And Dwight Franklin made me a lovely drawing of the beach at Cocos back in the old days, with a regular pirate landing on it from his ship. That picture is used at the end of my book. Cocos Island is really a wonderful place for a pirate party anyway, for real pirates were there many times, and maybe men were marooned there, or left there, and mutinies occurred. Treasure was buried there. Along the beach where ships came for fresh water, there are carvings on the rocks, ship’s names and dates, many of them old and back as far as 1813. There were names of famous whaling ships, and one, The Shrew, was a real pirate ship but the date was not given with that one, probably on purpose. There is a fine tunnel right through the rock in one place, going fully a hundred yards through a point of land to another bay quite round the corner. Don went through it in his little dugout canoe which he bought in Panama and Tamms, the third mate, went in his motor skiff with the Johnson engine. In one little bay beyond the settlement we found a hole twenty feet deep where Captain Gissler or someone else had dug for treasure. Don and Dwight went down it on a rope and only found a board and a piece of rope there. WEEKS AT SEA For two weeks after leaving Cocos Island we were at sea again. The daily soundings were taken, the temperatures of the water and samples, and then there were the nets. We had out the big otter trawl net to go to the bottom every day until we lost it by getting it tangled in the propeller over the stern. And the long eight-foot net to go to bottom we also lost, probably because it hit a submerged mountain peak or a huge rock. But there were always other nets, the one metre net, the half metre and the Blake dredge. A metre is a little over three feet. Once in the morning and once every afternoon these went over, and there was always great excitement about it. There were some fine rich hauls. In about the best haul there were two tubs of deep sea fish from bottom—black and queer looking, some with long pointed tails without a tail fin, some eels, black with pointed heads, and a lot of funny little fish like sharks only with bright green eyes. Many of these come to the surface with the scales all torn off or soft and peeling. There were light pink starfish, very brittle, a few sea cucumbers, some living sponges, crabs, bright red shrimps and two or three very queer looking fish with faces like demons or bogeys with funny little electric light things sticking out in front of them on long barbels, which is what they call the long whisker-like thing. I brought home for my collection a few specimens of this rare deep sea life. Starfish, shrimp and cyclothone, which is a small deep sea fish. Apparently there is a great undersea plateau around Cocos. It is about six hundred fathoms deep. Just off the edge of this it is thirteen to sixteen hundred fathoms deep.