Los Angeles, November 1934
The wire reports traveled three thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean and described a gruesome scene: On Marchena Island, a bleak and barren speck of land in the northern part of the Galápagos, passing fishermen found two bodies. Over the course of several months the tropical sun had mummified the corpses and eroded their features. Both lay on their backs. The larger one measured about six feet and had a tuft of brown hair sprouting from the skull. Parts of the body in touch with the ground were punctured with wormholes. The other, presumed to be a woman, was a foot shorter and dressed in torn scraps of clothing. The desiccated facial skin was affixed so tightly to the bones that the skull looked encased in parchment. Neither wore shoes. One of the fishermen noticed traces of faded footprints, as though the victims had paced the ground just before death came.
Hundreds of burnt matches and a pristine pile of wood suggested they had failed to start a fire. The head of a seal, the body of another, and scaly strips of iguana flesh apparently served as a final meal. The pair had died of thirst; on Marchena, covered almost entirely with lava rock, there was no freshwater. Beneath their overturned skiff lay a passport, baby clothes, several photographs, and a cache of thirty letters. The fishermen unsealed and read them all. One described the contents as “a hell of horror.” Another confessed they inspired nightmares.
A few of the letters were addressed to George Allan Hancock, a Los Angeles industrialist and explorer who had made several excursions to the Galápagos. Inspired by Charles Darwin and, more recently, the American naturalist William Beebe, Hancock sailed to the islands in search of exotic wildlife but found himself equally intrigued by the humans he encountered.
Over the past five years, eight people had settled on the island of Floreana, 112 miles south of Marchena, with one common desire: to create a utopia, although each of them had different visions as to what a utopia might be. The settlers were a doctor and his patient; a war veteran, his pregnant lover, and his teenage son; and a Viennese noblewoman with two male lovers by her side and a pearl-handled revolver on her hip.
Hancock was aware of escalating tensions on the island. There had been violent disagreements, a suspicious shooting, fantasies and threats of murder. A recent letter from the doctor to Hancock hinted at further turmoil: “We will hope that you will come once more…. Then I must tell you what I cannot write—because I have no proof of it.”
Hancock planned to answer this plea, but death was faster. As he learned when he came ashore, the Floreana community had lost yet another member.