plastic duck Bryan Leiser found just north of Gore Point; you won’t see any of this. You’ll see a faded, sea-battered bath toy, an icon of childhood. “Everything tells a story,” Ebbesmeyer likes to say. Perhaps, but not all stories are visible, no matter how illimitably long you study the evidence. Some stories only a mass spectrometer can tell.
16 Additionally you will pass a sign reading MARK TWAIN MONKEY POD TREE. In his Hawaiian travelogue, Twain makes mention of riding a mule to the summit of Kilauea, of visiting the scene of Captain Cook’s death, of trying in vain to procure coconuts by hurling rocks at them, of enjoying himself lecherously at a hula dance, of investigating the burial cave of a dead Hawaiian king (where he and his traveling companion blundered upon a skeletal hand in a burial canoe). He even makes mention of a cistern tree that collects freshwater and a mango tree that collects exceptionally delicious mangoes. But nowhere does he mention planting a monkey pod tree, or of planting any other sort of tree. Perhaps he did and neglected to mention it. The tree that he supposedly planted blew down in a hurricane in 1957. This impostor grew from a salvaged shoot.
17 Whether or not it was now, Moore’s Spanish hadn’t always been perfect: he’d intended to name his research foundation after an endangered species of Mexican seaweed that he thought was called algalita. In fact, the Spanish for the weed is alguita—little algae. Hence the name of his catamaran. Until his fateful detour into the North Pacific in 1998, protecting and restoring kelp forests had been one of the foundation’s main missions.
18 In the spring of 2010, cetologists in Washington State would use similar forensic methods, investigating the stomach of a thirty-seven-foot-long gray whale that had washed up, dead, near Seattle. Among the items they found: duct tape, electrical tape, fabric (miscellaneous), sock, sweatpant leg, towel, fishing line, golf ball, green rope, nylon braided rope, red plastic cylinder, black fragments, CapriSun juice pack, miscellaneous bag material (times twenty-six), red plastic stake, sandwich bag, ziplock bag, rubbery string, surgical glove, “unknown shell-like material, possibly natural.”
19 It didn’t help that in a book on oceanography, I’d recently learned why NOAA research vessels no longer permit swim calls—not long ago, a scientist swimming in the Caribbean lost a leg to a tiger shark. Nor did it help that Amy Young had told me about a surfer friend of hers who’d lost a ham-size hunk of thigh to the jaws of a shark. Nor did it help that, aboard the Alguita, I’d been reading and admiring Peter Matthiessen’s Blue Meridian, about a search for the great white. Matthiessen includes many impressively detailed accounts of attacks by what South Africans call the “white death.”
20 Like those facing the Laysan albatross, the threats to monk seals, a biologist named Bud Antonelis explained to me, are legion. There’s the increase in shark predation caused in part by the dredging of lagoons. There’s the loss of breeding grounds to rising, warming seas. There’s the toxic waste dumped by the U.S. military, the toxoplasmosis contracted from cat pee, the spread of West Nile virus. Of all the perils monk seals face, the most memorable one to my mind is this: changing phocine demographics have led to a shortage of females, and in response to this shortage horny bull seals have grown murderously, pedophilically aggressive, drowning and suffocating female pups while attempting to mate with them, thereby reducing the female population further still. And although the number of entanglements has fallen since the cleanup efforts began, the rate of entanglement in 2004 was actually seven times higher than in 2000. What accounts for the spike? During El Niño years such as 2004, the boundaries of the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone shift south, engulfing the monk seal’s habitat. Even in more typical years, the ocean deposits an estimated fifty-two tons of debris on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
21 If I don’t make it to Kamilo Beach then at least I’d like to make it to Green Sand Beach, which I read about in The Rough Guide to Hawaii: “It is greenish in a rusty-olive sort of way, but if you’re expecting a dazzling stretch of green sand backed by a coconut grove you’ll be disappointed. The only reason to venture here is if you feel like braving a four-mile hike along the oceanfront, with a mild natural curiosity at the end.” The green sand is pulverized