LONELY TROPIC ISLES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22260, 12 May 1934, Page 22

LONELY TROPIC ISLES

EXILES FIND HAPPINESS “ EMPRESS ” REGAL STATE. Scientists returning from a 10-weeks tour of the Galapagos Islands, 660 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 shores. Headed by Captain G. Allan Hancock, a wealthy Los Angeles patron of science and including Professor C. M‘Lean Fraser of the University of British Columbia, the party aboard the cruiser Valero 111 made contentment complete for the exiles by' taking a baby’s dress for a child /born to one of the retainers of a self-styled Empress. The “ Empress,” Baroness Bousequet de 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 cultivated European and American vegetables. One of the retainers, Mrs Ann Whitmer, was delighted with a dress presented her islandborn child, hitherto a nudist. The retinue and royal household of 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 hitherto 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.