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^-seamanship. He announced early, however, that he might try to leave at mid- 
trip, without giving explanations. I said nothing, but hoped this were not 
true. As he wanted to leave, and I conceded the point by transmitting his 
requests on the radio and saying nothing, disappointed though I was. We 
finally lost him just upon our arrival at Santa Cruz. He had done a great 
- deal of training of the others in field ways, and they took on well when 
he left, and we survived excellently. However, everyone suffered a real 
let down to lose his expert abilities and willing hand at all the tasks. 
It was a big loss. 
John Sheridan was the only replacement I could round up, and I shall 
be long grateful to him for having appeared. Joe Gibbs and Nancy Rogers 
turned down repeated radio overtures and pleas, and Mathias deserted me 
completely, even though I had paid his way to Micronesia and back via 
Ponape, hoping that he would be with us for a least this final part of 
this expedition. 
John Sheridan, however, was a great addition to our party. He arrived 
better prepared for camping and work in the bush than were most others, and 
equipped superbly with camera, sleeping gear, ruck sack, etc. which no one 
else quite had. He pitched in immediately and completely and did a heroic 
job, finally crowned by an amazing couriership of the first stack of frozen 
clots all the way to Canberra via Port Moresby for us. We have thus had 
wonderful good fortune in his arrival just when Paul left us. John did a 
great deal of both the clinical work and also the laboratory work on the 
ship, and had good stamina for the long boring physical examinations and 
tedious specimen collections and processing. He was a fine expedition 
companion, and I am very glad to have got to know him better on this trip. 
...midnight at sea, approaching Pingelap Atoll November 22, 1972 
We have had a relaxed, easy night of conversation, a moving picture on 
board ("The Last Tomahawk") , and good food and I have not even thought much 
of our program on Pingelap. I do not have any plans for collecting genetic 
information, since Newton Morton has done such an enviably thorough study 
of Pingelap already, and the achromatopsia studies which Dr. Carr is to 
continue have so fully exploited what can be wrung from that disease to 
date that it would be stupid to work on that direction. Thus, it is a 
leisurely period for snooping around and observing, and to excuse our pres- 
ence I shall keep busy seeing sick persons and perhaps examining many of the 
children, if it proves a wise direction to take. Obviously, for genetic 
chromosome banding studies we can get plenty of Micronesian pure blooded 
people from California and Hawaii and Ponape — even Pingelapese — so it is 
ridiculous to try to get such specimens here on the the atoll and preserve 
them all the way into our laboratory. 
I feel badly having seen so little of Tigweiyor and Nicholas Figir, and 
the other Yap Outer Islanders in Ponape. Mathias is on my mind, of course, 
since he has obviously not solved many of his problems and still is causing 
distraction at home, exactly as when I left. If I find this to be the case. 
