THE SMITHSONIAN-HARTFORD EXPEDITION TO THE 

 WEST INDIES, 1937 



By WALDO L. SCHMITT 

 Curator, Division of Marine Invertebrates, U. S. National Museum 



Not since the early days of the Museum has one of its expeditions 

 gone to sea in an old-fashioned full-rigged ship, the kind you read 

 about in sea-tales laid in the days of wooden ships and iron men. Just 

 such a ship was the Joseph Conrad, which George Huntington Hart- 

 ford III, of New York, recently acquired and refitted for a voyage 

 of exploration and scientific investigation to the West Indies under 

 the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. One can well imagine 

 with what feelings of anticipation I looked forward to this expedition. 

 The realization did not fall short of them. Our interesting experi- 

 ences and the good friends who helped us were so numerous that I 

 hope I shall be forgiven for mentioning only a very few of them. 



The expedition covered more than 4,500 miles at sea and stopped 

 one or more times for the purpose of collecting at 15 different islands : 

 Bahamas, Andros, and San Salvador or Watling Island ; West Indies, 

 Tortuga, Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, Saba, 

 St. Eustatia, Dominica, Martinique, Barbados, Jamaica, and Cuba. 



The largest animals we collected were porpoises, the smallest pro- 

 tozoa, chiefly the tiny calcareous shelled kinds known as f oraminif era. 



Porpoises are among the rarest things in museums. We wanted 

 as many different kinds as we could get, but we saw them more often 

 than we were able to catch them. We were fortunate, however, in the 

 harbor of San Juan, where, from the ship's launch, with "Jack" 

 Hawkins as harpooner, we got our first porpoise, a Tursiops truncata, 

 not uncommon along our eastern seaboard, yet taken here as a first 

 record for Puerto Rican waters. 



Our second porpoise, taken some 50 miles off the coast of Georgia, 

 was a gravid female of Prodelphinns plagiodon, of which the National 

 Museum possesses only one other specimen taken more than half a 

 century ago. The embryo she carried was one of the few ever to 

 come to the Institution, a beautiful mouse-colored specimen not quite 

 3 feet long, with whiskers on its " lip." 



Foraminifera are more easily taken than porpoises. A grab of 

 bottom mud or sand may yield thousands. In between these extremes 



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