Seven
Catalyst
As soon as Commander McDonald departed on the Mizpah, he sent a message via radiogram to a journalist at the Associated Press, announcing his discovery of a couple living on the Galápagos island of Floreana. Newspapers across the country reported on the “German Robinson Crusoe and his female Friday” and printed the same photograph of Dore and Friedrich: he on the right, face half-obscured by his beard, clutching a book; she with her collar buttoned up and her hands crossed, leaning almost imperceptibly away. One journalist noted that they bore a striking facial resemblance to each other.
Interest in the story deepened when McDonald returned to the United States one month later, in February 1930, and spoke to the press in person, this time at Union Station in Chicago. Accompanying him was a Galápagos penguin named Charlie Chaplin—a moniker inspired by what one reporter called its “white vest and West Point bearing”—who seemed blasé and incurious about the gathering crowd. McDonald, rather than divulge the results of his secret treasure-hunting mission, spoke of his encounter with this curious couple who had chosen to leave the world behind.
“With tears in their eyes, we left them,” he recalled, admitting that in the moment he’d been a bit melancholy himself. “Their arms were around each other and the expression on their faces would tell anyone who couldn’t recognize love in the civilized world that there, indeed, was a pair truly in that state of mind.” He spoke of the gifts he’d left them and wondered aloud what a man like Friedrich might do with floor polish on a deserted island—“unless,” McDonald joked, “he expects to use it to polish his steel set of teeth.”
Later, McDonald would regret starting the “avalanche of publicity” that would befall Dore and Friedrich, changing their lives in ways they could never have foreseen.
In the wake of McDonald’s discovery, others soon traveled to Floreana, hiking the long, tortured incline to find the “Modern Adam and Eve” and their “Garden of Eden.” Charles S. Howard, the San Francisco automobile magnate who, in a few years, would buy the champion racehorse Seabiscuit, arrived after a monthlong cruise along the western coast of South America. On board his 163-foot yacht, Aras, was a fleet of flamingos, a seldom-seen blue-footed booby bird, penguins, marine iguanas (which Darwin called “imps of darkness”), a baby monkey, a giant turtle, and a pair of blue-eyed Galápagos doves, all housed in cages or tanks, soon to be re-homed at the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park.
“The doctor and frau were rather scantily clad when we first saw them,” he later reported, “but they donned other garments to greet us.” He suspected Friedrich was tiring of his stringent diet, and gave his assessment of the doctor: “Why go so far to be a nut when it’s more comfortable and you can have plenty more company right in California?”
Then came the businessman and philanthropist Vincent Astor, who had inherited the bulk of an $87 million fortune (about $2.2 billion today) when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, died on the Titanic. The younger Astor confessed a lifelong obsession with the ocean, and his favorite pastime was, he wrote, “a game of stalking sharks, not as hunter but as observer. My father taught me how to let my boat drift upon them silently and so get a clear view of them; the mere dipping of an oar is enough to send them racing from view.” Later, Astor became intrigued by Darwin’s discovery of “a natural laboratory full of mysteries,” marveling, “The Galapagos stands practically unchanged—still mysterious, still a life wholly confirmatory of the theory we have come to know as ‘Darwinism.’ ”
Hoping to retrace Darwin’s steps, Astor announced his own Galápagos voyage on his yacht, the USS Nourmahal, a 263-foot “floating hotel,” as one guest put it, that would be acquired by the U.S. Navy during World War II. Although Astor’s wife, Helen Dinsmore Huntington, did not share his passion for exploration, she decorated the ship’s interior, favoring early American furniture and bold patterns and chintzes. Astor’s guests enjoyed a fireplace in the main lounge, a meticulously appointed library paneled in Norwegian pine, a dining salon with real windows (as opposed to portholes), a crew of fifty to ensure superior service, and operating costs amounting to $1,000 per week, approximately $22,000 today.
Astor’s itinerary included stops at twelve islands in the Galápagos archipelago, covering seven thousand miles. His scientific party included Kermit Roosevelt, the son of the former president. Astor, said to be as interested in “pleasure trips” as he was research, invited a woman companion for each guest.
When, months later, Astor returned to New York City and docked at Pier 1, he boasted a particularly exotic collection: several live specimens of the “testudo porteri,” which scientists had believed to be extinct; flightless cormorants, four-foot lizards, and a three-hundred-pound turtle; a fish with two backbones; several piscatorial specimens so rare that they had no names; a rookery of penguins half the size of their Arctic counterparts; and baby sea lions that approached the crew with, Astor reported, “puppy-like affection.”
Before escorting the cargo to the New York Aquarium, Astor took one of the penguins, small in stature and solemn of mien, on a short tour of the city. Remarkably composed, even nonchalant, the penguin—named Paddlewing—rode in Astor’s limousine through the bustle of lower Manhattan, was carried through the crowded lobby at 217 Broadway, and then took the elevator with Astor to his office. Once there, a witness observed, “he calmly surveyed his surroundings, picked out the mirror, walked up in front of it, and started preening himself. Quite unperturbed and disposed to let anyone scratch his head, he finally arrived at the Aquarium late in the afternoon, joined the other penguins in the pool, had a bath, ate all the minnows he could hold, and went to sleep.”
Over the following months, sadly, his friends died one by one. In order to compensate, aquarium officials built mirrors around Paddlewing’s tank, hoping to cure his loneliness. But the penguin was not fooled; one morning, Paddlewing, too, rolled over and died. The press claimed “heartbreak” as the cause.
Yet Astor’s most enduring memory from his cruise was the time spent on Floreana, where, like the others, he paid a visit to Friedo to meet the peculiar couple mentioned in all the American newspapers. Friedrich spoke of his philosophy and dietary habits, claiming that he refused to eat any food that was obtained through violence. He even refused to eat potatoes and beets because they “had to be dragged from the earth by force.” Astor gave them seeds for growing coffee and cabbages and noticed that Dore was missing a few teeth; presumably Dr. Ritter had pulled them, as he had pulled his own.
The explorers’ tales of the Galápagos idealists became welcome distractions from the compounding ills of the world. Seven months after the crash, the effects of the Great Depression grew more severe, with endless reports of “slumps”: a textile slump, a cotton slump, an auto slump, a marriage slump, a canal traffic slump, a potato sale slump, a Latin America slump, and an orchid slump, in which the value of the flowers decreased by half. Three million American citizens were out of work. Rainfall was perilously low in the eastern part of the country, a precursor to the dust bowl that would soon ravage the Great Plains. In Germany, the Weimar Republic government was forced to slash wages and increase taxes in order to pay reparations for the Great War, measures that stirred social and political unrest and emboldened Adolf Hitler.
Dore and Friedrich, themselves unaware of these developments, represented an escape, a bold blueprint for a life far removed from the madness, an experiment in extreme self-isolation that suggested a madness of its own. “One can’t help believing that Dr. Ritter and his companion are just as happy as they say they are,” opined The Austin Statesman.
They may have lost a lot of the attractions that civilization has to offer, but likewise they have gained a lot—for civilization, after all, has its price. Far from the world’s beaten path, they have escaped many things. They have no nosey neighbors eager to pry into their affairs, or always ready to bother by borrowing sugar or coffee; if Dr. Ritter chooses to come home slightly tipsy at night (although goodness only knows where he would be coming from) he need not worry, because there is no one to see him….
[Dore] has her freedom, too. She doesn’t have to worry about trying to make ends meet in running the household, washing dirty dishes, getting ready for bridge parties, remaking her last year’s dress to conform with the new fall styles or entertaining boresome guests who drop in at the most inopportune times and stay much longer than they are wanted. Yes, there’s a lot to be said in favor of a solitary existence on a desert island. So much so, in fact, it’s liable to make one wonder when the next boat leaves for the South Seas and how much a ticket costs.
Another editorial, drawing upon the unrest in Europe, considered the case of Friedrich and Dore in the context of a burgeoning mob mentality throughout society: A “great force which draws people together in mobs is the kind of narcissism which creates artists’ colonies, writers’ colonies, free love colonies, religious communities, Latin quarters, Greenwich Villages and all similar gatherings of people with the same points of view,” argued the New York Herald Tribune. “They justify their own opinions by grouping themselves with those who think as they do…. We cannot get away from our fellow man, a fact which was strikingly illustrated when the newspapers carried the pictures of Dr. Friedrich Ritter and a woman friend. Seeking to escape from civilization, these two had fled secretly from Berlin and taken refuge in a remote island of the Galápagos group. All to no purpose. The members of the McDonald expedition found them there, and before long their adventure was the common property of thousands of people on two continents.”
By the spring of 1930, Dore and Friedrich, busy tending to their garden and planning the next phase of Friedo, still didn’t know that their experiment had made international news. They were unaware of a plan, proposed by McDonald and supported by four hundred fellow wealthy Americans—Gifford Pinchot, Charles Kettering, and Vincent Astor among them—to buy the entire Galápagos archipelago and gift it to the U.S. government. Such a deal would foster friendliness between North and South America, the men argued, and be a boon for both continents, preserving the islands’ wildlife and increasing opportunities in trade and investment. Dore and Friedrich were unaware, too, that the citizens of Ecuador considered the very idea treasonous and urged their government to lease the islands to France, Japan, or even Germany—any country, really, but the “Yankee Menace”—in order to alleviate their own financial crisis. One Ecuadorian politician argued that selling the Galápagos to the United States would lead to a takeover of the entire country. In order to protect Ecuador, he advocated for a detachment of naval forces with “seagoing launches” to patrol the fishing grounds and the appointment of a governor capable of wresting control of the islands from “foreign intrigue.”
Their ignorance of all political, social, and economic affairs, and of their growing international notoriety, ended on a date that Dore would remember for the rest of her life.
It was on May 5, a Monday, that she and Friedrich ventured down to Post Office Bay. To their surprise, the Manuel J. Cobos was coasting in. Captain Bruun hadn’t come on this trip, but they were greeted by an Ecuadorian courier who handed them a thick parcel—their first mail delivery, forty-six letters in all, along with numerous newspapers. Together they sat on the soft sand and discovered that the letters were all from strangers; not a single envelope bore a familiar name. They hurried back to Friedo, where Friedrich left Dore in the garden so she could read all of the letters and newspaper clippings alone.
The letters were full of compliments on their initiative and bravery, followed by pleas to join them. A group of German citizens eager to escape named themselves the “South American Society” and required each member to contribute 3,000 marks ($720) for the journey to the Galápagos. In Berlin another group formed a “Galápagos-Emigrant” association (with a corresponding association in the United States), motivated as much by solitude being “in vogue” as by the political and financial upheaval. Imagine how wondrous it would be, the letters urged, if they all established a community of “like-minded souls.” Dore could think of nothing she and Friedrich desired less. He believed that the vast majority of those fantasizing about building a colony on the Galápagos suffered from “a flabby and hysterical sentimentality.”
With apprehension she unfolded a newspaper, wondering exactly how dire the situation had become in Germany since her and Friedrich’s departure. To her surprise, the headlines centered not on her tormented country but on Friedrich’s scandalous flight from civilization with one of his patients. They mentioned her name, her husband’s name, the dissolution of two marriages. They reported that her divorce had been finalized. Every lurid detail, both true and false, imprinted hotly on her mind.
She felt that all of the ideas and principles she and Friedrich held most sacred were being mocked, reduced to gossipy fodder by people who knew them not at all. McDonald’s visit and subsequent report had breached their solitude. They would never have peace at Friedo again.
“A radio telegram had destroyed this as surely and as swiftly as a single stroke of lightning destroys a living tree,” she wrote. “We had become objects of sensational publicity. People in many countries read garbled and exaggerated accounts of who we were and what our aims had been in cutting ourselves off from their world.”
The sound of her sobs drew Friedrich to the garden.
“What has happened?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”
She pressed the paper into his hands and said, “This is the end of everything.”