scientific illustration Archives

The 1925 Arcturus Expedition’s Women Staff

February 19, 2026November 5, 2023 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 6 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

The picture below is a press photo from July 1925 showing the five women scientists and artists who staffed the Arcturus Expedition led by William Beebe, February to July 1925. My grandmother, Isabel Cooper, is at the right.

Marie P. Fish, Ruth Rose, Helen Tee Van, Lillian Segal, and Isabel Cooper, July 1925, upon their return from a six-month scientific expedition on the *S S Arcturus* to the Sargasso Sea, Panama, and the Galapagos Islands. They are holding a stuffed albatross

More about the five women
A lot more about Isabel Cooper may be found found here. More about each of Isabel’s Arcturus colleagues is in this post from a few years ago. Also, each of the five has an Wikipedia entry. Isabel’s is here.

The S S Arcturus and the expedition

The wooden steam yacht S S Arcturus, fitted out for oceanographic study, left New York on February 10, 1925 and sailed into the Atlantic Ocean. It found its way to the mid-ocean Sargasso Sea where explorer and naturalist William Beebe (1877-1962) and his staff sampled water and sea creatures at various depths.

Gear on the ship could sample as deep as three miles. Doing so meant spooling out a half-inch cable from where it was wound in drums for three hours. It took three more hours to bring up the sample. The women artists and ichthyologists aboard set to analyzing and illustrating the samples immediately. Here is a post on Isabel Cooper’s work as a ship-board scientific illustrator on the Arcturus Expedition.

The ship discovered some of the first (very) deep sea fish species. One of the reasons to have artists along was that color photography had not yet been perfected, and fish could change in color, shape, and condition once brought out of the water, an issue particularly for fish evolved to live at extreme deep-sea atmospheric pressures. So the artists painted and drew them immediately on the ship.

The expedition continued to Panama, and passed through the Panama Canal, sailing into the Pacific Ocean to the Galapagos Islands for further exploration. It returned to New York City at the end of July 1925.

Why all the women?

William Beebe favored hiring women for his tropical research stations and ship expeditions. My grandmother, Isabel Cooper, worked for him in the late 1910s through much of the 1920s.

Hiring women and recognizing them for their professional expertise was not typical then. I’ve often wondered why Beebe not only hired women, but seemed to prefer to do so. It’s hard to avoid wondering whether Beebe also had a romantic interest in some of the women.

I’ve posted before on Beebe and the women he employed in this post: “I let too many girl pictures get by me”. But I think there is more to explore.

Prior to the Arcturus Expedition, William Beebe gave an above-board reason to employ women staff. He noted that he “preferred working with women and that ‘If it were feasible I would have my entire scientific party made up of them…Fine minds are as necessary in modern research exploration as fine courage. It is easier to find fine women than fine men.’” ¹⁾From: Cohen, Gene (November 21, 1924). “Women plan to chart ‘port of missing ships’ and to strip Sargasso Sea of its secrets”. Americus Times-Recorder. (Americus, Ga.) . He wrote another time that it was what was “above the ears” that mattered; knowledge, intelligence, and judgment.

It’s likely he first saw the professional competence of women through his collaborations with his first wife, Mary Blair Rice. They collaborated closely in studying pheasants and publishing treatises on birds.

For Beebe, the women collaborators at his first research outpost in Kalacoon, British Guiana (now Guyana) strengthened his perspective on women as colleagues. He recruited more women colleagues as he grew his work exploring nature with research stations in South America, and ship expeditions.

By the time he was planning the Arcturus Expedition, he had found a number of leading-edge experts in fish and other wildlife, and in the artistic illustration of animals. Most of them were women.

Were there affairs among the staff?

That Beebe later had an affair with an expedition colleague (while he was married) suggests that affairs among these colleagues happened. But like my father, Isabel Cooper’s son, before me, I am left without a conclusion about whether Beebe and my grandmother ever had one.

The men and women of Beebe’s staff were young, educated, progressive, modern people. There could have been and almost certainly were multiple shipboard affairs and romances on Beebe’s expeditions. And they didn’t have to just involve Beebe.

What matters most is that throughout Beebe’s years of research and exploration, women contributed centrally to his work and were vital to the expeditions’ success. Nothing that happened socially on his expeditions should in any way reduce what happened scientifically and professionally. In other words, if there were affairs, good for them.

References[+]

References
↑1	From: Cohen, Gene (November 21, 1924). “Women plan to chart ‘port of missing ships’ and to strip Sargasso Sea of its secrets”. Americus Times-Recorder. (Americus, Ga.)

Shipboard work for a scientific artist

February 19, 2026August 1, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 10 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

Isabel Cooper wrote a long article, “Fish Portraits,” on her work illustrating fish, hoping to get it published in Asia Magazine. It was not published. This post offers excerpts of that article, focusing on the work and working conditions, and leaving aside her colorful observations on the different kinds of fish she worked with. The full article manuscript is here: Fish Portraits by Isabel Cooper 1925 in a PDF.

What follow are Isabel’s words.

___________________

The ship as a workplace

Our ship was exceedingly sturdy and staunch, and broad-beamed, and well adapted to the requirements of an ocean laboratory.

On the upper deck of the laboratory-proper, neatly wedged between a chart table and the ship’s laboratory, was my ‘studio’. This may sound a bit cramped and crowded; studios are supposed to be reasonably spacious, with plenty of swinging-room for brushes, at least. But I assure you that the more tightly a floating studio is wedged, the [more] beneficial for the work and nerves of the artist! These boundaries fore and aft, together with the wall on the port side, made three directions in which I could not roll.

Image from William Beebe, The Arcturus Adventure. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1926

Possibly the most remarkable feature of my sea-going studio was the fact that it never remained quietly in one plane of space for longer than an instant….

By which mild and rather negative statement I really mean the gruesome fact that, in open ocean, the studio and its entire contents oscillated violently and almost continually through one, two, or three dimensions. This activity became really astounding at times. When the ship was merely slanting about, objects on my desk would develop the most interesting and intricate sorts of rhythm all their own. So you can see the necessity of keeping things as compact as possible. …

My immediate surroundings on the “Arcturus” were not bad at all, – if unusual. … To the starboard of my work-table was an open space which collected chairs and people, towards evening, and which was nightly rent asunder by the stress of arguments and discussions, – always the breath of life to me. And out of my wide, salt-splashed port there was continually to be seen the sea, – stormy Atlantic, or sparkling Caribbean, or slow, beautiful Pacific, with the comforting level of the horizon to furnish a refuge for my thoughts, at least, on tumultuous, busy days.

I had a great deal of trouble with my paints and inks and other rolling stock on board the ‘Arcturus‘. All these things would tend, in rough weather, to merge gradually into an indistinguishable mass, right before my eyes, – no matter how many new and fantastic tethering devices and halters and barricades I invented.

Imagine a desk which slants in almost any direction, or else revolves with a strange, shuddering corkscrew motion. And a working light which shines indiscriminately from east or west or north or south. And models who are mostly alive and swimming. And you will have a faint picture of my “Arcturus” studio. I am thinking especially of a wild morning in Mid-Atlantic, when I had definitely made up my mind that the elements were not to hinder me from finishing a special portrait. My desk had been long since hooked firmly to the deck. And I had worked out a complicated system of paddocks for microscopes, ink bottles, brushes, etc. My model was a very small and unprepossessing deep-sea fish, whose tiny aquarium was wired to the microscope slide. As far as I can remember my paints were safely sliding about in [a?] drawer. I was sticking to my chair in much the way that a rider sticks to a frisky horse, – a matter of knee pressure. But we struck a wave whose trough just fitted the wide sides of our ship. Which means that you roll as far as possible without actually turning over completely in the water. Whereupon I was projected across the room, several of my tools jumped the traces, a whole section of heavy scientific literature moved forward in a mass, and caught me amidship. A funny moment. I suppose the microscope must have looked like the Campanile in an earthquake, with a strange pale little fish spinning off through space like a lost soul.

I was obliged to study new phases and phenomena of gravitation which had never before troubled me. And not the least of these concerned the control of my subjects. In order to achieve sketches to suit the scientists’ purposes the fish had to pose alive. And they happen to be the most difficult models in the world. You cannot hold them still with any degree of comfort or success. They are nowhere near as easy to manage as my jungle models, the snakes and lizards and frogs of Demerara. Once you had a good firm grip on a snake’s neck the problem was solved. And some of the lizards and frogs would even sit still of their own accord and and look you angrily in the eye for minutes at a time.

Dealing with fish as subjects

There are just three ways to deal with fish. You can let them swim around in a glass tank, and regard them through the glass sides. Or you can have them flopping about in a pan of water. Or you can hold them up by the tail. If they swam, I considered myself lucky if they moved slowly and peaceably, allowing me a glimpse now and then of the pose which I wanted. But they were much more likely to whirl about in a panic, stirring up a terrific surf in the aquarium, and gulping great gulps of fear and dismay. Or they jumped right out of the water, and landed, slime and all, in the middle of my drawing or my face.

Arcturus Adventure IC plate vi yellow tailed surgeon fish — Yellow-tailed surgeon fish by Isabel Cooper. From *The Arcturus Adventure*

The most becoming pose a fish can take is in profile, – so that you may catch the full, charming contours of his deficient brain-case, the backward sloping forehead, and the definitely receding chin. But this profile view is almost impossible to get. They prefer to gaze at you head on, concentrating all the sadness and distrust of their bulging, jeweled eyes upon you through the glass, and biting feebly at nothingness, with their strange skeleton mouths.

A fish model who is reclining upon his side in a pan of water is far from satisfactory. He either flops appallingly, or else dies, which is just what must be carefully avoided. When you find yourself with a really adaptable and congenial fish you may be sure it is dead! I arrived long ago at the point where I was willing to hold a fish up by the tail, through they are damp, slippery handfuls at best. But it is not often that I have been able to keep a firm hold upon a living fish. They have the most slithering of contours, as well as a violent power in their flat tapering muscles, against which the strength of the most capable human hand would not function.

The element of speed enters into almost all my work from living creatures. There is always some very good reason why the sketches must be completed as soon as possible. This enforced absorption in my work is an excellent thing, particularly at sea, where it serves to keep my mind off some rather pessimistic reflections upon the activity of the ocean itself, and the very comparative pleasure of working on ships.

The pleasure of the scientific artistic work

Parti-colored bumpheads by Isabel Cooper. From The Arcturus Adventure — Parti-colored bumpheads by Isabel Cooper. From *The Arcturus Adventure*

I wonder whether I will be understood when I remark that the satisfaction of turning out accurate drawings of these diverse and beautiful creatures of the sea was only enhanced by the rather exceptional difficulties involved. This is quite true. There was an extraordinary pleasure in bringing the precision of fine pen and brush work to the many problems presented by silver scales, and transparent fish finds, and weird iridescence of sculptured fish faces. And all this amid wind and rain and tossing salt spray, in a tiny studio that swung and eddied through space, entirely without benefit of gyroscope!

Art for work, art for play

Isabel was ever the artist, so even when she was not doing her work, she drew and painted. She wrote about this to Charles:

“Island of Indefatigable, alias ‘Santa Cruz’.

My procedure in this harbor is to go ashore early and mess around with feeble landscape sketching ’till it gets too hot even for my sun-helmet, then return to the ship and work all day, except when I play hooky and read or talk or just keep cool in a bathing suit.”ⁱ

ⁱ Letter, IC to CDM, from Indefatigable, April 10, 1925.

Grown men, scientific artists, pirates

February 19, 2026July 25, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 3 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

Don Dickerman in the late 1920s, dressed, as was his habit, as a pirate.i

Somehow in all her long letters to Charles Mahaffie, Isabel Cooper failed to mention the presence of not one, but two men on the Arcturus Expedition who were obsessed with pirates. Don Dickerman and Dwight Franklin were pirate-obsessed. And along for part of the journey was David Putnam, 12-year-old son of the publisher George Palmer Putnam. David joined the grown men in reveling in the world of pirates.

Dickerman was a painter and illustrator, and Franklin an expert at modeling and sculpting. They were surely valuable to Beebe’s work, and likely went as proper paid staff on the Arcturus, but from their histories, it seems either would have leapt aboard the Arcturus on the first word that the ship would visit Cocos Island, a famed Pacific Ocean treasure island.

Don Dickerman

Dickerman was an artist, but more so a Greenwich Village personality. He gained multiple wry mentions in the gossip pages of The Quill, which tracked and spoofed, and celebrated the characters of the Village in the late 1910s.

Dickerman attended Andover and Yale, and studied art in New York. He had tried toy designing and worked in illustrating children’s books. Doing poorly at those, he opened a tea room in Greenwich Village, mainly as a place to try to sell his hand-painted toys. It did well, and by 1917, he had turned it into a pirate-themed, make-believe lair called “The Pirates’ Den.ⁱⁱ”

He joined the Arcturus Expedition as an artist, but seems to have distinguished himself there too as a personality and adventurer, celebrating David Putnam’s 13th birthday with a pirate-themed costume party and a special pirate song.

David wrote: “The night of the birthday party Don Dickerman wore his ‘Marooned man’ costume. It is entirely rags and tatters and mended with bits of old string and leather. With a wig of tangled hair all knotted and a bandanna and a cutlass he looks pretty awful. John Tee Van [an assistant to the project’s director William Beebe] had torn trousers, bare body, a frightful long black wig and he painted on a terrible scar across his face, and slashes of blood on his insteps. Some of the others had fine clothes of velvet with old lace, the rich pirates or those who had stolen booty from some recent captive. And the girls looked like pirates’ wives or sweethearts, except Mother [Dorothy Binney Putnam] who came as a wild woman, my captive, all bound up with ropes and being dragged along.”

David Putnam’s 13th birthday party aboard the Arcturusⁱⁱⁱ

“About the grandest birthday present one could get was given me by Don. It was his favorite sword, a real old time cutlass which perhaps was used by pirates. He called it ‘Fury’ and got up an awfully funny card to go with it.^iv”

William Beebe wrote about Dickerman’s zeal in looking for pirate treasure on Cocos Island: “Our atavistic pirate threw his tiny Panama dugout and paddle overboard, dived after, baled it, crawled in, and sped shoreward, in the same spirit with which a pilgrim comes within sight of the Kaaba. No devotee ever climbed the 72 steps of St. Anne de Beaupre with more reverence than Don Dickerman, tumbled ashore by the breakers, crept up the pebbly beach.^v”

Dwight Franklin

Like Don Dickerman, the artist and sculptor Dwight Franklin was interested in pirates. A profile of Franklin in a theater magazine wrote of his modeling of pirates and other figures:

“Pirates have come into their own this season…For any lover of pirates and the Jolly Roger, there is one experience which is beyond all others. That is a visit to Dwight Franklin’s studio, which lies hidden on the fourth floor of a ramshackle old theatre building on Lincoln Square, New York City. here, with a switching on of the current, small scenes of gory adventure pop at you from the dark. Franklin has a facility for character and grace in modeling that are uncanny. One of his new groups, which is on the deck of a pirate ship, peopled with red-sashed and cutlassed gentlemen, so takes you back into the pages of your Stevenson, that you’ll be able to stand their for hours, dreaming of Long John Silver, and Jim Hawks^vi….”

Dwight Franklin pirate Diorama, 1933. This piece sold for just under $3,000 on eBay in 2015

Franklin was on the expedition to make plaster models of specimens. But he joined in the pirate fun. He had begun his career with the American Museum of Natural History, as a taxidermist. He later consulted on Hollywood movies and designed sets, including for Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate (1926). His work also included museum exhibit design, costume design, and theater set work.

Dwight Franklin, from The Arcturus Adventure

Franklin drew a pirate scene for David Putnam’s birthday and it became one of the pictures in the boy’s book, David Goes Voyaging, which also had “decorations” by Isabel Cooper and Don Dickerman.

From David Goes Voyaging.

Another pirate party

After the Arcturus Expedition the two men, in the Fall of 1925, joined in throwing a pirate-themed costume ball.^vii Among the other named hosts, with the men each listed as “Captain,” were “Capt. and Mrs. George Putnam,” the Normal Rockwells, and the muralist Ezra Winter whom Isabel Cooper soon began to work for.

Though she hadn’t mentioned pirates or Dickerman in her letters to Charles, Isabel attended the costume dance.^viii And later, in 1926, she and Charles spent time at Dickerman’s “camp” at Kezar Lake in Maine.^ix

ⁱ Image: http://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2008/12/09/anatomy-of-a-restaurateur-don-dickerman/

ⁱⁱ ”Don Dickerman and His Blue Horse Pills Cigarettes” http://www.freewebs.com/cigpack/bluehorsepills.htm

ⁱⁱⁱ David Putnam, David Goes Voyaging.

^iv David Putnam, David Goes Voyaging, pp. 100-101.

^v William Beebe, The Arcturus Adventure.

^vi “The Gossip Shop,” The Bookman, December 1921, Vol. 54, p. 415.

^vii Advertisement, Columbia Spectator, November 23, 1925.

^viii Letter, IC to CDM, November 25, 1925.

^ix Letter, CDM to IC, July 21, 1926.

A mere “slip of a girl” becomes an explorer

February 19, 2026July 23, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 2 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

In the 1910s it was unusual for a woman to be a recognized professional beyond established women’s work like school teaching, midwifery, or Vaudeville performing. But Isabel Cooper was unusual.

In 1917, at just 25 years old, this “mere slip of a girl,” as she jokingly described herself, became a scientific illustrator for the expeditions of naturalist William Beebe to the South American jungle. She had already established herself as a working professional artist, earning an independent living in New York City. This was rare for a woman.

Isabel traveled on eight of Beebe’s research expeditions between 1917 and 1925, including two journeys by ship which included the Galapagos Islands, and six seasons in the jungle in British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America.

She not only took up this work, she largely invented the techniques involved, since there was no training for it.

Snake detail by Isabel Cooper from Galapagos: World’s End

Isabel also spent time doing medical illustrations for a dermatologist and syphilologist, Dr. John A. Fordyce, at City Hospital in New York City. There Isabel worked to capture skin conditions with the details of color, shape and texture her employer required.

With the New York Zoological Society, she perfected the art of detailed, color animal illustration from live specimens before color photography was available. Isabel’s sharp, clear, artistically-appealing, but scientifically-valuable work got attention right away from the scientists and philanthropists involved with New York City science and exploration, and her work went on exhibit at the Bronx Zoo.

As Beebe’s fame and publicity grew, attention came to the women he employed. Their stories caught notice beyond the science/exploration community. Dozens of newspapers profiled Isabel, the “Bryn Mawr girl” who was living this exotic life.

The story for popular consumption

The newspapers thought Isabel and the other women recruited by William Beebe for his expeditions were interesting because they were women, sailing to the tropics, living shipboard or in jungle camps to do scientific work.

Story in the lead-up to the Arcturus puts the whole adventure on the women. Winston-Salem Journal, November 16, 1924

The reporters looked for, and used, story angles based on that. One Brooklyn Daily Eagle story reveled in it as Beebe prepared his 1925 Arcturus Expedition to the Sargasso Sea and Galapagos:

“Not to be all work and no play”

“The expedition is not to be all work and no play. The Arcturus on its upper deck has a fine new dance floor and part of the ship’s equipment is a powerful radio receiving set. In the party are three women, all of whom, in addition to their scientific qualifications, can dance. After the day’s work of dredging and diving and looking through the microscope is over the party will tune in on the best jazz music program in New York and there will be dancing under a topical moon in the warm tropical climate.”ⁱ

For how could these lovely ladies manage without dancing?

Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, February 21, 1926

Another reporter took up the “girl artist” angle. The story asked: “Where is a young woman most likely to find true happiness? On board a tramp steamer sailing the seven seas? Wandering along some far-flung shore where leaping waves whisper mystery and adventure? In unexplored jungles teeming with curious wild life? Or–in love and marriage–in a bungalow in one’s own homeland?

“These are questions that Miss Isabel Cooper has been trying to answer ever since her return to New York from the latest of her adventurous journeys to little known parts of the earth.

“Hidden away in every girl’s heart at twenty,” the article asserted, writing about a young “girl” who was now 33 years age, “are two dreams. One is a vision of far-off places where romance is supposed to lurk in waiting jut around every corner, where the world is always flooded with sunlight and where men are either great lovers or daring rascals. The other image is that of a model home, an exact replica of the blue and white kitchen in the window of the electrical store–a home where a perfect oven never burns the biscuits and where the embroidered guest towels are never unfolded, much less mussed.”

In fact, her letters tell the truth, she had already decided to end the journeying for the thrilling prospect of being with Charles Mahaffie, whom she had met just before committing to the Arcturus Expedition.

The profile ended with, “Choosing between love and a home and adventure is not an easy matter. Miss Cooper is still undecided whether she will be on the ‘Arcturus’ when it sails from New York again. If she is, it is whispered she will leave behind her a very disappointed young man.ⁱⁱ” This was referring to Charles, who was then 40 years old.

ⁱ “Scientists Will Spend Month on Mysterious Sargasso Sea,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 15, 1925.

ⁱⁱ “Love, or Life of Adventure?,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican,” February 21, 1926.

Isabel Cooper at work in the Galapagos

February 19, 2026July 15, 2015 by John B. Mahaffie

This entry is post 1 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

*Scanned from WCS Photo Collection (DTR)*

Here is Isabel Cooper, my grandmother, at work on one of the Galapagos Islands, or possibly on Cocos Island, which is in the Pacific five hundred miles northeast of the Galapagos. Madeleine Thompson of the World Conservation Society shared this picture after I visited her at the Bronx Zoo last week.

Isabel is drawing or painting a frigatebird. This is from when she worked for the naturalist William Beebe on his 1925 Arcturus Expedition as a scientific artist. Most of her scientific art was done shipboard, drawing and painting hundreds of animals, mainly fish, pulled out of nets or caught by the expedition’s staff.

The Arcturus sailed on February 10, 1925, and Isabel boarded the ship in Newport News, a few days later. The expedition’s work included investigating the Sargasso Sea in the central Atlantic, and the Galapagos Islands and Cocos Island and the seas around them, including the Humboldt Current, in the Pacific. Isabel returned home to New York from Panama on July 1, 1925 after almost five months at sea. It was her second ship-based scientific expedition, and her seventh overall. The others took her to the jungle of British Guiana.

In her letters and other writing, it’s clear she liked sitting on a rock or stump, and drawing or painting her subjects. She wrote to Charles from off Indefatigable Island (Santa Cruz), “My procedure in this harbor is to go ashore early and mess around with feeble landscape sketching ‘till it gets too hot even for my sun-helmet, then return to the ship and work all day, except when I play hooky and read or talk or just keep cool in a bathing suit.” [Letter, Isabel Cooper to Charles D. Mahaffie, Sr., from Indefatigable Island, Galapagos, April 10, 1925.]

With the intense work she did over several months on board the Steam Yacht Arcturus, this may be a picture of her taking a break from illustrations of fish, her main work.

For a nice balance, here is a casual painting Isabel made for herself on the Arcturus Expedition also of frigatebirds. This is from the scrapbook she put together on her career.

[Our family curator, my niece Joanna Church, of the Baltimore Jewish Museum, likely will now clutch at her heart having noted the Scotch tape across the top and bottom of this family artefact. Born in 1892, Isabel thought Scotch tape, paper towels, and, of course, sliced bread, were marvels of civilization. I think she would have quite liked PostIt notes, too.]