30 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
Two ‘members, Professor Walter K. Fisher and Mr. Willis 
Nutting, had gone ahead as advance agents; and three, Mr. 
Henderson, Miss Sykes, and Captain Greenlaw, were to meet 
us in New York. And so fourteen of us said goodbye to our 
friends and the Barbados-Antigua expedition was at last 
started on its adventure. Not quite fourteen either, as one 
member as usual had forgotten something which he at the last 
moment went back to secure and thereby missed the train, 
afterward joining us at Pittsburgh. 
Our transportation agent had arranged for us to spend a 
day at Pittsburgh, where we devoted practically all our time to 
a visit to the Carnegie Museum under the guidance of the 
director, Dr. Holland, who generously gave of his time and vast 
fund of information to make the day a memorable one for us. 
We had allowed two and a half days for New York, and 
found that we needed all of it to complete our preparations for 
sailing. It was necessary to have our passports viséed at the 
British Consulate, which we found besieged by a crowd of 
frantic travelers. The passports had also to be inspected and 
passed upon at the customs house, where great confusion had 
been oceasioned on account of the fact that two transports due 
to sail on Saturday had received sudden orders to depart on 
the preceding Thursday, and no other persons would be attended 
to until the passengers on these transports had been passed. 
Our worst trouble was at the French Consulate, where we 
were instructed to have our passports viséed in order to go 
ashore when the vessels called at the islands of Guadeloupe and 
Martinique. This was the only place where we were treated 
with pronounced discourtesy, the understrappers refusing to 
give us their attention long enough to understand what we 
wanted and also refusing to allow us to see the Consul himself 
or any other ‘‘higher up’’ official. They calmly insisted that 
it was absolutely necessary for us to present a copy of our 
original application for passports, at that time filed away, good- 
ness knows in what pigeon-hole in Washington. This was all 
the more aggravating from the fact that my son, only a week 
before, had had his passport viséed without any such demand 
being made, and at the very same consulate and for the very 
same trip. Finally we gave it up, after wasting more than 
