The Galapagos Islands
After Tahiti the Galapagos were the most famous of all the tropical islands in the Pacific. They had been discovered in 1535 by Fray Tomas de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, and were now owned by Ecuador, 500 odd miles away. Already in the 1830s some sixty or seventy whalers, mostly American, called there every year for 'refreshments', They replenished their water tanks from the springs, they captured tortoises for meat, (galapagos is the Spanish word for giant tortoises), and they called for mail at Post Office Bay where a box was set up on the beach. Every whaling captain took from it any letters which he thought he might be able to forward. Herman Melville called in at the Galapagos aboard theAcushnet not long after the Beagle's visit, and the 'blighted Encantadas' are a part of the saga of the white whale. 'Little but reptile life is here found', wrote Melville, 'the chief sound of life is a hiss'.
Apart from their practical uses there was nothing much to recommend the Galapagos; they were not lush and beautiful islands like the Tahiti group, they were (and still are) far off the usual maritime routes, circled by capricious currents, and nobody lived in them then except for a handful of political prisoners who had been stranded there by the Ecuador government. The fame of the islands was founded upon one thing; they were infinitely strange, unlike any other islands in the world. No one who went there ever forgot theta. For theBeagle this was just another port of call in a very long voyage, but for Darwin it was much more than that, for it was here, in the most unexpected way-just as a man might have a sudden inspiration while he is travelling in a car or a train-that he began to form a coherent view of the evolution of life on this planet. To put it into his own words: 'Here, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact-that mystery of mysteries-the first appearance of new beings on this earth'.
The Beagle cruised for just over a month in the Galapagos, and whenever they reached an interesting point FitzRoy dropped off a boatload of men to explore. On Narborough Island the turtles were coming in at night to lay their eggs in the sand, thousands of them; they laid six eggs in each hole. On Charles Island there was a penal settlement of two hundred convicts, who cultivated sugar-cane, bananas and corn on the high ground. But the group that concerns us is the one that was put ashore on James Island. Here Darwin, Covington, Bynoe and two sailors were landed with a tent and provisions, and FitzRoy promised to come back and pick them up at the end of a week. Darwin visited other islands as well, but they did not differ very much from James Island, and so we can conveniently group all his experiences into this one extraordinary week. They set up their tent on the beach, laid out their bedding and their stores, and then began to look around them.
The marine lizards, on closer inspection, turned out to be miniature dragons, several feet in length, and they had great gaping mouths with pouches under them and long flat tails; 'imps of darkness', Darwin called them. They swarmed in thousands; everywhere Darwin went they scuttled away before him, and they were even blacker than the forbidding black rocks on which they lived. Everything about these iguanas was odd. They never went more than ten yards inland; either they sunned themselves on the shore or dived into the sea where at once they became expert swimmers, holding their webbed feet close to their sides and propelling themselves along with strong swift strokes of their tails. Through the clear water one could see them cruising close to the bottom, and they could stay submerged for a very long time; a sailor threw one into the sea with a heavy weight attached to it, and when he fished it up an hour later it was still alive and kicking. They fed on seaweed, a fact that Darwin and Bynoe ascertained when with Bynoe's surgical instruments they opened one up and examined the contents of its stomach. And yet, like some sailors, these marine beasts hated the sea. Darwin took one by the tail and hurled it into a big pool that had been left in the rocks by the ebb-tide. At once it swam back to the land. Again Darwin caught it and threw it back, and again it returned. No matter what he did the animal simply would not stay in the sea, and Darwin was forced to conclude that it feared the sharks there and instinctively, when threatened by anything, came ashore where it had no enemies. Their breeding season was November, when they put on their courting colours and surrounded themselves with their harems.
The other creatures on the coast were also strange in different ways; flightless cormorants, penguins and seals, both cold-sea creatures, unpredictably living here in these tropical waters, and a scarlet crab that scuttled over the lizards' backs, hunting for ticks. Walking inland with Covington, Darwin arrived among some scattered cactuses, and here two enormous tortoises were feeding. They were quite deaf and did not notice the two men until they had drawn level with their eyes. Then they hissed loudly and drew in their heads. These animals were so big and heavy that it was impossible to lift them or even turn them over on their sides Darwin and Covington tried-and they could easily bear the weight of a man. Darwin got aboard and found it a very wobbly seat, but he in no way impeded the tortoise's progress; he calculated that it managed 60 yards in ten minutes, or 360 yards an hour, which would be roughly four miles a day - 'allowing a little time for it to eat on the road'.
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