Galápagos expeditions
Beebe was eager to undertake an expedition to the Galápagos Islands, intending to obtain more detailed data in support of evolution than Charles Darwin had been able to collect in his earlier visit. In 1923, Harrison Williams agreed to finance such an expedition, and Beebe was provided with a 250-foot (76 m) steam yacht called the Noma for this purpose along with a support crew. The support crew included several scientists who had worked with Beebe previously and several artists including the marine painter Harry Hoffman, as well as some of Williams' friends whose inclusion was a condition for Williams' agreement to fund the expedition. Passing through the Sargasso Sea on the way to the Galápagos, Beebe was fascinated by the diversity of life that could be found in the sargassum weed floating on the surface and spent several days scooping the weed from the water to examine the creatures that lived in it.
Beebe's first expedition to the Galápagos lasted twenty days, broken into two ten-day periods, between which the Noma was forced to return to Panama for fresh water and coal. During this expedition he documented the unique ways that animals that inhabit the Galápagos have evolved in response to the absence of predators. The Galápagos animals generally showed no fear of humans, causing the team to have a high degree of success at capturing live specimens for the zoo. Beebe also discovered a previously unknown bay on Genovesa Island (also known as Tower Island) in the Galápagos, which he named Darwin Bay, and documented the diversity of animal life that inhabited it. During the return to New York from this expedition, Beebe continued to dredge animals from the sea, using a pair of new devices he had devised to assist himself with this: a "pulpit", an iron cage affixed to the bow of the ship that enabled its occupant to examine the surface of the sea more closely; and a "boom walk", a 30-foot (9.1 m) boom jutting from the side of the ship from which he suspended himself. The book in which Beebe summarized this expedition, titled Galápagos: World's End, was an instant best-seller and remained on the New York Times top ten list for several months.
In 1924, Beebe went on another expedition to his Guiana research station of Kartabo, intending to continue the detailed documentation of the tropical ecosystem that he had begun at Kalacoon. The paper which finally resulted from this study was published in Zoologica in 1925 and was the first study of its kind in the developing field of tropical ecology. Beebe continued to battle depression during this trip to Kartabo, both over his earlier loss of Blair, and over the death of his mother Nettie, who had died shortly before the beginning of the expedition.
Despite his ongoing research in Guiana, what Beebe desired most was to return to the Galápagos, this time with a properly fitted-out scientific research vessel that possessed the ability to dredge animals from beneath the ocean. In 1925, Beebe set out on a second Galápagos expedition, the Arcturus Oceanographic Expedition, backed by Williams and several other donors. His ship for this expedition was the Arcturus, presented to the New York Zoological Society by Executive Committee member Henry D. Whiton. (Though Beebe and others called Arcturus a "steam yacht", it had been built as a Design 1065 wooden-hulled cargo ship for the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation during World War I; originally named SS Clio, it had later been acquired by Union Sulphur Company, of which Whiton was the former president.) Arcturus was much larger than the Noma, at 280 ft (85.3 m) long and over three times the internal volume (gross register tonnage), and was capable of being at sea for extended periods of time. The Arcturus was outfitted with Beebe's pulpit and boom walk from the Noma, as well as cages and tanks for live animals, chemicals and vials to preserve dead ones, and a darkroom for developing film and studying the bioluminescent animals they hoped to encounter.
The Arcturus did not encounter the thick mats of sargassum in the Sargasso Sea that Beebe was hoping to study, but Beebe and his crew experienced great success dredging creatures from the sea off the coast of Saint Martin and Saba. In the Pacific, they encountered a strange boundary between two currents of very different temperatures, containing a vast diversity of life on the border between the two. He sailed along the border between the currents for several days to document it, theorizing that it could be the cause of the unusual climate which South America had recently been experiencing. Beebe's study of these currents, and their effect on the climate of South America, is the earliest known study of the phenomenon known as El Niño.
Anchoring near Darwin Bay, Beebe made his first attempt at studying sea animals in their native environment by descending into the ocean in a diving helmet. Beebe continued to perform helmet dives throughout his Galápagos expedition, documenting several previously unknown sea animals. In addition to his helmet dives, Beebe applied the same method of research that he had pioneered in the tropics to a small area of ocean, sailing in circles around it for ten days to document all actions and interactions of marine life within that area. This study yielded a collection of 3,776 fish of 136 species, many of them also new to science.
While anchored off the Galápagos, Beebe and his crew noticed volcanic activity on Albemarle Island, and set out to investigate it. Anchoring in a small cove, Beebe and his assistant John Tee-Van searched for an active crater where they could observe the eruption and were nearing exhaustion by the time they found one. As he observed the crater, Beebe realized that the air surrounding it was filled with noxious gases, and narrowly avoided suffocation before staggering away from it. Observing the eruption from his ship for another two days, as well as again at a later point in the expedition, Beebe recorded how numerous birds and marine animals were killed after either failing to escape the lava or drawing too close to it in an attempt to scavenge other animals that had died.
During the return from the Galápagos through the Sargasso Sea, Beebe once again failed to find the thick mats of Sargassum whose study had been one of the primary goals of the expedition. Searching for a way to satisfy his expedition's donors, Beebe hit upon the idea of documenting the marine life of the Hudson Gorge just beyond the shore of New York City. Applying the same techniques to studying the Hudson Gorge that he had used in the Galápagos, Beebe encountered a surprising variety of sea animals, many of which had previously been thought to be exclusive to the tropics.
Shortly after Beebe's return from this expedition, Anthony Kuser requested that Beebe produce a condensed, popular version of his pheasant monograph. The book which resulted from this, titled Pheasants: Their Lives and Homes (also known by the title Pheasants of the World), was released in 1926 and received the John Burroughs Medal. During the course of writing this book, Beebe was reminded of many experiences during the pheasant expedition which he had not included in his original monograph, and wrote an additional book titled Pheasant Jungles about his adventures during this expedition. While A Monograph of the Pheasants had been a factual account of this expedition, Pheasant Jungles was a somewhat fictionalized account, in which Beebe altered some aspects of his experience to appeal to a wider audience.
