DARWIN HAD BEEN only six years older than I now was when he first set foot in the Galápagos. But he was a scientist and I was a sailor. I’d been reading his journal while I was on the eleven-hundred-mile, eight-day sail from Panama to San Cristóbal. My voyage was almost trouble-free except when I nearly knocked myself out on the tiller.
It sounds a bit heavy, but I liked one phrase Darwin used about the Galápagos. He said: “Here we seem to be brought to that great fact of history—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of a new being on this earth.”
In the Galápagos I often thought I was pretty close to the “mystery of mysteries.”
The depth-sounder helped me feel my way into Wreck Harbor on an inky night and next morning I went ashore to check up on news of Patti. There was none and the next mail wasn’t due for several days. I was sour and a bit worried. I hadn’t a clue where she was.
The cats wanted some attention. Blind Fili was pregnant. She had picked up some infection, but a few shots of an antibiotic provided by a doctor in Ecuador put her on her feet again, and she later gave birth to two live kittens—Pooh and Piglet. I knew the kittens’ father because I’d caught Fili with a midnight-cowboy sort of cat on the Atlantic side of the Canal. At the time I had thought it was a pretty lousy thing to take advantage of a blind lady who’d gotten lost on her way home. Anyway, the kittens were cute.
A cable arrived from Patti to say she would be flying out from Guayaquil in Ecuador the following day. The only airport in the Galápagos was on Baltra island, fifty miles away, so I ran all the way back to Dove and sailed under full canvas. I was just in time to see the plane touch down, but Patti wasn’t among the passengers. I discovered later that although she had had her reservation she had lost her place to Ecuadorian servicemen, who always have priority. She sent a message to me by another passenger to say she would be on the next plane, two days later. Two days is a long time to hang around an airport.
When the next plane arrived Patti disembarked with her father and stepmother. For the next ten days the four of us explored the islands. The Ratterrees were great company. Right from the start there was a fifth member of the party—the ghost of Charles Darwin, who breathed down our necks.
We saw Darwin’s “finches that shook the world.” Darwin had listed thirteen different types of finches and they helped him build up his theory which challenged the age-old belief that the world was created in six days.
The most fascinating finch is the Santa Cruz woodpecker, which uses a twig or cactus spine as a tool to burrow into trees for grubs. This bird uses twigs as easily as a carpenter uses a screwdriver.
On reaching Plaza island we had a marvelous time playing around with sea lions. They were more like puppies in the way they picked up sticks and brought them back to us.
Patti was no longer bikini-trim, but she almost held her own in an underwater tug of war with a young sea lion that never tired of playing. When we had enough of the game the sea lions sulked and then began to catch the waves and surf to the shore in a style that would have won the Malibu beach title.
Because it comes in on the Humboldt Current, the water around the Galápagos is quite cold. We found we could not swim for long. Like the marine iguanas we sought out rocks, which reach a temperature of 120 degrees in the noonday sun. When I discarded my shorts in a secluded cove I discovered how hot the sun can be in these tropical islands. That night I couldn’t sit down.
Most evenings our dinner menu was fresh fish or lobster which I’d caught or speared an hour or two earlier. No one has really eaten lobster until he has tried the Galápagos variety. I discovered my first one by accident when looking for groupers in a pool off James Bay. Patti and I had speared so many groupers that day that there was no more freezer room to store them, but I went on diving because I could not tear myself away from the fascinating colors and lava formations beneath the surface. Then on the edge of a shelf I spotted an extraordinary prehistoric creature.
Back on Dove’s deck I taped: Went looking for starfish species when I saw something strange lying in a foot of water. It looked like a crayfish but there was something very weird about it. Instead of antennae up front it had flippers like a sand crab’s and its shell was quite different. I touched it cautiously and then grabbed it and threw it in the dinghy. I thought: Well, if there’s one of these there might be a relative close by. Sure enough I found number two. The third one was suspicious of me and almost escaped, but within ten minutes I had caught five of these weird creatures…. Patti barbecued them (they’re really hard to open) and we’ve just eaten them for dinner. If one of those Hollywood restaurateurs gets to hear about the Galápagos lobsters they’ll be breeding them in basement aquariums.
With such discoveries I often felt I was looking at evolutionary potter’s clay. The “gentle dragons”—the marine iguanas—seemed to waddle right out of the mists of time. No wonder the Spaniards called this corner of the world Las Islas Encantadas (“The Enchanted Isles”). The thirteen islands of the archipelago (five are volcanic) have created the world’s best natural history laboratory. Fortunately Ecuador has recently declared the islands a protected reserve and has given the wildlife legal defense against the worst of predators—man.
Galápagos was first ravaged a long time ago when English pirates used the islands as a base for attacking the treasure-laden ships of Spain. These pirate ships probably brought the rats which have wiped out much of the wildlife. Baltra island was occupied by the United States in World War II and the land iguanas were used as pistol targets by bored servicemen. Only a handful of the land iguanas survived the Baltra massacre.
For more than a century whaling ships and merchantmen have stopped at the Galápagos to take on provisions, and too many captains’ logbooks speak of taking huge numbers of land tortoises. Typically, Captain David Porter, who commanded the U.S. Navy frigate Essex, recorded in 1815: “Here to be obtained are land tortoises in great numbers. They are highly esteemed for their excellence and weigh three to four hundredweight each. Vessels…generally take aboard two to three hundred of these animals and stow them in the holds where, strange as it may appear, they have been known to live for a year without food or water.”
One estimate is that 400,000 have been slaughtered or seized in the past century and there are now not 10,000 left. I get angry when I find statistics like these and I just hope that enough of my generation get as stirred up as I do to prevent the world being stripped before it becomes as dead as the moon.
While we Americans self-righteously point our fingers at Japanese whalers scouring the oceans for the last of the whales, we like to forget what we did to the great herds of buffalo! As we explored the Galápagos my anger mounted against all who ravage our planet.
With the islands’ weird currents and with rocks just below the surface, sailing around the Galápagos can be tricky, so we decided to leave Dove for a few days in Academy Bay at Santa Cruz and sail in a local powered boat, the Vagabond, chartered by National Geographic. The advantage of the charter boat was that it allowed me to relax for a bit and not worry about the chores of sailing Dove. I had more time to appreciate this strange and magic world. On the tape recorder I reported our day-by-day adventures:
FEBRUARY 26: Went ashore on little Hood island, the southernmost of the group, and was fascinated by the mockingbirds, which crave fresh water. If you hold a teaspoonful in your hand they fly down and suck up the drops. The booby birds were just as tame.
Climbed lava rocks and came across a colony of marine iguanas, incredibly colored in reds and greens. It’s their mating season and they have put on all their war paint to go courting…. Discovered a blowhole in the cliffs where the surf sweeping in from the Pacific is thrown up thirty feet. A baby fur seal nuzzled up to Patti and nibbled at her fingers.
FEBRUARY 28: Back on Dove. I powered to James Bay on San Salvador island. We were pretty pooped after a tiring trip, but we went ashore to watch the turtles laying eggs. Bob Madden [a National Geographic photographer] tried to get up close but one turtle did not like him and kicked sand into his eyes. Bob had red eyes for quite a while and I’ll bet there’s a moral here somewhere.
MARCH 1: Went ashore looking for pigs. The pirates or early settlers brought in the first pigs and goats, which have gone quite wild and now threaten the indigenous wildlife. I borrowed an antique rifle and managed to shoot two goats. The herds of goats have to be thinned out, and the shooting sure helps to keep down our meat bills.
MARCH 2: A local man has been telling me of a salt mine near here where ten miners live off the land. It seems that they each ate ten doves a day for ten months. Total cost 30,000 birds. Walked for half a mile to a beautiful pool where seals were diving around and playing. Sailed to Buccaneer Cave, named for seventeenth-century pirates who hung out here. It’s weird and you can easily imagine pirates with wooden legs and patches over their eyes walking among the dark lava rocks.
MARCH 3: Ashore and had a terrific dinner (Al Ratterree the cook) of wild goat ribs and then powered back to Baltra island to see Al and Ann off by plane.
MARCH 4: Returned to Academy Bay to haul out Dove. This turned out to be an interesting operation. I tied Dove to a pier, and when the tide went out she was left almost high and dry. I was cleaning off the barnacles and standing in a foot of water when a puffer fish sneaked up and bit my toe. Oh! the hazards of the sea!
MARCH 5: My birthday, so Patti baked a cake. The boat was tilted over so the cake was shaped like a door wedge, but it tasted a lot better than it looked. Painting a boat is an awful way to spend a twenty-first birthday!
MARCH 6: All the populated islands have a seacoast town and an inland town. In the seacoast towns the people live off fishing and tourists and in the inland towns they are farmers. Took a day off from cleaning up Dove and went up to a farming town and then trekked to the rim of a dead volcano. Got pretty thirsty but the island’s water is hard to drink. It’s brackish and awful, but the islanders don’t seem to mind. In fact, when they drink fresh rainwater they put salt in it to make it “nice.”
MARCH 7: Last night Bob Madden tried to take pictures of a yellow warbler nest and climbed a poisonous tree. His neck looks as if it’s been badly burned. Found a doctor, whose injection helped.
Patti and I sailed alone around the tip of Isabela island for Fernandina island. There was no one around so we took our clothes off. It was very funny the way some porpoises swam over and sort of tilted their heads sideways to take a closer look. They’d probably never seen any naked human before. Patti got most of the looks, perhaps because she is five months pregnant. It’s the tameness of the wildlife that’s so fascinating. The animals don’t seem to have any fear of us. They sort of accept us.
MARCH 13: We’re sailing under the volcanic mountain on Isabela’s northern shore. It’s towering 5,600 feet above us—desolate but beautiful. The lava has trickled down in huge trails to the ocean, and at the mountain’s crest there’s a little crown of clouds. If I hadn’t seen this mountain I couldn’t have even dreamed it up…. Around the next cove and the cliffs are rising hundreds of feet and are streaked bright red as if the rocks are bleeding. The view here is really amazing…. Evening now and we’ve just anchored Dove beyond the surf…. It’s dark now and quite hairy listening to the huge waves pounding against the cliff face.
MARCH 14: Arrived Fernandina—a cruel-looking island with lava rocks streaking down to a shore lined with mangrove trees. Small fiords full of fish cut into the land like slices taken from cake. One lagoon is filled with flightless cormorants. Their wings look like tattered laundry. They waddle up the rocks using their wings to keep their balance. I rowed the dinghy through twisted channels to a small lava hill like a little world on its own. Brilliantly red-colored crabs scuttle over the dark lava rocks. They are called Sally Lightfoots. The sun is right over our heads at the equinox, but the water here is still cool and really refreshing. As we lay on the rocks some penguins waddled over to take a look at us. The penguins came in on the cold Peru current.
MARCH 15: Oh, God, is it true that there are cities somewhere and that people live in concrete egg boxes!
Patti and I are alone now in a wonderland which you can’t really describe. This morning I threw fish scraps over the side and some pelicans flew in to clean them up. One bird had a bad tear in its pouch, and we watched it trying to scoop up food. Everything it took into its bill just floated out again. We saw that it would soon die of starvation. I jumped over the side of Dove and grabbed it while Patti took some pictures. We brought the pelican aboard—it was covered with black bugs. Patti broke open the first-aid equipment. The wound needed about twenty nylon stitches. Then I drilled two holes and wired up the broken bill with stainless steel. The operation took me an hour. Then I threw the pelican back overboard.
MARCH 16: The pelican I fixed up yesterday is back again. We’ve been watching him hold all the fish we throw him. In fact he can outdo all the others in picking up the scraps. It’s great! Fernandina island is the most exciting of them all. The underwater life and colors are fantastic. It’s the most marvelous diving I’ve done anywhere. When we’re tired of swimming around we go ashore and lie naked on the hot rocks, along with a bunch of iguanas, who take us for granted. We feel like we’re part of where it all began—I mean, part of creation and life….
I didn’t record it on the tape, but something quite odd happened here. When I’d been in New Guinea I’d bought a Bible. I don’t know what made me do it except I just had a vague idea that I’d like to read the Bible sometime. I bought a Koran too. In case anyone might think me religious or something I had wrapped the Bible in the lurid jacket of a detective story. I never did get around to reading the Bible—at least not until that evening when we were anchored off Fernandina.
I was waiting for dinner—Patti was cooking some lobster and I was wondering how to fill out the time. On sudden impulse I took the Bible from the shelf and went up on deck. Page one seemed to be the best place to start. When you read the first chapter of Genesis in the light of a stained-glass window it may mean one thing. When you read it by the light of a Galápagos sunset, it surely means another. Prehistoric turtles were swimming around the boat and pelicans were flying above as I read:
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind; and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth….
Patti called me for dinner just as I had reached verse 26:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply….
I went down to the cabin. I patted Patti’s swelling stomach and said, “And God saw that it was good.”
Patti gave me a puzzled look. She thought I was talking about the lobsters and said, “What’s got into you?” I produced the Bible from behind my back and told her, “Genesis sounds a lot better than anything old Darwin wrote.”
Now Patti looked really surprised. “Okay, when we get back to California you can start your anti-Darwinian revolution.” She scooped up some lobster flesh from the shell and added seriously, “I didn’t know you read the Bible.”
“There’re a lot of things you don’t know about me,” I grinned.
The coffeepot began to boil over and we didn’t continue the dialogue—not then.
We moved Dove from cove to cove, and there was always something unexpected turning up. For instance, I was diving around in a patch of blue water when a leopard ray glided into range of my spear gun. I don’t know what the fish thought of me, but it was too beautiful to harm as it circled several times.
In the shallow water our movements disturbed the fine gray lava sand, and murky clouds would roll up and engulf me. I had the feeling of being out in space, weightless like an astronaut and sort of aware of infinity. In another place we spent hours swimming among mangrove roots which reached down into the water like an old man’s fingers. Patti said they looked like an Impressionistic painting.
We ate when we were hungry and our meals were from a gourmet’s cookbook—lobster, wild goat’s meat, clams, baby octopus. We would sit cross-legged in the cockpit and eat off a table I’d slung from the boom.
Sometimes we backtracked Dove, but when we paid a return visit to a cove or beach it never looked as lovely the second time around. We’d find a lagoon that was really beautiful and return to it perhaps two days later, but the water was colder, the colors more subdued, the wildlife less interesting. After this had happened several times we learned not to look over our shoulders. It was the next place that mattered, the view around the next headland, the swim in the next lagoon.
Eventually the time arrived when we had to turn about. We sailed directly back to James Bay, where we found the inter-island fifty-passenger boat, called the Lina-A, anchored offshore. Lina-A was full of tourists, who came over to Dove and played twenty questions with us. It was awful. I found it hard to be patient with these people—especially the women with rasping voices and men with stomachs bulging over plaid Jamaica shorts. Some of these tourists think that they’ve explored the Galápagos when they’ve poked a stick at a turtle or chased an iguana up a rock.
Lina-A had an empty cabin and we fixed it up for Patti to sail to Baltra, from where she would fly to Ecuador and then sail back to California. We were so busy provisioning Dove on that last day together that there was hardly time to think about another separation—the last, I hoped.
Lina-A was due to sail at midnight and at eleven o’clock I rowed Patti across in the dinghy with all her gear. We had spent seven weeks in the Galápagos islands, two weeks longer than Darwin had done a century or more earlier. We were unlikely to come up with any new theories on how the world began, but we felt closer to that “mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings upon this earth.”
Patti was looking very pregnant but terrifically healthy, and as we strolled down the deck of Lina-A I mimicked her awkward walk, leaning back on my heels. We roared with laughter.
“You both look fine,” I said, as I put a foot over the rail.
“Sure,” said Patti. “Junior spends his time swimming around like his father. I just hope he’s not born with webbed feet.”
The crew of the Lina-A were preparing to raise the anchor. Patti covered my hands with her own.
“Honey, you’re not afraid any more—I mean of the baby and me?”
“No. that’s all gone,” I said.
Bob Madden, the National Geographic staffman who had been with us in the Galápagos for a while, had told us how he and his wife had just had a baby by the natural method. His story had really excited us. He had told us what an easy time his wife had had and how he had been present at the birth and had actually helped her with breathing techniques and massage—that sort of thing. After we had listened to Bob tell the story of the birth of his child, Patti and I decided that that was the way we wanted our baby to be born. I think it was then that I really lost my fear of what Patti would have to go through.
I still had my leg dangling over the rail of the Lina-A when Patti said, “Now remember, Robin, we’ve made a pact. You’ve promised to be with me. No dilly-dallying on the way.”
“Promise,” I said.
“And our baby will start life as naturally as the baby porpoises,” said Patti.
“And the iguanas.”
“Yes, and the baby iguanas.”
For a while we were silent, then Patti said, “Oh, it’s so exciting, Robin—I mean the thought of you being with me, and I’m not going to have drugs or anything.”
She squeezed my hands on the rail and a crewman passed and said, “Time for you to leave, sir.”
I climbed down into the dinghy and then rowed around the Lina-A. The crazy thing was that I couldn’t remember which side Patti’s cabin was on. I peered up at the portholes but I didn’t see her again—not for another thirty-eight days.