1. If I’m certain about the identity of a particular plant or creature for which I offer a common name in the text, as here with “white oak,” I’ve listed its genus and species alongside its common name in the Appendices. When the term I’ve used in the text refers to one of several animals, all in the same genus, but where I’d be guessing about the species, I’ve used the scientific name for the genus followed by “spp.” In cases where I’ve used a common term, like sea lion, but can’t be certain of the genus—a “sea lion” might be either a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) or a Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus), whose ranges overlap—I’ve not included a scientific binomial. An animal already identified in the text by a binomial is not listed again in the Appendix. For domestic or feral animals, I’ve not provided scientific binomials.
2. A memoir describing a period of traumatic sexual abuse in my childhood, “Sliver of Sky,” appeared in the January 2013 issue of Harper’s.
3. Though the state of Alaska could not be considered an international destination for an American writer, that vast landscape seemed a uniquely untrammeled part of the larger world when I first visited it, in March 1976. I think of having gone there then as a greater leave-taking of my country than earlier trips to Europe, in 1962 and 1966. Over the following seven years, I continued to travel widely in both Alaska and the Canadian High Arctic, working on a book and on magazine articles and essays. Outside those earlier trips to Europe, and boyhood jaunts to the California borderlands in Mexico, I didn’t feel I had any real international experience (not in the usual sense of that term) until I decided to travel to Japan, in 1984. That exposure to rural and urban Asian culture began a period of heavy international travel, a way of working that hardly slowed until 2016, when I had to adjust the way I travel for health reasons.
When a marriage of twenty-nine years ended for me in 1996, I went on living in the house I had shared with my first wife since 1970. It’s situated on a white-water river in temperate rain forest on the west side of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. My first wife and I didn’t have children; in the years following our divorce, I found myself away from home even more often than before—back in Alaska or Antarctica or traveling without a definite purpose through Indonesia, the Middle East, and Central Asia. During those years I developed a relationship with Debra Gwartney, a writer who would later become my second wife, a single mother with four young daughters.
Because I had had no children during my first marriage, and because I had mostly set my own schedule for decades as a freelance writer, I was able to travel the world as few others my age ever could. When Debra and I became a couple, and I got to know my four stepdaughters as a stepfather, my sense of how most of the world actually lives—in families, with all their inherent complications and responsibilities, and with the joy and illuminations and expressions of love that family life brings—and my perspective on human life began to change. I took my youngest daughter to Cuba with me. I took my oldest to Antarctica, and the six of us traveled together to Belize. Traveling with my family gradually changed the way I understood the complexity of social forces at work in the modern world. Debra traveled with me to Greenland and to the Canadian High Arctic. The two of us traveled to Mexico, to South America, and to Europe together. With this experience I began to see even the remoter parts of the world through which I had traveled earlier (without them) through the eyes of these people I loved.
Whatever it is in me that requires—demands, Debra might say—the kind of travel experience one can find only by traveling alone—journeying to physically demanding places, where following the story is everything, or choosing arduous situations, where the schedule for eating and sleeping is haphazard—I need to thank both my family and my first wife. I benefited enormously from their understanding and support.
4. My mother had no children with her first husband, Sidney van Sheck. She had two boys, myself and my younger brother, Dennis, with her second husband, Jack Brennan, a New York advertising executive. When Jack and my mother (née Mary Frances Holstun) were married in Atlanta—in 1942, I think—Mary Holstun van Sheck became Mary Holstun Brennan. Jack was married at the time to another woman, whom he never subsequently divorced and to whom he returned after he walked out on my mother, my brother, and me in California in 1950. In 1956, my mother married Adrian Lopez, a New York publisher, and took his surname, as did both my brother and I. Jack and his first wife, Anne, had had one child, John Brennan, born in 1938. He and I were unaware of each other’s existence until 1998, fifty-three years after I was born. My mother died in 1976. Jack, whom I never saw again after his divorce from my mother was finalized, died in 1984. Adrian Lopez died in 2004. My younger brother took his own life in 2017.
5. After his experience in the First World War and his work on military aircraft for Bechtel-McCone, Sidney became a pacifist and humanitarian. His mural is entitled Youth’s Strife in the Approach to Life’s Problems, and it bears the following inscription: “Gloried be they who forsaking unjust riches strive in fulfillment of humble tasks for peace, culture, and equity of all mankind.”
When I saw the mural for the first time, in 2011, it was being restored and conserved by a Birmingham firm, a project for which Woodlawn High School alumni had raised $281,000. The work was finished in 2013.
6. It is slightly disingenuous, of course, for an American writer to denounce foreign dictators like the Shah of Iran or Pol Pot without pointing out the ways in which his own country has been complicit in the mayhem some of these dictators were responsible for. Since the United States overthrew the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893, deposing Queen Liliuokalani, it has acted decisively to remove the legitimate governments of Luis Muñoz Rivera in Puerto Rico, José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua, Salvador Allende in Chile, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran. Though these interventions were routinely presented to the public as efforts to dethrone dictators or spread democracy, they were also attempts, especially in Central and South America, to protect American business interests. In some of these cases, the United States failed to categorically denounce the brutal regimes of some of the very dictators it installed, like Mohammed Reza Shah and Augusto Pinochet.
There is also the question of America’s “look the other way” support for repression in countries considered important economic partners or allies, like South Africa and Saudi Arabia.
My condemnation of inhumane behavior, then, must include an indictment of my own country for its legitimization of slavery and genocide—about which it remains embarrassed but not formally repentant; for its promotion of a robust international trade in arms; and for its history of self-aggrandizing economic intervention in the affairs of other countries, which is in fact a continuation of nineteenth-century colonialism.
1. When Darwin visited the Galápagos in the nineteenth century, individual islands in the archipelago were commonly identified by their English names. Over time, Spanish names have largely supplanted these English names, though one still hears, for example, “Tower” for Genovesa, “Hood” for Española, and “James” for San Salvador. The list below privileges the Spanish names, and would be useful to anyone trying to sort out the occasional confusions here.
| SPANISH NAME | ENGLISH NAME |
| Baltra | South Seymour |
| Bartolomé | Bartholomew |
| Española | Hood |
| Fernandina | Narborough |
| Floreana (also Santa Maria) | Charles |
| Genovesa | Tower |
| Isabela | Albemarle |
| Marchena | Bindloe |
| Plaza Norte | North Plaza |
| Plaza Sur | Plaza |
| Rábida | Jervis |
| San Cristóbal | Chatham |
| San Salvador (also Santiago) | James |
| Santa Cruz | Indefatigable |
| Sin Nombre | Nameless |
| Tortuga | Brattle |
2. The seven-ton vessel has a beam of 21 feet and a draft of 3 feet and 1 inch. Its mainmast (kia hope) is 34 feet and 6 inches tall and set in tandem with a foremast (kia mua) of the same height. A crew of eleven to thirteen steers the vessel by adjusting the cotton sails, using a sweep (hoe uli) aft, and port and starboard steering blades aft of the main mast (respectively, hoe ama and hoe‘akea). The deck platform (pola) covers about 300 square feet.
Hōkūle‘a is the Hawaiian word for Arcturus, a bright star that passes directly over the island of Hawai‘i. The word means “star of gladness.”
3. The fact that the number of visitors to Galápagos continues to climb—215,000 arrived in 2014—doesn’t necessarily mean the overall experience of the islands has been seriously diluted. This is especially the case on islands other than Isla Santa Cruz, which receives and accommodates the majority of visitors who arrive in Galápagos and have signed up for land-based tours. The national park is more strictly managed now and the number of approved visitor sites has been increased. Each tour vessel is given an itinerary by the Park Service—which sites to visit, when, and for how long—which vessels must strictly adhere to. One group of tourists, therefore, rarely encounters another at the same site. According to one of the most responsible tour operators in Galápagos, a person whose experience goes back four decades, the impact of greater numbers of visitors on the wildlife in recent years has been “relatively light.”
There is no longer a limit on the number of people who may visit the islands in any given year.
4. There are three domains of life: Eukaryota (which includes all plants and animals), Bacteria, and Archaea. Darwin’s theory applies almost exclusively to eukaryotes. It applies poorly to the evolution of bacteria and archaea, which dominated the first two billion years of life on Earth.
1. The coordinates for Jackal Camp, 3°06'08" N 35°53'18" E, are approximate. I’ve obscured the camp’s actual location to protect the search area.
2. The somewhat confusing terms hominin, hominid, and hominoid refer, respectively, to ever larger groups of human and human-like creatures. You and I are hominins, along with Neanderthals and australopithecines. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and extinct forms such as Proconsul and Dryopithecus are hominids. Gibbons are hominoids. The term Hominoidea refers to a superfamily that includes hominins, hominids, and hominoids. The less inclusive term Hominidae, a family, refers to all great apes, including humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. The tribe Homini, a subdivision of the family, includes all the genera of bipedal primates that are more closely related to humans than they are to chimpanzees, i.e., humans, extinct species of Homo, australopithecines, and species in the genera Paranthropus and Ardipithecus.
Making sense of this terminology is made more difficult by the fact that until the 1990s most paleoanthropologists had used the term “hominids” to refer to species they now call “hominins.”
An easy way to keep track of all this is to remember that “hominins” are us and our near relatives; that “hominids” includes hominins and our more distant relatives; and that “hominoids” includes both these categories as well as our even more distant relatives.
3. The tree-of-life metaphor is an even more precarious construct than I’ve suggested here. Recent work in molecular phylogenetics—the study of evolution at the molecular level—and the discovery of horizontal gene transfer—that genetic material moves not only vertically through successive generations but horizontally (sometimes with the aid of viruses)—is on the verge of rendering the tree-of-life metaphor too misleading now to perpetuate. Archaea, once thought to be subgroups within the domain of bacteria, are now understood to constitute an entirely separate domain of life, one coequal to the Bacteria and the Eukaryota. (The Eukaryota encompass the kingdom of plants, the kingdom of animals, the kingdom of fungi, and certain other creatures with nucleated cells.)
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), sometimes referred to by health professionals as “a modern scourge,” are now believed to appear, often with inexplicable speed, as a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, sometimes referred to as “infective heredity.” A book that explores these phenomena and brings them together skillfully into a new understanding of evolution is David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.
4. In describing the emergence of “behaviorally modern” man, I’ve chosen to follow a particular line of scientific thought about how and exactly where this might have occurred. Other views concerning the timing of this event, the relative size of the human population initially distinguished in this way, and the nature of any supposed encephalic change all offer valuable insights. For example, it could be that the capacity to become “behaviorally modern” was present in H. sapiens for a long time but that it went unused; or that the capacity was used in a way that left no trail of obvious archeological evidence. The change in behavior could also have been a function of population density, such as the genetic presence of altruism in most members of a particular band, which might have ushered it across an evolutionary threshold and then been widely imitated.
1. During the time I was writing this book, 1,624 mass shootings took place in the United States, over a period of 1,870 days, according to a February 15, 2018, article in The Guardian. (The British paper defined a mass shooting as one in which four or more people, not including the gunman, were shot.) Since Adam Lanza killed twenty first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in 2012, more than four hundred people have been shot in more than two hundred school shootings. (The same Guardian article estimated that America now has more guns than people.)
The incident at Port Arthur traumatized the Australian people, and the country moved quickly to ban the sale of the gun Martin Bryant used, an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle. (The AR-15 has been used frequently in mass shootings in America, including those at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando; the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas; Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.) There are so many mass shootings in the United States every year that many Americans are now inured to this sort of violence. They have difficulty identifying with the state of genuine shock most Australians felt in the wake of the Port Arthur shootings.
The overwhelming majority of mass shootings in the world occur in the United States. Shootings like those committed by Martin Bryant in Australia, the solider in the airport in Timika, in Irian Jaya in Indonesia, and by Anders Breiviks in Oslo and Utøya, Norway (seventy-seven killed and more than two hundred wounded), are statistical outliers. Repeated efforts by members of Congress to strengthen gun laws routinely fail, largely because of political pressure brought by the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbying group that contributes heavily to the political campaigns of pro-gun members of Congress. According to repeated national polls, U.S. citizens overwhelmingly support stricter gun laws.