This boom has two railings tied to the bottom plank so one can walk out there and fish or haul in nets or go down the rope ladder. Sometimes when the ship rolls a lot the end goes right under the water. And out from the bow a pulpit is hung, a strong wire cage-like thing in which we can stand for harpooning or catching floating objects as we pass. To get down to the pulpit you climb down a rope ladder. When it’s rough it’s pretty exciting. In the forward part of the ship there are two rooms fitted out as shops, one belonging to Bill Merriam the general handy man, who always mends the nets, shapes a new dredge, puts another seat in one of the rowboats, makes a lobster pot or fixes the motor boats. The other is a workshop for Serge the taxidermist and for Dwight Franklin the sculptor. Dwight makes wax moulds and plaster casts of fishes and preserves them, as well as making drawings and paintings. Isabel Cooper is the scientific artist. She has been on many other expeditions and made many wonderful pictures. On this trip she did over two hundred water color drawings of fish. The Arcturus has two huge cables, one seven miles long, for hauling in the big trawls. These are put down over the side and held out while the ship goes slowly along at half speed. Sometimes the cable goes out as much as three miles and often the sea is over a mile deep below us. There are thirty-eight in the crew and eighteen members of the expedition. Each night and morning the nets are put over, for a surface haul and for a deep one a sounding is taken—a curious lead on a wire, weighted down with an iron weight which forces the sound lead down to the sea bottom and brings up a sample of the bottom, so we can see if it is muddy or rocky or sandy. Each time the weight automatically drops off when the bottom is reached, because the sounding wire isn’t strong enough to pull it up. After the nets are out for an hour they are hauled in and the contents put into tubs of water. Sometimes the whole net has only a pint glass full of tiny, tiny fish which have been brought up from a depth of over a mile or two miles. On the boat my room mate was Dr. W. K. Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History, who is also Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Columbia. Pretty nice, I think, for a real professor to let a twelve-year-old boy bunk with him! Everyone called him just “Greg” and liked him a lot because he always is so nice and so interested in his work. I think Greg would rather dissect a fish than do almost anything. I know I’d just about rather catch them! My bunk was right next to where the smokestack went up from the engine room, and the wall was pretty hot. So most of the time, except when it rained, I slept on deck. Really, although we crossed the Equator twenty-one times it was not so hot while we were at sea. Lots of times, right on the Equator, it was cool enough to be comfortable wearing a sweater. WE START ON OUR CRUISE