The Ballad of Lonesome George (cont.)

Outside Magazine January 2001

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The Ballad of Lonesome George (cont.)

AT DAWN ONE MORNING, the Polaris stops at Floreana's Post Office Bay, where we go ashore to see an old barrel where a tiny population of colonists once left mail for passing sailors to pick up. It was, one of those residents wrote, "the loneliest mail-boxin the world." Despite the garish scraps of painted driftwood festooned around the barrel, it's an eerie spot, where the wind whistles mournfully through the scalesia trees. You can still leave postcards that may or may not ever reach their destinations. Visible from off the beach are the ruins of a low lava wall, evidence of an ill-fated, never-completed resort of the 1930s.

The first Europeans to visit these uninhabited islands thought they were bewitched. In 1535, Fray Tomas de Berlanga, the third bishop of Panama, nearly died of thirst in the Galápagos when his ship, en route to Peru, was caught by the powerful South Equatorial Current and carried into the archipelago. His impression: "It looked as though God had caused it to rain stones." In the 17th century, pirates, whalers, and whole navies used the islands as a hideout and provisioning station, stacking live tortoises—sailors' fast food—upside-down in the holds of their ships, where the animals remained miserably alive for months without food or water.

The first human to live in the Galápagos was Patrick Watkins, an Irish sailor marooned on Floreana in 1807. According to whalers who saw him, he went about "covered in vermin; his red hair and beard matted...so wild and savage in his manner and appearance that he struck everyone with horror." In 1809, he seized a whaleboat and disappeared with five hostages, eventually turning up in Guayaquil. No one ever learned what became of his hostages; legend has it he "ate them or threw them overboard."

Even Charles Darwin was alarmed by the islands when he arrived in 1835 on board the HMS Beagle. Of his first sight of the Galápagos he wrote, "Nothing could be less inviting." He found the weather "overpoweringly hot," the tortoise meat "very indifferent," and fancied that "even the bushes smelt unpleasantly." But after he got over his initial distaste, he spent his time riding tortoises and collecting what would become his famous finches, amazed at their tameness: "They approached so close that any number might have been killed with a stick." He threw one unlucky marine iguana repeatedly into the water to see if it would return to shore. (It did.) In the interest of science, he also took it upon himself to yank the tail of a land iguana, which was sticking out of its hole. "At this it was greatly astonished," he wrote, "and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in the face, as much as to say, 'What made you pull my tail?'" Darwin spent a brief 19 days on the islands, visiting only four (San Salvador, San Cristóbal, Floreana, and Isabela). But his observations of the volcanoes and the geology, the plants and the animals—particularly the tiny variations in size and shape of finches' beaks from island to island—led to his mind-altering and world-shaking theories of evolution and to his great book, On the Origin of Species (1859).

In the 20th century, as it became easier to get to the islands, more strange characters arrived. In 1929, after reading American naturalist William Beebe's travelogue Galápagos: World's End, an egomaniacal German dentist named Friedrich Ritter, who fancied himself a successor to Nietzsche, dumped his wife and sailed to Floreana with his girlfriend. Resolved to limit himself to a vegetarian diet, he had his teeth pulled before the trip; once there, the pair lived off mashed fruit and the eggs from their chickens. Sensational press reports about the couple's Edenic exploits drew other eccentric Germans to the island during the thirties, including the colorful Baroness von Wagner de Bosquet—the self-styled "Empress of Floreana"—and two of her lovers. Sporting a pearl-handled revolver, bathing in the island's one source of fresh water, and stealing food from the few other inhabitants, the baroness commanded one of her companions to begin building the lava wall, now crumbling, that can be seen from Post Office Bay. The wall was intended to surround a retreat she planned to name the Hacienda Paradiso, "a lovely spot where the weary traveller can rejoice to find refreshing peace and tranquillity on his way through life."

The tranquillity was short-lived. In the summer of 1934, the baroness and one of her boyfriends disappeared, probably murdered by the other boyfriend, whose mummified body was found months later on an island to the north, after he attempted to flee on a rickety fishing boat. Ritter, the dentist, died that same year of botulism, and his girlfriend left for home.

More recently the islands have been the scene of sporadic mob violence as Ecuador's government has struggled to monitor the powerful tuna-fishing industry and waters rich in sea cucumbers, sluglike bottom dwellers considered a delicacy—and an aphrodisiac—in Asia. In 1994, after the government tried to crack down on rampant abuses and close the sea-cucumber fishery in the Galápagos, a virtual guerrilla war broke out. Fishermen resentful of the national park burned the Darwin Station's chief scientist in effigy and slaughtered 86 giant tortoises on Isabela, leaving, according to one scientist, "tortoise heads; [and] bits of their legs hanging from the trees." In January 1995, fishermen wielding machetes and knives invaded the station, taking the staff and the tortoises hostage for four days and threatening to kill Lonesome George. Two years later, a park employee was shot and nearly killed while participating in a raid on an illegal sea-cucumber harvesting camp. In 1998 Ecuador passed a Special Law of the Galápagos, which purports to limit immigration and to regulate tourism, fishing, and introduced species. Whether the country has the will to enforce it remains to be seen.

Almost every day, we snorkel off a different island, dazzled by the brilliant, seemingly abundant sea life: angelfish, butterfly fish, damselfish, parrot fish, trumpetfish, schools of golden rays flying through the water. But while snorkeling in areas where sea cucumbers once blanketed the sea floor, we see only a single cuke, as lonely as Lonesome George. I would never have known they were missing if Lynn Fowler hadn't mentioned it. But once she does, it becomes impossible not to feel like Noah seeing one of his passengers go overboard. When she asks for donations for the Galápagos Conservation Fund, I get in line.

AFTER SEVEN DAYS cruising the waters of the Galápagos, we're delivered back to Guayaquil and brought to the city's central square, known as Parque de los Iguanas, to see some more of the critters before we go home. The place is crawling with free-range iguanas the size of terriers, clambering in the trees and swarming around trays into which people throw lettuce and fruit. They're the bright, neon-green iguanas of mainland South America, garish, streetwise cousins of the clean-living marine iguanas of the Galápagos, with dangling dewlaps and a decadent string of fringe down their backs. They look as if they could mug somebody.

A long time ago, a couple of their ancestors became among the first tourists in the islands. During a period of heavy rains, possibly during an El Nino year, they may have been swept out to sea on a raft of earth, a chunk of land that broke off from a riverbank, carrying whole trees and hapless animals as it sailed off into the Pacific, caught in the current until it hit land: the Galápagos.

The iguanas had no choice but to stay and get on with their lives, evolving into something unprecedented and miraculously cunning: the only reptiles on the planet that can swim in the sea, eat algae, and snort salt through their snouts. On each island, they adapted, developing to survive the environment, becoming the fat red-and-black iguanas of Espanola or the wily little masturbators of Genovesa.

Sometime after the iguanas' big adventure, Darwin dropped by. He rode a few tortoises and pulled a few tails, not yet aware that he would one day change the course of human history. Now you, too, can come see what Darwin gawked at not so long ago: "that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth." But know, as you stroll along a trail among creatures found nowhere else, that you are implicated—for good or ill—in the evolution going on around you. Watch your step.

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