England, later, and only after his father's death in 1915, Lord Rothschild. The expedition was launched to study and collect giant tortoises and the land birds of the Galápagos, and here Beck also polished his sailing skills and became better acquainted with seabirds and the unique fauna of the Galápagos. Beck returned again to the Galápagos to collect more specimens around 1901, and he personally delivered these specimens to Walter Rothschild in Tring. While in Tring, he planned future potential collecting trips to Colombia for Rothschild, and he returned to California by way of Washington, DC, in order to apply for the necessary permits. Cocos and Galápagos Back in San Francisco, Beck met with Leverett Mills Loomis, Director of the California Academy of Sciences. Loomis was interested in seabirds, especially the Tubinares, now the Procellariiformes, and hired Beck to collect in Monterey Bay, the Channel Islands of California, and the Revillagigedo Islands of Mexico, while he waited for his Colombia permits. In 1905–1906, Beck was hired by the California Academy of Sciences to organize and lead a large seagoing expedition to Cocos Island and the Galápagos Islands aboard the Schooner “Academy.” Loomis organized scientific specialists in botany, herpetology, entomology, and malacology, geology, paleontology, as well as ornithology. Besides Beck, the expedition's scientists were: Alban Stewart, botanist; W. H. Ochsner, geologist/paleontologist/malacologist; F. X. Williams, entomologist/malacologist; E. W. Gifford and J. S. Hunter, ornithologists; J. R. Slevin and E. S. King, herpetologists. Together they assembled the largest scientific collection of specimens from the archipelago ever, leading to our great understanding of the biota of the islands. The great April 18, 1906 San Francisco earthquake and three days of subsequent fire struck while Beck and the expedition were still in the Galápagos Islands. They would not return to San Francisco until Thanksgiving Day, November 29, 1906. Their extensive collections of some 78,000 specimens allowed the Academy as an institution to rise, literally and figuratively, from the ashes of "the great conflagration" that devastated San Francisco. The schooner “Academy” acted as the meeting place and storage place for the California Academy of Sciences for several months after their return. Some historians believe that had Beck and the expedition not been out to sea and collecting, the Academy would have suffered a lethal blow. Beck married his wife and lifelong companion, Ida Menzies of Berryessa, in 1907 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He went to work for