Tagus Cove is on the west side of Albemarle Island, a deep little bay
about half a mile wide. The cliffs around it are steep except for one
place at the end where there is a little gully in the rocks. There is
no beach, so we landed in this gully where the rocks were very
slippery.
When you are once ashore, however, it is fairly easy walking because
the lava is very old and crumbly, like clinkers, and the scrubby bushes
and stumpy trees give one a hold.
Over the nearest and lowest ridge there is a little crater lake and
nearly one hundred years ago Charles Darwin climbed up and discovered
it when he was cruising around here in the Beagle.
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
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 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.
Mother and Isabel took a hard climb in the opposite direction over two
high hills and they saw a very much bigger crater lake which had never
been reported before. It had very steep walls over five hundred feet
high, and six little cone-like islands in the middle.
Along the shores of the cove there are grottoes and little caves and
here there are penguins, and pelicans, and boobies and some very
strange birds called flightless cormorants—birds which really have lost
the power of flight because they have lived so long on the island and
never really used their wings because they didn’t have to get food or
travel anywhere.