A film of sweat remains on my supine body.
This discomfort is only a minor distraction, however. In my hurricane mind, the churning of esoteric information goes on, thoughts I can’t seem to organize well enough to create any point of stillness. Genetic variability, how that plays into speciation, is not a realm I’ve much familiarity with. Instead I have books and some correspondence with experts, an approach to learning that is one part gaping wonder, one part respectful critique. To gain a little more room in which to work out some of the biological problems, I’ve been reading the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking tonight on the unboundedness of the universe, the entity containing all other entities and still expanding, 13.8 billion years after it apparently initiated itself. Out there, so very far from here, I’m thinking one might lay out the genetic variables in the joinery of haploid cells expecting—given a blackboard that big—to sort it all out. On my damp, narrow bed, I can only steeply arch my back and gaze upside down through the open window at the geography that preoccupies Hawking, the depthless black with its pulsing crystal dots. A region where there is no upside down. And where, I read once, there is no “nothing.” Plasma physicists define the permeability of free space—the emptiest parts of the universe—as 4π × 10-7 newtons/ampere2. There are always atomic particles there, until you reach the edge of the universe and the province of true Nothing.
Stacked on a folding chair next to the bed are disquisitions on natural selection and genetic drift, refinements on the original sketches that Wallace, Darwin, and Mendel worked up, not that many years ago. Holding these loose pages down—in case the breeze does come—is a one-pound book about something else entirely, a popular history entitled Satan Came to Eden. In it one finds lust, self-delusion, and what some say is murder and others call pitiable death. The setting of this melodramatic Eden is the Galápagos Islands in the eastern equatorial Pacific, the place I’m lying in tonight being Puerto Ayora, on Isla Santa Cruz.1 And Satan, as I understand the concept, is as complex an entity as any idea either Hawking or Darwin ever addressed, though probably active in the minds of a great many more people.
Farther from my bed is the room’s second chair, on the seat of which are more books and several manila folders. On top of these is a folded letter from a friend, a man who came to this place in 1960 with a poorly planned and ill-fated expedition, hoping, along with his companions, to actually build an Eden here. They fell short of their goal.
Satan Came to Eden is a single minor work in the extensive library of books chronicling the cultural history of the Pacific Ocean. Like many of the others, it deals with the effect cultural illusions about this ocean have had on (mostly Western) explorers hopeful of discovering an Earthly Elysium. In the Pacific, no dragons waited in ambush along unexplored edges of the sea, as had historically been the case with the Atlantic. Here there were only teasing possibilities, cultures of, reportedly, voluptuous ease, made idyllic by “salubrious zephyrs” in places like Tahiti.
No Tahitian zephyrs are passing through my room this evening, but there is plenty here for me to read. Somewhere in it all, I know, is that geologically complex story of how the moon departed, leaving the crater outside my window that now cradles Magellan’s “pacific” ocean.
THE FIRST HUMANS to put ashore in the Galápagos might have been Polynesian explorers, hundreds of years before Western cartographers began guessing where exactly to situate the larger islands and associated islets of this archipelago in Earth’s newly discovered ocean. The isles lie on the equator, about six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, just south of an active tectonic boundary separating the Cocos and Nazca Plates. The Western discoverers were Spanish sailors and ecclesiastics, blown off course while sailing from Panama to Peru, in 1535, with Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama, aboard. By the late sixteenth century, the Galápagos had become a center of operations for pirates and coastal raiders, as well as a regular watering station and depot for merchant vessels and ships of exploration. These ships frequently left goats and pigs behind, a form of insurance for shipwrecked sailors who might find these coasts. Also important to ships’ crews were the islands’ giant tortoises. Stored upside down in ships’ holds and left inverted there, some lived as long as a year before being killed for fresh meat.
Shortly after Darwin’s arrival in the islands aboard the naval barque HMS Beagle, in 1835 (Ecuador annexed the isles in 1832), the archipelago became a popular way station for American whalers. The Plymouth, out of Sag Harbor, New York, with the mestizo adventurer Ranald MacDonald aboard, anchored here briefly in 1845. The crew filled their water barrels and took on firewood, checked for any letters that might have been left for them in a barrel on Isla Santa María, and then deposited in that same barrel correspondence to be carried east by vessels bound for Atlantic ports. In 1845 whale ships outbound from here were mostly sailing for fresh whaling grounds in the Sea of Japan.
In his The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, Melville wrote that the Galápagos Islands present the sailor with a Plutonian sight. He compares the mountainous landscape, with its plains of volcanic rubble and its parched coasts, to the ruins of a burned-out prison colony. By not emphasizing fog-draped forests in the damp highlands of some of the larger islands, or the abundant (and docile) bird and marine life, and by demonizing the place as an Orphean haunt, Melville fixed the islands in the minds of many of his nineteenth-century readers as bleak and unwelcoming, and condemned the archipelago itself as a weird and exotic destination.
Melville used the imprecise Spanish word encantada to emphasize the feeling of mystery that emanated from the isles, a characteristic his fellow whalers often referred to when discussing the Galápagos. (Seamen also intended the term “Las Encantadas” to convey the fact that complicated currents streamed through the islands, making the archipelago difficult to navigate. Sailors maintained as well, even after the widespread use of chronometers made it possible to accurately determine longitude at sea, that the islands remained difficult to find.) Once Western scientists came to appreciate the complexity of the islands’ terrestrial, avian, and marine life, and the resident animals’ remarkable docility, encantada (when used by English-speaking people) came to mean something much less ominous—a bewitching place, more inspirational than funereal.
This once-elusory Pacific archipelago has become, today, more than a mere focal point for the study of island biogeography or adaptive radiation, two modern disciplines that have produced much of the evidence validating Darwin’s and Wallace’s idea of evolutionary descent by natural selection. The islands’ unexpected preindustrial silence, easily and quickly accessible to a visitor to the islands’ interiors or along its unpopulated coasts, is a rare and deeply satisfying experience for most tourists. Because of the presence of so many animals here indifferent to human life, and because of a peculiar “end of the road” undercurrent in Galapagean society, of people questing for a final meaning in life, a vision of the end, one might characterize this Pacific destination as una tierra de los sueños, a dreamscape. This remains true despite the fact that commercial ecotourism, illegal market hunting, government corruption, creationist dogma, and naïve schemes for amassing material wealth have been colliding here, dramatically, for decades.
The average visitor does not journey to the Archipiélago de Colón in search of scientific elucidation or of Pacific island history, but rather with hopes of finding that state of pure wonder so effortlessly attained here when standing, say, before a flock of ethereal flamingos, dozing one-legged in a saline estuary, or before a lethargic cast of marine iguanas on a ridge of lava, creatures seemingly left over from the first days of creation. People come here to clear themselves out, to rediscover an inner core of tranquility in a place they believe to be uncorrupted.
On the dirt road that passes near the cabana in which I now lie, in anticipation of an evening breeze, I once fell into conversation with a local man about this feeling that so many visitors have of attaining here a state of transcendent peace. Concerning the modern significance of these islands, he had this reflection: “La tierra puede transformar el alma y lamente, y corazón de todos los hermanos.” (“It’s possible for this place to shift your soul, to ameliorate the pain of modern existence, to elevate the heart of everyone who visits here.”)
We’d begun speaking that afternoon, he and I, mostly in English, about images of life and death in the islands. The intensely hued vermilion flycatcher of the high country, who will land on your head and yank out a few hairs for its nest. The swallow-tailed gull, which will fly backward against a headwind in order to settle more gently on its nest; a bird, moreover, that has evolved to hunt successfully in darkness far out at sea. A wounded fur seal, hauled out on shore rocks, a chunk of shark-ripped flesh the size of a pineapple hanging from its flank. A dying immature masked booby, hung up like a broken kite in the branches of a palo santo tree, having misjudged a swirling wind and now, as you come upon it, blinking its last looks.
The young masked booby dying in a palo santo tree, which I mentioned to this man, was not the only dying—or deceased—bird I came upon the morning I visited their nesting grounds on Isla Genovesa. There might have been twenty-five or thirty dead, immature masked boobies. The opportunity to behold this scene of natural carnage, while at the same time not losing track of the transporting beauty of orchids in full bloom on the slopes of the islands’ volcanoes, was one more thing that Las Encantadas offered me as a guest: the possibility of holding both images together in the same moment.
I GOT UP in the dark, determined to make something good out of my sleepless night. I turned on the lamp by the side of the bed, a 40-watt incandescent bulb, its weak illumination further muted by a crude lampshade fashioned from the translucent skin of an Opuntia cactus. Two geckos shot across the red concrete floor and sprinted up the whitewashed wall opposite, hanging motionless there, tense as strung bows, while I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I closed the window, locked the door behind me, and set off for a breakwater of igneous boulders flanking Pelican Bay in front of the Hotel Galápagos’s lodge.
Even at night, with its emphatic horizon missing, the Pacific is vast. Most of us perceive this ocean as a single undifferentiated entity, though Cook gave these waters to the cultural West with a distinct face, and not merely by discovering islands within what had once been a colossal emptiness—Norfolk Island, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, the South Sandwiches—and confirming the location of islands like Easter Island, South Georgia, Tonga, the Hawaiian archipelago, and the northern and southern Marquesas, which might have been seen earlier by other mariners. He was the one who gave the Pacific a continuous surface. After Cook, scraps of the former Western Ocean—the coastal waters of the Americas, the Polynesian waters, the separate Philippine Sea—became, together, a piece of whole cloth. Cook anticipated, too, the widespread revelation, two hundred years later, of a unique Polynesian epistemology, a singular way of viewing the human-occupied world, one in which the primary frame of reference was not land surrounded by water but a mass of water containing widely scattered bits of land. The Polynesians, he intuited, were ocean, not land, dwellers.
Frequently, from the shores of Earth’s five oceans and also from the bridges of ships, I’ve tried, hour upon hour, to understand the oceans not as waiting grounds, empty places waiting to be defined by an event, but as a type of consciousness. The modern oceans, evolved from the Panthalassic Ocean of the Paleozoic, from the Tethys of the Mesozoic, and a few other primal bodies of water, all of them moving on now toward something with yet another name, proceeding according to a clock different from the one I keep, also different from the clock that was ticking while thirteen species of Galapagean finch evolved from a single common ancestor, and different from the measure of geological time that applies to the evolution of the archipelago’s shield volcanoes, rising from a single hot spot in Earth’s mantle, a vent that periodically erupts through the Nazca Plate and is the explanation for the ancient heights and calderas we today call Isla Santa Cruz, Isla Sin Nombre, Isla Marchena, and so on.
Beneath a sky alive with universes, sitting here this May evening on a breakwater by the dark ocean, which sighs now and then in lazy susurrations against the rocks, I feel an urge to get closer to the water, to raise the Pacific out of its thinghood and into the personhood that Cook and others who sailed so very close to it knew. I picture the tracks of their voyages, a spider-web maze of lines drawn on a large map I keep at home, the routes that brought the Pacific out of obscurity for my ancestors: Magellan’s crossing; the passages of the cultured English pirate William Dampier; the voyages of Tasman, Bering, Lapérouse, Roggeveen, Mendaña, Wallis, Heyerdahl, and Charles Chichester; of Spain’s Manila galleons; and the tracks of the pioneering British research vessel Challenger in the nineteenth century. And of the Polynesian double-hulled exploration canoe Hōkūle‘a in the late twentieth century. Lines imposed by me on a surface that maintains no such records, and whose lack of roadways, water courses, and mountain spines compels the imagination to remedy the tracklessness, to make something up.
The Pacific’s inconstant surface—what Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale called its “unpath’d waters”—was once a symbol of the unknowable. I sit before the unknowable then, imagining these years-long voyages. I try to see past what could have been the tedium of Sir Francis Charles Chichester’s single-handed circumnavigation of the planet (he put in at only one port), recalling his harrowing doubling of Cape Horn. I imagine the giant squid, hunted a mile deep by a sperm whale, and Don Walsh sitting on the bottom of the Vitiaz Deep. I think of Halobates, riding the Northern Equatorial Current.
If I were to scribe a line on a map of the Pacific this evening, straight away to the northwest, it would not cut a shoreline but for Galápagos’s for 6,098 miles, not until it came to the Aleutian Islands. If I were to draw another line straight south, it would not encounter a coast until it met the wall of the Abbot Ice Shelf in Antarctica, 4,993 miles distant. If I looked to my left and imagined the far-off Bay of Panama, and then to my right and envisioned the Philippine Sea, the span would be more than 10,000 miles. The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific. If one were truly to comprehend the size of the thing, one would be halfway to imagining God.
I’ve sat still so long here, and my pupils are so dilated, I can make out three brown pelicans dozing on the water, not twenty feet away on Pelican Bay. Sometimes in the presence of such apparent innocence—these birds who are oblivious just now to all that is hidden and potentially threatening in the lightless world we share—I recall that line Conrad gives Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, when he tries to engage Marlow’s imagination around the unaddressed barbaric nature of the jungle reality Marlow has stumbled into: “The horror! The horror!”
I am attuned to this. The seeming innocence of the birds and the starvation camp at Cape Sabine. A lyrical afternoon walking across the Alexandra lowland and the bodies of the luckless stacked like industrial kindling beside the burial pits at Banda Aceh.
The Bay of Panama. It lies below the indecipherable horizon there in the east. I can imagine it, picture Vasco Núñez de Balboa, standing on his historic (though today still unidentified) peak in Darien, toward the end of September 1513. He’s ordered his Indian guides and his soldiers to remain behind, a few hundred feet below the top of this mount. As conquistadores went, Balboa was not as ruthless, not as vain, as hungry for silver as most. But I can see him standing there with the dog, his formidable perro de presa, Berganza. A soldier dog, trained by conquistadores to chase down Indians and tear them to shreds. Perros de presa were raised to be symbols of Spanish virility and prowess. Broad-chested, with short hair and a high, wide forehead above small eyes. The muzzle short, the mouth wide, the canines long. They stood to a man’s knee. They were bred from bull baiters, canids used in the corrida dramas, dogs that created such a spectacle of gore and mayhem they were eventually replaced by human banderilleros wielding barbed picks.
It does not take much in the way of travel or the reading of histories to turn up the barbaric perros de presa nearly every culture has arrayed against those it hates, or those whose possessions it desires. When thinking of the conquistadores, who maintained the trappings of civility while they loosed their dogs to savage people, I think about the bankers in Amsterdam who first underwrote a nascent Portuguese slave trade out of West Africa, as immoral an enterprise as anything the Mongol pariah Timur Lenk ever imagined. And once those slave-based economies began to falter, with the rise of capitalized industrialism early in the nineteenth century, what of the English bankers, who took this for-profit commerce in human beings from Dutch financiers and the Portuguese, but were able to distance themselves later from Britain’s history of rapacious behavior?
The moral oblivion of the slave trade. The piracy and ransacking of Spanish villages by Drake and the other West Country mariners. These things do not seem at all immediate in the modern world, nor any longer even relevant. Indeed, to recall them and to express outrage, regret, or sorrow is regarded by some as unworldly, as if conquistadores like Pizarro and perros de presa like Berganza were part of the West’s uncivilized past, largely gone, or an unfortunate aspect of the human desire to possess, to exercise control. Most people do not wish to hear about what the historian David Stannard calls “the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world,” the elimination of the Indian populations of the Americas.
For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now.
Back in my room in Hotel Galápagos, laid out on a ceremonial cloth with a few other things, is the eight-real piece salvaged from the Nuestra Señora. It reminds me not to forget the ease with which sixteenth-century Spaniards succumbed to the temptation to exploit the native peoples of the Americas, because their deaths did not matter, and, for them, there was no accountability. The coin fills me with wonder and dread whenever I pick it up. It represents the spirit of Leopold of Belgium, centuries later and closer to my own time, holed up in his country estate in Laeken, while his functionaries bled the Congo basin of everything marketable, working to death, murdering, or otherwise doing away with ten million Africans. It reminds me of the soldier-thug Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who collaborated with Belgian intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington in 1961 to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically chosen prime minister. Four years later Mobutu, with American support, staged a military coup in Congo, a country he would rename Zaire and rule as a dictator for thirty years, enforcing policies as indifferent to human suffering and misery as Saddam Hussein’s, and, as Mobutu Sese Seko, amassing a personal fortune of some four billion dollars.
It is easy to misremember the Mobutus, the Batistas, and the others; or perhaps it is not possible to recall them at all clearly if the goal is to facilitate Western-style progress and its twin sister, profit, if the agreement is not to focus on the past but to lament these regrettable and uncommon aberrations, and then to move forward. What the coin tells me, though, nine-tenths of an ounce of Mexican silver, is that it is dangerous to believe the past is behind us, that a remedy for barbarism has been found. Is it not, in fact, barbarism that sits well dressed and well spoken today in a corporate boardroom in Frankfurt, Shanghai, or Delhi, as far from human suffering as the bombardier flying back to Tinian Island aboard the Enola Gay? Or is barbarism a term reserved instead only for those flying planes into the World Trade Center towers?
History tells us that with every great empire comes great barbarism, that the two are inseparable, so that to diminish barbarism you must dismantle the empires. This forces the question of what, really, civilization brings to people that they did not already have. And why is civilization so hard on the people who turn it down?
The inequity, the memory of it, upends my thoughts. I accept its inevitability, but cannot accept the scope of expression we permit it.
WHEN I STAND UP, the pelicans are startled. They paddle slowly away. No breeze yet, but it’s cooler now. I’m curious about the town, Puerto Ayora, this late at night, and head somewhat aimlessly in that direction, over the small bridge that crosses the head of Pelican Bay. Two pariah dogs pause in the road to watch me pass. Neither domesticated nor feral, these are the town’s scavenger animals. They make their living within the ambit of Puerto Ayora but are associated with no house. They do not venture out into the countryside, where they fear the feral dogs that travel there in small packs, subsistence hunters of iguanas and feral pigs, dogs not to be put off their hunts by a human with a treat or a handout.
From the bridge I move into town, past shuttered houses and shops. Nothing seems to stir here. I move like a specter through the streets. Laundry hangs limp in the humid air to dry. Children’s toys lie inert on the ground. Eventually I find my way back to the water, at the end of a private dock at the Hotel Delfín. Looking across Academy Bay from here, I can just make out the Hotel Galápagos, though not the cabana beyond it where I am staying. The few lights that still burned on the hotel grounds earlier are now dark, the hotel’s generator having been shut down at midnight.
A crescent moon, late to rise, silhouettes about thirty sailing and motor yachts and several sport and commercial fishing vessels anchored in Academy Bay. I once interviewed a man, Dennis Puleston, at his home on Long Island. He’d sailed to the Galápagos (and all around the Pacific) in the 1930s, while in his twenties. Later he wrote a book about his adventures, Blue Water Vagabond. In his eighties when he spoke to me, he struggled to translate his experience, speaking of it as if trying to reach me from another world, a world without GPS, without onboard radar to penetrate darkness and fogbanks, a person guided solely by his magnetic compass, his charts, by a feeling for the wind and the sea, and the look of a windward horizon. The Galápagos he knew, I understood him to say, is no longer there.
IN THE 1960S—I’ll tell this story in its shortest form—a group of anthropologists, academics who disputed the idea that Polynesians reached the Hawaiian Islands, the Marquesas, the Societies, and other South Pacific archipelagos by accident, set about trying to prove that Polynesian navigators, departing their homelands in more densely islanded Micronesia, knew exactly what they were doing. The scholars intuited that Polynesian navigators had found their way south to New Zealand, as far east as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and as far north as Hawai‘i by employing a sophisticated awareness of currents and wave and wind patterns; by noting the direction in which transiting birds such as black noddies and fairy terns were flying, early in the morning or late in the afternoon; and by using rising and setting stars to set and hold a course.
What the scholars most needed to know, in order to confirm their ideas and proceed with their work, was what the navigational techniques used by the Polynesians actually were and how they were employed; and what a Polynesian voyaging canoe—thought by them to be a double-hulled, catamaran-style vessel—looked like. Length, beam, draft, architecture of the hulls, design of the steering oar, and how its masts were rigged.
The anthropologists, maritime historians, and other researchers involved in the project eventually earned the respect of native Hawaiians, who joined them as colleagues. Working alongside each other, they settled on the rough dimensions of a practical double-hulled, two-masted vessel; on the canoe’s rigging and the shape of its sails; and on the design of the sailing platform and other details. Then on the island of Satawal, in the Caroline Islands, they located a man still familiar with the techniques of traditional Micronesian navigation. A group of native Hawaiians apprenticed themselves to the Caroline islander, Mau Piailug, and began learning how to read wave patterns, cloud color and shape, ocean currents, changes in water depth, prevailing winds, and the presence of freshwater lenses sitting on the ocean’s surface, the discharge of nearby rivers. These variables, however, were only part of what composed the dynamic system of open-water navigation that Polynesians had historically relied on. The other part was an ability to read the stars throughout the solar year, to monitor their changing positions as the hours, the days, and the seasons passed. The discipline needed to learn and then recall these movements provided the navigator with a “star compass,” a mental construct by which he could set and hold a course. Polynesian navigation was fundamentally different from the system that grew up in the West, where a sextant, paper charts, a magnetic compass, and ships’ rutters (logs) provided the most reliable guidance. The latter depended on instruments, which could be lost overboard, and on paper, which was perishable; and it was a system that was most accurate in stop-time. The Polynesian system was held in the mind, where it could not wash overboard or be misplaced; and its time frame was dynamic, constructed for use aboard a moving vessel.
Pulling together all the information they’d gathered, the group built and, on March 8, 1975, launched from a beach on Maui, the Hōkūle‘a, a traditional 62-foot double-hulled Polynesian voyaging vessel. The crew of young Hawaiians who’d trained under Piailug, who was sailing with them, navigated it unerringly across 2,500 miles of open ocean to Tahiti, using only traditional methods of navigation.2
A year after the Hōkūle‘a’s initial voyage, an archeologist named Yosihiko Sinoto found some parts of an 800-year-old voyaging canoe preserved in a saltwater swamp on the island of Huahine, in French Polynesia. The vessel had apparently been driven ashore and crushed by a tsunami. His examination of the debris—of its 18-foot-long steering sweep, for example—tended to confirm that the design group in Hawai‘i had done an exceptional job of matching the Hōkūle‘a’s design to the design of the original prototype.
Thirty years later, when I visited the swamp where Mr. Sinoto made his discovery with him, the two of us were invited to join several others for dinner. There we were introduced to one of the Hōkūle‘a’s navigators and to some of the vessel’s crew at that time. The crewmen prevailed on their navigator, a young Cook Islander, to show us the tattoo they’d chipped in to get him in Tahiti, after he’d proven himself. The modest navigator was reluctant but eventually pulled his T-shirt up over his head and turned his back to us. From the nape of his neck to his coccyx, the major stars of the Southern Hemisphere were inked across his back in their familiar relationships to each other. Riding the star pattern was a brightly colored marine iguana, the tip of its tail resting at the spot where a man’s tail might have been, its body crossing at an angle over his spine, and its head swiveled to stare out at the viewer from the base of the man’s neck.
Later in the evening, the tattoo now hidden again under his shirt, the young man explained to us what it meant to be able to navigate the Hōkūle‘a. At the urging of a few anthropologists, he said, some of his people had set about rediscovering a way to navigate without conventional Western instruments, across a seemingly empty wilderness of intimidating space. This came at a time, he told us, when dominant cultures around the world had begun to worry that despite their scientific and technological sophistication and their large reserves of material wealth, they were losing their way. They seemed to traditional people like cultures trapped aboard a rudderless ship, sailing very fast over a deceptively calm ocean.
“Once we too, Polynesians, felt lost as a people,” he said. “Now we have something to offer others, a way to regain confidence.”
IT WAS LATE when I returned to my room. Waiting here for me was John C. Beaglehole’s reverent biography of Captain James Cook, which I was two or three hundred pages into; and my notes from William Beebe’s Galápagos: World’s End, which I wanted to review, now that I had returned to the islands for a third time. Beebe’s 1924 book had turned many people’s attention toward this Pacific outpost, and a few readers, believing the untrammeled archipelago was the paradise that might finally be their sanctuary, looked for a way to get there.
I’d arrived in Galápagos by myself, a week ahead of a group of fourteen people, mostly strangers, whom I was to join on a tour of the islands. I came early in order to have some time in the evenings just to read, after daytime strolls. But tonight the reading would have to wait. The heat and humidity that had propelled me from my room had abated some, and I’d sufficiently worn myself out now to be able to fall asleep at this late hour. Had the electric power still been on, the blast of light from the room’s overhead bulb would have sent the geckos scurrying, but it wasn’t and they were not alarmed by the beam of my pocket flashlight. I opened the window by the bed, propped the door open with a chair, wove a length of rope across the doorway to keep the pariah dogs out, and slid quickly sideways into sleep.
MY REGULAR ROUTINE here in the morning is inquiry. Every day I consider how fortunate I am to be free to wander in Galápagos. Not everyone gets to come. Pay attention to small things I tell myself. Look closely at what are clearly not the answers to some of your questions. Do not presume that later you’ll be able to read about something you’ve witnessed today.
Even if I’ve gotten to bed late, I’m usually up at first light, which comes without warning on the equator. Just a few minutes, really, between full night and full day. The hotel generator starts up at six, breakfast is served at six-thirty. I usually go for a walk around Puerto Ayora afterward and watch people come to terms with the day—the unloading of foodstuffs at the market (fruit and vegetables from fincas in the highlands), children escorted to school, someone shouting at a recalcitrant internal combustion engine.
Some mornings I stop at the shipyard to see how repairs are going on a fishing boat that’s got a rotting keel. Or I walk up to the Charles Darwin Research Station to use the library. One morning I borrow a small rowboat and cross Academy Bay to keep an appointment with Karl Angermeyer, whose family has been in Puerto Ayora for many decades. When we speak, he offers me some particulars of Galapagean history not in the books I’ve read, going over the particulars of scandalous events in the 1930s on Isla Santa María, for example, or relating a bit of folklore about Darwin that I know not to be true. As a paterfamilias in Galápagos, Mr. Angermeyer resembles other people I’ve spoken with in villages in South America or Asia who are simply trying to keep track of what is important to remember, a worldwide effort in small settlements to keep one’s people from slipping off into caricature or oblivion.
Another morning I catch a ride with someone headed for the airport. My aim is to visit a resident in the highlands I’d met on an earlier trip, a man I’d taken an immediate liking to, Steve Divine. I hadn’t been able to walk the extent of his finca in the highlands back then. Now I could. The narrow road north from Puerto Ayora to the airport takes a traveler to the north shore of Isla Santa Cruz, where a narrow seawater breach—a natural canal—separates it from Isla Baltra, where the airstrip is. The road first ascends into agricultural areas in the highlands, passing through the small settlements of Bellavista and Santa Rosa before descending again to a great plain of dark a’a and pahoehoe lava, a land hostile to nearly every seed and spore that falls upon it.
My acquaintance drops me off at the gate to Steve’s farm. When we ran into each other a few days before in Puerto Ayora, Steve invited me up for a walk in the scalesia forest around his place. He’s very well informed about the biology and ecology of the islands, someone with an attractive attitude of allegiance to the country all around him. As I’ve pursued my reading about the archipelago, both the popular literature and the scientific literature, and become more conversant with its basic geography and natural history, my conversations with Steve have offered helpful clarification and surprising connections, the type of insights only a residency, a true apprenticeship, can offer. He calls the palo santo tree, which conserves moisture by shedding its leaves in the dry season, a “hard to die” tree. And it was he who told me that on the islets of Plaza Sur and Plaza Norte, off the eastern shore of Isla Santa Cruz, I would be able to see swallow-tailed gulls flying backward against a headwind to land gracefully on their nests.
Steve is articulate about—and insightful regarding—smoldering resentments in the islands, most of these due to tensions between the staff of Galápagos National Park (about 97 percent of the land in Galápagos and virtually all the archipelago’s near-shore waters fall under the jurisdiction of the park) and a group of settlers in the islands who feel the park’s boundaries shut them out. They want their hunting and fishing activities to extend into the park. At the time I spoke with him, these resentments were particularly strong in the settlement of Puerto Villamil, on Isla Isabela, where residents had deliberately started forest fires inside the park’s boundaries and had established illegal commercial fisheries in near-shore waters. Steve could see both sides, but had no respect for the villagers’ violent way of registering their complaints. Too often in the past, when settlers have entered the park to hunt feral cattle or cut down large matazarno trees for lumber, or when they’ve defiantly ignored catch limits and harvesting seasons for lobsters, sea cucumbers, and other marine life, the shouting and insults voiced at town meetings have turned into fistfights. Once, villagers stormed the Charles Darwin Research Station, the symbol of scientific research in the islands and the strong international interest in the islands’ protection, smashing windows and destroying years of scientific records. On other occasions they’ve deliberately killed tortoises living in the park. (The image of the giant tortoise, the park’s iconic animal, appears on the park’s logo.)
The root of this disagreement is class resentment. A relatively small, well-educated, conservation-oriented group of caretakers finds itself in direct conflict with a much larger group of working-class fishermen and subsistence farmers, mostly Ecuadorian nationals, who until they reached the islands were largely unaware of the international movement to conserve the islands’ ecology. Its ideals are almost incomprehensible to them. Like the American colonists who arrived at Isla San Cristóbal aboard the Western Trader in 1960, these Ecuadorian nationals arrived in Galápagos with unrealistic ideas about an archipelago that has very little freshwater or arable land, and only minimal municipal services. Basic commodities like flour, cooking oil, and paper products are expensive and in limited supply; the infrastructure to support health care is primitive; there are few paying jobs; and thousands of well-to-do tourists, innocent of the economic and social complexities here, arrive every week. The visitors’ money is eagerly sought, but many residents consider their presence a nuisance.
In almost every public meeting place in Puerto Ayora, you can hear the discussions about unemployment, class privilege, disputed jurisdiction around park boundaries, and schemes to circumvent or solve these problems. The fundamental disagreement among island residents is over the relative importance of the biological integrity of the islands. The disagreement is exacerbated by differences of opinion over the place of conservation in a human community with high unemployment, and it is further complicated by disagreement over the need for economic growth and development in the islands. Too, some Ecuadorian nationals deeply resent the investments international conservation groups are making to preserve the park.
For many years park custodians have argued, unsuccessfully, for a limit on the number of visitors to the island. (Most all visitors sleep aboard tour boats and take their meals there. They may come ashore, sometimes just briefly, only at a restricted number of sites in the islands, where guides try to ensure they don’t wander off the established trails, disturb animals, take souvenirs, or discard trash.) When I came to the Galápagos for the first time in 1986, the annual limit, set by the Ecuadorian government, had just been raised from 18,000 to 25,000. The actual number of visitors that year was 32,000.3
Part of what motivates Ecuadorian nationals to move to Galápagos can be found in Ecuadorian folklore, the widespread idea in mainland Ecuador that anyone can make a fortune from “tourism” on “the Ecuadorian frontier.” The fortunes to be made here, however, are mostly made by business acquaintances of politicians in Quito, who decide who will and who won’t get a license to operate a tour boat in Galápagos.
The deeper one digs into the phenomenon of Galápagos, the more one finds the kind of thievery and injustice that infect ordinary life wherever in the world economic opportunity and political malfeasance drive “progress.” My sympathies in the Galápagos, I found, lie both with the misled Ecuadorians who arrive here on government-subsidized flights from the mainland with a defective dream, and with members of the park’s staff, an underfunded and underpaid group of dedicated scientists and conservationists trying to control illegal hunting, fishing, and timber theft and to mitigate the impact of more visitors than they believe the park can support. And my affection lies with immigrants like Steve, who are sympathetic to both sides of the conservation issue and who try to encourage in visitors the same degree of wonder they themselves feel about protecting the islands from economic exploitation. Some visitors to the islands have considerable economic and political power in their home countries, and people like Steve hope they will bring those strengths to bear on behalf of the archipelago.
ONE MORNING, on a previous visit, when Steve and I were having coffee on his porch, a friend came by to catch up on local news with him. While they spoke, I began making notes on the conversation Steve and I had been having. My attention, however, soon shifted from the page in my notebook to a patch of darkness developing on the surface of the ocean. It was taking shape in the middle of a vast sheet of incandescent light. The ocean, some miles away and far below us, was visible over the canopy of a forest sloping away from Steve’s house. A huge vertical mass of gypsum-white cloud was sliding over the sun, dimming the polished silver surface of the water. My glance took in the great sweep of Isla Santa Cruz’s southern coastal lowlands, where Puerto Ayora was, the treetops nearby, and finally an open grassland that abutted Steve’s compound. Here beside me was a pond, on which a pair of white-cheeked pintail ducks were feeding. My eyes then settled on the glitter of an orb weaver’s web, ballooning in a light wind. The sunlight was so strong, and the air it moved through so clear, that even at a distance of several feet I could see perfectly the tiny distinctive spines on the body of a yellow-and-black star spider.
Steve’s friend departs. We sit in silence. The weather, despite the threat of a storm rising on the southern horizon, is conducive to well-being. The coffee excellent. Neither of us tries to voice a thought about the state of our ease.
I WANTED TO GET BACK to the hotel in time for lunch, so I said goodbye and set off down the road, hoping for a lift.
When the overloaded airport bus comes into view, swaying drunkenly on its ruined shock absorbers, I can see that the luggage rack on the roof is already crowded with people. I find a place on the rungs of a ladder mounted on the rear bumper. By the time we reach the village, I’m covered with dust. It’s caked on my skin because of the heat and humidity. I ask the hotel’s proprietor, Jack Nelson, whether I can take a brief shower, my second of the day, freshwater being at a premium. Sure, he says—and he’ll set some lunch aside, including fresh vegetables from Steve’s finca, delivered the night before.
The interwoven nature of quotidian life in Puerto Ayora—Jack’s sister, Christy Gallardo, runs the town library—makes me feel comfortably situated here. But wary.
Returning to my room, I give the manzanillo tree in the courtyard a wide berth. Its milky sap causes skin to blister and itch, like a brush with poison ivy. My room, cabana numero cinco, I had noticed the day I arrived, is across the road from the cemetery. Because volcanic soil is so difficult to excavate, most of the graves there are sarcophagi, with minimal decoration. The whitewashed concrete coffin boxes rest squarely on the hard ground. A few are elevated on pier blocks.
Always a caution, a cemetery.
On that first visit to Galápagos in 1986, I was so transfixed by the range and extent of bird and animal life on the islands, and by the inshore life that overwhelmed me as a snorkeler—by the seeming miracle of it all—that I missed initially how thoroughly and intimately life and death are mixed here. Paddling through mangrove thickets along the coast or pushing through heavy vegetation in the highlands, one is acutely aware of the living: small birds twitter and flit constantly in the understory of the scalesia forests. In sheltered lagoons, visitors float on transparent water above pods of spotted eagle rays undulating slowly past below. On coastal shores, flocks of ruddy turnstones and sanderlings probe the beach in search of food, along with black-necked stilts, oystercatchers, and yellow-crowned night-herons, and sally lightfoot crabs make short scampers across the surface of the water. On clinker plains in the lowlands, where there is little vegetation, death is a more striking part of the tapestry of life. My initial encounter with life’s insistent companion, as I mentioned to the colonist that day, came on Isla Genovesa, the remnant of a volcano’s collapsed rim, an island less than a fiftieth the size of Santa Cruz.
We had arrived at Genovesa on an overcast day. The motor yacht anchors in Bahía Darwin and the small group of us make our way up the Prince Philip’s Steps trail to a lava plain that forms the island’s flat summit. A strong onshore wind sweeps through the chirping of birds nesting among bare, mute-spattered rocks—thousands of red-footed boobies, masked boobies, great frigatebirds, and wedge-rumped storm petrels. The gaunt plain is strewn with sun-bleached palo santo twigs, with the castings of short-eared owls, and with the skeletons of large birds, stripped of their flesh by Galápagos hawks. The air is ripe with the odor of fish, which adult birds are disgorging for their chicks at hundreds of nests.
Clots of entwined cinder-colored marine iguanas, each the image of the stygian imps some sailors once thought they were, stare across this hysterical landscape, still as gargoyles. Mockingbirds snatch booby chicks, kill and eat them only a yard or two from the patch of pea gravel where an impassive parent sits. Short-eared owls emerge from crevices in the lava to savage the young of petrels. The wind sends frigatebirds, surprised by a sudden change in its force or direction, cartwheeling across the ground that surrounds their waist-high nests in clumps of saltbush.
The skeletons of birds deceived by the wind hang like auguries in the limbs of trees. Masked booby chicks, gorged on fish to the point of stupefaction, and lacking the muscle tone to bring themselves erect, lie sprawled on rocks beneath the trees. The larger booby chick in a nest occasionally kills the smaller one.
Above it all maneuver adult birds, just in from foraging in the ocean, dazzling in their acrobatic management of the shifting wind. The marine iguanas drop from the rocks into the same rich waters, like seagoing lizards. Tenacious cacti and muyuyo and lantana shrubs have found footing in interstices in the lava rubble and are thriving. The extent of death here burnishes life, and the vivacity of the living diminishes the tyranny of death.
I recall here a musical term: motet. Suspended over all that I saw was a thick cloud of birdcalls, raucous to some ears. A cacophony. A motet is “a vocal composition in polyphonic style on a text of some sort.”
What text is this, here on Isla Genovesa, with the exuberant peeps of satisfied hatchlings and the squawks of those whose lives are ending?
SOME EVENINGS I skip dinner at the hotel and eat in one of the cafés in Puerto Ayora, hoping I might meet someone from one of the other settlements in the islands, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal or Santo Tomás on Isabela, which I have not been able to visit yet. I can also practice my miserable Spanish and try to get the run of Ecuadorian Spanish, different to many ears from Cuban Spanish or Argentine Spanish. One night I meet one of the park’s guides for langostinos (prawns). The following morning, he tells me, he’s taking a small group of volunteers by boat around to Tortuga Bay on the south coast of the island, a stretch of beach where endangered Pacific green turtles regularly lay their eggs. The group might see females coming ashore or even burying their eggs; but his main intention, after walking everyone through a lesson in the ecology and conservation of green turtles, is to have the volunteers clear the beach’s wrack lines of jetsam, the garbage thrown from passing ships.
I’m welcome to join them, he says.
We do not see any turtles that morning but locate a number of pits where females have recently laid their eggs and covered them with sand. According to the guide, each pit shelters hundreds of eggs. The hatchlings will emerge at night, when darkness gives them a better chance of crossing the exposed beach below the high tide line. Once in the water, though they’ll still face other predators, they’ll be safe from mockingbirds, Galápagos hawks, and ghost crabs.
We leave the beach by boat at midmorning, carrying several dozen bright yellow bags filled with trash and feeling very good about our work.
That night I decide to return to the beach using an overland trail. I hope to see hatchlings emerging. The two-mile route leads to the beach over rocky ground and is flanked by dense shoulder-high brush. The air is muggy, but I can make out the trail easily enough in the light of a waxing moon. I don’t need to turn on my flashlight. (In the half dark, a flashlight beam would only make the visible world smaller.)
Just as I step onto the beach, I catch movement at the water’s edge. Mockingbirds. In the minutes before I arrived, a group of hatchlings had apparently tried to cross to the water. There might have been a scene here then as brutal, on a smaller scale, as tyrannosaurs attacking a scurrying herd of herbivorous ankylosaurs in an open grassland. There are no hatchlings now on the beach. A few moments and then the mockingbirds are gone. I find the pit the hatchlings came from above the high tide line and sit down on the sand nearby, where I have a view of open ground to the left and right. An hour passes. The absence of light and color make the beach even more still.
I’m adrift in memories of dark nights spent watching for animals in other places when I see, moving past my hip, a disk darker than the sand and half the size of my palm. I rise quickly and scan the beach near it methodically with my flashlight. It seems to be alone. The line of its advance is a determined strike for the water. I walk alongside it. No birds are aloft, but I soon see a ghost crab, then another, scuttling toward us. I fend them off with my foot, but they’re as determined as the young turtle, circling behind me, charging in. I consider carrying the hatchling to the water, but this feels immediately like crossing a line—too much interference. How is one ever to measure these things? I stay with the skirmish, protecting the turtle until it’s safely away in the surf.
I’ve seen what I’d come to see at Tortuga Bay and now turn back for Puerto Ayora, feeling suddenly very tired. A long day, and I’ve made it even longer with the hike out here. From time to time a cloud crosses the face of the moon, and it becomes so dark I have to feel ahead with my toes for secure footing. I don’t want to turn the light on. At some point a large animal thunders past me. A dog. I hear its panting as it passes. The ticking of its nails on the rocks suddenly stops up ahead. It’s looking back at me. I sense something else coming up behind me. Gooseflesh runs up my back and I swing the flashlight that way. No eye shine. An empty back trail. I shut the light off, to keep the outer dark from getting darker, and continue on. I don’t hear the dog ahead anymore and am sure he’s gone.
Images of feral dogs begin to crowd in. I hear a swish of brush and am certain the noise is behind me. Then the ticking of claws again. I leave the light on now and begin to trot, looking back over my shoulder and up ahead into the beam of light, eager now to reach the streets ahead. When I see the silhouette of the first house against the starry sky I realize I was much closer to the village than I’d thought, and slow to a walk. The dogs overtake me before I can react—four of them, calico-patterned, race by on the left. Ten yards ahead they break sideways into thick brush. I stand stock-still until I hear nothing again.
What was I thinking, running like that? That I could outrun what I imagined was there?
They were toying with me.
Two pariah dogs asleep at the edge of the village do not lift their heads from the dirt as I pass. Back in the room, sitting in a wicker chair, I try to separate the world of threat the hatchling faced from the world of vulnerability I had just reacquainted myself with.
A FEW DAYS AFTER my encounter with the dogs, I have lunch at the Hotel Galápagos with Bruce Barnett, a biologist studying feral dogs in Galápagos at that time. Many types of dogs go feral in the islands—terriers, spaniels, German shepherds, bulldogs, retrievers, Great Danes. All are phenotypic expressions of the same genotype—Canis familiaris. In the wild, most of these phenotypes disappear. The range of canid expression, in other words, shrinks. Depending on where and how they live in the islands, feral dogs occupying the same area begin to resemble one another after only a few generations. In a region of lava flows and sparse vegetation—above Bahía Isabel on Isla Isabela, for example—where feral dogs hunt mostly marine iguanas, Barnett found that the dogs have the same look despite their different ancestries: long-legged, bat-eared, short-furred, bare-bellied animals, adapted to the hot, sun-blasted lava fields over which they travel.
Barnett’s research appealed to me. It had none of the cachet that attaches to studying the systematics of Galapagean finches. It was, instead, focused on the morphology and social behavior of an animal that, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong here, and it was research related to the everyday lives of human beings, from whom the dogs had fled or who had abandoned them.
In addition to studying feral dogs, Barnett was involved in a more contentious issue, the eradication of populations of feral goats, pigs, cattle, rabbits, cats, and donkeys, each of which has had a major ecological impact on every island on which they’ve been found. (Feral dogs, pigs, goats, and cats were already established in the islands by the time Darwin arrived in 1835, though their populations were relatively small. Exotic plants, too, had already established themselves, from seeds inadvertently brought ashore on the shoes and clothing of ships’ crews. And by then, too, upwards of 10,000 tortoises had probably been taken off the islands to provision sailing ships. Later, scientists would continue removing even more of them for their collections. [I saw the hollow carapace of the only giant tortoise ever found alive on Isla Fernandina on a research shelf alongside the carapaces of other Galapagean tortoises at the California Academy of Sciences museum, in San Francisco, in 1994. It had been collected in 1905–1906. Along with the other carapaces neatly arrayed around it, the carapace from Fernandina had the appearance of a book from which all the pages had been torn, leaving only the covers.])
Over the years, in an effort to preserve the general outline of the flora and fauna of the ecosystems Darwin and other scientists first described, multiple eradication campaigns have been mounted, some of which were large-scale military-style operations. Professional hunters from New Zealand, for example, using helicopter gun platforms and coordinating their attack plan with sharpshooters on the ground using Judas goats as lures, removed nearly 100,000 goats from a single island in one year.
While the effort to maintain a “pristine” Galapagean ecosystem is in one sense worth praising—left unchecked, sizable populations of exotic plants and animals can radically upset an ecosystem comprised of species that have been evolving alongside only one another for thousands of years—attempts to distinguish between “indigenous” and “exotic” species are problematic. One view holds that ancestors of the finches, the tortoises, and other iconic Galapagean creatures were themselves “colonists,” while the Norway rats, the pigs, and the rest who arrived with the sailors were merely “invasives.” But drawing the line today between those that belong and those that should be exterminated is tricky, politically as well as biologically.
What most angers ardent conservationists on Galápagos is the imprint of mankind here—the palm trees, the mosquitoes, the havoc wreaked on the islands’ vegetation by goats, the carcasses of sharks washed up on island beaches, their fins cut off by commercial hunters to supply Asian markets. As far as practical, conservationists would like to see all the feral animal populations removed. No more pigs rooting out green turtle eggs, no more cats plundering Hawaiian petrel nesting burrows, and no more indigenous mammals—five species of rice rat, for example—lost to the black rats that came ashore from ships.
No one would argue—probably—that people abandon the islands; nor does anyone—probably—want to accommodate the wild pigs and goats. It’s the middle ground that no one can seem to find. Moving darkly through the discussion of what belongs here and what doesn’t—for example, which are the preferred plants and which should be eradicated?—is the age-old disagreement in human societies concerning human immigrants. The echoes of racist rhetoric, nativist prejudice, and economic self-interest in these sometimes volatile conversations on Galápagos are unmistakable.
MY WEEK AT Hotel Galápagos is nearly at an end. The people I’m scheduled to travel with for the next ten days aboard the Beagle III will arrive tomorrow at Baltra. I’ll be over there to meet them at the airport and to board our motor yacht. I’m packing my bags and dive gear and making some notes—Barnett has given me copies of some of his technical papers—when I hear a distinctive rap on my door. Jack, the proprietor. He’s come to say that there are two men in the lobby who wish to see me. They’re local residents and want to know whether I’m available to write up the story of their many trips to Thailand together.
I meet the men in the hotel lobby. I’m uncertain about their reasons for wanting to meet but want to do Jack a favor, as he has done many for me. We shake hands and move to seats in the restaurant. No one here at midmorning. Jack serves us coffee—on the house—and they launch into their proposal.
The men are about twenty years older than I am, two bumptious, overweight Americans, very enthusiastic about Thailand as a tourist destination. I’m not the person for their project, I tell them right away, but to be polite I ask about Bangkok. Have they seen its floating market, the Wat Phra Kaew complex? Have they visited Chiang Mai? It’s quickly apparent that none of this is of interest to them. Their interest is in sex, especially with adolescent girls.
I push back from the table, say politely that I am not able to accommodate them, and leave the table without shaking hands.
As I walk out of the restaurant I catch Jack’s eye in the kitchen, cutting up tomatoes for lunch. To be civil, I gesture back with a shrug, when what I want to do is confront him.
The darker part of the real world is always just around the corner.
Back in my cabana, trying to defuse my anger and refute what I’d witnessed, I remembered a story that put me back on track.
A friend of mine, an ethnomusicologist, had gotten funding to study percussion ensembles in West Africa. After a week in one village, when he felt comfortable enough with his host family to ask the question, he inquired about ritual scarring. He wanted to know in particular about a man whose scars were in the shape of crescent moons, randomly spaced on his arms and back. His host said the man had molested a girl, and all the men in the village had bitten him.
WHEN I FIRST CAME face-to-face with extensive schools of brilliantly colored tropical fish in Galápagos, in shallow water at Gordon Rocks near the Plaza islets, I shouted so forcefully with excitement that I spit out my snorkel and choked. The fish that caused this outburst were blue-eyed damsels, dozens of them moving through the gin-clear water, together with schools of dusky sergeant majors and yellowtail surgeonfish. Blue-eyed damsels are darkish fish with yellow lips and tails and bright blue eye rings, about five inches long and compressed vertically. What made me shout was more than the vividness of their colors, though these hues were intensified in the sun-shot water by a glycerin-like mucus that covers their scales. It was the sheer number of them, all turning away from me in unison, as though they comprised a single organism. And it was how perfectly placed they seemed to be in the world, in that particular spot, in the moment that I found them.
On subsequent dives on that trip—growing accustomed now to the use of the snorkel, diving deeper, learning how to stay down longer—I could not turn away from the marvel of these fish—wrasses, parrot fishes, Moorish idols, butterfly fish, the damsels, triggerfishes, needlefishes, stargazers, halfbeaks. Back on the boat I pored over Godfrey Merlen’s A Field Guide to the Fishes of Galápagos, the fish chapters in Roger Perry’s Galapagos: Key Environments, and dive notes and drawings that the guides gave me. The popular names for the fishes—grunts, sleepers, knifejaws, boxfishes, triggerfishes, and the rest—were captivating: guineafowl puffer, tinsel squirrelfish, clown razorfish, rainbow scorpionfish, Sheepshead mickey.
It was some years after that first exposure to Galapagean fish that I returned to the islands as a scuba diver with the equipment and skills needed to descend into deeper waters and to stay down longer. It meant having a better opportunity to see whitetip reef sharks and Galápagos sharks, and being able to inspect reef life in a more leisurely way. One day on this trip six of us dove on a small seamount called Roca Redonda, hoping to find moving “walls” of hammerhead sharks there, not an uncommon sight in water to the north of Isla Isabela. When I rolled backward off the gunnel of the panga in my scuba gear and stabilized myself in the water, I saw several scalloped hammerheads about fifty feet below me, moving slowly past the vertical wall of Roca Redonda in water through which I could see no bottom. As we descended, the hammerheads drifted off into the gloom. When our group leveled out at about eighty feet and looked straight up, we saw the sharks gathered together again about thirty feet above us. Sixty or seventy of them, some close to twelve feet long. They moved lugubriously in an open pattern, suggesting a lattice, backlit by the sky.
The French use a phrase to describe the scuba diver, l’homme sans poids, a weightless person, a play on the alliterative French expression poissons sans poids, the beguiling weightlessness of a fish in water. Weightlessness allows us to ascend the walls of Roca Redonda slowly, inch by inch, inspecting tiny stone ledges on which small animals and plants play out their lives in shadows thrown by the passing sharks. Suspended as each of us is, we can swim along the wall “upside down” and study the underside of the surface water above, see bursts of wind hitting it, wavelets forming and collapsing on it. Somewhere shallower than here you could watch the bottom passing below you and see on the sand there the movement of clouds overhead. To possess this ability to go left or right, forward or backward, up or down, all at the same time, to be released from the constraints of gravity, gives you a frame of reference like a tethered astronaut’s. This is what Icarus wanted. With this perspective, the third dimension that birds and fish move through effortlessly is yours for a few moments. And then the nature of their lives opens up more fully for you. The hammerheads move past us like swans milling on a city park pond. When we lose sight of them again, they’ve formed up in a shape like a leaning wall, a kind of close vertical stacking that birds don’t readily employ because it would compromise the lift they need to fly.
The wall of them slides into the distance like a shoji screen.
I could be wrong, but the hammerheads seem hardly to have noticed us. At the time I encountered them, years ago now, they had yet to be harvested in great numbers by Galapagean fishermen, solely for the commercial value of their fins. The upwelling of nutrients around Roca Redonda maintains schools of medium-size fish feeding in the area—jacks, basses, and groupers—which in turn (once) fed the numerous hammerheads.
Back on the boat that day, we were toweling off when someone spotted a school of common bottlenose dolphins about half a mile away. It had been only a few days since fifteen of us had been in near-shore waters with masks, fins, and snorkels cavorting (as we imagined it) with this same species of dolphin. They’d breach all around us, bolt off, then come racing back. Trying to engage with them quickly wore most of us out. The dolphins approached closely but never close enough to be touched. When we saw dolphins again, only a couple of people expressed an interest in getting back in the water with them.
I left our yacht with two others and a boat driver in a panga.
This pod of dolphins was less interested in us than the other dolphins had been, but when we got close, we rolled out of the panga anyway. Maybe they would come to us. The water was very deep, water open-ocean sailors call blue water, because of its cobalt hues. What appeared beneath me was not dolphins but something I would not ever have expected to see. Thirty feet below was a female sei whale, a dark steel-gray form about forty-five feet long, nursing a single calf. In a moment like this, the mind recovers equilibrium before the heart can reclaim its normal rhythm. It pieces together the light and the shade, the lines of the forms in the water, to make a coherent image.
I breathed slowly through my snorkel, floating motionless, watching the creatures until their undulations took them into indistinction. I hoped my two companions, who had dropped off the opposite side of the boat, had seen the whales. It turned out they hadn’t. Underneath them when they first looked down had been a young sperm whale.
Back on the boat, how could we relate the details of what had happened without distressing those who’d chosen not to go?
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, the Beagle III was motoring southwest across Bahía Isabel, an embayment on the west coast of Isabela. I went to the bow after supper to watch the overcast night. The western headland of Punta Cristóbal ahead was barely readable, an opaque black inseparable from the opaque black of the sea, but distinct against the slate black of the sky. A light breeze crossed the bow.
To the southwest, toward the open Pacific, I saw something in the blackness I could not immediately understand, a straight whitish-turquoise line aimed at the starboard bow and continuing to extend toward it as I watched. The line widened as it drew closer and then suddenly hooked at the bow like the letter j. A dolphin, now riding the pressure wave just ahead of the boat. He or she was the first of six, all arriving within minutes of each other—from behind us, from up ahead, from the port side—each trailing a pale turquoise line: bioluminescence, from plankton excited by the dolphin’s movement through the water. With the six of them riding the boat’s pressure wave in parallel, they lit up an oval of water in which each animal was a distinct ghostly silhouette. I could hear their plosive breathing and smell their rank breath.
The most intense illumination, a radiant creamy white, surrounded the dolphins’ heads and the leading edges of their pectoral fins when they extended them slightly to steer. The light was less intense along their flanks but didn’t start to fade until it was fifteen or twenty feet behind their dorsal fins and flukes (the dolphins were seven or eight feet long). They rose in curvets from the water, streaked ahead, crossed beneath one another and veered away from the boat, constantly changing their alignment. Fish burst away from them, triggering additional blooms of bioluminescence. From moment to moment I couldn’t tell whether the original six were still with us or whether some had gone and others had arrived. The air thickened with their mewling squeaks. By my watch, the dolphins were on the bow for an hour and a half.
When the last one departed, the sea went dark again until, minutes later, a patch of bioluminescence more than fifty feet across suddenly opened in front of the boat. I fully expected the Beagle III to plunge in. I gripped the boat’s steel railing and fought off feelings of vertigo. We crossed through the light and the moment of panic faded. I set my eyes again on Punta Cristóbal, which, despite the long interlude with the dolphins, did not appear to be any closer.
Even with nothing to be seen, I continued to stand on the bow, waiting to see anything I could. Eventually I saw a flock of swallow-tailed gulls, the night hunters, passing to the west with the slow wingbeats of egrets. They are a kind of bird the Hōkūle‘a navigators look for just before dawn, when they are reliably headed back to land and to their nests.
When I left the bow to go below, it occurred to me that the large patch of bioluminescence could have been caused by a whale suddenly halting its effort to surface until we’d passed.
EVERY COMMERCIAL AND PRIVATE boat tour in the Galápagos—some commercial tours are only a few days long, others last a couple of weeks—must follow the itinerary given to them by national park officials. This ensures that no tour group shows up at the same place, at the same time, as another. (Passengers may go ashore only at one of the park’s approved landing sites, of which there are about sixty. In order for visitors to see as much of the variety of Galápagos as possible, the itinerary assumes that most tour boats will be in transit during the night, while passengers sleep. That way, visitors often awaken to find themselves already anchored at the place they’ll disembark to after breakfast.)
Evenings at sea aboard the Beagle III at this time of year are mostly warm, and some of us forgo the bunks below to sleep out on the decks, where the Milky Way is particularly dense with stars on a clear night. On the morning I’m thinking about, our itinerary has us anchored at Isla Rábida. The engines have been shut down for a while; a few Galápagos doves are asleep on the ship’s railing. No movement, no gas or electric light is visible ashore. The silence here is a presence, like the air inside a large rotunda. It’s finally rent by the sound of a knife blade stopped by a cutting board—the cook, preparing cantaloupe for breakfast.
We’re at Rábida to visit a colony of greater flamingos living at a salt lagoon. They feed in the shallow water on a type of crustacean that makes their feathers pink, and the females lay their single white eggs on small heaps of mud on a salt pan nearby. They’re among the wariest of the islands’ birds, and having heard the boat’s engine earlier, they are arrayed on the far shore of the lagoon when we arrive via a short trail. Something about the arrangement of space here and the scheme of simple colors—the broad turquoise lagoon, the deep blue of a high-pressure sky, the long pink line of distant flamingos in front of a wall of green mangrove trees—induces silence in the eight or ten of us standing there. We move like tiptoeing parents in the bedroom of a sleeping child. Outside of the soft puff of an intermittent breeze against my ears, the only sound here is the bleating of the birds, a sound like the honking of geese. The overall impression is that the birds are pink, but with my binoculars I can separate out individual feathers: salmon, vermilion, scarlet, coral.
We’re downwind of the birds and the intermittent breeze brings their floating feathers to us over the water—breast and nape feathers, coverts and scapulars—floating curves, turned up at each end like a child’s drawing of a canoe. The stately hesitation of flamingos feeding and the trembling of hundreds of feathers on water lapping the lagoon’s edge create an opening that was not there when we arrived. Vulnerability and a feeling of friendship—with the birds and among the people I’m traveling with.
We return to the boat carrying that eloquent silence.
WE’D SPENT THE last part of one afternoon around Isla San Salvador swimming with fur seals and hiking up to an old saltworks. We were en route to Isla Genovesa when I saw something unusual on the water inside San Salvador’s Buccaneer Cove, near Cabo Cowan. The sun was setting and its last low rays were reflecting on splashes on the surface water, about a thousand yards away. At first I thought these were the plunge dives of blue-footed boobies, which feed near shore and dive straight into the water, like pelicans. The pattern of the splashes, however, never changed. Not boobies, then, but animals struggling in the water. Caught in a net. Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus californianus wollebaeki).
Our guide, Orlando Falco, prevailed on the captain—who was reluctant to get involved—to change course. Orlando knew that Galapagean fishermen had started using sea lion carcasses as bait to catch sharks, and that Asian factory ships had been calling at villages like Puerto Villamil that year, offering to buy shark fins and supplying fishermen with nets. The entire business—factory ships putting in at the villages, netting the sea lions, killing the sharks, selling their fins—was illegal, but the park had neither the funds nor the personnel to stop it.
When we got closer, we could see that about fifteen sea lions were tangled in the net and drowning. Some were bound up together in the mesh, each one fighting the others to reach the surface to breathe, before being driven back under by their companions fighting for air. A crewman lowered a boat for us. Working from one side of the panga, Orlando and I began cutting the animals out of the net with our dive knives. Three other people, counterbalancing the boat on the other side, were holding flashlights for us to see. The most desperate of the sea lions were trying to clamber aboard the boat. The boat driver was using an oar blade to keep them from biting the two of us or turning the boat over. It took about forty minutes to free them all. As well as we could determine in the dark, all but one of the fifteen were able to swim away.
In the melee, Orlando and I had cut each other’s hands and arms, and when we got back aboard the Beagle III, we saw that our shins were black and blue from banging against the panga’s gunnel. Strangely, each sea lion seemed to understand at some point what we were trying to do. As I moved to cut the last few strands of green line from around a sea lion’s head, it stopped fighting me and trying to bite. It rested calmly in the water.
Two years later, when I returned to Galápagos, I saw the carcasses of thirty or forty finless sharks cast up like driftwood on a dozen beaches. The fishermen’s practice then was to throw them overboard and leave them to die after cutting their fins off.
AS WE CRUISED through the islands and went ashore one place and another, I began to recognize patterns of color and the presence of shapes and forms that, taken together, suggested this setting and no other. On the northeast coast of Alaska is a place called—in the Iñupiaq language of the Iñupiat there—Naalagiagvik, “the place where you go to listen.” The name refers to the practice of a particular Iñupiaq shaman who visited this area regularly to listen to the voices of animals and to voices not audible to others, like those of her ancestors. From this ensemble she built up the guiding stories her people steered by, the stories that gave them a direction in life and kept them from harm.
Inspired by this act, and by the enormous metaphor it was, the composer John Luther Adams, an Alaska resident then, designed an installation for a room at the Museum of the North, at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, called “The Place Where You Go to Listen.” A continuous stream of precisely modulated electronic sounds flows from a suite of speakers here, tones created by the dynamics of Earth itself. Seismographic, geomagnetic, and meteorological data from outstations across Alaska feed into computers in Fairbanks, which using Adams’s algorithms create a “whole cloth” of intricately woven tonal values. The viewer/listener at the installation sits on a bench facing a set of five glass panels. The panels change color according to the season of the year, the weather, and the time of day. The pattern of changing color reinforces the sensation of being present to a real landscape, one made richer by the translation of Earth’s constant micro movements and phenomena like the northern lights into the patterns of a singular sonic landscape.
For many years John and I have exchanged ideas about the nature of music, language, and the natural world, and how combining them in various ways can tell us where we are, literally and figuratively. Prompted by John, I’ve tried, wherever I’ve gone, to stay attentive to the sounds that emerge from an environment, believing with him that each place offers a unique pattern of sound, arrangements that change over time, depending on the season, the temperature, the humidity, the strength of the wind, and the hour of day in that locale. I’ve long been attracted, too, to the work of other artists who have a gift for patternmaking—painters, choreographers, composers—and who respond to the world that lies outside human control. Each singles out components from what’s available—tones, hues, movements, progressions. Brought together successfully, these components offer us art so well integrated, so seamless, we call it beautiful, in the way the particle physicist’s singularity or the Greek philosopher’s Theosophos can be said to be beautiful.
When I look at a landscape as a traveler, if I’m diligent, I can sometimes make out an inherent visual pattern, a sort of topology of lines and colors, into which movements fit—a bird gliding downwind across a brindled cliff face, above a dark ocean, say, or a range of treeless hills shadowed by a passing storm. Within the pattern, the separate pieces—sound, color, movement—all inform one another. In the end, whatever the components, it seems impossible to separate them again into single elements. They fit together so well that an analysis of exactly what is going on, rather than an uncritical appreciation of the phenomenon, is likely only to distance one from the scene.
Recalling my conversations with artists about the guesswork associated with creating a pleasing pattern frequently enables me to see better what is before me, see it not so much as art but as essence—the essence of a place, for example. In Galápagos it was—to pick something at random, seen from a passing boat just offshore of an island—a white ramulose horizontal strip of leafless palo santo trees, barely separated from a parallel strip of white beach below by a matte black line of lava, and then a dark ocean below that, holding a bright white line of surf against the lesser white of the beach, all of this surmounted by a pointillistic forest of scalesia trees on a slope above, with the dark ocean weakly reflecting the land and sky.
The image did not have to have meaning. This was only the presence of the place, in the middle of a March afternoon on the equator.
ON ONE OF the last days of our excursion aboard the Beagle III, our group landed at the foot of a trail on the east coast of Isabela. The trail here led up to the rim of el volcán Alcedo, a climb of about 3,700 feet. I was eager to climb Alcedo for several reasons. The largest undisturbed population of giant tortoises in Galápagos lives inside its crater, and the daylong hike to the rim takes one through all of the islands’ vegetation zones, from the coastal plant communities up through the transitional dry zone of the scalesia forest to the wet-zone communities and the pampas around the crater. In addition, because the climb is physically taxing and requires making an overnight camp in the wet zone, few visitors attempt it. It’s one of the least-visited approved sites in the archipelago. It still has the look of the Galápagos Darwin found.
If the giant tortoise is the archipelago’s most iconic animal, the shield volcano is its most iconic landform. Molten lava, periodically bursting through the Nazca Plate from a hot spot in Earth’s mantle, flows out across the ocean floor and cools, creating a shield that slopes away gently on all sides. Each succeeding lava flow adds another layer of molten rock to the shield—more height, more breadth—until the flows breach the surface of the ocean. The flows continue, but at this point what began as an underwater volcano is now a volcanic island. As the Nazca Plate advances eastward, the stationary hot spot bursts through at another site in the plate, eventually creating another island, the islands eventually forming an archipelago. (The oldest island in Galápagos, Plaza Sur, is to the east of Santa Cruz. Among the youngest is Fernandina, far to the west. The hot spot sits today between Fernandina and Isabela, close to La Cumbre, which is an active volcano.)
Once a Galapagean volcano becomes extinct, like some of those on Isabela, its vent begins slowly to collapse, forming a dry crater. (The ancient disintegrating crater on Genovesa has collapsed so completely that it’s flooded today by the ocean.) The most spectacular craters in the islands are those of the still-active volcanoes on Isabela like Cerro Azul, and of course the crater of La Cumbre, which is filled with glowing lava, not tree ferns, bromeliads, and liverworts.
Earlier, on a visit to Puerto Villamil, our guide had hired a man with a stake-side truck to take us up to the rim of el volcán Sierra Negra, at 4,890 feet. From there we’d have a spectacular view of Santa Cruz to the east and, to the northwest, of Fernandina. Ten of us were standing on the truck bed, leaning against its wood railings, as the vehicle left Villamil and began laboring up a steep grade in first gear. Suddenly the engine quit. The driver quickly put his foot on the brake. He then informed us that because he had no starter motor, he was going to have to jump-start the truck by rolling backward down the dirt road and then easing the clutch in. Which he did. A few minutes later the engine quit again, just as he was coming through a curving section of the road. As the truck began to roll backward through the curve, it became clear that for some reason the driver wasn’t able to engage the clutch—and that he had lost his brakes. A few of us made moves to jump off the truck, but we were too late. It was gathering speed and fishtailing. Twice it rose up on one side, threatening to flip over, before rolling to a stop in a barrow ditch by the side of the road.
We decided to walk the rest of the way.
The view from Sierra Negra that afternoon was theatrical, a vista encompassing nearly a thousand square miles in which not so much as the wake of a boat upset the illusion of the extent of space around us. It spread outward from droplets of dew on blades of grass on the crater rim to heavy surf breaking on the beaches of Santa María, fifty miles to the south.
On our way back to Puerto Villamil, ever-trusting, we accepted a ride in the tip bin of a brand-new Hino dump truck. Bright yellow. We passed the aging Daihatsu stake-side that we’d started out in, still tilted precariously in the barrow ditch. I felt a pang of sympathy for the driver, standing there with hands in his pockets, facing expensive repairs, and with no sign of help on the way.
I’ve been in situations like this before, a near miss and you walk away with a good story; but memories of this potentially fatal mishap remained unsettled in my mind for hours. The driver had accepted a fee without mentioning the marginal condition of his truck. We were lucky it hadn’t flipped when the clutch and then the brakes failed. We were miles from help in Villamil, and even farther from competent medical help on Santa Cruz—if we could raise anyone there on our shipboard radio. And yet here was this middle-aged man trying to make ends meet.
What was he going to say to his family about the money our guide asked him to give back?
IN THE CRATER of Alcedo we would encounter giant tortoises on their own terms and, if we stayed long enough, see something of their way in the world—eating, resting, mating, sleeping, moving with determination on their elephantine legs, wallowing in drip pools beneath scalesia trees festooned with epiphytes, gazing into the distance with pensive faces, reckoning events impossible for us to imagine. The carapaces of the oldest of these are encrusted with lichens and used by hawks and vermilion flycatchers as observation posts.
We spent a full day inside the crater, fogged in and chilly. Those without hats sported helmets of beaded moisture on their hair. The melancholy atmosphere encouraged a kind of brooding in me, about the finless sharks, the poverty in Villamil, and war zones I’d seen. The reaction of the tortoises to our presence seemed to unfold in slow motion. They were like wizened sentinels, waiting for us to pass on. Theirs were intensely local lives.
The floor of the crater was pocked with volcanic vents encrusted with canary-yellow sulfur deposits. (We came upon a lone feral donkey here, remnant of a herd that once carried panniers of sulfur down to the coast for shipment to the mainland, another early effort, like the one at the salt mine on San Salvador, to develop an export economy in Galápagos. The animal was in good flesh, alert and wary, in great contrast to the bone-thin, scarred, limping horses standing abject and catatonic in the dirt streets of Villamil.)
When we broke camp in the morning, I lashed a large volcanic cinder to my pack. I’d read that some creatures in the Galápagos might have originally dispersed through the islands by riding volcanic cinders carried by the archipelago’s strong currents and pushed by the wind. I had a hard time imagining a rock floating in salt water, and curiosity led me to break the park rule about leaving everything in the park undisturbed. The cinder was about three feet in circumference but it weighed little more than a pound. I carried it down from the crater rim to the edge of the water and flung it in. It sank with the impact but quickly bobbed to the surface, where it floated with about half its mass clear of the sea.
VILLAMIL. THE SETTLEMENT was like a fishhook in my mind. It’s easy to make the mistake when traveling abroad of finding only the good or only the bad in a place, easy to miss how complicated the weave of bad with good is. If archetypal goodness in Galápagos is represented by the idealistic park ranger who will not accept a bribe, archetypal evil is represented by those residents of Villamil who started the forest fires on Isabela, killed the sharks for their fins, and harassed and terrorized the family of a park ranger who tried to live there, driving him and his family back to Santa Cruz.
The day the group of us returned from Sierra Negra, our guide told us that in light of the accident with the truck and his having to ask the driver to return the fee, it might be good to act in a friendly way in Villamil, to buy a few sodas and trinkets from vendors. We can take the time to do that, he said. Another plan came to mind right away. Could I find someone to escort me to the ruins of a penal colony west of the village?
There are a few images in a poem by the American poet Robinson Jeffers called “Apology for Bad Dreams” that rise up regularly in my mind. Jeffers writes in the poem about the contrast between beauty and violence. He suggests that the world cannot be understood without accepting both. He says that it is not good to forget, in the pursuit of virtue, the degree to which immorality defines our condition and our history. In an essay called “In Defence of the Word,” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano refers to the writer as “the servant of memory,” both his or her own memory and the memory that his people have of what has been done to them. Galeano is arguing, essentially, that a writer who lies ceases to be a writer; and that a writer is obligated to resist complacency and to remember the things the ruling classes hope will be forgotten. He is thinking, I believe, of writers like Rian Malan in South Africa or Bei Dao in China.
Many years ago I attended a trial in Delmas, South Africa, during the last years of apartheid. Delmas is about forty miles southeast of Pretoria. The federal government chose Delmas as a venue to make it more difficult for foreign reporters based in Johannesburg or Pretoria to attend. Nineteen black men were being tried for sedition. The charges were trumped-up distortions of the truth, but the court found all nineteen guilty, and sentenced them to death. (With the collapse of the apartheid government several years later, their appealed convictions were reversed and the men were all set free.) A friend in Johannesburg suggested I attend the trial before I left on a long trip into the Namibian outback. He said I would get a feeling for the racist government’s psychopathic indifference to human rights and to truth.
Having attended that trial in March of 1987, I never afterward entered the outback in the same frame of mind. I carried with me the faces of those nineteen men and the spectacle of bigotry that unfolded in that federal courtroom. (I also wondered more often, in those days after Delmas, about my own state of moral oblivion, the indifference in myself that left me blind to injustice in places far from home.)
It’s not difficult to locate the ruins of penal colonies set up on the edges of empires. The British sent their undesirables first to North America, until the American Revolution forced them to ship people to Australia, during the era of transportation. The French used Île du Diable and New Caledonia, the Spanish sent theirs to Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, and the Portuguese, who began the practice of using colonial prisons, built one in Madeira. The question for me is not only who is justly or unjustly condemned, or whom a nation tries to rid itself of, but the capacity of nations to indifferently expunge human life, like Portugal under Salazar, or Panama under Noriega, or Indonesia under Suharto.
Jeffers would have argued, I think, that it is foolish to believe one can actually eliminate the brutality men are capable of; but one can reduce the level and the extent of cruelty. And Galeano would have argued, I believe, that not only must the horror of these places not be forgotten but any effort to suppress these stories must be exposed and discussed openly, if democracies are to function.
If you never pass through Nagasaki, if you never see the ruins of POW camps in North Vietnam, if you don’t walk the Shoshone slaughter ground at Bear River, Idaho, it’s easier to believe that these things are merely historical, or to believe that the era of death camps, penal colonies, and raids on American Indian encampments no longer exists, that these places are now only symbolically important. It is to put forth the idea that autonomous drug cartels in Mexico can be brought to heel by a strong government.
Our guide said no to my going to the prison grounds outside Villamil. “You won’t learn anything out there,” he said. “It’s all overgrown.”
WHEN WILLIAM BEEBE, a biologist and explorer affiliated with the New York Zoological Society, published Galápagos: World’s End in 1924, he lit up in the minds of many of his readers a vision of Elysium. People inferred from his romanticized account that anyone with the means to get there would be able to pursue a self-sufficient life of tropical leisure. Planning a trip to Galápagos aboard a tramp steamer became a fad, for a while. Several American owners of private yachts refitted their vessels to support scientific exploration in the archipelago, and an unknown number of Europeans set sail for the islands with the hope of leading lives free of bourgeois convention and of establishing small-scale export businesses. Few of these ventures came to anything, but among them were some that burdened the archipelago with stories of tragedy, mystery, and pathos. It’s the rare visitor today who leaves the islands without having heard something of the gossip and speculation concerning the people involved in those misadventures. The best known of these stories is famous all out of proportion to its banal content, but decade after decade it seems to grab the attention of visitors who want to know “what really happened” on Santa María in the 1930s.
A man named Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor with a practice in holistic medicine and an enthusiastic proponent of Nietzschean ideas about male supremacy, arrived at Isla Santa María in 1929 with his companion, Dore Strauch, a German woman with multiple sclerosis who had initially been his patient. They were intent on building an idyllic haven for themselves on the island. Each had walked out on an unhappy marriage in Berlin, and the exotic nature of their new home, together with the bohemian trappings of their relationship, made them the titillating subject of numerous articles in popular European magazines.
Late in the summer of 1932, a more down-to-earth German couple from Cologne, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, arrived on Santa María, and they, too, began homesteading, not far from Friedrich and Dore. Within a couple of months four more people arrived in the area, a ménage à trois and an Ecuadorian man the other three had hired to do their chores. The group was led by a flamboyant self-styled “baroness” who held in her thrall the two men she was involved with. The Wittmers had a respectful but cool relationship with Dore and Friedrich, but the two couples were united in being disapproving of the “Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet” and her two lovers, Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Philippson. The baroness, one suspects, was ultimately to blame for much of the petty thievery and intrigue that came to characterize the small community; and when relationships with their respective lovers began to deteriorate, both Dore Strauch and Rudolf Lorenz began to seek sympathy and comfort at the Wittmers’ farm.
One day the baroness informed the Wittmers that she and Robert were leaving Santa María. They were sailing for Tahiti. No one actually sees them leave, but neither is ever heard from again. At the same time, Rudolf arranges for a ride on a boat bound for Guayaquil, on the Ecuadorian coast. Months later, he and the boat’s captain are found dead on a beach on Isla Marchena, nearly a hundred miles to the north. Friedrich dies on Santa María, claiming to have been poisoned by Dore. Dore returns to Germany. The Wittmers stay on.
Until her death in 2000, visitors who stopped at the Wittmer compound, at Black Beach on Santa María, could socialize with Margret Wittmer. They could sip a glass of her fermented-orange “wine” while she signed their copies of Floreana, her version of what had happened on the island in the thirties. A short, stout woman, Mrs. Wittmer had about her a strange air of self-importance. She seemed to possess a permanent sense of irony about life, believing that most of the people who come thousands of miles to behold this famous Darwinian shrine to biological evolution, the Galápagos archipelago, were actually far more eager to speak with her about the baroness.
WHEN THE BEAGLE III left Black Beach, after my second encounter with Mrs. Wittmer (we’d met earlier, on my first trip to Galápagos), we doubled the coast to the north and anchored at Bahía del Correo. The famous post office barrel here, refurbished many times, is still used by tourists (though they’re no longer able to have their postcards hand-canceled by Mrs. Wittmer). In a mostly dependable but somewhat haphazard way, mail leaving Bahía del Correo today, bearing the correct amount of Ecuadorian postage, will eventually get to its destination.
The setting for the decorated barrel, a dusty clearing set back from the beach, has the faux charm of tourist kitsch with its many hand-lettered signs affixed to posts in the ground (San Francisco 3452 miles), but it’s good fun to post a letter or a card and nearly everyone does. Our guide tells us how the barrel once served whalers and others far from home, and his words are as poignant as they are historical. He speaks about the tenuousness of this kind of communication in the nineteenth century, the likelihood that a letter would be destroyed in a shipwreck or that a question written out with great anxiety and earnest thought (“Will you marry me?”) might go unanswered for several years. The hopefulness of it all, the desire to be known and heard when so far from home, to be remembered, gave all of us an insight into the vastness of the commercial world nineteenth-century whalers lived in, the contingency of their emotional lives.
From Bahía del Correo we have a long run to Academy Bay. One of the guests has prevailed on the captain to be allowed to take the helm for part of the crossing. The seas are relatively calm, the weather is good, and there are no hazards between here and there. The captain graciously turns over the wheel. When he does, I ask him if he has time to talk. Yes, he says. We sit on the aft deck beneath an awning. The cook brings us dark Ecuadorian coffee, and I ask Captain Eugénio Moreno about orientation and navigation. How does he know where he is going?
The captain is a private person. He rarely engages with passengers beyond a few polite sentences, but he is not reticent. I got to know him on another trip and learned that he can be very forthcoming and that he also has a good sense of humor. Once, when we were making a fast crossing between two islands together in a panga, a school of flying fish shot over the bow. All but one veered off and that one hit me hard in the chest, knocking me backward off the thwart I was sitting on. The captain laughed so hard he could hardly steer the boat. I laughed, too, a reaction that confirmed our good acquaintance.
Captain Moreno didn’t say anything about the importance of magnetic compasses (though he was trusting the gentleman upstairs to hold a heading of something like 018° magnetic for the next thirty minutes). Instead he followed up on an earlier conversation we’d had about the Hōkūle‘a. He was very interested in what the Hōkūle‘a’s navigators were doing. He told me that a mainland person would automatically be suspicious of such traditional non-Western techniques, but that they made excellent sense to an island person like himself. He told me that after so many years in Galápagos he had a feeling about where to go when the seas got rough and how to get there. It wasn’t in the charts, that information. It wasn’t determined by bottom soundings with sonar or by weather faxes. I told him that some of the Polynesian navigators were able to lie down in the trough of a canoe and sense by the way the water knocked against the hull where they were in the currents. And that a blind navigator once worked in Micronesia. He didn’t doubt it.
With his last sip of coffee the captain looked past me at the line of the ship’s wake, which he had to lower his head to see clearly, underneath the keel of the panga hanging from davits in the stern. He raised his eyebrows quickly and said he would see me later. When I turned to look at the wake, I saw that its shape was serpentine. To steer the course he was asked to keep, the helmsman had been overcorrecting constantly to maintain his heading.
I sat alone at the table after the captain went to the bridge, experimenting with my own sense of orientation. Where was I? Riding very comfortably over the Pacific, in glorious weather, shaded from the sun, enjoying the breeze, glancing at seabirds as they passed. Soon lunch would be served: a crisp salad, fresh fruit, fresh fish. Later I would go back to the Gabriel García Márquez novel I was enjoying. I would also talk with the guide about the biology and ecology of the red-billed tropicbirds circling the Beagle III just then.
I seemed to want for nothing.
But where was here in that moment? The nexus of here, a place like the mail barrel’s, a pinpoint that links a speaker to a listener, the here to some there across an intervening distance—where was this particular here located? I will try to tell you, from my deck chair in the stern of the Beagle III, with the captain now at the helm and three waved albatrosses in the distance, animated specks of white gliding across Wedgwood blue, headed south for their colony on Isla Española.
To the northwest of me at this moment, then, lies the Hawaiian archipelago. To the southwest is New Zealand. To the southeast, beyond Peru, lies Bolivia. To the northeast, Panama. Four points of a compass rose, converging here, on the Beagle III. In Hawai‘i, one finds the still-unresolved matter of a military takeover of these islands by the United States in 1893, in support of American sugar and pineapple growers who wanted the native Hawaiian monarchy deposed and a new and different apportioning of lands in Hawai‘i. Native Hawaiian people, kanaka maoli, continue to bring their story to the attention of the world. In Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, the author, Noenoe Silva, quotes the African historian Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, speaking to the core of the native Hawaiian problem today: “[T]he biggest weapon wielded…by imperialism…is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”
In southern Bolivia, outside the city of Potosí, is a mountain called Cerro Rico. The Inca ruler Huayna Capac, after learning from his men that the mountain had warned them with a terrifying bellow to stay away, had named the mountain potojsi, “a great thundering noise.”
Over the centuries, indigenous Quechua miners took untold tons of silver from Cerro Rico for their masters. Now mostly all they mine there is tin. As many as 8 million Quechua workers have been killed by cave-ins, by accidents with explosives and smelters, and by silicosis, an occupational disease. The Quechua say they used to believe that the mountain was sacred, that it was the home of a personified energy that gave Quechua people life. After the Spanish forced them into making their living as enslaved miners, the personality of the mountain began to shift in the Quechua imagination. Today it is seen as something quite different, a Beelzebub. On El Día de los Compadres, an annual festival day for Quechua men, the miners descend deep into the mines to pay homage to a Quechuan god named El Tío. They explain that the benevolent life-giving force that once resided here has now abandoned the mountain, leaving it to El Tío, a hellion whom they represent with life-size papier-mâché constructions as a spike-eared human with red horns, a large phallus, and a conquistador’s goatee.
The American anthropologist June Nash quotes a Quechua man on this perversion of sacred life-giving energy. It has been reduced to a papier-mâché model, festooned with streamers of colored paper called serpentinas. Its mouth is stuffed with coca leaves and surrounded by gifts of alcohol and tobacco. Today, the miner told Nash, “[w]e eat the mountain, and it eats us.”
In Christchurch, New Zealand, five Native American skulls were once kept on display at the Canterbury Museum, that of an elderly Lakota woman, that of an Arapahoe man, and those of three Salish Indians. The skulls were sold to the museum in 1875 for seven dollars, apparently by an American paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh. At that time, the heads of Native American people were routinely gathered up at the site of a massacre as souvenirs. Native American repatriation committees are working today to locate the appropriated heads of their ancestors and to bring them home for burial. When the late Wiyot painter, sculptor, printmaker, and carver Rick Bartow, an Oregon resident, was invited to Christchurch by Maori artists in 1994, his hosts asked him if he knew about the skulls in the Canterbury Museum. He didn’t. The Maori said they were anxious about the situation but didn’t know how to approach the museum. Bartow didn’t either, but he asked someone on the museum staff for permission to improvise a ceremony and to contact members of a repatriation committee in Umatilla, Oregon.
On the day of the ceremony a museum curator placed the five skulls on a table and stood away. (This was in the hours before the museum opened to the public.) Maori women sang Bartow into the room. He entered shoeless, holding cedar branches he’d gathered in a nearby park and carrying tobacco and water. He was weeping. He recalled later that his tears came partly from his knowledge of human tragedy (such as he had seen while working in hospitals in Vietnam), from his own feelings of unworthiness in that moment, and from the relief he was feeling with the prospect of repatriation. He lit the cedar branches and cleaned the room with their smoke. He bathed the skulls and placed an offering of tobacco in front of them. He picked the skulls up one at a time and cradled them, brushing the forehead with his hand while he wept. He spoke words he does not remember now. Finally, with the skulls all sitting on the table again, he asked them to tell him what they needed. He said he was there to bring them home.
When I spoke with him later, he declined to repeat what they said.
After the ceremony he walked to the River Avon, in the park where he had gathered cedar branches and, praying, placed the remains of the ceremony in the moving water.
EARLY IN HIS NAVAL CAREER, then-lieutenant Robert Peary developed the idea that in order to succeed in life, he had to find some consequential project or enterprise to associate himself with, and then ensure that his name would be the first mentioned when people referred to the project or event. When military and commercial interests in France and the United States began to plan the building of the Panama Canal, Peary put his name in as a candidate to represent the U.S. Navy. He was selected, but he saw eventually that there were too many others—industrialists, politicians, military officers—involved. He wouldn’t be able to establish himself as the project’s visionary. There were too many decisions to be made that he wouldn’t be able to control.
He resigned his position and shifted his aspiration to the conquest of the North Pole.
To sail through the Panama Canal today, in an era when robots build cars and space probes have entered the sphere of the Oort Cloud that surrounds the solar system, is to be moved to silence by the sheer scale of engineering, by the audacity behind constructing this shortcut to the Pacific. Peary’s instinct about the project was correct. To this day, in the minds of most who see it, something of the miraculous still clings to this series of locks. But no single name.
I made the passage through the canal once from the Caribbean side, aboard an icebreaking research vessel headed for the Weddell Sea, in Antarctica. When we entered the Gatun Locks at the north entrance, Russell Bouziga, the Cajun captain of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, ordered the bridge cleared of all the ship’s supernumeraries, including a small party of scientists headed for Antarctica. (This was the Palmer’s first voyage. When it entered the Weddell Sea a few weeks later it would be the first vessel to do so in winter since Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed there in 1915.) I was leaving the bridge with the others when the captain told me to stay where I was. (A couple of weeks before this, during the ship’s sea trials in the Gulf of Mexico, I volunteered to attend to an urgent problem for him. It involved diving to inspect the Palmer’s inoperable bow thruster. The professional diver on the ship’s crew had gone ashore for the day and my offer to help [I was a certified diver], not knowing what would be required of me, made an impression on the captain during a time when his crew was overworked trying to meet inspection deadlines.) Bouziga, a Vietnam combat veteran, told me the reason he asked those who were not members of his crew to leave the bridge during the Panama passage was because so many laborers had died building the canal. Most were now buried below us in unmarked graves. It was his feeling that only workingmen should be on the bridge for the crossing. For the hours it took us to reach the Pacific, Bouziga asked for complete silence.
BEHIND ME, now that Captain Moreno had taken the helm, the wake of the Beagle III was straight as a runway.
And my here was, again, here, awash in equatorial sunshine and soft air, riding the untroubled waters of El Canal de Santa Cruz, two magnificent frigatebirds moving west on deep, slow wingbeats, and the Beagle bound for a supper of fresh Bacalao (grouper) and langostinos in Puerto Ayora. The episodes that memory had brought forth, of my conversations with the native Hawaiian patriot Noa Emmett Aluli, of purchasing the silver real in Christiansted, of the time Rick told me about the Maori invitation to ease the universal grief of traditional people, and of the honor silence Russell has asked for, to acknowledge the work ordinary laborers had done in their anonymous way, were now situated in the undisturbed present, this moment here, where the world seems more benign and the opportunity to forgive, to accept, floods the heart.
To recall trouble does not necessarily mean to dwell on what once had happened. The recollections also bring with them the relief that perspective offers.
AT THE CORE of Darwin’s idea about evolution is a very simple observation: every living thing has parents.4 The germ cells of each parent carry sets of genes that, though generally the same from one generation to the next, hold out multiple possibilities for the offspring of any given set of parents. The nature of this event, what will actually come of combining these two packets of information, is what scientists call stochastic (i.e., a result that can be approached statistically but that cannot be predicted, i.e., random).
With the aid of sophisticated tools of observation, geneticists today can identify whole swaths of genetic material in a particular genome—the human genome, for example—and say with some confidence which genes influence which trait in the ontogenic development of a member of a new generation. They can say, in other words, which genes will influence the color of a baby’s eyes and what color they’re likely to be. What they are not able to predict, however, despite their knowing the color of both parents’ eyes, is what the baby will actually look like or—a much more complicated question—how the baby will behave. They can speak with some precision about the first part of the event (the creation of a new person, the beginning of its ontogeny, or growth) but not the second (who the person will be). No one can know what, in fact, is to come.
Change in the genome of a species over time and the relative quickness with which genetic mutations can start to alter the familiar (and similar) appearance of members of a species are not phenomena easy to characterize. Together with the speed and direction of genetic change taking place because of selective pressures being exerted by an animal’s changing environment (changes in its climate, catastrophic geological events, chronic pollution of its environment, changes in the species it shares an environment with), random genetic change creates a landscape of quicksilver movement for an evolutionary biologist, paleoanthropologists, and other scientists trying to guess where any particular species might be headed, including human beings.
We know that as one generation succeeds another within a given species, the species changes, usually incrementally but occasionally dramatically. (A species is not so much a permanent thing as a point on the developmental line of that thing through time.) We know that genetic mutation interacts in some way with a species’ environment such that some randomly generated changes in the nucleotides of a gene are reinforced, in order, generally, to perpetuate fitness in a species. But there’s a great difference between the fate of an individual of a particular species and the fate of that species itself. Parents who have great hopes for their own children in an environmentally compromised world may therefore also be parents who despair over the fate of mankind.
The reason radical changes in the human environment caused by the Industrial Revolution are so anxiety-producing is not that they keep us from predicting a benign future for ourselves. We’ve never been able to do that anyway. It’s that, apparently, major changes in Homo sapiens’s physical environment are occurring with what scientists believe is unprecedented speed. However well individual people might manage in the face of these changes in the decades ahead, the future of the species remains as open a question as it was for all the other hominins we’re related to, none of whom, it’s important to note, are still with us.
It is characteristic of our age that the urge to commit to the eschatology of a particular organized religion, and the intense critiques of all of organized religions’ eschatologies, are both driven by the same conviction: no one knows where we’re headed. We know only that we will change over time, and that our long history as a relatively stable species (200,000 years or so for anatomically modern man) is no guarantee that these changes will take place slowly, especially in the Anthropocene.
Darwin receives most of the credit for the way modern people imagine themselves changing through time as a species and for people’s ability to conceive of their phylogenetic ancestors—from australopithecines and several species in the genus Homo through to, probably, Homo heidelbergensis—as being both different from and similar to themselves. In reading The Voyage of the Beagle as a young man, I was struck by two things that I felt shaped the way Darwin came to understand biological evolution. One was the effect of his years-long experience aboard the Beagle. During his time at sea in this two-masted barque, in weathers calm and calamitous, he developed, I thought, a more informed sense of the sheer size of Earth, which he’d had little inkling of as a boy growing up in Shropshire. Each day he spent offshore was one more day in which he stood at the center of almost unlimited space, an expanse of water and sky defined only by the continuous line of the horizon. Every hour at sea, becalmed in the Atlantic’s doldrums or scudding before a quartering wind, the breadth of the ocean he saw and the great reach of the inverted bowl of the sky were in stark contrast to the world Darwin was familiar with as a passenger aboard HMS Beagle, little more than a mote of dust in the vastness between continents. This contrast, day in and day out, between the unknown ocean and the familiar ship, I felt, encouraged Darwin to develop a similar figurative vastness around the idea of evolution just then beginning to mature in his imagination.
The extent of pelagic space surrounding the Beagle compelled Darwin, I believe, to take what he thought he knew about change in an entirely new direction. The Beagle offered him the comfort and reassurance of a known cultural world: each leech line, halyard, clew line, and sheet on the Beagle was meant to do something specific in a complicated (though not complex) system, and he leaned toward complexity. Each book in the personal library Darwin took aboard the Beagle at Devonport in December 1831 addressed a topic he was already more or less familiar with. His table conversation with Robert FitzRoy, a zealous Christian fundamentalist and the Beagle’s autocratic, mercurial, and very empirically minded master, was predictably orthodox, class sensitive, and reactionary. I have to imagine that Darwin’s glances out the open door of FitzRoy’s cabin, as the inscrutable and protean ocean rolled past each day during their meals together, spoke volumes.
It struck me as indicative, too, that the subject of the first paper Darwin wrote that was based on his experiences aboard the Beagle concerned the nature of dust blown westward from North Africa on a harmattan wind, dust he found covering the ship’s main deck one morning. Far out to sea, he discovered indisputable evidence of the impermanence of the enduring world.
The second thing I feel significantly shaped his ideas about biological evolution early on were the three volumes of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The ramifications suggested by Lyell’s central idea—that Earth was far older than was commonly believed—created a kind of fever in Darwin’s mind. (Darwin received the first volume as a gift from FitzRoy, on their departure. The second and third volumes reached him later in Montevideo and at Port Stanley, respectively, in the Falkland Islands.) In the 1830s, geologists could be roughly separated into two camps. Uniformitarians maintained that Earth had changed only gradually through time; catastrophists argued that changes evident on the surface of Earth had occurred suddenly. Each tended to stress the characteristics of physical geology that most strongly supported their views. Uniformitarians pointed to the gradual buildup of sediments on the floors of lakes that give rise to sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone and shale. Catastrophists brought in volcanic eruption and unconformities in layers of rock. What Lyell, a uniformitarian, introduced was a temporal framework within which to reconsider either one of these positions. What he placed before his (for the most part) religiously conservative Christian colleagues was a span of time over which geological processes had been at work that was immense, vast beyond their reckoning. Archbishop Ussher’s six thousand years would not begin to cover it.
What Lyell offered Darwin was the second part of the context in which to consider biological evolution. With the enormity of space surrounding him almost every day, and with Lyell, who gave him an enormity of time, Darwin was able to see biological evolution as a very long road branching off and unfurling through time, that phenomenon more profound historically and infinitely more complex to him than the impressive but still incidental English machine that he was sailing aboard.
I can imagine, too, that Darwin sensed yet another stimulus for revising his nascent ideas about biological change through time. It came during the thirty-five days he spent meandering though the islands of Galápagos in 1835 while FitzRoy was making marine soundings. While islands might offer the traveler firm footing and certain concrete realities to deal with—species of plants, layers of sedimentary rock, catchments of freshwater—they are also each circumscribed by a shoreline. In an archipelago, similar islands are almost always visible nearby, across a watery surface that is forever in motion and not so easily characterized by empirical measurements. And to reach any of these other places requires some sort of assistance—a ship or a boat. Darwin must have noticed that certain birds and sea mammals—sea lions and fur seals, for example—actually moved easily among the islands. Later, when he understood for the first time how finches on the various islands differed from one another, he must have considered again what might explain the thing that held all this biology together. What, in other words, was the nature of a biological archipelago—a number of distinctly different but similar things (islands), each individual biome characterized by its own menagerie of life-ecologies but all these biomes subtly related. He must have seen in the connection between biology and geology here, in this microcosm, the adumbration of something quite new.
DARWIN CREATED a massive scientific and cultural disturbance in the West with the publication of On the Origin of Species. Theologians viewed his ideas about humankind as a most serious threat to orthodoxy and social order. This Shropshire gentleman, they believed, was arguing that biological change followed no preset course and that it had no purpose other than biological fitness in the moment. Moreover, it was change without a destination. In essence, they saw, he was saying not only that Homo sapiens was not headed in any particular direction as a species (i.e., Homo sapiens was changing over time but not “improving”) but also that humanity had no end point in “perfection.” Further, he was implying there was no hierarchical arrangement of Earthly species, at the apex of which Homo sapiens was to be found. According to one of his most astute biographers, Janet Browne, what most frightened Darwin about his own ideas was not the threat they presented to fundamentalists among the theologians of his day, but that he was implying there was little difference, ultimately, between people and animals. In other words, that humans were not set apart by having “a soul.”
Darwin’s assertions were shattering to consider because they suggested for some the ultimate meaninglessness of human life. Resistance to his ideas of adaptation and change remains as strong in some quarters today as it was in England in the 1870s. (One of the most peculiar pockets of resistance to the theory of evolution happens to be in Galápagos, where fundamentalist Christians have sought successfully to become certified as official guides. They want to offer visitors alternative ideas about evolution and to emphasize the “special creation” of human life.) Darwin strived to restrict the discussion of his ideas to the province of biology, but of course he was unsuccessful. Atheists, agnostics, political revolutionaries, existentialists, and eventually social Darwinists—all commandeered his insights and took them off in directions Darwin himself probably would never have headed. Darwin was a cogitator, not an agitator, someone better imagined as a philosopher than a provocateur. He was, in fact, the herald of a kind of thinking that wouldn’t come to the fore in another discipline—particle physics—for another forty years. Like Copernicus before him, and like Freud and Jung after him, he changed fundamentally the way we imagine ourselves in the world.
At the time Darwin was writing, scientists trying to explain the natural world concentrated their research in only two areas, chemistry and physics. Biology was viewed primarily as a descriptive science, a sort of stepsister to the other two types of inquiry, and further, one largely in the hands of gentlemen naturalists, people with nothing more serious on their minds than the twittering of birds and the blooming of roses. What Darwin did was to put biology on a level with physics and chemistry as a path of inquiry into the nature of the natural world. His work in systematics and his theoretical work in evolution took biology into areas of unpredictability and indeterminacy, which physics in fact had been aimed toward since the time of Democritus, and which it finally attained with the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Darwin anticipated Heisenberg’s famous insight, that the kind of indeterminacy that characterizes quantum theory is present in all natural systems. He wasn’t implying that the human effort to achieve, say, moral progress without a map wasn’t possible. He was saying it wasn’t possible to make such a map in the first place.
Though inclined as a scientist toward the immutability of laws—physics and chemistry had laws: Newton’s first law of motion, say, or Boyle’s laws about the behavior of gases—Darwin was actually giving us reason to consider that biology had no laws. Instead, it had situations, like evolution or parthenogenesis or mitosis. People wonder sometimes whether Darwin might have written in a different way about biological evolution if he’d had Mendel’s “laws” of inheritance to work with. The answer to this is that if Mendel had preceded Darwin, we likely would never have gotten the Darwin who created such an impact. Mendel’s observations about genetic inheritance were not about predictability, as Mendel had hoped. They were about probability, and probability was awaiting a mathematics that would make change more comprehensible.
When I was seventeen, traveling though Europe with a group of my prep school classmates, I remember emerging from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence one afternoon with my head spinning. The artwork had made a terrific impression on my adolescent and febrile imagination. Trying to walk off the excitement, I ended up on the Ponte Vecchio, staring down at the Arno River. I had a book in my shoulder bag which I’d been trying unsuccessfully to read for several weeks. I was in over my head with it. It was called The Orientation of Animals: Kineses, Taxes, and Compass Reactions. The authors were an entomologist named Gottfried Fraenkel and a zoologist from Sri Lanka, Donald Gunn. Their subject was the way animals, mostly insects, orient themselves in the environments in which they live. Given their needs—to feed and to survive long enough to reproduce—and the quality of their environments, and given a particular moment in time—the temperature and humidity, the season, the angle of the sun—how did they orient themselves in the physical world? The subject was deeply fascinating to me, that animals could be understood in terms of how they adjusted themselves daily in a changeable environment in order to satisfy some utilitarian need. Or simply to please themselves.
I stood at one of the Ponte Vecchio’s portals between two shops, struggling with the meaning of some of the technical terms the authors were using, and, not for the last time, closed the book, distracted by the muddy surface of the rain-swollen Arno. And wondering where, in a world of autonomous insects evolving in some South American jungle at that moment, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus might fit, that painting having left me in a state of wonder as deep as the one Messrs. Fraenkel and Gunn had taken me to.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON, our guide aboard the Beagle III, Orlando Falco, offered to take a few of us swimming at Bartolomé, a small island off the east coast of San Salvador. I brought my fins and my mask along, though Orlando said there wouldn’t be much in the way of tropical fish there. The bottom was composed mostly of old lava flows around a few pockets of sand, but there was no coral. The water was so clear I could read the textures of ropy flows of pahoehoe lava twenty feet below the panga. After everyone else had jumped overboard, Orlando took me a little farther offshore, into deeper water, and motioned for me to drop overboard there.
I rolled out of the panga and kicked hard for the dark bottom I saw below. The bottom that came into focus, however, was not a continuation of lava flows from the shore of Bartolomé—it was a huge school of orange-eyed mullet. Before I could halt my descent, the schooling fish parted, rising up around me in the form of a hollow cylinder. As I continued downward, the fish below me parted to reveal a white sandy bottom at about thirty-five feet. When I turned over to look back up at the fish from below, I saw that the elongated school stretched off more than a hundred feet in both directions. The lowest layer of this lens was about five feet off the bottom. The mullet were swimming in tight synchrony, veering and milling.
Thousands of them moved in unison above me, like a single thunderhead.
When I needed to ascend I put my hands together over my head like a springboard diver, kicked, and started moving up through them. When I glanced down, I saw the white bottom wink out beneath me and slowed my rise. Wherever I extended my hands now, the fish moved gracefully aside. When I pulled in my legs and hugged them to my chest, the fish came in closer, and for a few moments I was entirely surrounded. When the last layer of fish divided above me I saw the white bottom of the panga through about ten feet of water.
That minute and a half with the orange-eyed mullet was an experience my body as well as my mind continued to remember. Here, for me, was the edge of the miraculous. In every corner of the world there was such resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous.
ON THE LAST DAY of our ten-day excursion, the Beagle III put in at Puerto Ayora. We had a dinner of sea bass, rice and beans, and a fresh vegetable salad. The evening air was beginning to cool. We said good night to one another and headed for our rooms at the Hotel Galápagos, me to cabana numero cinco to begin sorting out my gear, to shower and pack. In the morning we’d all board a bus for the overland trip to Baltra and the flight out to Quito.
I wasn’t ready to go. I picked at my belongings, indecisive about what to put where. My mind was surging in several directions at once, trying to align Darwin’s catalytic history here with environmental degradation today in the islands, and with the future of possibilities for Homo sapiens. Somewhere the Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has written that humanity’s task now is to “resituate non-humans in the ethical and to resituate humans in the ecological.” Having an ecological—rather than a solely political or economic—view of Homo sapiens and knowing that the physical environment exerts a selective pressure on the human genome lead to a straightforward observation: to care for the environment is to care for the self. To run roughshod over the environment is to subscribe to the belief that humans are free to remain indifferent to their physical environment, that natural selection doesn’t apply to them. That humanity’s biological future lies, instead, I suppose, not with natural selection but with genetic engineering, with the edited genomes of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) babies. Designer children.
From the small window in my bathroom, after my shower and after I’d turned out the bathroom light, I could see the palisades of the night standing on the plain of the Pacific. What would Cook and Darwin have said to each other about the grids each man had used to navigate? How might they have defined that word archipelago? And what might Darwin have offered us if he’d sailed with Cook and not with the fundamentalist FitzRoy? And what might either of them have said to the crew of the Hōkūle‘a, after being apprised of the Pacific islanders’ trust in “navigator birds” to help shape their course?
I’D BROUGHT ALONG to the Galápagos a three-by-four-and-a-half-foot navigational chart published by the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center, in 1978, which incorporated a sequence of fifteen revisions. Based on British Admiralty chart 1375 (which is based in part on FitzRoy’s sounding in the Galápagos in 1835), it was entitled “Archipiélago de Colón” and rendered in a scale of 1:600,000, meaning an inch here equaled about 9.5 nautical miles. The islands were represented in shades of gray, and a series of concentric lines revealed the topography of each one. The waters between them and the ocean surrounding the archipelago were white and hatched with lines of latitude and longitude. A navigational grid of thin green and maroon lines, based on magnetic compass bearings, was imposed over the other lines. Random stretches of water were stippled with numbers designating depths and with tiny, feathered arrows showing the direction of currents. Numbers atop the arrows indicated the average speed of these currents.
I wanted to fix this third journey to Galápagos in my memory. I was using the chart as a framework in which to envision the events of the trip and to establish the sequence in which they had occurred. I noted each of our landfalls: the dive at Roca Redonda, where it was not possible to step ashore; the route of our climb up the eastern flank of Alcedo, above el Canal de Isabela; the crossing of Bahía Isabel, where we’d seen the dolphins slipcased in phosphorescence. It was an exercise for me in recollecting and imprinting.
As I walked around the room, folding clothes, putting notes in manila folders, cleaning the residue of ocean air from the lenses of my binoculars, I would step over to the map spread out on the bed and fix on it from memory the place where something else I’d just recalled happened. It was mildly disconcerting to me that Bahía del Correo was actually north and east of Margret Wittmer’s Black Beach, not to the south of her holdings, as I had pictured it. And Isla Darwin and Isla Wolf were much farther north of the main islands of the archipelago than I had imagined them to be.
When I had everything ready, I prepared to roll the map up and slip it into its protective case. As I brought the large sheet of paper across the bedside lamp I was suddenly reading the archipelago as if it were lit from beneath. The weak lightbulb was the volcanic hot spot under the Nazca Plate, venting through La Cumbre and Cerro Azul.
I removed the cactus-skin shade from the lamp to make the hot spot more intense. And then suddenly I saw the situation in reverse—the bulb was the sun and I was looking at it from the ocean floor, not seeing the islands in an overview as the peaks of a cluster of volcanic mountains but seeing them from below as floating objects on the surface of the ocean, like volcanic cinders. To enhance this illusion, I rotated the chart, swapping top for bottom. What was the “upside down” of this place now? And if that was sunlight I saw dimly through the surface of the ocean, backlighting the islands but revealing no detail, was it now all right that west was on my right and not my left? If I rotated the map end for end to put the west back on my left, the “bottom” of the archipelago was now apparently its “top.”
What would be the correct orientation for a navigator at the start of a voyage through Galápagos? What alternatives might there be for a mariner steering here by conventions other than port and starboard, east and west? What would the navigator in the Hōkūle‘a suggest here?
In a corner of the navigational chart I saw the following in purple letters: “WARNING: The prudent mariner will not rely on any single aid to navigation.”
Like Cook, Darwin wasn’t navigating in Galápagos with an existing map. He was making a map.