LONELY TROPIC ISLES

Evening Star, Issue 21722, 17 May 1934, Page 2

LONELY TROPIC ISLES

EXILES FIKO HAPPINESS “ EMPRESS’S ” REGAL STATE. Scientists returning from a ten weeks’ tour of the Galapagos Islands, C6O miles off the coast of Ecuador, told recently of happiness achieved _ by a party of exiles who fled from civilisation to live a Swiss Family Robinson existence on romantic tropical shoves. Headed by Captain G. Allan Hancock, a wealthy Los Angeles patron of science, and including Professor G. M‘Lean Eraser, of the University of British Columbia, the party aboard the cruiser Valero HI. made contentment complete for the exiles, by taking a baby’s dress for a child born to one ol the retainers of a self-styled empress. The “ Empress,” Baroness Bouseqnet He Wagner, late of Vienna, was found

to be enjoying vigorous health and supreme control over her several subjects. These subjects consist of several white persons living in her tropical realm, which yields papatas, oranges, bananas, wild cattle, and carefully-cul-tivated European and American vegetables. One of the retainers, Mrs Ann Whitmer, was delighted with a dress presented her island-born child, hitherto a nudist. The retinue and-Royal household ol the Empress, quartered on the outer end of the island, consists of the baroness’s husband and two others. The

Empress set up. her “dominion” on one of the islands after financial reverses in Vienna reduced her to comparative poverty. Sailor yarns about the Empress include the story of her clubbing a seafaring man who refused to acknowledge her sway. The expedition was a pronounced scientific success. A vast number of marine specimens, heretofore unknown to science, were found. The San Diego Zoo is recipient of most of the rare finds. Others will-go to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington and laboratories of several universities.