A Narrative of the Smithsonian-Bredin 

 Caribbean Expedition, 1956 



By Waldo L. Schmitt 



Head Curator of Zoology, U. S. National Museum 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 8 plates] 



The Caribees, the Lesser Antilles, the Windward and Leeward 

 Islands ! — names to conjure with. This cradle of many of our hurri- 

 canes and much of American history is equally fascinating from a 

 purely scientific point of view. It is still a happy and a fruitful 

 hunting ground for the naturalist, and so it proved to be during 

 the recent Smithsonian-Bredin Expedition to the Caribbean, spon- 

 sored and led by J. Bruce Bredin, 1 of Wilmington, Del. The Smith- 

 sonian has long been interested in these islands "adjacent" to our 

 continent and has welcomed all opportunities such as the present one 

 to learn more about them and their inhabitants — animal, plant, and 

 human, present and past, recent and fossil. 



In 1947 Ernest May financed explorations along the historic route 

 of Columbus so that Dr. Herbert Krieger, Smithsonian ethnologist, 

 might reconnoiter the native village sites reported by the discoverer 

 of the New World in the course of his four voyages of exploration, 

 and so that Conrad Morton, Smithsonian botanist, could spend six 

 weeks on the Island of St. Vincent sampling the flora of its little- 

 investigated higher levels and mountains. Earlier, in 1937, the writer, 

 as marine biologist to the Smithsonian-Hartford Expedition on the 

 Joseph Conrad, visited a number of the islands of the West Indies, 

 including some in the current itinerary, and others in the Greater 

 Antilles, and in 1938 as a member of the Hancock Atlantic Expedition 

 to the north coast of South America he was enabled to collect on 

 the island of Tobago, not reached during the Bredin Expedition. 



1 An Honorary Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution, Mr. Bredin sponsored the 

 Smithsonian-Bredin Expedition to the Belgian Congo in 1955 and another expedi- 

 tion to the Society Islands in 1957. Previously he had actively participated in 

 the Smithsonian-Hartford Expedition. 



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