60 
ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
DARWIN BAY, TOWER ISLAND 
A sheltered, mile-wide bay which seems never to have been described or mapped. Every niche of cliff, 
every bush or shrub holds nests of gulls, terns, boobies, doves and frigate-birds. 
Here we again found the small islands in the 
vicinity to be far more interesting than the large 
one. South Seymour, to the east, was geograph¬ 
ically quite unlike any other island, as back from 
the shore it consisted of open veldt-like country. 
This was covered with grass and dotted sparsely 
with cactus and fair-sized trees, where moving 
flocks of spiral-horned goats took the place of 
antelope in corresponding places in Africa. This 
too, w r as the only place where we found Cono- 
lophus, the giant land lizards. 
Dahpne Major, five miles to the north, was 
visited twice. It is a perfect island crater, and 
after landing on its most inhospitable cliffs, we 
climbed its precipitous sides covered with loose, 
easily-sliding shale and looked down into the 
deep crater. The floor covered with white sand 
was dotted everywhere with hundreds of nesting 
boobies, all of the blue-footed species. We went 
down and walked about among them, collecting 
a chick, or an egg or an adult here and there, 
and taking photographs at close range without 
causing more disturbance among them than an 
occasional gurgling protest. Except for one 
dead pelican we saw no other kind of sea-bird 
on the floor of the crater, though on the outside 
slopes were numbers of nesting tropic-birds, 
terns, Creagrus and Galapagos gulls. 
In all our wanderings we had seen no tortoise 
nor traces of one anywhere, although not so 
many years ago they were probably the most 
usual sight on the islands. The whaling ships 
used to carry them away by the hundred to pro¬ 
vide a welcome change of diet on long voyages. 
Oil hunters from the mainland have made great 
inroads on their numbers and wild dogs and 
pigs have probably accounted for numberless 
eggs and newly-hatched young. Where the 
tortoises are not actually extinct, the survivors 
have evidently betaken themselves to the craters 
of the interior. In 1907 it was reported that 
these reptiles were most numerous on Duncan, 
so five members of the expedition went to Dun¬ 
can in a large motor boat, thirty-six miles away, 
hoping to verify this report. They beat over 
the land near the shore and much of the interior 
of the lesser crater and found only one mod¬ 
erately large tortoise, which, after the most 
exhausting labor, they managed to carry back 
to the boat. It seems certain that another unique 
form of life is well on the road to extinction, 
thanks to the efforts of man. 
Our last anchorage in the Archipelago was at 
Tower Island, in Darwin Bay, a hitherto un¬ 
mapped bay which we discovered and named. 
The bay is over a mile square, with deep water 
