Over the nearest and lowest ridge there is a little crater lake and nearly one hundred years ago Charles Darwin climbed up and discovered [[112]]it when he was cruising around here in the Beagle.
Reading from Left to Right, David, Don and Bozo, the Young Sea-Lion.
There is a five-mile channel across to Narborough Island which is a huge volcano, with sides almost entirely black with lava right down to the sea.
Don and I were almost the first ones ashore, and we found a small sea lion right in the rock gully, asleep. We tied a rope to him and played with him quite a while before Don took him back to the ship.
Serge took me with him collecting and we scrambled over two or three hills. I caught a two-inch scorpion under a rock and quite a few big grasshoppers and moths and butterflies. Serge is a Russian, whose last name is Chetyrkin. He speaks very little English, but is a fine taxidermist. His job is to preserve and mount birds and fish. He mounted for me my little pet penguin which died after we had him aboard for nearly a month. He was an awfully funny little bird, as tame and [[113]]friendly as could be. We’d put small live fish in a glass tank and then watch him catch them, for these penguins are wonderful divers and swimmers. I think their entire food is fish. And that was the way my pet got his exercise and his dinner at the same time.
Another day, Don and I fished right off shore near the landing place and got many fine fish, one especially beautiful one all bright orange and black with a big bump over his nose. And once when we left a string of new specimens in the water to keep them alive, a shark came right up and bit one off the string!
The very first day in Tagus, Mother and the Doctor went out fishing and they brought in the finest lot of game fish we had the whole trip—big mackerel, groupers, bonito, tuna and barracuda.
Betty wanted to get up high enough on the mountain slopes to see across to the volcano which was the other side of the Island. It was the same one we had seen in eruption [[114]]seven weeks earlier. She left the ship at five in the morning and was climbing all day till evening. She did get up beyond the clouds and then had to go by compass. There was damp wet grass and vegetation up there, although the lower slopes had all been dry lava and burned bunches of grassy stuff. She saw fresh tortoise tracks and wanted to follow on, but she knew everyone on the ship would worry if she did not come back and so she had to leave to climb down again. She went all alone.
