THE SMITHSONIAN 
BREDIN SOCIETY ISLANDS 
EXPEDITION, 1957. 
Shades of Captain Cook, of Herman Melville, of Typee, Omoo, 
and Moby Dick; of Pierre Loti, Gaugin, Robert Louis Stevenson, 
Jack London, James Norman Hall, and Charles Darv/in ahd the "Beagle’^ 
dtll these names n tinge , and many more, seemed to come alive when 
Mr. Bredin proposed our going to the French Society Islands - - 
Tahiti, Moorea, --i' *•. ""s-j Bora Bora — those romantiCj^ 
Isles- of Paradise in the far blue yonder of the 
South Pacific.. All hold something beyond _^eams and wishful 
thinking for the explorer, the scientlst> i^irriter, poet, artist, 
or adventurer. 
Although we left Vfeshington and the Museum quietly and 
without fanfare, this Smithsonian expedition really went off 
with a "bang" I No sooner had Dr, Thomas E. Bo^OTian, the expedition 
copepodologist , and I foregathered for luncheon at his parent’s 
home in San Francisco on tiiat March S2nd~— the day before the 
departure of the "Mariposa” for the South Seas— than the city 
"threw" the second most severe quake in the city’s recorded 
seismic hsltory. This tremor registered 5.5 on the Richter 
scale as compared with 8.25 ^or the catastrophic quake of April, 
1906, just fifty-one years before, almost to the month. 
live 
The senior Bowmians on the sunny side of Market Street wligre 
A 
this v/ell-known thoroughfare passes along the southern slops of 
