90 THE LAST CRUISE OF THE CARNEGIE 



species characteristic of English shore-Hfe are found on these weed- 

 covered flats: limpets and sea-anemones, blennies and sea-cu- 

 cumbers, prawns and algae. 



The town of Looe itself is built upon the cliffs surrounding the 

 boat-harbor. One looks down at the tiny fishing-boats, propped 

 up with stilts at low tide, or careened over on their beam-ends. 

 Great racks along the waterfront display the drying nets; and 

 over the whole scene innumerable screeching gulls whirl and 

 dive for the morsels of fish discarded by the fishermen. 



Polperro is a town of the imagination. At every turn one 

 expects to meet a pirate, or a wrecker returning gaily from his 

 nefarious business of dismantling a ship put aground by the 

 falsifying of lights along the shore. Some of the quaint houses 

 are no more than niches cut out of the precipitous walls of the 

 gorge. Others perch on stilts on the mud-flats below. Polperro 

 justifies its claim of being the most paintable village in Cornwall. 

 Certainly there are no thrills left for a cyclist who has once ped- 

 alled over the crazy cliff roads surrounding the village. And 

 anyone who has navigated a bicycle with brakes on the front 

 wheel will appreciate how exciting a twenty per cent grade can 

 be, when the path is but ten inches wide, and a hundred-foot 

 cliff begins two or three feet to one side! 



Before we left Plymouth, Dr. Allen of the Marine Biological 

 Laboratory informed us that a complete set of the reports of the 

 famous Challenger Expedition had arrived, and he invited us to 

 take them with us for our work. This set, numbering about 

 sixty large tomes, had been collected for us by the Royal Society. 

 The task was not simple, for many of the volumes had been long 

 out of print and for that reason were almost priceless. But to 

 safely stow away aboard the Carnegie such a bulky library was 

 out of the question. Each member of the party took only those 

 volumes which would be most useful in his work, leaving the others 

 ashore. The destruction of these books in the fire at Samoa must 

 be considered one of the major losses of equipment. 



By June 18 the necessary repairs had been completed, provisions 

 had been stowed away, the scientific records were mailed to the 

 United States, and we were ready to square the yards for the short 



