There is air in front of your eyes so you can see just as perfectly as when you are on the surface. Whole crowds of tiny fishes swim by, many of them different colors and very bright. Pink, or green, or blue, or silvery or striped ones. One day as Uncle Will entered the water, and was just going down, a huge shark swam by. He waited a few minutes and then went down, and the shark had apparently gone along on his business. Later he had a cage built, so he could stay in that and look around if there were too many sharks. That afternoon when he went down he saw many very strange fish, some bright orange and black with a white cross like a belt, others dark gray with yellow tails. Of course there is always a chance in these waters to see octopus, big sting rays or devil fish and sharks. So the cage with three heavy wire sides one can stand in, is pretty nice. One day I went down. I was a little scared because the helmet weighs forty pounds or more and the stuffy feeling of having something over one’s head is unpleasant. I went over the stern of a rowboat in about fifteen feet of water near shore, and climbed down a heavy iron ladder, holding onto the rounds. There is a kind of roar from the air coming in, and a curious feeling against the ears, but otherwise it is grand fun to be down underneath the sea and see all the rocks and ledges and fish swimming past. Your feet seem to float out around you and the distances under the water all look different. You think you can reach out and take hold of something, not believing it is far away. It must be fun to go down often enough to get used to the feeling and then walk all around on the bottom like the pearl divers do, or the men who go way down below to salvage wrecks. THE SHIPWRECKED MAN Today Christianson is a taxi driver in New York City, but in November, 1906, he was a sailor on the ship Alexander, bound from South Wales to Panama with a cargo of coal. Fred Jeff was his pal, and they had made other voyages together. The story of the wrecked taxi cab driver is told in a chapter in Uncle Will’s book Galápagos, World’s End. I read it long before I ever thought there would be a chance of my really seeing the Islands myself. It is about the most interesting adventure story you could imagine. On May 8th, the captain said they were seven hundred miles off South America, and the weather was still bad because they had no wind, and the Alexander was a sailing ship. For three weeks they had just drifted. He thought they had better put to sea in the small boats because water was scarce, and their supplies had given out. Galápagos Islands were the nearest land, so they started for them.