Wake of the Beagle

When the yacht Velero III, which by express order of its owner is referred to as a cruiser, never as a yacht, tied up in San Diego Harbor one day last week, there disembarked an eccentric man, and after him some of the earth's most eccentric animals. The man was Captain George Allan Hancock, multimillionaire California oil and real-estate operator, musician, aviator, scientist, explorer.

Allan Hancock was the browbeaten son of an overbearing dowager who made him house his wife in the back yard of her vast Los Angeles estate. In 1925 he lost his only son, Bertram, in the Santa Barbara earthquake. He turned to mechanics, playing engineer at the throttle of his Santa Maria Valley Railroad engines; to aeronautics, learning to fly and fostering the Hancock Foundation College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria; to music, with serious and successful study of the cello; to yachting, with what has become a formidable interest in marine biology.

On the 1931 cruise of Velero III, a 195-foot, steel superyacht equipped with tanks, cages, diving helmets, dredging apparatus, Hancock found "Eden," the idyllic home on Galapagan Charles Island of toothless Escapist Dr. Frederick Ritter and his toothless common-law wife Frau Dore Koerwin. Three years later he discovered on Marchena the twisted, mummified body of Alfred Rudolph Lorenz, castoff tuberculous lover of a Galapagan lady, the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrborn, whose favorite costume was a pair of silk panties and a pearl-handled pistol.

But scientific adventure rather than romantic has been the object of his cruises in the wake of Charles Darwin's Beagle. Allan Hancock is credited with at least two discoveries--the fish Aganostomus hancocki Seale and the lizard Diploglossus hancocki (Slevin). Among the prodigious animals he brought back last week:

Pistol shrimp, which snap their claws with a report as loud as that of a cap pistol.

A spectacled bear from Ecuador, and several pugnosed Peruvian sea lions, one of them ten feet long and weighing half a ton.

A painted frog from the Amazon, whose jewel-like skin contains poison used by natives for arrows and darts.

Pigmy marmosets (monkeys small enough to hide in a teacup).

A capybara, a guinea pig as big as a wolf.

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