Matt  James, Geology Department Chair at Sonoma State University, is a biographer of Rollo H. Beck  working on a book about Beck’s expedition to the Galapagos in 1905-06. He was kind enough to share his wealth of knowledge about this iconic collector of birds in this interview over the phone on April 5, 2006.

 

RW: How was it that you came to learn of Beck in that you are a geologist as opposed to an ornithologist?

 

Matt James: In 1982 I was doing graduate work in geology in the Galapagos. We were collecting marine fossils and using the notes from one of the members of the 1905-06 expedition that Beck led. In reading his notes there were many references to Rollo Beck. There were 8 on board with Beck, who was the oldest. Since then I’ve interviewed Beck’s’ relatives and the relatives of those eight young men who went to the Galapagos.

I’ve tried to read everything those eight guys have written but it’s Beck who became my main focus. I’ve even visited all of their gravesites that are in the Bay Area with the exception of one who is buried in Florida that I haven’t visited yet. Basically I’ve been trying to figure out who these guys were and why they did what they did and Beck stands out as the one who did the most expeditions and the most collecting.

 

There was a paper written by Frank Pitelka, a bird professor from Berkley who has since passed away. In that article he describes Beck as THE Collector because he figures so prominently in the world of collecting and it’s true that Beck was the preeminent field collector of his time and that included mostly birds. He kind of got his fame in seabirds. That theme got started down around Monterey in the 1890’s.  He lived in Pacific Grove and that is where Beck gets his big start. He was born in 1870 so in the 90’s so he’s in his twenties. There’s a point in which he starts to stuff birds and sell eggs. There was a big trade for eggs and bird skins back then. There were magazines devoted to egg trade much like stamp collecting.

 

RW:  So how did Beck make the leap from collecting birds locally to getting invited on that first Galapagos Expedition?

 

Matt James: It was a matter of good luck for Beck but bad luck for other people. The expedition was put together on the east coast from Massachusetts. They took a steamer to Central America. This was before the Panama Canal and a bunch of them get Yellow Fever and die so they get themselves up to San Francisco to get a new collecting crew. They charter a vessel called the Mary Sachs which they intend to sail on down to the Galapagos.

 

Beck is a member of the Cooper Ornithological Society, he’s one of the early members. In one of the first issues of their bulletin he’s written up as this promising star in California birding and undoubtedly there he meets some of the professional curators who go to the meetings and along the way he becomes connected to the California Academy of Sciences. By knowing those curators and in particular this fellow named Alfred Mills Loomis, a procilleriiformes guy  who is the director.  Beck becomes his man in the field.  He is the one who sends Beck down to Monterey to collect. Beck does this for a couple of years. When this Galapagos trip arrives in San Francisco and they’re asking around for collectors they are going to ask at museums and end up at the Cal Academy.

 

Loomis had been sending him down to Pacific Grove where Beck would go out and collect seabirds and eventually either send them up or take them up himself to deliver his catch and he would be paid.  That was his job. He made a little bit of money on the side by collecting his own birds and sell a stuffed this or that for a dollar – fifty cents which doesn’t seem like much now but it was back then.  He was making his living on selling and trading eggs and skins.

 

What Loomis wanted was for Beck to collect specimens so that Loomis could then publish on them. This was the kind of parasitic relationship that they had. Beck wanted to make money, Loomis wanted to publish and so it was a little marriage made in heaven. Loomis got to stay in San Francisco and run his museum and Beck would just fill up the museum with specimens because he was just so prolific.

 

He got to be so good at stuffing, this was a remarkable thing about Beck was that we was renowned for his accuracy and his speed. He could put up a bird skin in just a phenomenal amount of time. His accuracy was such that when you look at his birds in a museum drawer they look like cigarettes in a box they were so exact.

 

He once went to New York City to the American Museum of Natural History and when the scientists heard Beck was coming they wanted to see him stuff a bird. So they sent someone out from the museum to the upper West Side to the Hudson river where they got hold of some dead starlings and brought them to the museum and they had a Rollo Beck demonstration.

 

RW: They probably realized at some point that Beck was a real ace at collecting.

 

Matt James: Right, right. He has like a seventh grade education and he’s kind of tough as nails. Beck would go out in a row boat out of Monterey/Pacific Grove for days.

 

RW: He would go out for days at a time?!

 

Matt James: Yeah, days at a time.

 

RW: Unbelievable!

 

Matt James: He’d go out for like a week or ten days and he would come back weighing more than he did when he went out because after skinning them he would be eat the carcasses of the seabirds. He took a box that had sand in it on this rowboat so he could have a fire and he could cook them. They must have tasted terrible! Skanky tasting!

 

Beck perfected this technique which is to take this rowboat and row out, drop bits of meat or fish or something for two miles and then row back. The birds have now come back, attracted by the oily smell and he would shoot them. Later, when he went on the expedition around South America, he would tell the crew OK it’s really calm, we’re not sailing anywhere today so I’m going to row out and get some birds. They’d say but there aren’t any birds around, we don’t see any birds. But Beck would come back with all these birds because he could draw them with this line of flesh in the water.

 

Frank Pitelka  from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkley knew Beck. Pitelka would ask him can you bring me X, Y and Z from the Central Valley to demonstrate some phenomenon and Beck would bring a cardboard box of 150 of these birds and pile them on the table.

 

Pitelka said to me, “He was a little devil you know.” It was interesting that Frank Pitelka, who was the most devilish person you can imagine, is telling me that Rollo Beck was a little devil. Even in these old black and white photos of Beck you can see that he has these blue eyes with a definite twinkle. So I don’t have any reason to doubt that he wasn’t a little devil.

 

RW: At what point did his wife Ida start going on these expeditions with him?

 

Matt James: She traveled with him on this big South America trip that lasted a few years that went all the way around to the Dominican Republic. Then she went on a bunch of  the Whitney Expedition. That expedition had a lot of rough points because they’re out there so long and it was such a difficult time. Beck probably wouldn’t have been kept on the Whitney trip if he hadn’t been so good. Personally people didn’t always get along with him.

 

RW: Now wasn’t he the leader for that expedition?

 

Matt James: He was the leader, yeah. As my father used to say, “He was a tough little bastard.” I think it was hard for people to keep up with him. I really do. I think he was just tougher than most people. He required less sleep, less food, less water. He drove people to their grave. It’s undeniable that the guy was remarkable with faults or not.

 

RW: One of the criticisms we hear about Beck and many of the collectors of the time is that they were almost rapacious in their collecting. Some have claimed that Beck single handedly wiped out the last of the Guadalupe Caracara and killed the last tortoise on Fernandina Island in the Galapagos. How do you respond to that?

 

Matt James: I actually talked with Ernst Mayr who replaced Beck on the Whitney South Seas Expedition. Mayr said that although Beck is attributed with collecting the last specimens that bird was already on the decline so we can’t say that Beck went there and shot so many of them that it caused the bird to go extinct. There were 11 birds seen and he shot 9 and then no one ever sees them again. But the truth is somebody else got the first 9,000.  So it’s just a little too easy to say he caused their extinction.

 

And the same could be said for this Galapagos Tortoise on the island of Fernandina. The whole point of this 1905-06 expedition is to collect these tortoises before it’s too late. They believe that the tortoises are fast disappearing and this comes from Beck’s earlier trip to the islands collecting for Lord Rothschild where they see thousands of tortoises slaughtered all over the place. Loomis finds out about this and decides to put together this expedition. People are eating them, whalers, buccaneers all manner of people have eaten them over the years. So the Academy decides to get them before it’s too late. Thinking they’re better dead and preserved in a museum than left to the whims of the locals. They go there to simply harvest the last ones.

 

So when Beck goes to the island of Fernandina he hikes up to the top of this island. Which, by all accounts is an almost impossible hike. Hiking to the top of Fernandina will kill the average person, literally. Well, he gets up there and he stays overnight, sleeps on lava, he has 200 ticks crawling all over him. He picks them off two at a time. He has nothing more than an oil cloth to sleep on the bare lava.

 

Eventually he finds this tortoise as the sun is going down so he puts down his pack and eats his dinner with the tortoise munching on grass nearby. Then, he writes, “I skin the tortoise by moonlight.” He probably stayed up most of the night because it takes like seven or eight hours to skin out one of these tortoises. Then he puts it on his back, this thing still has to weigh like a 150 pounds or something like that. He carries this all the way down to the coast on a walk that will kill the average person.

 

Beck would have collected this tortoise, the last of its kind, even if it had a sign on it that said as much. You cannot be a modern day conservationist saying, “Oh Beck did something bad, because he would have said, I’m going to collect it anyway, I’m going to get the last tortoise because it is better for me to kill it and put it in a museum than it is for someone to eat it and throw it into the ocean or leave its bleached bones laying in the sun.

 

If you apply modern day political correctness to what people were doing a hundred years ago it just doesn’t work. It was a different mind-set.

 

I have this quote from Elliot Coues where he advises birders to collect 50-100 of every species you find except the most common. The logic being that the most common you can always go back and get later. He says that, “birds are so abundant that they could populate every public museum and private collection without noticeably diminishing their numbers.” Now this is the recommendation of the most prominent ornithologist of the time.  I use this quote in my presentations to show that this was the mind set of the time. You have to put it into that context.

 

RW: What were the conditions like on the boat for these Galapagos Expeditions? They were their own crew right? They weren’t just sitting in cabins enjoying the ride were they?

 

Matt James: They were sailor/scientists, exactly. That was the plan all along. There was a guy they brought along as a navigator and a mate.

 

RW: I heard he was a bad navigator.

 

Matt James: The navigator ended up getting kicked off after running them aground a few times. On those vessels everyone was expected to lend a hand with hoisting the sails. You just don’t have a complete crew and everyone sits around with their feet up on the table. These weren’t dilettante gentlemen waiting for the sails to be raised. It wasn’t like the Alan Hancock expeditions to the Galapagos where everybody dressed in tuxedos and played classical music after dinner and you only got to go if you could play a classical instrument.

 

RW: After they left the Whitney Expedition and spent the next year in New Guinea what did he do?

 

Matt James: Beck wrote that after all that time away he was looking forward to staying at home for a while. He’d been on this trip for all those years under really harsh conditions. He nearly died of malaria that last year in New Guinea. There are photos of him in San Francisco where he looks really skinny, really bad.

 

He just wanted to be a gentleman farmer. He grew up on a ranch in San Jose.  He bought a piece of property in Planada just east of Merced on the way to Yosemite. He grew apricots there. He lived on that property and he died there on November 22, 1950.  He’s buried in the family plot in San Jose at the Oak Park Cemetery. It’s a big, old cemetery with a lot of the old pioneer families buried there.

 

But all the while he did continue to collect for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology on the Berkley campus and they would get him his collecting permits. He collected in the Central Valley for them until his death.