and took the wonderful movie “Grass.” He is called “Shorty” because he is about six feet six inches tall.

We had rough seas and constant rains almost all the time out here perhaps because we were still so close to the Cocos Islands. But it has meant we could not go over the side for a swim or even put out the little motor skiff for game fishing or trolling.

TAGUS COVE

HALF A MINUTE SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR

Tagus Cove is on the west side of Albemarle Island, a deep little bay about half a mile wide. The cliffs around it are steep except for one place at the end where there is a little gully in the rocks. There is no beach, so we landed in this gully where the rocks were very slippery.

When you are once ashore, however, it is fairly easy walking because the lava is very old and crumbly, like clinkers, and the scrubby bushes and stumpy trees give one a hold.

Over the nearest and lowest ridge there is a little crater lake and nearly one hundred years ago Charles Darwin climbed up and discovered it when he was cruising around here in the Beagle.

There is a five-mile channel across to Narborough Island which is a huge volcano, with sides almost entirely black with lava right down to the sea.

Don and I were almost the first ones ashore, and we found a small sea lion right in the rock gully, asleep. We tied a rope to him and played with him quite a while before Don took him back to the ship.

Serge took me with him collecting and we scrambled over two or three hills. I caught a two-inch scorpion under a rock and quite a few big grasshoppers and moths and butterflies. Serge is a Russian, whose last name is Chetyrkin. He speaks very little English, but is a fine taxidermist. His job is to preserve and mount birds and fish. He mounted for me my little pet penguin which died after we had him aboard for nearly a month. He was an awfully funny little bird, as tame and friendly as could be. We’d put small live fish in a glass tank and then watch him catch them, for these penguins are wonderful divers and swimmers. I think their entire food is fish. And that was the way my pet got his exercise and his dinner at the same time.

Another day, Don and I fished right off shore near the landing place and got many fine fish, one especially beautiful one all bright orange and black with a big bump over his nose. And once when we left a string of new specimens in the water to keep them alive, a shark came right up and bit one off the string!

The very first day in Tagus, Mother and the Doctor went out fishing and they brought in the finest lot of game fish we had the whole trip—big mackerel, groupers, bonito, tuna and barracuda.

Betty wanted to get up high enough on the mountain slopes to see across to the volcano which was the other side of the Island. It was the same one we had seen in eruption seven weeks earlier. She left the ship at five in the morning and was climbing all day till evening. She did get up beyond the clouds and then had to go by compass. There was damp wet grass and vegetation up there, although the lower slopes had all been dry lava and burned bunches of grassy stuff. She saw fresh tortoise tracks and wanted to follow on, but she knew everyone on the ship would worry if she did not come back and so she had to leave to climb down again. She went all alone.

Mother and Isabel took a hard climb in the opposite direction over two high hills and they saw a very much bigger crater lake which had never been reported before. It had very steep walls over five hundred feet high, and six little cone-like islands in the middle.

Along the shores of the cove there are grottoes and little caves and here there are penguins, and pelicans, and boobies and some very strange birds called flightless cormorants—birds which really have lost the power of flight because they have lived so long on the island and never really used their wings because they didn’t have to get food or travel anywhere.

THE GIANT DEVIL FISH

Two days after leaving Tagus we were cruising around along the shores of Narborough Island, trawling with the nets.

Two or three skiffs were near shore, some diving, some fishing and others dynamiting. Mother and Doctor Cady were trolling for big fish and suddenly Mother had a terrific hard pull, and for half an hour she had to “play” a tuna. It was 46 inches long, and weighed 46 pounds.

Soon after they saw a great long fin moving slowly along and when they came near found a big flat fish like a skate, slowly skimming just below the surface so that only his two fins came above the water. They followed him around and actually herded him over towards Bill and Dwight in another boat.

Next morning Don and Dwight and Doc went out to find one with two harpoons, plenty of rope and two kegs. They cruised around a little and soon saw a big ripple on the water, a ray going along with his fins sticking up in the air twenty inches.

They struck with their harpoons and after a great splash the big ray just sank out of sight and pulled the rope and two kegs right down with him. They waited a long time and watched for him to rise, but when we came along in the launch Pawnee we said we would stay to look while they went to the ship for another harpooning outfit. We chased another big ray for almost half a mile before the others came back.

Dwight took first shot, but the harpoon soon pulled out, and the big fish went sailing along the surface again. Then Don took a shot which held and he played out the rope, holding on to the end so that the ray had to tow the boat.

Meanwhile Bill had come along in another skiff to see the excitement. Bill gave them a second harpoon which Dwight stuck in and then the fish towed the two boats for a time, every once in a while flipping up its tail and hunching its back to try to sweep off the ropes and harpoons.

Gradually it swam back towards the ship and the men started their engine and forced it over that way. When it was quite near, we hurried to the boat to get the movie camera for Shorty, and I brought Dwight’s revolver to him. He shot it five times with a thirty-eight, and Bill put in five loads of heavy buck shot. Then it seemed to make a great effort and tried to swim down deep. Don held it with all his strength and would not let it go straight down. It flipped its wing and hit Don right across the shoulder and head twice but he never let go. Then it tried to spill over the boat by getting right under it. But finally they towed it near enough for the sailors to throw a rope down and get a line over it.

It had been bleeding pretty heavily and there was a big trail of blood all the way to the shore, and some sharks were following this up.

It measured eighteen feet across from wing to wing and weighed 2400 pounds. And after they started dissecting it they found an unborn ray that weighed 28 pounds and made a perfect specimen to preserve and take back to the New York Zoological Society.

MOLTEN LAVA

We were sailing along the east coast of Albemarle Island for we wanted to know if the volcano we had seen in eruption on Easter Sunday, nearly two months before, was still in eruption. We were almost there, practically on the Equator, and we recognized the columns of smoke half way up the side of the mountain.

Suddenly a yell came from the bridge and the Mate blew the foghorn (which is the way we are called to hurry to see something) and when we came running out we saw a high funnel of bright white smoke rising right out of the sea down at the end of a point, a few miles ahead of us. It couldn’t be spray for it was too enormously high and kept right in one place.

Uncle Will thought for a long time it must be a geyser or small volcano right at the water’s edge. And everybody watched it through glasses and climbed up into the crows-nest for a better view. But when we came along closer we could easily see it was a great field of hot lava which had reached the sea and was pouring into the cold water. For a while before we reached there we could see a streak of dull green in the water, quite distinct from the dark indigo blue, making a very clear line between the two. And the temperature of the water went up from the normal 74 degrees which we had had right along, to 99 degrees, and even that was a quarter of a mile away from the shore.

Luckily, the strong on-shore wind made it possible for us to go very close and not run any danger of getting in poisonous gases or smoke, for there were great clouds of smoke.

The shore rocks were black, there were two colors in the water, green close to shore and blue out beyond, and these big masses of very white steamy smoke. And then as we came closer we could see huge openings at the end of the lava flow, like pipes emptying red hot lava out into the water. It looked like bright blood.

All day till dark, we circled around and kept passing near it, keeping about a quarter of a mile from shore. There were high waves and a strong breeze and the smoke was blowing steadily up the mountain side so that by sunset time we couldn’t see the little cones up on the higher slopes from which the whole flow had come down.

But after dark we could tell just the line the stream had flowed down, a rather zigzag course, and right over the place to which Uncle Will and John had climbed two months earlier. There were great hot patches which glowed red in the dark and little specks of hot fiery places all along the slopes. And then at the bottom right at the shore, these great huge open hot red streams spilling out into the sea. Once or twice it would break out in bigger flows or whole big chunks would fall off into the water, and then it would shoot out and throw boiling lava into the air, way up, like blasting or skyrockets.

Through the glasses we could see several birds which had flown too near and their bodies were floating along in the water. Once we saw a poor sea lion throw himself straight up into the air five times and then flop down dead right near the terrible stream. A great big octopus floated by, just about dead. And we watched a whole wave so full of fish it looked black, swimming as fast as they possibly could straight out to the cold water. Once too, we saw a shark in a kind of daze, swimming along, and probably not knowing why the water was so suddenly growing hotter and hotter.

Shorty took some fine pictures of the whole thing, the smoke spurting up in the air, the pieces of rock crunching off and exploding into the water, and the great streams of melted rock.

The last thing at night when we left, we saw six big outlets or hot glowing spouts dimmer and dimmer as we turned eastward. Next morning we left the Galápagos Islands for Panama.

(A Little Song Written by Don Dickerman for David’s Birthday Party)

SONG TO DAVIE PUTNAM

Oh, his name was Davie Putnam,
And the youngest man aboard,
In truth we guessed they shipped him for a lark.
Didn’t need no powder monkey,
Guests we couldn’t quite afford,
But he sailed with William Beebe on the Ark.

Oh, we took this Davie Putnam,
And we sailed away I say,
To those desert islands cruel, bleak and stark.
There we captured giant lizards,
Sharks and tortoise in the bay,
As we sailed with William Beebe in the Ark.

And this little Davie Putnam,
Who was only twelve y’see,
With his mates t’home a’friskin’ in the park,
Steps out with all his olders,
Hunts and fishes with the best,
As he sailed with William Beebe in the Ark.

So this little Davie Putnam,
Smallest man aboard the ship,
As the topmost fightin’ pirate makes his mark;
And besides we liked his spirit
And his many a merry quip,
As we sailed with William Beebe on the Ark.