Galapagos---Lost Isles of the Pacific

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 32, 20 February 1931, Page 5

Galapagos---Lost Isles of the Pacific

Stirring Broadcast from 4YA

THE stirring sea story of "Galapagos" will be broadcast by 4YA on Friday, February 27, by a strong cast of characters under the direction of Major Lampen. When first presented to an American radio audience "Galapagos" created a sensation, its echoes reaching even New Zealand. ; This occasion was noteworthy _ because of the fact that Martin, "Red" Christiansen himself, told the story of his experiences at Galapagos. He is a taxi-driver in New York. In introducing Christiansen to the radio audiencé, the announcer explained how one morning he had been sitting in his car reading a paper, when he chanced to see in the news that William Beebe was. homeward bound from the Galapagos Islands, one of the lost places of the Pacific. Christiansen read that item and rushed down to the dock so that he might greet the only man he had ever heard about who knew those islands. Christiansen was on the dock when the explorer arrived and the story he told Beebe afterward constituted a rattling good chapter in the explorer’s book about those islands. All of that explanation was packed into a few sentences by the announcer, who then turned over the air to Christiansen, and let him speak for himself. . He was the sort of man fully capable of _ effort and proceeded along this e:"Well, I suppose the story begins when I signed up with the barque Alex-

ander, down on the other side of the world. That was.at Newcastle, New South Wales, in Australia, The Alexander was loaded with a cargo of coal bound eastward across the Pacific for Panama. "She carried a captain, mate, cook, and sixteen of us mon. "t had been living in a sailor’s boarding-house, run by Nellie Simonds. The day we shipped, Nellie rowed out in the bay and brought some refreshments along as a parting gift. tT don’t mind telling you that her brand of refreshments made a bigger hit with us than the stuff we had to drink before we got through that voyage. As the tug took hold and started off, we sang to her, and she sang pack. It was a happy send-off." Before’ Christiansen stopped talking, there was hardly a radio ear in some thousands of miles that was not a-quiv-er with his story about those forsaken islands and the things that happened there. It was such a yarn as Stevengon would have liked to spin. A listener could experience for himself all the heartache, thirst, and peril that went into the sailor’s adventures. In the end, it was pleasant to know that he had adopted the comparatively easy and safe pursuit of driving a New York taxi-cab, although many men of a less eventful past might call that high adventure. Major Lampen will take the part of Christiansen in the 4YA presentation.