448 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE, 1956 



shores, sea caves, and interspersed sandy beaches held promise of good 

 collecting of marine invertebrates. 



We spent the afternoon collecting on a rocky reef between the ship 

 and the farther shore in a bight called St. Martin's Bay. A few 

 dredge hauls were also made off Grenada's famed swimming beach, 

 Grand Anse, just outside the harbor proper. 



Although we planned an early morning start for Carriacou, 30 or 

 40 miles to the northward according to the strength of the wind, a case 

 of dysentery on board led us to seek advice and a prescription from a 

 local doctor. He refused payment for his services, considering us as 

 guests of the city, but finally he was persuaded to accept something 

 toward the cost of the local hospital's charity patients. 



The delayed sailing made it possible for us to extend the courtesies 

 of the Freelance to Dr. Slominsky, the resident physician on Carria- 

 cou, sparing him a 4-day wait for the next boat returning there. In 

 turn he was of service to us in locating a good and convenient anchor- 

 age in Tyrrell Bay. The bay is ringed with conical "peaked-cap" 

 shaped hills, all seemingly a little slumped over to the right. This 

 gnomelike setting was one of the richest collecting grounds of the 

 cruise : Porites beds with turtle-grass patches, rocky reefs, mangrove 

 swamps, and a wooden wreck thickly encrusted with animal and plant 

 growths. In a few hours, over the flats, along shore, and in the wreck, 

 this well-populated littoral area yielded such a profusion of specimens 

 representative of all groups of invertebrates that we could not prop- 

 erly preserve all of them before sailing the next day at noon. Never- 

 theless, that night we put over an electric light at the gangway. 

 Under it the captain wielded a busy dipnet. This routine was a regu- 

 lar thing for the captain almost every evening, and it always brought 

 in a host of the "finer things" of life, from Protozoa and copepods to 

 pelagic mollusks, little squids, and small octopuses, and now and then 

 an unexpected fish and many bizarre larval forms of them and no end 

 of large olive-green and blue-black sea-hares that were drifting or 

 swimming by. At this time of the year they were spawning in the 

 grass patches in shallow water, and evidently Tyrrell Bay was one of 

 their favored habitats. 



That afternoon the weather began kicking up, and by 4 o'clock we 

 were driven to seek shelter in Chatham Bay on the lee side of Union 

 Island. This was the only really bad spell of weather encountered 

 during the 5 1 / ^-week cruise. The wind screeched and whistled all 

 night, and for a time both anchors with all available chain threatened 

 to drag. The clearing sky the next morning was ushered in with a 

 light breeze. Before long we reached the idyllic anchorage among the 

 Tobago Cays for which we had been headed the afternoon before. 

 Except for the utter lack of water ashore, one would be tempted to 



