Iguana 12.1


Visits to Saba, St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Marie
Galante, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent,

Cariacou, Grenada, Tabago [sic], Trinidad, followed, then La
Guaira and Puerto Cabello in Venezuela, Curacao, Santa Marta,
and Cartegena [sic] in Colombia, Colon in the Canal Zone, Port
Limon in Costa Rica, Tela, Honduras, and Cienfuegos, Cuba,
where we fetched up on the 15th of April. The collections from
the West Indies in the Museum of Comparative Zoology are
extraordinarily rich and varied, so that in many localities there
was nothing especially for me to do but to see the sights. This
always gave me the greatest possible enjoyment. Next to vigor-
ous collecting in a new locality, nothing is so interesting to the
naturalist as the opportunity to see those places from which he
has studied material gathered by other collectors. That was the
case with all these islands in the Lesser Antilles, which I myself
had never visited before.

From Beata Island,2 however, we had no material whatso-
ever in the Agassiz Museum so that everything which we got
there was new to us, and we made a fine haul, too, all pure gold.
This is one of those islands where one of those great and strange
looking rhinoceros iguanas3 once abounded. The big, bulky
lizards crept about the high limestone hills not far inland from
the beach. Harmless and inoffensive nevertheless they look like

fearsome dinosaurs on a miniature scale. Each about three feet
long and weighing perhaps fifteen or more pounds they walk
slowly about browsing on buds and leaves and before scuttling
away with surprising alacrity when they are approached, they
first stare at the intruder and bob their heads up and down in a
singularly truculent way. This might be a bit disconcerting to
one unfamiliar with the ways of lizards in general and iguanas
in particular. We preserved several. I am glad we did, for obser-
vations made during this visit, and subsequent ones as well,
forced the conclusion that they belong to a doomed race.4 No
young individuals were to be found and tracks in the sand
showed that feral cats, escaped from the abandoned camps of
fishermen, who go to Beata to dry fish or catch turtles, were
responsible. I may add that the fishing off the west coast of the
island near our anchorage was splendid.

46 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1  •  MARCH 2005 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Allison Armour 
and the Utowana1

Thomas Barbour

1 Excerpted from Barbour, T. 1945. Allison Armour and the Utowana.
Priv. Published, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2 Off the southern tip of the Barahona Peninsula of Hispaniola.
3 Cyclura cornuta.
4 The population on Beata is extant and doing well, despite Barbour’s

pessimistic assessment.

Barbour’s conclusion that the Rhinoceros Iguana population on Isla Beata was a “doomed race” was premature. Photograph by John Binns.