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ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
by man. In the old whaling days, when voy¬ 
ages lasted from two to five years, the tor¬ 
toises’ ability to remain alive for months at 
a time without food or water constituted an 
excellent reason for capturing them in vast 
numbers. Whaling vessels would stop at the 
islands, fill their empty holds with living tor¬ 
toises, to be killed and eaten when needed. 
Captain Benjamin Morrell, who visited the 
islands on a fur-sealing cruise in 1825, writing 
of these tortoises, says: 
. . They are excellent food, and have 
no doubt saved the lives of thousands of sea¬ 
men employed in whale-fishing in these seas, 
both American and English. I have known 
whale ships to take from six to nine hundred 
of the smallest of these tortoises on board 
when leaving the islands for their cruising 
grounds, thus providing themselves with pro¬ 
visions for six or eight months and securing 
the men against scurvy. I have had these 
animals on board my own vessels from five to 
six months without their once taking food or 
water, and, on killing them, I have found 
more than a quart of sweet, fresh water in 
the receptacle which nature has furnished 
them for that purpose, while their flesh was in 
as good a condition as when I first took them 
on board. They have been known to live on 
board some of our whale ships for fourteen 
months under similar circumstances without 
any apparent diminution of health or weight.” 
Other old accounts repeat the same story, 
and it is a wonder that tortoises of any kind 
or size remain after this systematic destruc¬ 
tion, which was continued for year after year, 
without thought or care on the part of the 
destroyers. 
At the present time the few that are to be 
found are no longer on the coastal portions 
of the islands where years ago they were so 
plentiful, but are hidden deep within the 
craters or among the higher gullies and valleys. 
The smallness of their numbers makes it no 
longer a necessity to migrate for food or water, 
and the trails made by the tortoises and 
described by the older explorers were nowhere 
to be seen on the islands visited during the 
past year. 
During the last twenty-five years the few 
expeditions that have been at the islands 
have all given the same monochrome report— 
a general scarcity of these ancient reptiles. 
Mr. Frank Webster, who collected for Lord 
Rothschild, declares that: “I consider now that 
these creatures are so nearly extinct that any 
remaining ones will only be stragglers and 
will only be secured at a great expense of 
time, hardship and money.” Later, however, 
Mr. John Van Denburgh, in a very excellent 
report published by the California Academy 
of Sciences and based upon seventeen months’ 
exploration in the archipelago during 1905 and 
1906, mentions one locality, Vilamil, on 
Albemarle Island, as having tortoises in 
abundance, and another, Duncan Island, as 
having them fairly abundant. The tortoises 
on the other islands of the archipelago were 
classed as “rare,” “very rare” or “extinct”. 
Such was our knowledge of the presence 
and numbers of the animals from which the 
islands take their name. Naturally such 
rarity only increased our desire to obtain a 
tortoise for exhibition in New York. On our 
first trip from Panama on the Williams’ Gala¬ 
pagos Expedition, we searched in many places 
—along the shores of Indefatigable Island, in 
the wooded country above the long, sandy beach 
of James Bay, and beyond the precipitous sides 
of Tagus Cove on Albermarle Island. But no 
tortoises were to be seen, no indication of their 
presence could be found, either recent or ancient; 
not even a stray bit of worthwhile information 
from the inhabitants of Chatham Island. On 
the second expedition the same negative results 
were yielded by the opposite side of In¬ 
defatigable, and on the flat veldt-like country of 
South Seymour Island. 
One day toward the end of our stay the 
temptation to explore the double rounded 
slopes of Duncan Island overcame us, and we 
decided to test the truth of the statement that 
on that island tortoises were “fairly abundant 
So early one morning five of us started from 
the “Noma” intent upon securing a tortoise 
from that island. 
Our expedition had at least one great stim¬ 
ulus. The “pot of gold at the end of the 
rainbow” was the largest of its kind. These 
tortoises and their close relatives living in the 
surrounding Galapagoan Islands and a group 
of cousins in the far distant Marquesas were 
not to be included in the categories of ordinary 
big game, but in the list of giants. Occasional 
specimens have been found weighing over four 
hundred pounds, and Lord Rothschild men¬ 
tions one that he considered weighed over eight 
hundred pounds! 
From Seymour Bay to Duncan Island is 
twenty-five miles. The first sixteen lay along 
the low shore of Indefatigable, and over a 
calm Pacific sea, gently rising and falling in 
long, low rollers with an almost imperceptible 
motion. Only as one watched the horizon and 
