GALAPAGOS: WORLD'S END.
DESERT islands with unexplored volcanoes in the centre, undiscovered bays on their coasts, gold and red and azure fishlets in the pools, thousands of great game fish in the sea itself, birds so tame that they alight in curiosity on, one's head, sea-lions that play amicably with men, giant tortoises, the largest in the world, droves of huge lizards feeding on seaweed in the surf, or basking on the black lava amidst scarlet crabs, stories of buried treasure and of the hardships of shipwrecked men, new species by the dozen, and scientific problems of the first magnitude with which to cope—who does not envy Dr. Beebe and his party their voyage to the Galapagos ?
Perhaps all would envy, but not all would have enjoyed it. The tropical heat, the terrible walking over the lava— a mass of sliding, jagged fragments, among cactus and innumer- able other spiny and barbed growths—the incessant work at high pressure—these and other discomforts would have filled the indolent and the unimaginative with horror and cursings before a week was out.
The Galapagos Islands are a little cluster of volcanic islands, six or seven hundred miles out from South America, right on the line. They were discovered in all probability by King Pupae Yupenqui, one of the rare adventurous spirits among the Incas. Before that they had lain unknown and uninhabited—save by their lizards and birds and other creatures—in the Pacific. Only one island of the Archipelago is inhabited to-day : waterless, jagged lava does not invite colonization. But their greatest claim to fame is and for ever will be that they were visited by Charles Darwin in the 'Beagle,' and that their birds and reptiles formed one of the two main sets of facts which finally forced him to embrace the idea of Evolution. On the east coast of South America he had made acquaintance with a strange and unique faui a —anteaters, armadillos, sloths ; and he had also made acquaintance there with a stratum of rocks yielding abundance of fossil animals, which, though now extinct, clearly belonged to the same type as the living ones on the earth above.
That made him think. And then he came to the Galapagos. In the archipelago there are some fifteen islands, large and small, many of them lying twenty to sixty miles away from their nearest neighbours. On the islands, as every reader of The Voyage of the Beagle or of The Origin of Species will remember, there exists a genus of finches. These finches are clearly related to the finches of the neighbouring mainland ; however, not only are they not identical, but almost every island possesses its own peculiar species. Some-' thing very similar is true of the mocking birds, the iguanas, and the tortoises. There was more food for thought, and for thought which followed the lines along which it had already been started. Gradually the idea of special creation was blown away by the facts. Special creation could only be the work of an irresponsible and capricious power, if such were its results : while if the concept of Evolution were adopted, all fell harmoniously in place. Of course there was the idea, seriously put forward by serious men, that the fossils had been put into the rocks by God to test men's faith. But Charles Darwin had too sane a mind to spin such unwholesome cobwebs.
Thus the Galapagos, historically, were one of the sparks to set off the explosion which blew one world of thought to bits : and to-day exploring parties on them have the opportunity of studying Evolution in comparatively rapid progress.
The tameness of the Galapagos birds and reptiles is remark- able. The photographer often found it difficult to get far enough away from mocking-bird or finch or gull to secure a picture ! The sea-lions, with one solitary exception, regarded human beings as comrades, possibly relatives ; the baby sea-lions all instinctively came to play with men and women. The great lizards basked on the rocks within a few yards, while the smaller ones ran over the explorer's bodies. Dr. Beebe could classify the birds at once into two classes—residents and migrants—according as they were tame or showed the usual distrust of man. Finally, the giant -marine iguana has been so long without enemies that It not only lacks fear but actually is without any instinct of self-defence !
What marvellous creatures, by the way, are these marine lizards. There is a photograph of one of them crouching on a rock in the midst of the Pacific surf—a strange, unreal vision : and another photograph which I have no hesitation In saying is one of the two or three most amazing I have ever seen in the field of Natural History—of acres of lava covered with thousands upon thousands of these great reptiles. In the foreground is a fissure, up which crawls a huge crab : it is a picture of a new circle in hell.
Nor was human interest lacking. After he came back to America, Dr. Beebe was visited by a New York taxi-driver who had been shipwrecked on the Galapagos with a boatful of companions. His story is given in full, and is one of the best stories of real adventure I have read for a long time.
Their exaltation when they saw land ; their growing despair as they failed, again and again, to find traces of water ; their final discovery of turtle's blood as a drink, and their enforced subsistence on this and raw turtle-meat and raw lizard-meat for months ; the rapid ruination of their boots on the jagged lava, and their utilization of sea-lions' hide instead (one sea-lion's hide worn out by the party every day) ; their eager but slow exploration of the coast, followed by encampment in a particularly attractive cove ; the strange apathy and silence which fell on them once they settled into stationary camp—" when we was travelling, we had something to think about and somewhere to try and get to, but when we sat down and just waited, it was hard. . . . We'd already told each other everything about ourselves, and now we just sort of grunted and held out our hands when we wanted something."
Then there was the comic relief. They got to this cove after two months or so. "The cook had had on two flannel ;hirts ever since we left the ship. . . . (Here) he thought he'd take off his top shirt. . . As he leaned over, something fell on the ground.
"The Captain saw it. What's that ? he says. The cook looked and he says, 'I dunno.' The Captain picked it up and it was a match. Where did that come from ? ' he says. The cook looked and he says, I dunno.' Then 'the Captain looked at him and sticking out under the flap of his second shirt pocket was another match.
"Well, sir, that cook had had a box of matches squashed flat in his underneath shirt pocket for two months and a-half, and us living on raw turtle."
Tragedy, as well as comedy, came, and one of the party died on the island. Finally a schooner, sent out to look for the missing men, actually discovered them, and in their emotion and excitement they one and all entirely forgot that they had buried 1600 in English gold in a cove near their first landing place, to save weight in walking : and there the gold is to this day.
But, though the taxi-driver's story and the historical chapter are each admirable in their way, the book's main interest is, of course, biological. Here its success is undoubted. The layman will find it an exciting and interesting piece of natural history, the professional biologist a most stimulating introduction to all kinds of problems. Add that it is well 'written and most beautifully produced and illustrated, and you have the assurance that it is one of the most attractive books on nature and exploration which has been published
Previous page
