Following are excerpts from the novel Plundering Paradise, by Michael D’Orso.

I first read this book after Bere and I had decided to create Come To Galapagos. I was impressed at how a journalist could arrive here and spend the limited time he did and still come to the depth of understanding of our lives and challenges that he did. His willingness to render our reality within a personal context so paralleled our work that we wanted to include some of his perspectives as a journalist/novelist here on the web site as they shed a unique light on the reality of the Galapagos today. I wrote him a note asking his permission, without ever having met or talked to him. This was his reply,

“Rick,

Great to hear from you. I love your website (the video is wonderful....the vibe is perfect). I love your mission statement, your approach to "tourism," your love and understanding of what makes these islands and the people who live on them tick, and your eagerness to share that love and understanding. By all means, feel free to use as much of my book as you'd like. I'm honored.

Thank you, and the best of luck,
Mike D'Orso"

And so following are the Prolog and the sections of the novel titled: The Village, San Cristobal, The Station, Paradise, Cigars and Wine, Cerado and Grandeur. Please visit Michael’s web site, www.michaeldorso.com for more information about this and other books he has written.

It should be noted that Michael’s primary experience here was in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz which is the tourist capital of the Galapagos (a place we try to steer our hearts away from as much as possible) and that his material is somewhat dated as his book was published in 2002. His insights however are very pertinent to the reality that exists here today. Most of the people with whom he was discovering our world and of whom he writes are still here, moving forward and most are friends or acquaintances of ours. I hope you enjoy his writing as much as I have. Thank you, Michael. Please forgive any typos in the text as it was scanned into digital format.


Prolog

It was five years ago that a friend of mine, David, returned to his home in Brooklyn from a week-long tour of the Galapagos Islands. David could not stop gushing about the primeval purity of the place, the otherworldliness of the creatures that live there. These ungodly animals, he told me, have no fear of people because of their utter isolation, the absence of human predators on this cluster of oceanic volcanoes.

 
I listened politely as David described how he had approached a blue-footed booby on a rocky plateau, reached out to feed the ungainly bird a twig, and the thing responded with no hesitation at all, devouring the snack with the eagerness of a calf in a petting zoo. David’s eyes rolled back in his head as he talked of lying with his wife on a spit of sugar-white sand, gazing into the round, wet eyes of a baby sea lion that had cozied up next to them. It was, he said, “a religious experience.”

I was glad he was so moved. But I had no great urge to visit the Galapagos myself. Sure, I’d heard of them. The iguanas. The tortoises. Darwin. All that. But until David mentioned his brief stay at the Hotel Galapagos—the Hotel Galápagos!—J had no idea anyone actually lived in this place. The only humans I had ever encountered in the magazine spreads and books and video documentaries that I’d seen in my lifetime—-that we’ve all seen—were biologists, a guide or two, and maybe an on-camera narrator, someone like Richard Attenborough or Alan Alda.
There are the tourists, of course, tens of thousands of them each year, but they don’t count. For these outdoor enthusiasts, the Galapagos are and have always been the ultimate theme park, a place where humans can step ashore from their cruise ships and walk the same lava-encrusted ground that the young Charles Darwin did nearly two centuries ago, which is essentially the same ground that thrust itself up from the ocean floor when these rocky islands first burst through the surface of the sea some five to ten million years ago, a blink of an eye in geologic time. For the ecowanderer, the Galapagos are and always have been a Holy Land.

But not for me. I’ve got nothing against nature. I live in an oak- shaded house on a quiet Virginia river not far from the Chesapeake Bay. I sit on my porch in the morning and read the newspaper while watching a crabber empty his pots in the pink light of dawn. I enjoy an occasional drive up to the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially in autumn when the leaves change. I even allowed a friend to convince me one winter to join him for a three-day hike in subfreezing temperatures along a spur of the Appalachian Trail—a mistake I will never make again. The hiking itself was just fine, but the two nights I spent cursing and praying for the sun to rise as I lay trembling in my pathetically outdated sleeping bag were the longest two nights of my life.

The point is, I take my nature as it comes but make no inordinate effort to reach out for it. As a journalist I’ve been lucky enough to see more than my share of the world. Wherever I’ve traveled, from Arctic Alaska to the swamps of South Florida, the one species of animals that truly excites me is the human. That’s why I perked up when David mentioned the odd little hotel at which he had stayed on these islands.

“You mean there are people who actually live there?” I asked. “Even better,” I added, “they’re. . . odd?”

Now this indeed seemed like something to sink my teeth into. So I began some cursory research—a little poking around—and quickly discovered there’s been a lot more going on in the Galapagos lately than simply snorkeling and bird-watching. At the time, I wasn’t even sure where the Galapagos are. I knew they were located in the Pacific somewhere. When I learned that they sit directly on the equator, six hundred miles west of Ecuador—the nation that owns them—I imagined that might put them roughly due south of California, maybe even I-{Hawaii, I pulled out a map and found I was off by roughly half a continent: The Galapagos are perched on precisely the same longitudinal line as . . . New Orleans.

Just as surprising were news briefs I found that told of poachers during the past decade invading the protected waters around these islands in pursuit of shark fins, sea urchins, and—I swear to God— sea lion penises, prized throughout Asia for their aphrodisiac effects. I read of a shoot-out between fishermen and Galapagos Park Service rangers. I read of local protesters seizing the tortoises at a scientific research station on one of the islands and threatening to kill the poor beasts if some demands were not met. Hostage tortoises. Who knew?

Who knew that the indigenous Galápaguenos, the first permanent settlers on these islands, were not Ecuadorian, but Norwegian—a colony of expatriate fishermen and farmers who fled their homeland in the mid-1920s to sail to a new life half a planet away?

Who knew that the ensuing half-century would bring to the Galapagos a swirling array of nomads and grafters, dreamers and hermits, a wild stew of men and women from all over the world who shared one thing in common—a desire, for better or worse, to get as far as they could from the lives they’d been living. What better place for such an escape than to an honest-to-god desert island?

That is essentially what the fifty-some islands and islets that compose the Galapagos are—desert. Rocky and barren. Scorchingly hot. With cacti and lizards and no fresh water to speak of, other than the rain that occasionally sweeps down from the highlands. There are forests and farmland among some of those highlands, but that farmland is hacked out of virtual jungles, ridden with brambles and insects and volcanic stones.

It’s easy to see why, when the Galapagos National Park was created in 1959, only a few hundred people lived there, Those scattered souls were allowed to remain, and the soil on which their homes stood—a few seaside villages and some farms in those highlands—a mere total of three percent of the archipelago’s landmass, was set aside from the Park and from the restrictions created to protect and preserve the other ninety-seven percent of the Galapagos.

That unpeopled ninety-seven percent is what most of the world knows of these islands. It’s what is portrayed in the books and magazines and TV documentaries with which we all are familiar. But it was that other three percent that I became eager to explore. I was hungry to learn how the hand of man has come to shape itself here, in Darwin’s garden. And so, in late 1998, I booked my first flight to the islands for a one-week visit, a scouting trip to give me a taste of this place and these people. If things went as planned, this first trip would be followed by subsequent stays.

It isn’t easy getting to the Galapagos by oneself. Flying from the United States to Ecuador is a snap; several major airlines routinely come and go daily from Miami to the capital city of Quito or to the industrial seaport of Guayaquil. But the only planes that fly on to the islands are Ecuadorian-owned, and those owners are intimately aligned with the nation’s tourist industry, which controls almost all seating on the aircraft. Foreigners booking a trip to the Galapagos through a travel agency in their homeland (say, an American in the United States) can do so only by purchasing a package deal, which includes not just airfare but also the cost of joining a tour group on one of the ninety or so boats currently authorized to circle the islands—vessels ranging from six-passenger sailboats to 100- berth cruise ships. These one- or two-week junkets, which include the price of meals, guides, and shipboard lodging, typically cost from two to six thousand dollars per person.

If you’d rather get to the Galapagos on your own, I found out, you must first buy a ticket to Ecuador, then, through a travel agency in Quito or Guayaquil, reserve an individual seat—if it’s available—on one of the two island-bound flights that leave the continent each day. Most of those individual seats are filled by Ecuadorians themselves, mainlanders traveling to visit kin on the islands, businessmen jetting out to close a deal, or Galápagueflos themselves, returning home from a trip to the continent.

At the time I made my arrangements that winter of 1998, the Ecuadorian economy was manic. The value of the nation’s currency—the sucre—was plunging every day. A year earlier, the sucre had been worth 2,000 per American dollar. By the time I booked my seats that November of ‘98, the figure had ballooned to 5,000. Two months later, as I boarded my flight from Miami to Quito on a bright January afternoon, the value of the sucre had plunged to 7,000 per dollar.

After an overnight stay at a small Quito hotel, where the desk clerk shouldered an automatic rifle and the smell of burning automobile tires hung in the air from an antigovernment demonstration staged downtown earlier that day, I boarded an Ecuadorian TAME Airlines Boeing 727 bound for the islands. TAME is owned by the Ecuadorian military and dominates virtually every route flown within the country. As the sun rose over the Andes behind us, the Pacific coast, glowing apricot in the warm morning light, soon loomed ahead.

We landed briefly at Guayaquil’s grim international airport, where half the passengers deboarded. Those of us heading on to the islands were instructed to stay on the plane because the city was currently under martial law and not even the terminal was considered safe ground.

When we again lifted off forty-five minutes later, we were soon soaring over nothing but azure ocean, the coastline of Ecuador disappearing behind us, and the distant serenity of the Galapagos lying ahead. Even with all I had learned from my months of preparation, it was hard to imagine the turmoil and rot of this decaying nation stretching its tendrils across these hundreds of miles of open sea to invade those ageless islands. From the outside looking in, it seemed impossible. But soon I would be on the inside looking out, through the eyes of the people who live there.
This is their story.

The Village

The midwinter sun has just begun to climb above the fiat, blue Pacific, and already the cobbled payers that form the streets of Puerto Ayora are warm to the touch. Marine iguanas, as common here as house cats, have crawled up from the sea to begin their day- long naps on the black lava crags that rim this island of stone.

They are outside Jack Nelson’s front door as well, dozing on his concrete stoop as Jack steps into the white morning light. He shuts the door softly behind him, careful not to wake his partner Romy and their young daughter, Audrey. The mottled black reptiles lie undisturbed as Jack loosens the bleached red bandanna knotted around his neck, slips a sweat-stained Panama hat on his head, adjusts his knapsack, and checks his watch.

The march is set to begin at nine, but Jack’s in no hurry to get there. Nothing begins on time on these islands. If there’s one thing Jack Nelson has learned in his thirty-odd years in this place, it’s that nothing in the Galapagos happens when it’s supposed to. This was one of the first lessons his father taught him when Jack arrived here in the summer of ‘67. Patience, flexibility, the capacity to adapt—these are the qualities the old man said a human must have to survive on these islands. They are the attributes that allowed Forrest Nelson to settle this point of land nearly forty years ago, carving a couple of cement-block shelters out of magmatic debris and sun-scorched brush and calling them a hotel. The guests back then were mostly field scientists in search of a cot and some shade, or the occasional yachtsman and his crew bound west to Tahiti, or the hustlers and con men who, to this day, arrive on these islands seeking a place where neither the law nor the truth will follow.

Tourists, per se, did not yet exist here in 1961, when the Hotel Galapagos first opened for business. Six years after that, when Jack Nelson showed up, weeks still might pass between one guest and

the next. Jack never dreamed he’d stay in this godforsaken place for more than a year or two. There were fewer than four hundred people on this entire island when he first set foot here. The Norwegians on their small cattle farms up the vine-tangled slopes of that extinct volcano had been around the longest, nearly half a century. Then there were the Germans and Belgians in their little hamlet across the harbor; most of them had come just before and after World War II. And here on this side, in what was no more than a scattered settlement, were the Ecuadorians, their fishing dinghies anchored in the turquoise shallows of Ninfas Lagoon.

Of course there were the scientists, always the scientists, coming and going from their base camp at the southeastern tip of the island, just beyond Jack’s father’s hotel. Forrest Nelson had helped build that camp for the scientists in the summer of 1960, kicking up clouds of dust as he gunned his small three-wheeled tractor up and down the dirt trail to the site. The scientists stayed at his hotel while the gravel road was put in and the first Charles Darwin Research Station dormitories were put up.

There were no paved roads back then. No electricity. The only fresh water to be found was that which fell straight from the sky, collected in downspouts and barrels and stored beneath layers of scum and dead insects. The closest mainland was six hundred miles east, where the beaches of Ecuador baked in the equatorial sun. A shortwave radio might be able to pick up a signal now and then from Guayaquil or maybe Quito, the voices chattering in Spanish over the buzz of the static. To hear an American, Forrest Nelson had to fiddle with the knobs of his shortwave, typically late at night, when the skies were clear and he just might connect with a farmer in Nebraska, or a college kid in New Orleans, or once in a blue moon, with someone closer to home, up in Southern California, the place he had left when he sailed here in the ‘50s. People still talk about the time old man Nelson hooked up with a guy in a garage in Long Beach, where Nelson’s ex-wife and kids had continued to live after he’d left them a decade before. He asked the man for a telephone patch, gave him the number, then told the man who he was calling.

“Jack and Christy Nelson?” repeated the voice in Nelson’s headset.
“That’s right,” said Forrest.
“Just a minute,” said the voice. Next thing Nelson knew, he could hear the guy shouting at the other end of the line. “Jack! Christy!” And in a minute or two, Nelson’s son and daughter were on the wire. Turned out this man lived next door to Christy and Jack and Nelson’s ex-wife Dawn.

Who could believe it? Who could believe any of this life the old man had cobbled together, here in this place where tortoises the size of refrigerators and the age of sequoias roamed through moss festooned mountain forests, where schools of hammerhead sharks darkened the crystalline sea like squadrons of B-52s, where the shadows of Darwin himself lurked among the lava-bouldered beaches and cactus-stabbed seaside slopes.

It was a universe away from Haight-Ashbury, where Jack Nelson had been shacked up with a girlfriend that summer of ‘67, the Summer of Love, dropping acid and working the streets, making ends meet by selling a lid or two of grass when circumstances demanded. This was before the vampires arrived in the Bay Area— the straight press with their hunger to label and devour, and the posers, the losers, the wanna-bes who showed up wherever the next new thing was supposed to be happening. The tour buses had not yet begun crawling through the Haight at that time, with their megaphoned guides pointing out the head shop on the left “where ,Janis Joplin is said to have shopped” and the soup kitchen there on the corner “still run by the Diggers” and the free clinic just down the block “where you might like to stop and make a donation when your tour is completed.”

This was all still beyond the horizon at the start of that summer, and by the time it rolled through, Jack Nelson was long gone. It was a short letter that drove him away, a notice from his draft board telling him he was 1-A for Vietnam, which was not a place Jack intended to visit, not in this lifetime. Canada was out of the question—way too cold for his blood. But the Galapagos Islands, now could there be a better place on this planet for a man on the run?

And so Jack Nelson came here to join his father for a year, maybe two. But two years became three, and the cat-and-mouse game with his draft board grew more tiring until Jack finally said “screw it” and had his friend Fiddi Angermeyer take a snapshot of Jack perched on the summit of the island’s Devil’s Chimney volcano, an impish smile on his full-bearded face and not a stitch of clothing on his darkly tanned skin. 1-Te signed the photo “Best wishes,” and mailed it to his draft board in Long Beach, which brought a return envelope containing a letter of indictment.

All was forgiven when Jack returned to the States in ‘75 to pick up his amnesty from the Ford administration. By then he was entrenched; so much of himself and his sweat was sunk into the hotel that leaving was out of the question. Not that he wanted to leave. The islands had begun to seriously shift, with the seeds of tourism finally starting to sprout. The first cruise ships—fishing boats, really, fixed up with some cots, some hammocks, a cook stove—had begun circling the islands, ferrying passengers ashore for close-ups with the boobies and finches and sea lions. The airstrip up on the island of Baltra, left to the rats and weeds after the U.S. military shipped out at the end of World War II, was now cleaned up and reopened, bringing one flight a week from the Ecuadorian mainland. Most of the people aboard those flights were Americans. Most still are today, and if they run into problems, the person they turn to is the U.S. Consulate warden for the province of the Galapagos, a man once wanted by the FBI for draft evasion, none other than Jack Nelson.

It’s been ten years now since Jack was named warden, and that’s part of the reason he’s risen so early this mid-January morning, to check out this march in case something happens. Given a choice, he’d just as soon skip it. He was up until two last night, working his way through a week’s worth of e-mail—reservations, cancellations, invoices for kitchen supplies and laundry equipment from the mainland. He still wasn’t dune when he finally fell asleep.

He strolls toward the hotel’s main building, a long, low-roofed lodge, its walls made of whitewashed cement blocks, its rear floor- to-ceiling windows looking out onto the ocean. The walkway is lined with artfully arranged shards of driftwood, thickets of red- blossomed bougainvillea, and dense clumps of opuntia cacti. Ahead, through the structure’s open-screened windows, Jack can hear the clatter of pots and the laughter of women, the lilting Spanish voices of his small kitchen staff.

There are only two guests this morning, a young Japanese couple who checked in late last night. They are finishing their fresh mangoes and toast as Jack steps through the dining room door. He nods good morning, moves past the bar and the pegged-wood-and-leather furniture, the reed matting on the cement floor and the broad wall of glass that looks out onto the glistening water of Academy Bay, then ducks into his office to check the reservation book.

Good. The tour group scheduled to arrive this afternoon have confirmed. Their cruise ship, the Lobo de Mar, should reach its anchorage sometime around three, in the harbor outside the room where Jack now sits. Sixteen passengers. That means just about all fourteen of the Hotel Galapagos’ cottages will be filled come this evening.
Maybe, Jack muses as he grabs some keys from a hook on the wall, he’ll untie his skiff later on—the fourteen-footer—and take it out past Punta Estrada for some fishing. Perhaps he’ll ask Fabio to join him. The guiding has been slow this week, so Fabio should be free.

Yes, Jack decides, that’s what he’ll do. He sticks his head in the kitchen and, in a fluent burst of Spanish, tells Betty, the cook, to plan on preparing fish for the guests’ dinner tonight. Probably tuna; word is the bigeyes have been running out near Estrada.

Then he heads in toward town. It’s a short stroll down the worn, brown payers of Darwin Avenue, past the cemetery, the El Bambu boutique, and the Media Luna café, where Jack sends guests who ask where they might find a decent pizza. It’s not like the pizza they may be used to back home, he warns, but for the Galapagos, he tells them, it isn’t half bad.

He passes the ramshackle docks of Pelican Bay, where the slim, sleek pan gas, painted the colors of fruit, their outboard engines droning like hornets, slice in and out of the channel, some pointed toward a day of fishing, others already returning, their holds heavy with slick, silvery bonito and bacalao.

“Buenas,” a small dark-haired boy says with a grin as he clambers barefoot over the black shoreline rocks to help his mother empty a basket of mullet.

“Hola,” answers Jack. He has seen the boy before, though he does not know his name. There was a time, not long ago, when Jack knew nearly everyone’s name in this village. But no longer. There are far too many names to know.
As he approaches the hub of the waterfront, the buildings grow larger, more numerous, squeezed more tightly together. Some are two, even three stories high. There is the Banco del PacIfico, a satellite dish planted on its roof and a line of men and women— local Galäpaguenos queued up on the sidewalk out front, waiting for the windows to open. Some are here to cash paychecks, but most carry sacks stuffed with sucres and U.S. dollars, the weekend’s take from the tourist trade at the restaurants and shops that rim the harbor. This day the exchange rate is 7,000 sucres to a dollar. Two months ago it was 5,000. Two years ago it was 2,000. Next year, next month, say the locals, cursing the thieving politicians back on the mainland, who knows what the sucre will be worth? Better, they say, to take the dollars straight from the foreigners’ pockets whenever you can.

It’s not quite nine, and already the taxis are trolling for business, the rusted Toyotas and pale yellow pickups tapping their horns each time they pass a pedestrian. The Rincon del Alma has thrown open its shaky screen doors, and a couple of old men sit at one of its terrace tables, each nursing a cold, brown bottle of beer. Tonight, after the tour boats pull in, this café will be pulsing with customers-__Swedes Germans, and Italians, in their silk shirts and fine linen skirts. But right now the old men have it to themselves.

And here the avenue ends, at a row of souvenir shops, their makeshift shelves heavy with key chains and paperweights, their windows adorned with hand-painted T-shirts. The tourists, who step from their water taxis to the wharf here at the waterfront, are confronted with a vista that is much more a city than the village they had imagined. Houses by the hundreds slope down toward the sea like waves of tossed boxes. Freshly washed laundry pinned to rooftop-rigged clotheslines flaps dreamily in the mild ocean breeze. Bursts of bright yellow muyuyo blossoms and ruby hibiscus hang over dry, dusty alleys and cobblestoned streets. Powerlines dangle like webbing, looped between high, cement stanchions.

Jack hears it all the time from his guests when they first come ashore from their ships. It’s all so much huger, they say, much more sprawling than the place they’d envisioned. In the brochures and ads pitched by the tourism industry to tout the Galapagos, this town doesn’t exist. Nor is it seen more than in passing in the documentaries and books and magazine spreads done on these islands— such as Sports Illustrated’s 1998 swimsuit issue, which was shot in the Galapagos and featured supermodel Heidi Klum on its cover, posed on a remote sandy beach, her cleavage, as the headline declared, “straddling the equator.”

This is the Galapagos shown to the rest of the world: a place far out there, beyond this town and this harbor, among the unpeopled coves and volcanic uplands where the tortoises creep and the scientists camp and the echoes of Darwin abound. Puerto Ayora does not fit into that picture, and so it is largely ignored.

But it’s here, and anyone with eyes can see that it’s growing. The main road that rises toward the north end of town, up toward those cloud-shrouded peaks, is lined by scaffolded buildings of cinderblock and stone, bleached by the sun to the mildew-gray shade of old bones. The buildings house shops and kioscos, dark inside but for the daylight that slants through their windows. Thrown- open doorways display hardware and clothing, groceries and toys, shelves stocked with dated goods dusted by age. On the sidewalks outside, men sip cervezas, women nurse babies, and children on bicycles dash madly around corners. The faces are Latin, almost all of them locals.

Jack has heard it a thousand times, and he does not disagree:
The Galapagos is no longer here, say the true natives, those who have been in this village longer than the shops and the bars and the discotheques. It is still out there, they say, among the inlets and coves where the cruise ships circle, where the tourists are put ashore to hike and to swim and to sun in a place like no other on Earth, a place alive with creatures that know no fear, birds and animals that do not flee at the approach of a human. To reach out for a finch that hops into your hand, to swim among sharks gentle as dolphins, these are transcendent experiences, say those who have had them. It is still a virtual Eden out there, they say, a timeless place of balance and harmony.

But that place is no longer here, not in Puerto Ayora. And not in the other three villages on the other three islands where the people of the Galapagos dwell. There was a time, say the old-timers, and it has not been that long, when these streets were serene, when there were no sidewalks, no traffic, when a single supply ship came through perhaps four, maybe five times a year. Jack remembers those days, when months would go by between the arrival of one hotel guest and the next. He and his dad would stay busy, building or repairing, or simply launching a party that would drift on for days, friends coming together from the town and the hills, drinking and dancing and howling at the moon, diving for lobster at sunrise, sharing stories and music and rum through the course of the day, some sharing each other at night, then doing it all over again the next morning, and the next. They had beaches, playas, back then, but not anymore. The sand is all gone now, used for cement. The nearest playa, out at Tortuga, is an hour’s hike west from the west end of town.

Only twenty years ago, the old-timers recall, no more than three thousand souls lived in this village. You were born here and you married here, had children and died here. Now that number is close to ten thousand in this village alone, and nearly that many again in the rest of the islands. Now more than ninety tour boats ply these waters, not the mere two dozen or so that existed only two decades ago. The crews on those boats, as well as many of the owners, are largely strangers to one another, men and women who have recently fled with their families from Quito and Guayaquil, where the streets are awash with poverty and crime and the air stinks of corruption and despair. The mainlanders have heard how these islands are booming, how the tourists flock here by the tens of thousands—sixty thousand last year alone, And so these families with so little to lose have come here as well, bringing all they own, which, the old-timers are quick to point out, is often nothing at all.

With this influx of newcomers has come an influx of crime, though not of the sort that infects the mainland. The muggings and murders and rapes routinely described on the news broadcasts beamed from the continent out to these islands through Puerto Ayora’s newly installed cable television system have not yet reached the Galapagos. But there has been a sharp rise in break-ins and vandalism, mostly by teenagers who, Jack understands, know and care nothing about the ocean, who have never been in a boat other than the one that carried them here, who have never journeyed beyond this island or even outside of this town. They have never beheld the albatrosses nesting down on Española or the frigate birds mating among the rocky cliffs of Genovesa. They have never hiked through a foggy caldera in the highlands of Isabela or climbed to the lip of Fernandina’s still-steaming volcanic crater. They don’t know what it’s like to swim with the bottle-nosed dolphins in the clear cobalt waters off Santa Fe. And if they have seen a six-hundred-pound tortoise, it would be on the road just above town, where the large lumbering beasts sometimes cross the asphalt to get to their feeding grounds on the forested slopes.

Up that very road, away from the waterfront, toward the section of the village that few tourists visit, Jack now hears chanting. Clapping and whistling. Hooting and shouts. He cannot believe it. The march has begun, on time, and without him.

He hurries to catch up. He can see them now, a throng of perhaps sixty men, women, and children, crowding the boulevard from curb to curb, walking shoulder to shoulder. They wave homemade placards and hand-scrawled signs, laughing, joking, urging the onlookers they pass—their friends and neighbors—to leave the storefronts and stoops and small dusty yards and to join them in the march.

A small girl, too young to wear the uniform of the town’s main Catholic school, leaps on her bicycle and pedals into the procession. A shopkeeper locks the front door of his farmacia and falls into step with some friends. Block by block, by twos and threes, the crowd swells, and their rhythmic chanting grows louder.

“Out! Out! Out!
The judge is corrupt!
Our town is united!
Together we struggle!
Avellan! Avellan!
Take him away!”

They move north, toward the top of the town, where the homes and bodegas dwindle and Puerto Ayora ends but the road keeps rising, a lone ribbon of asphalt disappearing into the mist-draped peaks of the highlands. They call the mist the garüa, and it is almost constant up there, in the hills that form the northern horizon. Even on a morning like this, with the cloudless sky a brilliant blue and the sun beating fiercely on the shoreline below, the garua hovers over the highlands like a gray shroud of cotton.

By the time the marchers reach the top of the town, their number has doubled. Jack is with them now, staying to the rear. Ahead, to his left, strides a group of biologists from the Research Station. Among them, naturally, is Godfrey Merlen. Jack had no doubt Merlen would be here. Chanting in Spanish along with the crowd, thrusting a tanned, weathered fist into the air, shocks of wild, wiry hair bursting from his head and his chin and a fiery rage filling his eyes, Merlen could seem like a madman to someone who knew no better.

But the townspeople know him, at least those who are marching this morning. They know him, although they have not read the guidebooks Merlen has written, if they have heard of his guidebooks at all—biologic rosters of the fish and animals that inhabit these waters. They have seen Merlen board the boats of the poachers, leaping like an ecologic Captain Blood onto the wet wooden decks of those dinghies to hurl their illegal catches—strangled hammerheads and mangled sea turtles—back into the ocean, slice the green mesh of the lawbreakers’ nets, and curse the bandits in their native tongue.

They have all heard how this British scientist, who looks like no scientist they have ever seen, led a raid not long ago on an illicit camp on a beach out at Fernandina, where a gang of the poachers were chopping down mangroves to build the fires to cook their pepinos.

Pepinos. Sea cucumbers. The wormlike creatures that cover the ocean floor around these islands by the millions. Headless, tubular grubs no larger than good-sized dog turds.

A decade ago the pepinos meant nothing to the locals who fished the Galapagos. But then the trawlers appeared on the western horizon, massive vessels from Taiwan and Korea, hungry to fill their holds with these creatures, which are prized as a delicacy on dining tables in Hong Kong and Singapore, and as an aphrodisiac in bedrooms from Bangkok to Tokyo. The money those boats were prepared to pay—75 cents per pepino—put to shame the ten or so cents a pound the local fishermen earned for their traditional catches of mullet and grouper.

And so began the gold rush, as some islanders call it. Every boat that could float was put in the water to harvest the bounty. Skin divers, pepiñeros, took to the sea bottom in droves, breathing through crude rubber tubing as they crawled along the ocean floor, picking pepinos as if they were mushrooms. At first there were perhaps a hundred Galapaguenos who became pepiñeros. But as the price of pepinos climbed toward $2 apiece by the end of the decade, and as the islanders saw that a three-man crew could make as much as several hundred dollars each in a single day—this in a nation where the average per capita annual income was less than $1,600—the business exploded. Soon there were four hundred pepiñeros in Puerto Ayora alone. Then more than a thousand. Most of the newer pepiñeros came from the mainland, but it was hard to say how many, because most worked the waters without a license.

But who needed a license? Everyone knew that the laws were a joke. Eliecer Cruz certainly knew it. When he was named the province’s Park Service director three years ago, he understood all too well how the law works on these islands, which is the same way it works throughout Ecuador. The local judge, whomever he might be, sits in his office, where he receives a steady stream of visitors who pay cash for his verdicts. Here, in Puerto Ayora, the pepineros, or the mainland fisheries for whom many of them work, pay often and pay well.

And so, although laws had been reluctantly written in recent years by the Ecuadorian Congress to protect the fragile marine food chain of the Encantadas—the “enchanted islands”—everyone knew that the laws had no teeth. The politicians on the mainland had more pressing matters to worry about: students and Indians rioting in the streets of Quito, martial law declared in Guayaquil, an economy gone to hell with no hope in sight, an exiled madman ex-president lying poolside at a hotel in Panama City, plotting with his stooges to return to the nation he so recently pillaged.

The Ecuadorian government would have passed no laws at all were it not for the pressure that mounted from the international community of scientists and naturalists who reminded them that if they did not give a damn about the food chain in these delicate island waters, perhaps they might consider the chain of tourist dollars that would be broken if the ecotourism industry were to be alerted to the slaughter taking place. If the sea cucumbers weren’t enough, warned the caretakers from afar, maybe the world would like to hear about the Galapagos sharks being butchered for their fins or the growing black- market demand for yet another Asian aphrodisiac—the penises of sea lions. The very idea of boatloads of camera-wielding tourists rounding the bend of a sun-speckled cove only to be confronted by a heap of wet carcasses with their balls hacked away—this was not good for business, not good at all.

 
So the Congress passed laws. But the Park Service wound up with just one boat to enforce them, a boat that came not from the government but one that was donated by an Asian billionaire with Yakuza— Japanese organized crime—connections. One boat to patrol a watery region the size of Pennsylvania (the Galapagos Marine Reserve is the second-largest area of protected ocean on Earth, next to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef). And that boat rarely had enough fuel to fill its tanks. The Park Service’s joke of a budget left no room for fuel, and so most days the Guadalupe River, an aluminum-hulled 100-footer built for sheer speed, could be seen bobbing harmlessly in the gentle harbor swells just beyond the lobby window of Jack Nelson’s hotel.

It was so easy to see why, despite the laws, the pepino industry in these waters grew like the drug trade on the mainland. Almost overnight, sea cucumbers became the cocaine of the Galapagos, and the number of fishermen on these islands multiplied like crack dealers in the Bronx, with the same attendant violence. Locals still talk about an encounter in the spring of 1997 between a crew of pepiñeros and a team of park wardens who stumbled upon the poachers’ clandestine camp on an Isabela beach. Guns were pulled, and one of the wardens took a bullet through the liver. He survived only because a military helicopter happened to be visiting a nearby islet, answered a radio alert, flew the fifty miles to where the man’s wounded body lay, lashed the victim—Julio Lopez was his name— to the aircraft’s struts (there was no room for the hemorrhaging body inside) and medevaced him back up and over the volcanic craters of Isabela and across ninety miles of open sea to a clinic on the southeastern island of San Cristobal, where he was then stabilized and rushed by plane to the mainland.

Not quite two years before that, a mob of fifty machete-wielding local fishermen invaded the Research Station itself. They were enraged by the government’s latest pepino fishing restrictions. Which do you value more, the fishermen asked, us or these animals? For three days and nights, encouraged by a town politician urging them to break windows and sack buildings, the masked protesters brandished Molotov cocktails, threw the scientists out, then drank and played poker and waved machetes at the station’s resident animals, including Lonesome George, a penned-in poster-child of sorts for the Galapagos’ famed giant tortoises, the only survivor from the thousands of saddlebacks that once roamed the far northern island of Pinta. Just a year earlier, in the spring of 1994, some of these same pepiñeros had slaughtered seventy-two tortoises on Isabela in response to an earlier tightening of the laws—slit the poor creatures’ throats and left them hanging from trees. So this threat to the station was taken seriously. Government negotiators flew out from the mainland to talk to the fishermen.

 
Jack remembers that scene, how surreal it all was. The masked fishermen barking in Spanish, waving tourists and scientists off the property. The roadblock erected at the entrance to the Park. The campfires that burned through the night. After three days of discussion, the officials decided to sit tight, to refuse the pepineros’ demands. And with that the siege ended, on the bright early morning of its fourth day, with the protesters departing as they had arrived, swiftly, silently, via the ocean, in their flbras—their fiberglass dinghies.

Jack was not happy with what happened that week. It didn’t help business, the dispatches going out on the news wires about guns and terrorists here in the Galapagos. But he understood the fishermen’s feelings, the frustration and anger they felt watching so much money washing around them, those gleaming cruise ships berthed in the harbor, their colored deck lights twinkling each night as if it were Christmas, the hotels and restaurants sprouting like seedlings along the waterfront, their tables filled with big-spending foreigners, the bank changing hundred-dollar bills for the never-ending lines of tourists cradling sacks of souvenirs in their arms.

And what did the fishermen come home to? The more recent arrivals lived in hovels no better than what they’d left behind in the ghettos of Guayaquil. As for those who had lived here for years, many of them still slept in lean-tos and shacks made of hardwood hauled down from the highlands, rough-hewn homes built by their fathers when only their fathers were here. Those homes had seemed fine when there was nothing beside them but more of the same. Now, though, the village had become a town, and the town was becoming a city. And those homes? They now felt like slums.

Was it a crime to want more? Who could blame a man who hungered to give his wife and children and himself some of the things they saw others enjoying? To see the Europeans and Norte Americanos, so well dressed and wealthy as they stepped ashore from those ships, and to turn on the television—television!---and witness a world so much richer and more radiant than the one that existed on the backstreets of this village—who could blame a man for wanting some of that? So what if some sea slugs had to die to provide it?

Jack understood such emotions. He was torn by his central role in the chain of tourism that was now choking these islands and by the reverence he felt for the sanctity of this place, the closest he had come in his life to a sense of the holy. That feeling, beyond anything else, was why he had stayed here in the first place. The wonder of this untouched paradise had gripped him, crept into his soul. It wasn’t just the purity that appealed to him, the ancient innocence, although that beauty was certainly something to be adored, something he expressed in his paintings and sculptures, in the odd pieces of art that adorned the walls and rafters of his hotel’s lobby. That beauty was mighty, but it was these islands’ harsh brutality that entranced Jack even more, the tests that a creature— every creature—had to pass to survive here.

Life had to be earned in this place. It was that simple. It had to be fought for, especially if you were human. These islands were simply not made for people. Those who came and survived understood this. They arrived armed with the strength, the resourcefulness, and most of all with the humility it took to carve out a life here. Among those who stayed and persevered, there was an unspoken respect for one another simply because they had endured, unlike the fools whose bones were scattered among those mountains and beaches, the dreamers and wanderers who had perished here over the centuries. Entranced by the primitive allure of this place, they did not comprehend its fierce lack of mercy, and so, through the unyielding calculus of indifferent nature, became casualties.

This was what separated those who belonged in the Galapagos from those who did not. Jack liked that, He had always been a man who could take care of himself. He had built this hotel, he and his father alone, cobbling it together piece by piece. There were no plumbers to call. No welders. No carpenters, except for the odd neighbor who knew how to handle a hammer and saw and might help you out. For the most part, if you needed something done, you did it yourself with whatever you had or could find on your own.

Now, though, there were plumbers in this town. And electricians—electricity! Now there were people who lived here who did not know how to do for themselves, who did not need to know. That bothered Jack. He knew that in his own way, with his hotel and its role in the growth of this town, he was part of the problem as well as of the solution.
Yes, Jack understood the townspeople’s frustrations, those of the deep-rooted fishermen and those of the freshly transplanted marginados, the waves of newcomers to the Galapagos who have no niche at all in the islands’ economy.

Eliecer Cruz understood them as well. Cruz was born and raised Galapagueno, on the island of Floreana, at the southern edge of the archipelago. Life there—only seventy or so people live on the entire island—is rustic even by Galapagan standards. Other natives refer to the residents of Floreana as Robinson Crusoes and shake their heads at the isolation of life in that insular place.

When Cruz was given the job of Park Service director in the spring of 1996 and announced, in his soft, unassuming voice, that he was honored to accept the responsibility of preserving the integrity of this province, no one took him seriously. This is the same speech every official gives, everywhere in Ecuador. Judges, police chiefs, bureaucrats, and, yes, Park Service directors, make speech after speech in such lofty language, then simply sell their services to the highest bidder.

But Cruz was different. No sooner did he put on the government- issue white cotton shirt and green khaki shorts of the Park Service than he overhauled his staff, sending away the mainlanders who had worked for his predecessor and hiring native Galápagans like himself as his lieutenants. Then he took that single patrol boat, the Guadalupe River, tuned it up, topped off its fuel tank, and actually began roaming the islands looking for lawbreakers. When his men made their first arrest, hauling in a small panga filled with illegally harvested black coral, eyebrows were raised. But when the town’s judge immediately handed the boat back to its owners1 with not even a fine imposed, the villagers shrugged. Business as usual. They watched with mild curiosity as a handful of Cruz’s staff, along with a few scientists from the Station, responded to that release with a small protest, gathering in the street outside the judge’s office and chanting for justice. But when the judge, a man named Avellan, came out, chiding them like children and sending them home, they went. And the townspeople just smiled. Nothing was different.

Still, Cruz kept pushing. He gathered support, went to the mainland, met with politicians and urged them to create laws that would protect these waters while also allowing the people who lived here to make a decent living. Keep the outsiders away, he told the congressmen, but take care of our own.

Then he and his staff went back to the people and talked to them about vision, about realizing that any future they might have depends upon preserving what is around them, not destroying it. The staff from the Station spread the same message, at meetings, in the schools, even in the churches, where anti-Park feelings were often the strongest. The choice, they said, does not have to be between these animals and yourselves. The fact, they said, is that one cannot survive without the other.

Some of the people listened. Not all, but some. Cruz and his wardens continued to make seizures, small arrests here and there. And the judge continued to turn around and release both the boats and their owners.

Then came the Magdalena. A big boat—a barge, really. A pirate vessel roaming the seas of South America and filling its hold with whatever contraband was available. No one was certain what nation it belonged to; it flew the flag of whichever country’s coast it approached: Peru, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela—it didn’t matter.

The Magdalena was flying an Ecuadorian flag on the March afternoon that it was surprised and seized in a channel between Fernandina and Isabela by the Guadalupe River, with the help of an Ecuadorian Air Force spotter plane. In the ship’s hold were forty black plastic sacks of cooked sea cucumbers, a thousand cucumbers per sack.

That seizure made national news. Television crews from the mainland arrived in Puerto Ayora to tape the arrival of the barge and its illegal cargo. Cruz and his men made a show of unloading the huge bags of black crusty pepinos. The Magdalena’s crew was handed over to the Puerto Ayora police, and the barge was hauled into the harbor’s inner lagoon, where it was anchored a stone’s toss away from the souvenir shops.

Two years went past and still the barge sat there, its dark blue paint peeling from its brown rusting hull, its waterline crusted with barnacles, the chain of its anchor slick with algae, creaking as the Pacific tide rose and fell. The Magdalena’s crew was long gone, released almost instantly by the police upon orders from Avellan, just as everyone had expected. The barge, too, was ordered to be returned to its owners. But Cruz, not the police, was in charge of the boat, and he refused to give it up.

Now this was something new. No one had directly defied a judge in this way before. Avellan himself could not believe it. He issued another order. Again, Cruz refused. And so the judge then issued a warrant—this one for the arrest of the Park Service director himself.

With that, Cruz disappeared. Rumors flew. Some said he had fled the country. Others said he was down on Floreana, hiding at his family’s highland farm. Some believed he had flown to the mainland to gather support.
Wherever Cruz had gone, he eventually returned. And when he did, he was embraced by a coalition of his staff, of scientists from the Station, and of local businessmen, including Jack Nelson. They met and talked late into the evenings, in one home or another. They finally framed a list of demands and decided that a demonstration, a march—this march—would be the best way to deliver them.

“Avellan! Avellan!
Take him away!”

The chant rings like an anthem as the crowd continues to swell. This is the demand the march planners agreed upon—that the judge be ordered to leave the island. Nothing less will do, they decided. Jack shares their emotions, their sense of drama. There is no way, of course, that it will actually happen. Even now, as the marchers turn back toward the center of town, with Cruz himself leading the way, flanked by members of his staff, Jack knows there is no way the judge will actually go. But that isn’t the point. It’s the sheer drama of simply making the demand. Jack has seen this sort of thing many times before. Here. On the mainland. Even back in Long Beach in the ‘60s.

He knows what these marches are really about. They’re part politics, part catharsis, part street theater. A carnival of emotion. No matter how somber the subject, there is always a sense of giddiness that takes root in a crowd of this size, an infectious air of elation. You could sell refreshments if you wanted.

In fact, as the throng, now numbering close to three hundred, arrives at its destination, fanning out in front of the whitewashed two-story building that houses the office of the judge, a street vendor rolls up with his umbrella-shaded cart, breaks out his colored bottles of syrup, and begins crushing the ice for the sf0-cones that will sell as fast as he can make them.

Jack finds a spot beneath the feathery limbs of a flamboyant tree, pulls a bottle of water from his knapsack, and takes a long swallow. He looks at the crowd. They are laughing, singing, jeering. He looks at the police arrayed on the building’s front steps. There are seven of. them, a fourth of the town’s entire force. They are young, each dressed in gray-and-black camo fatigues and caps, combat boots on their feet, loaded pistols in their holsters. They face the crowd, expressionless. Behind them are two heavy, steel-barred doors.

Jack knows what will come next, speeches. One after another, men—all men—step forward to orate, until, finally, Cruz takes his turn. He is lighter-skinned than the park wardens who stand beside him. Where their hair is jet-black and straight, his is brown and soft. His voice is gentle, and the crowd hushes to hear him. There is no emotion in his tone, no anger. But his words are angry, and by the time he is finished, the crowd is whipped into a fury.

The mob pushes forward. The police push back. There is jostling, but it is restrained, all in slow-motion, as if it were staged. One officer loses his cap, but no one comes close to touching the doors. Then they recede. There is no sign of life within those windows and doors, no sign that anyone is actually inside that building. The moment, whatever its purpose, seems lost. The crowd begins to break apart. Small knots form in the narrow street and in the shade. A group of young men find a spot by a wall, not far from where Jack stands. They light their Larks and their Belmonts and wait for something to happen. A group by the steps shake their fists toward the second-floor windows. They are certain the judge is up there. They shout for him to show his face. “Where is the little turd?” hollers a stout, white woman with a British lilt to her voice. She wears a ball cap and a worn, cotton smock. Sandals are strapped to her sunburned feet. Jack knows her well—Georgina Cruz, who lives with her husband, Augusto, and teenaged son, Sebastian, across the harbor, in the place the townspeople call El Otro Lado—”the Other Side.”

“Romeo, Romeo!” the woman shouts toward the barred windows above. “Wherefore art thou?” Jack smiles. Through the building’s ground-floor windows he can see two American movie posters tacked to a wall. The posters are old, their colors bleached by the sun to a lifeless blend of purples and white. Billy Crystal. Leonardo DiCaprio. The room is a video rental shop, leased from the building’s owner, just as the judge leases his office above.

The crowd mills, watches, waits. A small girl on her bicycle leans against a wall, slurping the red juice from her cup of flavored ice. Above her, in the distance, dark clouds gather beyond the highland garüa, billowing skyward like plumes of volcanic ash. It’s raining up there in the mountains, but down here it’s clear, and the midmorning heat is blistering.

Nothing is happening. The protest is all but over. Jack can feel it. But the crowd is in no hurry to leave. Most have nowhere else to be. For a few minutes more, they will joke and laugh and gossip, and then, in the same way they came together, by twos and threes, they will disperse, drifting back into the rhythm of another day. Then there is a sudden burst of shouts, a clamor of movement up by the steps. The police look startled, alarmed. One steps back, waving his arms. Another stumbles, reaching for his holster as he falls to his knees. They are shouting in Spanish for the people to stop, to get back. But no one listens. And then there are screams, cries of pain.

“Jesus!” exclaims a young man near Jack, a thin, suntanned blond wearing a torn dive shop T-shirt and a shoulder tattoo. “They’re using pepper gas!”

It’s true. The protesters in front are now reeling back. One, a small, wiry, brown-skinned young man, stumbles from the throng, clutching his face, gasping for air as he gropes his way out into the street. My God, realizes Jack, it’s Fabio.

In an instant Jack is beside his young friend, grabbing his forearm and guiding him into the shade of a small grocery’s front door. From his knapsack, Jack pulls out his bottle of mineral water, turns Fabio’s welt-mottled face toward the sky, and carefully, clinically, dribbles the cool liquid over his friend’s clenched, seared eyes.

Someone yells out to build a fire. Smoke, they shout, is good for eyes burned by gas. Within seconds, a small pile of protest signs has been set afire, the yellow flames licking and crackling as the cardboard blackens and curls.
“Wow,” says a small woman gazing through wire-rimmed glasses at the flames and the smoke and the crowd. Her accent is American. “It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen something like this.” Then she pauses. “At Berkeley,” she says.

As Fabio’s eyes, red and swollen, begin to open, yet another clamor arises from a nearby side street. A massive wooden pole appears, a log really, cut from giant tropical bamboo. It’s more than twenty feet long, nearly a foot in diameter. It seems to levitate, rising above the crowd, then slides along a sea of upraised hands toward the barricaded doors.

The police hold their ground but do not resist as the pole is passed over their heads. They apparently have had enough. This fight is now the judge’s, if indeed the judge is around.

A second pole appears, and the mob surges forward, its momentum bringing the full weight of their battering rams smashing into the doors’ iron bars with a shattering clang. They pull back and charge again. And again. The bars begin to bend. The aged hinges loosen. And then, with one last blow, the doors fall open.

The people roar. The leaders, those in front, pour into the building’s darkened front hall. Cruz is among them. Several of his staff stay behind, stationing themselves at the entrance, ordering the crowd to move back and wait while the judge is being located. Word soon emerges that Cruz and the judge and both of their staffs are upstairs, negotiating. For ten minutes, then twenty, the people wait. No one is about to leave.

Then, stepping from the blackness of the unlit front hall out into the bright morning sunlight, Cruz appears. He stops at the top of the steps, waving the cheering crowd silent as three of his colleagues, wearing the same Park Service uniform as he, fan out behind him like sentinels.

The judge, Cruz announces, has agreed to leave the island. The audience explodes with applause. He will be gone, says Cruz, by sunset. Another burst of cheers.

The judge, cautions Cruz, has asked only that he not be touched. And with that, Avellan appears, flanked by four of the same policemen who had earlier confronted the mob. He is a small, portly, elderly man, his snow-white hair slicked straight back on his small, globe- like head. He wears a casual tropical shirt—a guayabera—white, silk, expensive, untucked. In one hand he clutches a black briefcase; in the other he holds an umbrella. His shoulders are hunched. His eyes show terror.

The crowd pushes in. The police push back. An egg cuts a long, lazy arc through the air. It sails past the judge’s head and breaks against the building.

Then comes another. A policeman swats it aside. A flurry of eggs and tomatoes fills the sky as the judge is rushed into a waiting pickup truck. Two policemen with shotguns in their hands leap onto the vehicle’s rear bed, raising their weapons as the truck lurches away.

Now it really is over. By sunset the judge will indeed be gone, on an airplane bound for the mainland.
The street empties. A mound of black ash smolders near the curb. Yellow egg yolk oozes down the building’s front wall. The iron doors dangle on broken hinges.

It’s almost noon now, time to find shelter from the sun. Jack Nelson heads back to his hotel, his friend Fabio by his side. Jack has his e-mails to answer, and later he’s got fish to catch for the evening meal. Then, after that, sometime this evening, he’ll make a couple of phone calls. If the judge is truly gone, it would be nice to know who’s going to take his place.


San Cristobal

It’s an hour before dawn and the cove lies in blackness, shielded from the moon by a bank of low-lying clouds. The two tour boats are silent—still and dark. But on the Symbol there is movement, a single figure, Bico, choking the throttle to start the engine. Robert and Sebas stir in their sleeping bags out on the deck alongside the surfboards, regretting now that they chose to sleep under the stars rather than squeezed down below with the others. The night air is so cold they can see their own breaths.

As the inboard coughs to life, the boys do their duty, lifting the anchor while Petra brews coffee on the small galley stove. By the time streaks of pink pierce the sky to the east, the Symbol has left Santa Fe, slicing full sail through a gray, choppy sea, bearing southeast toward San Cristobal. The island is hardly in sight, a smudge on the horizon, but Jason is already worried that they may find no waves. The clouds, the breeze, the feel of the ocean-—it just doesn’t look good, not to a surfer.

He peers off toward the sunrise, where the sky now glows tangerine. A flock of storm petrels sweeps past like a cloud of mosquitoes. But Jason hardly notices. He’s thinking about waves, and their fecklessness. With all the technology wrapping the planet today, with satellites downbeaming data on wind speeds and directions all over the world, with ocean buoys hundreds of miles at sea rigged to record passing swells, with surf-forecasting Web sites like “Bluetorch” and “Swell.com” broadcasting on-line reports from all over the globe, it would seem that wave hunting is no longer an art but a science.

But Jason knows better. No matter that the forecast looked good when they set sail yesterday. The surf gods are fickle; they’ll turn on a dime, and Jason is nervous about what lies ahead. This trip took some planning, and money to boot, and his parents weren’t happy with him leaving the store for four days. If the waves are as hoped for, it will all be worthwhile. If they’re breaking the way six years old. It had been four years since the HMS Beagle set sail from England for what was intended to be a two-year expedition to survey the South American coastline. The Beagle would not return home for yet another year after this.

San Cristobal was the first island Darwin explored during the five weeks he spent in the Galapagos. And he was less than impressed, as he wrote in his journal:

Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance, A broken held of black basaltic lava . . . is everywhere covered by a stunted, sunburnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun,

 gave the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
There were no people living on San Cristobal at that time, at least none who were mentioned in the diary Darwin kept during the six days he spent roaming this island. In fact, the only humans who had lived anywhere in the Galapagos up to that point had arrived here by accident or had been brought against their will.

The very discovery of the Galapagos was sheer happenstance. There is evidence that ancient means encountered the islands while riding rafts made of balsa in pre-Colombian times. Author and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl concluded as much after studying pottery shards on the beaches of Santiago, Floreana, and Santa Cruz in the summer of 1953, on the heels of his fabled Kon-Tiki voyage.

The means were most likely first. But the man who is credited with “discovering” the Galapagos is a Spanish priest and Panama’s first bishop, a man named Tomás de Berlanga, whose ship was becalmed then swept away from the west coast of South America in the winter of 1535 by a current that carried it into an uncharted part of the Pacific, where it drifted for six days before encountering land. Actually, “land” is a generous term, considering de Berlanga’s own account of first seeing these islands. “It seems,” wrote the bishop in a letter addressed to his lord, the king of Spain, “as though some time God had showered stones.”

Before the end of that century, this shower of stones had a name, galdpago (from the Spanish term for a cleated saddle, which the shells of the giant tortoises resembled), and it now had a place on navigational maps as well. Over the next two hundred years, those maps became a bit confusing as British buccaneers, prowling the South American coast for slow-sailing Spanish ships heavy with treasure, turned the Galapagos into a home base of sorts: a place to rest, heal their wounds, and stock their holds with live tortoises before setting sail for more plunder.

An odd sense of patriotism compelled these pirates to give British names to the islands. To this day, Floreana is also called “Charles” by some, San Cristobal is sometimes called “Chatham,” and Santa Cruz is occasionally called “Indefatigable” by those who are able to pronounce the word.

Although the buccaneers spent a good deal of time searching these islands for food and hiding from pursuers in hundreds of small coves and inlets, the only people who actually lived here were castaways, mutineers, and other miscreants whose punishment by their brethren was to be left alone on these godforsaken, freshwaterless shores.
Some legends have it that Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor upon whom Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe, spent his four years in exile on a Galapagos island. In truth, Selkirk was actually marooned far to the south, on an atoll off the coast of Chile. But he did visit the Galapagos soon after being rescued by a shipload of British buccaneers in 1709, who carried him with them on a raid of Guayaquil’s harbor. From there they retreated to the Galapagos, where Selkirk and his new shipmates regrouped, then moved on.

The Galapagos’ own Robinson Crusoe was an unfortunate Irishman named Patrick Watkins, who was set ashore almost a century after Selkirk, in 1807, on the island of Floreana, where some quarrelsome shipmates left him to die. Watkins refused to oblige, surviving on meager crops of potatoes and—of all things—pumpkins, which he traded to passing ships in exchange chiefly for liquor. During the War of 1812, when the U.S. warship Essex arrived in the islands with orders to wreak havoc upon the British whaling fleet sailing these waters, its captain, David Porter, was so intrigued by the stories he heard of this man/beast named Watkins that he set down a detailed description in the Essex’s log:

The appearance of this man, from the accounts I have received of him, was the most dreadful that can be imagined; ragged clothes, scarce sufficient to cover his nakedness, and covered with vermin; his red hair and beard matted, his skin much burnt from constant exposure to the sun, and so wild and savage in his manner and appearance that he struck everyone with horror. For several years this wretched being lived by himself on this desolate spot, without any apparent desire other than that of procuring rum in sufficient quantities to keep himself intoxicated, and, at such times, after an absence from his hut of several days, he would be found in a state of perfect insensibility, rolling among the rocks of the mountains.

This is what the Galapagos can do to a man. By the time Porter wrote these words, Watkins was four years gone from the islands. He hijacked a shore party of five sailors with their longboat and made his getaway to Guayaquil, where he arrived, noticeably alone, in the summer of 1809. Rumors persist today that Watkins’ meals during that journey to the mainland consisted of his hostages’ bodies.

That left those British whaling crews as the only humans who set foot on the islands during that time. And they—or more precisely, their ships—were what the Essex had come for.

The first whaling ships had arrived in the southeastern Pacific in the late 1 700s, from Great Britain and New England. Sailors in this region had long known that large baleen whales—fins, sperms, and humpbacks—were abundant in these waters. The sailors were also familiar with a remarkably strong ocean current that swept up from Antarctica along the Peruvian coast before bending west at the equator—a swift, frigid stream of seawater that ran straight through the Galapagos. That current was eventually charted by a nineteenthcentury oceanographer named Alexander von Humboldt. Scientists thereafter quickly made the connection between the Humboldt Current, which was cold enough to support rich swarms of plankton in the heat of the equator and the proliferation of plankton-devouring whales in this region. Some biologists, including Darwin, went on to make the further connection between that current and the odd sea and animal life found in and around the Galapagos, creatures that simply do not belong, such as the penguins that still roam the western islands of Fernandina and Isabela.

But those British and New England whalers had no interest in science or penguins. What lured them to this part of the Pacific was the oil to be found in those whales, which were hunted and harpooned with a fury. By the start of the War of 1812, dozens of American whaling boats roamed the eastern Pacific, with as many British and European vessels hunting alongside them. The crews of those ships, who were at sea for months, sometimes years, at a time with no refrigeration to preserve meat or produce, typically ate nothing but salt pork and biscuits. Once they learned of the tortoises that abounded on the Galapagos, many weighing as much as six hundred pounds—six hundred pounds of meat that would keep itself fresh inside an animal that could survive for a year without food or water in the hold of a ship—a slaughter began on the scale of that which would soon visit the American buffalo. By the end of the nineteenth century, entire populations of tortoises on several Galapagos islands were extinguished. When the whalers first arrived at the turn of the 1 800s, several hundred thousand tortoises roamed the Galapagos. Today there remain perhaps 20,000.

In much the same way that the whaling crews preyed on the slow, witless tortoises, David Porter and the crew of the Essex had their way with the whalers. No sooner did Porter arrive in the Galapagos in April of 1813 than he headed straight for the island of Floreana’s “Post Office Bay,” so-called because of a crude mail system set up on its beach. It consisted of a box nailed to a pole, into which passing ships would deposit, as well as pick up and eventually deliver, letters addressed to all points on the globe.

Porter’s plan was quite simple: Raid the box, study the letters, deduce which whaling ships were in the area, and attack them. It was not an intricate strategy, but it was effective beyond Porter’s wildest hopes. Hoisting British colors, which allowed it to approach its targets without causing alarm, the Essex captured three British whalers within the first month without a shot being fired. In the four months that followed, nine more ships were as easily taken. So successful was Porter that he soon found himself as fabled back in the United States as John Paul Jones. He also soon found himself as the Essex’s only officer. The others had gone, each having been awarded the command of a British vessel the Essex had seized. Among those young officers was Porter’s adopted son, a twelve-year-old midshipman named David Farragut, who would later become the young United States Navy’s first admiral.

Porter eventually lost the Essex in a vicious battle with a British frigate off the coast of northern Chile in late 1814. He was returned to the United States as a “prisoner on parole,” which somewhat dampened the glory of his Galapagos exploits and which might explain why his suggestion that the United States annex the unclaimed Galapagos Islands—a suggestion he urgently made both to his naval superiors and to Congress—was met with utter disinterest.

That left the door open for Ecuador to annex the islands some eighteen years later. It was three years after that that Darwin arrived on board the Beagle. When he stepped ashore here at San Cristobal, he encountered what he described in his journal as a “Cyclopian scene” of slaglike lava and odd little finches “so tame and unsuspecting,” he wrote, “that they did not even understand what was meant by stones being thrown at them.”

There were no people on this island at the time Darwin arrived, and, from what Jason and Lobo and the others can see as they lower themselves into the Symbol’s dinghy to paddle ashore on this still Sunday morning, there is no one here now.

The empty pan gas they pass, bobbing in the bay’s sparkling, green water, have coils of barbed wire or sharp, naillike spikes attached to their sides to keep out the sea lions, which infest this harbor like pests. The creatures have a habit of crawling up into unprotected dinghies and ransacking the contents, not to mention relieving themselves on the boats’ interiors.

Onshore, a young girl appears, sucking a bob (frozen fruit juice in a clear plastic bag) as she strolls past the wharf. A teen in a soccer shirt pedals by on an old beat-up bicycle. Four young boys appear at the far end of the bay, diving into the shimmering water without making a splash. Petra smiles and remarks on their Huck Finn—like innocence. Bico responds with a smile of his own. “They’re probably diving for pepinos,” he says.

Climbing ashore, the group splits apart. Jason and the boys head off to sniff out the surf conditions while Bico hikes uptown to locate some relatives. Lobo, Petra, and Mariana find a tiny, two-table café on a narrow sidestreet and sit down to order a late breakfast of three cold cervezas and three bowls of ceviche. There is only one item on the café’s small chalkboard menu: ceviche. There is nothing, the trio agrees, like good, fresh ceviche—the raw octopus, shrimp, sea snails, and fish, all taken fresh from the ocean that morning, chopped up and sprinkled with fresh lime and vinegar. And there is no ceviche in the world, they insist, like that found in the Galapagos.

The seafood arrives, with a side basket of popcorn, for 8,000 sucres apiece—about forty cents each. Outside, the bright sun beats down on the sloped cobblestoned street. Across the way, a small, lightless shop displays sacks of rice, bottles of ketchup, and fresh mangoes and limes. The cracked, broken sidewalk is empty of tourists, empty of anyone. Block after block of half-finished buildings—concrete and cinder-block pillars and walls rising jaggedly like rows of bad teeth, corrugated asbestos roofing held up by long bamboo poles—lead to the north side of town, where a hard, red- clay road winds up a hill to an unlikely “visitor’s center” overlooking the bay.

The center was built with money raised by a group based in Spain. There are buildings all over these islands built with money donated by nations beyond Ecuador. This one is modern, octagonal. With cathedral ceilings and walls made of fresh cedar, with broad, plate-glass windows, clay-tiled floors, and Park Service maps mounted behind panes of clear glass, the place would fit well in Yellowstone or Yosemite, where crowds of tour groups would line up at the door. But there are no crowds here, not at the moment. And not in the past several days, according to the register that sits by the front entrance. A short list of signatures was entered on New Year’s Eve:
Janice Bonaparte from Milton, Massachusetts; The McGaughan Family from Washington, D.C.; the Nelsons from Manchester, Massachusetts. The first entry on January 1—the first official visitors of the new millennium to the island of San Cristobal—are Joan and Thomas Rice from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

By the time the ceviche is finished, Jason and the boys have returned from their mission. The surf, they’ve been told by a couple of Brazilians at a bar down the way, is not bad up past the airport, at a spot called La LoberIa—”the Place of the Sea Lions.” And so they head in that direction, their boards under their arms, while Petra returns to the boat to join Bico for an afternoon nap, and Lobo and Mariana see about catching a truck for an afternoon drive into the highlands, where maybe they’ll go take a look at the ruins of El Progreso.

El Progreso. Lyrical labels like this have been laid upon dozens of ill-fated ventures launched all over these islands during the past century or so. Ranches, farms, communes, resorts, plantations, mines—the litany of doomed enterprises in the Galapagos is as sad as it is long. In some cases, it is savage as well. Forced labor, torture, and killings without conscience were as common here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they were at other so- called frontiers on the planet. There are phantoms all over these islands, ghostly wisps of past pain and unspeakable suffering curling into the air like the smoky remains of burned-away memories. Nowhere is that smoke any thicker than at the nightmare they called El Progreso.

Soon after the Galapagos were annexed in 1832, Ecuador dispatched a renowned military officer, a general named José Villamil, to govern the archipelago’s first colony, on the island of Floreana. The “colonists,” such as they were, consisted of two hundred or so political prisoners and prostitutes shipped out from the mainland. Their purpose was to ostensibly harvest a wild moss called orchilla, used to make dye. But in reality the place was no more than a penal colony. It was christened Asilo de la Paz (“Haven of Peace”) by the government, but within a matter of months it was better known as Reino Perro (“the Dog Kingdom”) because its governor could go nowhere without the protection of a large pack of hounds.

Within thirty years that colony was abandoned, a pathetic failure. Not long thereafter, in the late 1870s, a new one took shape on the neighboring island of San Cristobal, with orchilla again to be grown, and sugarcane, and coffee as well, on a much larger scale than the previous effort. This time there was no pretense that the setup was anything other than slavery. A businessman named Manuel Cobos was given free rein over boatloads of conscripted workers shipped from the continent, who sweated in his fields under satanic conditions. Floggings were routine, as were shootings by firing squads. When Cobos was in one of his fouler moods, he would order a marooning on one of the surrounding small islets, where an unlucky soul would be left on the rocks to cook in the sun until he or she died.

The place was called El Progreso, and it actually prospered through the turn of the century, until the prisoners, who by then numbered more than four hundred, finally revolted on a January morning in 1904. Cobos, clad only in his underpants as he sat in a rocking chair on the porch of his villa, was confronted by a small group of convicts who had surprised his sentries and seized their weapons. They shot Cobos twice—in the stomach and chest. Staggering, still alive, he retreated into his bedroom, where he was struck twice in the head with a machete, and finally fell dead. A month after that, a ragged sloop with no papers and flying no nation’s flag drifted into the port of Tumaco on the southwestern coast of Colombia. Eighty-five hollow-eyed men and women helped one another down the gangplank to shore, relating their horrific ordeal in bits and pieces. The story shocked all of Ecuador, as did the trial, where the cruelty of Cobos was revealed and all but two of the defendants were set free.

The remains of El Progreso are mentioned in most Galapagos guidebooks, which tell tourists to look for the ruins on their way up to a lake called El Junco, the only significant freshwater source in the entire archipelago. The lake sits atop the island, where over the eons a volcanic crater has turned into a rainfall-fed reservoir. That water was one reason Cobos chose this location to build his plantation, and it would seem a good reason—besides being the Galapagos’ provincial capital—that Puerto Baquerizo and not Puerto Ayora should be the hub of these islands today.
But it’s not. And the reason, the watershed moment, the single event that set the course for the future of San Cristobal—and for that matter, of the entire Galapagos—was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As early as the mid-1930s, the U.S. Navy was nosing around the Galapagos, scouting the archipelago’s coves and inlets, surveying
suitable sites for an air base, preparing for possible war in the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt stopped by to visit in 1938. But by late 1941 no ground had been broken and no troops yet deployed.

That all changed with December 7. Four days after that, several squads of U.S. troops, dispatched from the Canal Zone, arrived on the islands. The decision now had to be made, and quickly, where to build that air base.
It would have made sense, at least at first glance, for the base to be built at San Cristobal. There was fresh water. This was where most of the Galapagos’ 800 or so residents lived at that time, centered around a fish-processing plant built at Wreck Bay in the late 1920s by a group of Norwegians.

But San Cristobal was simply in the wrong place. The base’s primary purpose was to serve as a spotting station, a warning post against a possible Japanese invasion of the Panama Canal. If that attack came, it would arrive, of course, from the west. San Cristobal lies east, as far east as one can get in the Galapagos.

So the Americans decided on Baltra, more centrally located and conveniently fiat. Construction began there in February 1942. Within two months a mile-long landing strip had been blasted out of the lava. Around it stood more than 200 structures, including barracks enough to house the roughly 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors assigned duty there.

For the ensuing four years, Baltra, the little lunarlike island just above Santa Cruz, became the heart of the Galapagos. It was called “the Rock” by the GIs who were stationed there, and their duty was dead serious. Indeed, if the Japanese had prevailed at Midway a mere seven months after those first U.S. troops arrived here, the Galapagos would have been the next battleground.

But that didn’t happen. And so the soldiers and sailors who lived in this desolate compound of barracks and Quonset huts wound up with little to do but drink beer and shoot iguanas. So much beer was consumed by the GIs on Baltra that the Army sent down a team of investigators to see if their boys weren’t selling the brew to the locals. The investigators found that while the troops occasionally did trade tins of Spam for fresh fruit and vegetables from their island neighbors, the soldiers kept the beer to themselves. To this day, if a visitor steps to the edge of one of the hundreds of cracks and crevasses that split the stony, brown-and-black fields flanking the airstrip at Baltra, he can peer down and see the sunlight glinting off the remains of broken beer bottles, tossed off more than half a century ago by bored U.S. GIs.

Those fields are still studded today with the cement foundations of what was once a small city. Besides its barracks, hangars, and office buildings, the Baltra base had an outdoor beer garden, a chapel, a cinema (which the troops dubbed the “Rock-Si”), a bowling alley (added after Eleanor Roosevelt visited the base and bemoaned the horrid conditions), and a mess hail, where the soldiers ate fresh local vegetables and fruit, including, apparently, watermelons. Now, as then, it rarely rains on Baltra, but when it does, small green melons sprout as if by magic from the spots in the rocky soil where those sailors and soldiers once spat their seeds.

Wild goats roamed the islands even then, left by the buccaneers a century before, and Baltra’s communication system often went dead, the result of the goats chewing through the cables that snaked from one building to another. Despite a wealth of Armyissue fishing gear and free time to swim and sun, the men based on the Rock suffered from the same grim realities as the locals on surrounding islands. A dispatch cabled from a Time magazine editor covering the outpost’s closing in July of 1946 described a vista as bleak as any battlefield: Dysentery laid many low. Dead were buried in graves blasted out of the volcanic rock. Loneliness also took its toll. Stories abound about the way men called the rocks by name and greeted goats as friends.

No sooner did the Americans move out, formally leaving the base’s stripped-down remains to the Ecuadorian government, than the Galapaguenos on Santa Cruz began arriving by boat, peeling the precious wood from those buildings and carrying it back to build their own homes. There still stand rickety structures in the town of Puerto Ayora that were built with what the locals lovingly, laughingly, call “Baltra pine.”

The air base at Baltra sounded the death knell for San Cristobal, though the bell didn’t actually ring until thirteen years after the base was shut down. That’s when the Galapagos National Park came into being, in the summer of 1959, with outlines for a purposeful tourist industry, a plan that included taking that abandoned runway at Baltra and turning it into a modern airport—modern, at least, by Ecuadorian standards. When the airport eventually opened for regular, once-a-week flights in 1970 and a roadway was put through five years after that, running twenty-five miles from Baltra south over the mountains of Santa Cruz to the village of Puerto Ayora, the fate of San Cristobal was sealed.

One last pathetic attempt to “colonize” Cristobal was made in 1959 by a group of Americans from Washington State lured by a newspaper ad that read: 

Wanted: Swiss Family Robinson. Is your family one of the 50 adventurous families with the spirit of America’s early pioneers needed to establish a model community on a beautiful Pacific island?

The ad was placed by the founder of a sketchy utopian organization called Filate Science Antrorse (“Together with Science We Move Forward”). More than one hundred men, women, and children answered the ad, with plans to occupy the old fish-processing plant left by the Norwegians from the 1920s. They envisioned a lobster fishery there, and a working farm as well, on the land that was once El Progreso.

They didn’t get far. Upon their arrival, they found the processing plant in ruins, virtually useless. Their feeble attempts at gardening were destroyed by wild pigs and burros. On the Ecuadorian mainland, where a national election was taking place, the Americans on San Cristobal became an issue. A Communist Party candidate warned in a campaign speech, “Ecuadorians awaken! The small band of Americans in the Galapagos is but a prelude to a major-scale invasion. Yankee imperialists are about to take our islands.” One Ecuadorian newspaper editorial was headlined: “Don’t Let the Same Thing Happen to the Galapagos That Happened to Texas.” By January of 1961, all but one of the American “colonists” had returned to the States.

A few tourists today still arrive in the Galapagos at San Cristobal, but not many, not compared with the jetloads that land twice a day at Baltra. While dozens of cruise ships crowd the harbor at Puerto Ayora, only a small handful are anchored at Wreck Bay. And the one flight that arrives each morning at San Cristobal’s airport, which was opened in 1987, is sometimes filled with no more than a couple of bureaucrats, come to take care of dreary government business.

A nicely paved, two-lane road runs from Wreck Bay up to that airport. The airport’s terminal, like the one at Baltra, looks like a large picnic shelter, an open-air pavilion, where ocean breezes blow past passengers and baggage waiting to be processed.

There is no one in sight on this morning. But there is a faint noise, the soft sound of music drifting out from behind a closed door beyond the closed snack bar. Move closer to that door and the music takes shape—Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

There, in a small, wood-paneled office, a large, middle-aged man in a shirt with no tie, nice slacks, and shined shoes peers through spectacles at some documents stacked on his desk. An air conditioner hums in the room’s only window, above a small CD player, which, when Sinatra is finished, shuts off. A woman sits alone at a desk by the door, answering the telephone when it rings, which is hardly at all.

The man’s name, if you ask, is Abdon Guerrero, and this is his airport—or it may as well be. He’s the architect who designed it. When it was done, he became its manager, running the place for Saeta Airlines, whose planes are the ones that land here once a day. Compared with TAME, Ecuador’s only other air carrier, which is owned by the military and controls nearly all the nation’s flights—including those lucrative, two-a-day loops from the mainland to Baltra and back— Saeta is but a speck, a wink at the concept of competition. Every morning, Guerrero arrives at his desk half-expecting to hear that Saeta’s shut down and he’s out of a job.

Don’t get him wrong, he still has hope. This island might not be growing, he’ll be the first to admit, but it’s not dying either—at least not yet. He still believes, as he did when he moved here ten years ago with his wife and kids from their home in Guayaquil, that given the chance, San Cristobal could become something big, even if the tourism doesn’t work out. In the time that Guerrero has been here, he’s seen even the day tours dry up. The foreigners who land here are taken straight to their cruise ships anchored out in the bay. Those ships used to hang around for a day, maybe two, and their tourists would spend time in town, spending their money in the restaurants and bars and hiring taxis and drivers to take them up to the highlands. But in the last five or six years, those ships have gone straight out to circle the islands, taking the tourists and their money along with them. If they make a port call at all, it is over in Puerto Ayora.

But then, isn’t it like that everyplace? Guerrero sighs. The rich get richer, while the poor—well, just look around at the half-finished buildings, the hotels with no guests, the harbor with hardly a tour boat in sight. If it weren’t for the government and the navy base out on the point, there’d be no business at all here in Puerto Baquerizo, at least none you could count on.

What they really should do, if they had any sense at all, says Guerrero, is establish an institute here, a college of oceanography and biology and Galapagos culture, a real university with real professors and students, not a strange setup like the one they’ve got over on Santa Cruz, that Research Station, or whatever they call it. Guerrero doesn’t quite know how to say it, but the people who work over there, with their long hair and beards and their torn, dirty T-shirts, it’s like they’re well.. . hippies, not scientists. What Guerrero would like to see, what would save San Cristobal and launch it headlong into the twenty-first century, he believes, would be an actual campus with buildings and classrooms to outshine that. . . that crude camp that they’ve got over there.

His wife says he’s a dreamer. So okay, he’s a dreamer. Is that, he asks, such a bad thing? The fact is, he feels lucky to live in this place, a place of such peace. But if, God forbid, he should ever lose this job, it would not be the end of the world. He’d go back to the mainland and find something else. It’s an option he knows most of his neighbors on this island don’t have, and he does not take this for granted. He’s lucky, he knows, to have lived the life that he has, to have taken his wife and his children to the United States, to see New York City. That photograph on his desk of the four of them standing in front of the World Trade Center, that trip was like a dream, says Guerrero. Like visiting another planet.

How, he asks, could anyone not love the United States? Frank Sinatra. “My Way.” Or how about that big band from the old days, from World War II, what was their name? Yes, the Glenn Miller Band, that’s the one. Now listen to this, he says, and he puts on a disk, and the strains of a clarinet pour like sweet syrup from his small CD player. When the Americans were here at that base over in Baltra, he says, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair, this was the music they played.

It continues to play as the door closes shut, and the taste of the sea hangs in the hot air, and the afternoon breeze blows bits of paper and dust across the black tarmac runway, and the faint sound of the surf carries up past the cactus and lizards and rocks.

The surfing is pathetic. There’s no kinder way to put it. Eight people were here—four Venezuelans, three from Peru, one from New Zealand—when Jason, Robert, Andrew, and Sebas arrived late this morning at the clear turquoise cove that opens out to the breaks of La Loberia, just below the San Cristobal airport. Only the Venezuelans are still out there, bobbing like corks as they sit on their boards, peering toward the horizon and praying for something more than the soft, three-foot swells undulating beneath them.

The Peruvians are playing tag with a sea lion in the cove’s crystal shallows, while the New Zealander lies on the white, powdery beach, asleep on a towel with his girlfriend beside him. Jason tries staying upbeat, but he can’t hide his disgust. They could have stayed home and found better waves in Puerto Ayora, at Tortuga, or even up by the Research Station, at the break they call La Ratanera—”The Rathole”—where Jason first learned to surf.
After a couple of hours, they call it a day and unzip their wet suits, sling their packs on their shoulders, slide their boards under their arms, and trudge back up toward town. As they reach the top of the ridge, where the trail flattens out, Jason turns to take one last look down at the surf.

“Don’t,” says Andrew, as he grabs Jason’s arm and turns him around. “It always starts breaking when you stop and look back.”

The hike home is a long one, the sun beating down on the dusty clay path. The boys pass a quarry, layers of red earth and black rock formed over the ages, now laid open and stripped bare. There are no men or machinery in sight, just a raw gaping crater, a violation somehow of a landscape where there still exist plateaus and slopes and ravines on which man has never set foot.

By the time the group reaches the village, the sun’s almost down. Bico and Petra are uptown visiting friends. Mariana and Lobo sit by the harbor, on a bench near a tree strung with bright Christmas lights. Across the road, on a cracked concrete wall, the words “FELIZ MILLENNIUM” are scribbled in paint.

Lobo shakes his head, smiling, as his defeated friends approach. They don’t know what they will do tomorrow, they say. Maybe they’ll stay here and hope to get lucky. Or maybe they’ll leave, who knows. Right now they’re heading back to the Symbol to change into some clothes. They’ll spend the night on the boat later on, after they’ve killed a few hours checking out a few bars. They wouldn’t mind a nice bed in one of those little hotels just up the
way, but they don’t have the cash. No big deal, Robert says, shrugging, dancing away toward the wharf, singing aloud: “If I were a rich man.

 
Lobo and Mariana didn’t make that trip up to the highlands. They couldn’t find a ride. Still, it’s been a good day, just being here, together, alone. Mariana’s even smiling a little, watching the villagers emerge to stroll the streets as the night coolness falls. She’s in her late twenties, but she looks ten years younger, her shining, black hair cut short and straight like a boy’s, her slim, shapely figure clothed in a tank top, gym shorts, and a pair of white sneakers. She’s talking right now, in clipped broken English, about an American man she wishes she could meet. His name is Leo Buscaglia. She has read his books, about grief and loss and the paths back to joy. She wonders where this man lives. She wants so much to write him a letter.

Lobo just listens. He wishes there were more he could do, but what might that be? He’s not a psychologist, and if he were, can a man be a therapist to the woman he loves? Can he answer the questions she has about the things that he does—or can’t do—that are so much a part of the problems she feels?

Mariana knows Lobo loves her. She knows he’s a good man, doing the best he can. But there’s no question this thing—the death of her daughter—is taking its toll on everything in their lives, including their marriage. It doesn’t help that Lobo’s job takes him away for weeks at a time, on those boats with those tourists, while Mariana stays home with the walls closing in. When they get back tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, he will leave right away on a six-week tour aboard the Santa Cruz. It’s as if Lobo’s a soldier, always going to war while Mariana stays behind to deal with the grief and the guilt by herself.

It’s been two months since they buried the baby, and Mariana hasn’t once been to the cemetery, though it’s only a few blocks from her home. She’s emptied the room where her little girl slept, thrown away everything, as if the child never existed. Her parents said that would help, but it hasn’t. Nothing has helped. Her friends tell her to confront what has happened, then move on. But she’s afraid to do that. If she faced this thing fully, gave herself to her
feelings, she’s afraid she’d fall into those feelings forever. Just keep falling and falling. She loves Lobo, there’s no question about that. But she doesn’t know if she can take this anymore. She doesn’t know what she will do.
Lobo sits quietly, sipping a beer, the evening breeze at his back. Mariana asks for a tequila, which he brings her with lime and some salt.

“Caliente,” she says softly, wincing and smiling after downing the shot. It makes her feel, how you say. . . dicha? Happy? “Borrcho,” laughs Lobo. “Drunk.” Mariana lights a cigarette, but Lobo demurs. He quit not long ago. When he was a kid, no older than six, living up in New York, he and his friends used to scour the sidewalks and gutters, hunting for half-finished smokes. When they found one, they’d cross themselves, like good Catholic boys, before lighting it up. “Blessing the butts,” Lobo laughs. That’s what they called it.

By midnight everyone is back on the Symbol, asleep as the sea lions glide past the hull. In the morning, the boys give the surf one more chance, at the spot they call Tonga, up by the naval base. But the waves just aren’t there, and by midafternoon they’ve set sail in the direction home. It will be dark when they get there, but that’s not a problem. The reefs and currents off Puerto Ayora are nothing like those at Wreck Bay.

By dusk they’re beyond Santa Fe. For dinner Petra boils some shrimp and pulpo (octopus) and serves it with rice. Then they each find a spot on the deck and gaze up at the stars as the outline of Santa Cruz takes shape ahead. Less than two hours later they are there, the harbor aglitter with the lights of the tour boats, the sounds of traffic and music and laughter drifting down from the length of Darwin Avenue. The tourists strolling past the nightshadowed wharf hardly give them a glance as the ragged crew unload their surfboards and gear, hug one another goodbye, and head home to their beds.


The Station
It’s been a bad morning for Roz Cameron. Never mind the two- man film team from England who dropped in first thing, looking for permits to visit Española, where they want to shoot footage of some relocated saddlebacks. Or the Korean TV crew that “just popped up,” as Roz puts it, last week and has been camped at her door ever since, hoping to get out to the westernmost islands. Or “some blokes from Canada” who have also appeared without notice, and she’s not even certain what they want. Then there’s that frigging e-mail complaint that arrived sometime last night from someone in Germany who’s upset about not getting credit in that IMAX film.

None of this niggling nonsense is what’s bothering Roz. It’s all part of her job. As the Darwin Station’s director of public relations, her role every day is to act as a traffic cop at an insanely congested intersection of scientists, tourists, and reporters. Besides steering and shepherding the hordes of writers, photographers, and film crews who ceaselessly descend on the Galapagos from around the globe, Cameron must also keep track of the work of the researchers—the students, professors, and field scientists who shuttle in and out of their stints at this Station like foot soldiers in Vietnam.

At any one time, there are roughly two hundred Research Station personnel at this compound or out among the islands. More than two thirds are staff and volunteers; the rest come and go through grants, fellowships, and salaries paid by universities and research labs all over the world. Wherever they come from, for whatever reason, before they head out to the hinterlands of the archipelago, every one of these men and women must first check in at the Station. If the Galapagos Islands are a field scientist’s Vietnam, then the Charles Darwin Research Station is its Da Nang. And Roz Cameron is the one with the clipboard, waiting on the tarmac to deal with the press and the public and anyone else who wants to know what these scientists are doing.

 
But that’s not what’s driven her out to the porch of her barrack- like office this morning for her third—or is it her fourth ?—cigarette of the day. It’s that shitstorm on the continent: the rioting in Quito, the tear gas, the arrests. Not that Roz gives a rap about politics per se. She couldn’t care less about Jamil Mahuad or anyone else in that presidential palace. Don’t get her wrong, Mahuad seems like a good enough fellow, better than any other leader Ecuador’s had since Roz got here. And God, she says, taking a deep drag on her Marlboro, there have been so many “leaders.” Four in one day, wasn’t it? Yes, she nods, that’s right. Four presidents in one bleeding day, back when Bucaram was tossed out.

She stubs out her butt on the porch railing and surveys the vista around her—the dry brush and cactus in every direction, the ocean spread below like a bright-blue carpet, and the road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the entire Galapagos, a narrow mile-or-so stretch of dirt and gravel winding from the east edge of town )where the cobblestones of Darwin Avenue end), past Roz’s office near the ocean, to that dusty encampment of cinderblock lodges, classrooms, and office buildings just down the way, ground zero for the world’s students of natural selection.
It’s not just the scientists themselves, pedaling back and forth on their beat-up bicycles from here into town, who make that dirt road so busy. There are the Park Service trucks as well, grinding their gears as they come and go from their own headquarters back up in brush to the west. Eliecer Cruz and his people have got 150 or so staff and wardens up there, plus 250-some guides who are constantly checking in at that Park Service compound of buildings and garages.

Then there are the tour groups, on port call from their boats, trudging past one another in packs of a dozen or so, each led by a guide who, once they arrive here at the Station, invariably steers the flock directly to Lonesome George’s pen, where the tourists set up their cameras and tripods while the guide tells them about efforts to coax George to reproduce. For years now, the scientists here at the Station have been trying to find George a mate, but so far the seventy-some year-old “bachelor,” as the tour guides describe him, has not been responsive. At this point in the lecture, someone invariably makes a crack about Viagra, and the guide laughs politely. How many times has he heard that joke? He points out that George still has quite a few years left to become a father. This species, the guide explains, can live to 170 or even older, the longest lifespan of any creature on Earth. And George should be able to procreate until the day that he dies.

The reporters all want to know about George, just like the tourists. And Roz doesn’t mind fielding their questions, the same questions, over and over. She loves this job. She believes in this place, the Station, and its purpose. As for the islands themselves, she’s lost none of the awe that compelled her to sink her roots here eight years ago. That’s something Roz wants to make perfectly clear before she even begins to discuss the downside of what’s been happening lately, both in her own life and to the life of these islands.

“Look,” she says, sweeping her blond bangs out of her eyes. ‘I adore this place. The power of it. The enormity of that visceral feeling you get sitting alone out on one of those beaches or up in the highlands with the tortoises. Connecting with a place on a plane.

that has nothing to do with being a human, feeling that vivid sense of just being, that’s the essence of these islands, at least for me.” She pauses to answer a call on the two-way radio she keeps clipped to the pocket of her shorts. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, no-nonsense braid. Her tanned face is freckled. Her Station- issued sportshirt and shorts are a dark navy blue. “Ruddy” is a word that would aptly describe her. But don’t make the mistake of asking if that accent of hers might be British.

“Australian,” she snaps, with a mixture of disdain and delight. She pulls out another cigarette and apologizes. She doesn’t mean to be brusque, but this is a bad time right now, the worst she’s been through since she first came to the islands. And she’s been through a lot. There was, of course, her former husband, who couldn’t shirk what Roz calls his “Latin ways”—his drinking, his visits to Quatro y Media, his trysts with other women—and so she finally threw him out of her life. But he still comes around almost every day to visit their son, Mason, who’s now nearly seven. The locals look at Roz like she’s some sort of freak, this gringa who has actually dug in and stayed, rather than fled like the rest of the foreign women who have their fling with an island man, find themselves pregnant, then go back where they came from once the relationship fails. And who could blame them? Why in the world would anyone want to stay here in such circumstances?

But Roz has stayed. She even bought her own piece of land, back up in the village, where she had planned to build a nice cozy cottage for Mason and herself, But that was before the economy went down the sewer. The estimate she got from the builder just two months ago to begin construction has now doubled. That’s how crazy it’s gotten, and what’s worse is Roz couldn’t cash in her chips even if she wanted. Her life savings are stuck in an Ecuadorian bank, which has frozen all assets and denied access to depositors. She doesn’t even have the sucres to pay for her bleeding divorce, which is a moot point at the moment because there’s no judge on the island to finalize it. There’s been no judge for almost a year now, ever since Avellan was tossed off. But then that doesn’t surprise Roz either. The Ecuadorian bureaucracy on the mainland has more pressing concerns at the moment than replacing a provincial judge in the Galapagos—concerns such as saving its own skin.

Roz would laugh if it all didn’t hurt quite so much. Still, she’s not about to bail out. For all that’s gone wrong here, there’s no place on the planet she’d rather be. She felt it the first time she set foot on these islands, late in 1991. She’d arrived out of sheer curiosity, just a side trip while traveling across South America. She was thirty-two at the time, restless and searching, though she was not sure for what.

Her whole life had been like that, from the time she turned nineteen and took off with a girlfriend from her home in southern Australia. Just the two of them, with all that they owned jammed in Roz’s light green sedan—”a Datsun, belonged to my mum”— headed east across something called the Nullarbor Plain. It was a wasteland; a dry, treeless extension of the Great Victoria Desert. Roz and her buddy drove four days straight through, hardly a human in sight, nothing to get them across but a bucket of cookies crammed between the front seats, and Santana and the Sex Pistols screaming out of the stereo.

That was the beginning, says Roz. By the time she turned thirty, she’d been all over the Australian continent, from the small mining town of Karratha on the northwestern coast—where she worked as a barmaid, then spent three years driving salt trucks—to the village of Kempsey on the coast north of Sydney. There, she built her own house, busted her bum at a small local hospital, grew her own food, and, toward the end, learned how to surf. She took side trips to Nepal and Egypt and such, but it was not till she came to the Galapagos, on no more than a whim, that she realized she’d finally found what she was searching for. Which, even today, is a hard thing for Roz to put into words.

“I can only describe it as the culmination of twenty years of inner exploring,” she says. “Something touched me here. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a thing. It was just this energy. Something resonant and real. Something raw, crude, and timeless.

“It wasn’t what’s here that did it,” she says, looking out at the road and the Station and the town to the west. “It was out there, in those places where you can be all by yourself, in the highlands, on those islands.”

What struck Roz as strongly as the sense of this place, she says, were the people she found here, men and women from all over the world who shared feelings like hers, who were expatriates in the same sense that she was. They were people for whom the term “counterculture” meant just that: They had fled from, for whatever reasons, the cultures they lived in, and had come here to live on their own terms, not unlike those Norwegians who first settled these islands in the 1920s.

“I’ve always tended to gravitate toward hard places with a mishmash of interesting people whose real story you’ll never ever know,” says Roz. “Those kinds of people can be a mess, but they can also be so incredible. And this is a place where you find them. This is a place that tests limits, and a lot of people like it that way. Those are the kinds of people who pass through a place like this, who really pass through. They’re not your typical travelers.”
Money was the last thing on Roz’s mind when she decided to settle in Puerto Ayora. Money, in fact, was one thing she was trying to get away from. She’d had money before, more than she knew what to do with, back when she worked in the salt mines in the boomtown of Karratha. “Phenomenal money,” she says—$30,000 a year with no expenses, which in 1979 in rural Australia was no small amount. It was like the early days on the pipeline in Alaska, Roz says, spigots of cash flowing like oil. That’s what finally drove Roz away from that place, she says, all that money. It made her feel like a glutton, fat with excess and waste. “When I started buying color TVs for friends and flying a thousand kilometers to Perth every couple of months for a weekend break, just blowing away money because it was there, it began to feel wrong. It does not feel fulfilling.”

It bothers Roz that she has to worry about money now. But she does, if for no other reason than Mason’s well-being. She doesn’t need much, just enough to feel safe. But she doesn’t feel safe, not with the banks shutting down and the uproar in Quito, and the possibility that the talk of a coup might be more than a rumor. If that is so, then everything’s up for grabs, including the Special Law passed just two years ago, the fate of this Station, and the future of the Galapagos Islands themselves. Roz would never share such fears with the press—her job, after all, is public relations—but she’s not the only one here at the Station who’s worried.

“People are shaky, nervous, terrified,” she says of her colleagues and the stream of upsetting news from the mainland. “With the masses out in the streets there in Quito, and the military prepared to step in and take over, it’s the French Revolution all over again.”

For the time being, however, it’s business as usual, and right now Roz has to run. But a good person to talk to, she says, would be Godfrey Merlen, if you can catch him. He might well be at the library, she says, down by the Station dock, just a short stroll from here.

It’s not much to look at, the Darwin Research Station library, but it’s the repository for the world’s most complete collection of all that has ever been written about the Galapagos Islands. Thousands of research studies, periodicals, theses, and dissertations dating back more than a half century are squeezed onto the shelves that line the walls of this small, cellarlike room. The buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of an air conditioner are the only sounds to be heard as one steps inside. On this particular morning, a young pigtailed woman sits at one of the room’s bare wooden tables. She is bent over a laptop. Across from her sits an older, Asian man, chewing the tip of his pen as he studies an unfolded map. Near the door, at a desk by a bin where visitors stow their backpacks and belongings, sits a slim bird of a woman who looks not unlike the finches perched on the fence just outside. She is Gayle Davis, the Station librarian, who also happens to be Godfrey Merlen’s wife.

In The Beak of the Finch, which won a Pulitzer Prize for author Jonathan Weiner in 1995, biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant are followed as they study finch behavior on the Galápagan island of Daphne Major. Weiner’s account includes a brief stop in Puerto Ayora, during which he spends several paragraphs describing Gayle Davis feeding rice to the finches, both here at the library and outside the house in town that she shares with her husband. Weiner describes Davis’ hair as “pulled back in a bun, tropical-librarian-fashion,” which is the same way she’s wearing it this morning. Weiner’s book now sits on a shelf behind Davis’ desk, where at the moment she’s logging off her computer before going to lunch. Beside the computer are stacked papers to be processed and filed—ongoing studies of four-eyed blennies and great blue herons, the mating behavior of marine iguanas, and the morphology of lava flows on the Volcán Alcedo.

Some 9,000 species of birds, animals, and plants live in the Galapagos, hundreds of which exist nowhere else on the planet, most of which have been studied and written about in one way or another by the scientists who pass through this Station. Oceanic island systems, because of their isolation and self-containment, have always provided ideal environments for the study of biology, oceanography, climate, and geology. Such islands are, as the Galapagos are so often described, “living laboratories.” There are precious few such systems left on Earth, certainly none with such an astonishing range of biodiversity surviving in such relatively undisturbed conditions as that of these islands. Hawaii, the Solomons, Guam, New Zealand, Micronesia—all these biosystems have been disturbed beyond repair by the invasion of humans. Only the Galdpagos remain as a keyhole through which scientists can continue to probe into and understand the evolutionary, ecologic, and geologic processes which shape all life on Earth. It’s not just where we have come from that these scientists are studying, but where we are going.

This was what fascinated Gayle Davis when she first visited the Galapagos two dozen years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, after earning her zoology degree from the University of Wisconsin. She was a Chicago girl, born and bred, but like so many long-timers at the Station today, she fell in love with this place at a time and under circumstances that made it easy to leave behind the world she knew. Rules and restrictions were almost nonexistent back then, largely because there was no need for them. Few people were living and working on these islands, and conditions were so difficult for those few who were that there were no problems with overcrowding. Life for the scientists during the first couple of decades at the Station was much the same as it was for the people living in the village. If you could deal with the spartan conditions, the lack of amenities, the harshness of the setting and climate, and the near-absolute separation from the rest of mankind, well then, you were welcome to stay.

Now, there are rules at the Station just as there are rules-.—or the semblance of such—down in the town. Just getting on the list to secure a stint of study at the Station today—getting the green light, for example, to come down for three or four months to monitor the reproduction of sea lions on the island of Marchena—is a formidable task. Finding a way to navigate the sticky web of immigration restrictions in order to actually stay and live on these islands is almost impossible, for a scientist or anyone else.

Gayle Davis lives here. And she worries about the same issues that are on everyone’s mind at the Station right now: the political unrest on the continent (where Davis is due to travel in just a few days to a clinic in Quito for an operation on one of her eyes), the collapse of the Ecuadorian economy, and the ongoing struggle between the Park Service and the local poachers. The pepiñeros continue to be a problem, and now some local lobstermen, unhappy with the Special Law’s restrictions on shellfish, are starting to make threats against local authorities—the same kind of threats that led to the Station takeover four years ago.

Davis’ eyes still narrow with outrage at that memory. When those jacked-up fishermen burst out of the brush with their machetes and Molotov cocktails, no one was more upset than she. Like her colleagues, she fled when the mob first arrived, but she could not stay away, not with her library in danger. Within a day, she and a small group of friends—scientists and students—sneaked back into the compound. “Just to make sure everything was all right,” she says. “And in my case, to check my e-mail.”

E-mail has changed everything about life on these islands, says Davis. It used to take days, sometimes weeks, to get news from the outside world. Now it arrives electronically in seconds, when the server’s not down. Some of that news, frankly, is hard to believe. In a way it confirms Davis’ choice so long ago to leave behind a culture that seemed to be going in some wrong, even crazy, directions. Like the decision—when was it, just four months ago?—by the Kansas Board of Education not to teach evolution in that state’s public schools. Davis could hardly believe that one when she read it on the Web. None of the people at the Station could believe it. It flies in the face of all that they know, all they are doing. They can tell themselves, Okay, that’s Kansas, but even right here, in the very crucible where the theory of evolution was inspired and continues to be explored every day, there are now Mormons walking the streets in their white shirts and ties, knocking on doors to rescue the unsaved. There are Jehovah’s Witnesses doing the same. There is a Pentecostal church back up in the village, the Asamblea de Dios, where the congregation gathers three nights a week to garble in tongues and writhe on the floor and pray that the beast that their minister warned about, waiting to rise from the sea and swallow them whole, will stay away at least one more month.
Gayle is leaving for lunch now, but Godfrey’s just up the road, she says, doing some work with some finches. And so he is, right downtown on Darwin Avenue, just across from the Media Luna Café. Come this evening, he’s quite likely to be out there on its porch sipping a pilsner.

Now, however, he’s on task, standing motionless beside a head- high stone wall, staring up at a cactus plant a few feet away. He’s wearing sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt—standard dress for a Galapagos day. His thick, sun-bronzed arms are crossed on his chest. A well- worn ballcap is pressed down on a head of wild hair. And those eyes— those Rasputin-like eyes—are fixed on that cactus.

A tripod-mounted video camera standing beside him is fixed on it, too. Over the camera is draped a neatly folded dish towel to shade the device from the sun. But the heat appears to mean nothing to Merlen, who shows no expression as he stands and stares. The minutes go past. Then hours. Nothing appears to be happening.
The tourists stop and look at this odd man. Then they glance up at the cactus; then they look back at the man and wonder what the hell’s going on. Some even approach him and ask.

“Quite a lot, actually,” he answers, his voice Britishly polite, his eyes still transfixed on the plant. The tourists look back at the cactus for a second or two then they shrug and move on. If they stayed a bit longer, a flit of movement would appear in a tree to the right of where Merlen now stands. A tiny black finch, the size of a canary, has darted in from the distance and now sits on a branch. Another flit and the finch is closer, its tiny head twitching from side to side as it hops down the tree toward the cactus.

“The longer you watch, the more you see,” says Merlen. And it’s true. There’s a small hole in the cactus trunk, an opening the size of a softball. Look through the camera, and in the darkness of that hole small bits of twigs and slight shadowy movements can be seen. Look back at the finch, and in its beak is yet another twig. With one final dart, the bird is inside the hole, tending the nest for its babies.

The point of this study, explains Merlen, is to see just how closely a creature like this can coexist with the thrum of humanity: the pedestrians and traffic rushing past within a few feet of the nest, the restaurants and shops just across the avenue, the smells and sounds of a small city filling the air. To Merlen, the clamor is mere background, as it is to that finch. He and the bird are each focused on one thing at the moment, the nest. “There you are,” he whispers to himself as the finch hops into the hole. “There you are.”

The tourists don’t realize it, but this same man took most of the wildlife photographs featured in the Park Service calendars for sale in the souvenir shops down by the wharf. The pen-and-ink drawings of Darwin finches displayed as posters up at the Research Station are Merlen’s as well. His watercolors have been exhibited by the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C.

But the art’s just a hobby for Merlen. It’s science he lives for. Over the past fifteen years he’s published more than two dozen papers on a broad array of biologic esoterica, from the scavenging behavior of the waved albatross to the calibration of stable oxygen isotope signatures in coral. He’s also written two field guides to the waters of the Galapagos, one on fish and the other on marine mammals.

Even the writing, however, pales next to Merlen’s passion for the fieldwork itself. He and Gayle share a house in the village, but one gets the sense that Merlen is most at home on the water, preferably alone.

The water, in fact, is where he is bound the next afternoon, as he unties a small dinghy at the Park Service dock, at a small, sleepy cove just west of the Research Station. The cove is surrounded by mangroves, which, from here into town, have been invaded during the past year by a white, scaly insect that’s killing the trees at a devastating rate.
The parasite, known as “cottony cushion scale,” showed up in southern California’s orange groves in the early part of this century and nearly destroyed them. Now it is here in the Galapagos, attaching itself to the mangroves, sucking the trees’ sap and coating their branches with a sweet, sticky secretion. The goo both smothers the trees and attracts a black, sooty mold, which blocks out the sun. The effect in the end, as one scientist puts it, is that the trees are both “vampirized and mummified.”

Very visibly, the mangroves are dying, their leaves turning black as their branches turn white. The situation has become so severe that the Station, for the first time in its history, is considering introducing its own nonindigenous life-form to the islands to combat this invader. The creatures they’re thinking of sound benign— ladybugs, or “ladybird beetles,” as the scientists call them. The bugs have been effective elsewhere, eating the same parasites that are now killing the Galapagos mangroves.

This might indeed be the only way that these trees can be saved, agrees Merlen, but it’s still unsettling. Once you start fiddling with the chain of nature, he says, even the best intentions can turn on themselves. Look what happened with the mongooses in Hawaii and Fiji and the Caribbean Islands. Well-meaning scientists brought those animals in to eat the rats that had invaded the cane fields, but the mongooses wound up devouring other creatures as well, including sea turtle hatchlings, whose populations have since dramatically declined. Like the hosts of a party where a guest has turned ugly, these places have found that the mongooses are much harder to get rid of than they were to let in.

Of course, none of this would have been necessary in Puerto Ayora if these parasites had been kept out in the first place. But who knows how they got here. It’s hard enough controlling the goats and pigs and dogs and rats that have been let loose in the Galapagos over the decades. Although people knowingly bring in the larger creatures that now swarm over some of these islands, tinier but just as deadly organisms hitchhike in on uninspected produce, inside unchecked packages, on the soles of unclean shoes or the surface of unclean clothing, and most dangerously, in the ballast water of commercial and cruise ships.

Ballast water—the seawater used to balance the buoyancy of large ships—has become an increasingly alarming front line of battle in the global war against invasive species. When a good-sized ship empties its load, be it cargo or passengers, it fills the lower part of its hull with hundreds of tons of seawater to maintain the boat’s hydrodynamics. That water is typically filthy, the kind of oily, scum-ridden liquid that laps at the docks of urban ports from Stockholm to Hong Kong. In the hull of a ship, this water becomes an aqueous soup of bacteria, microbes, and larvae, carried hundreds or even thousands of miles from its source, then dumped out in a foreign harbor as the boat takes on cargo or people.

The implications are obvious. As Puerto Ayora continues to grow, the harbor of Academy Bay becomes busier each day with a steady stream of such ships. Several are anchored out there right now, as Merlen’s skiff swings away from the Park Service cove and slices across the mouth of the bay, pointing west toward the “other side.”
The sky is dark. An afternoon downpour—an aguacera—is moving in from the highlands. Merlen puils a worn canvas cap from his pack and yanks it down on his head.

Off to the right sits a small fishing trawler, empty, anchored, its steel hull flaking with rust and neglect. It’s been sitting there for almost two months now, ever since it was seized by the Park Service in November off Wolf Island, where it was illegally fishing, with longlines, no less. Like the Magdalena, which still sits in that downtown lagoon, this boat, the Mary Cody, is owned and operated by the barons of Manta. Like the Magdalena, it’s now awaiting legal action, which has been complicated by the fact that the island right now has no judge.

What makes the Mary Cody different and even more destructive than the Magdalena is the nature of the fishing it pursues. The Magdalena went strictly for sea cucumbers, which is harmful enough because of those creatures’ critical role in the nutrient dynamics of the waters in which they live. Marine biologists often compare sea cucumbers with earthworms because, like earthworms in farm soil, sea cucumbers aerate and enrich the sea bottom, where they lie by the millions, sucking up muck through their systems then spewing the nutrients out into the water. The abundant sea life in that water, from small fish to whales, depends on those nutrients as the base of their food chain. Removing the sea cucumbers is, as some scientists put it, like sterilizing your farm. No one yet knows the extent of the damage done to the food chain in the Galapagos where pepinos have been pillaged.

While that damage goes largely unseen, the havoc wreaked by longline fishing boats like the Mary Cody is much more visible. And horrific. The sight of a dolphin or tiger shark impaled on an industrial fishing hook is not pretty. Longliners hang thousands of such hooks from steel-cable fishing lines in deep ocean waters, lines that stretch out as far as seventy miles. The lines are laden with nets and hooks of all sizes, snagging anything that goes for their bait or swims in their way. The wastage, or “bycatch,” of such lines is said to be about thirty-five percent; in other words, as many as one third of the creatures caught on these lines are thrown back dead in the ocean. The Mary Cody was fishing for tuna the day she was seized, but her bycatch included sea lions, sea turtles, and sharks.
Such boats are barred from the Galapagos Marine Reserve by the Special Law, but that hasn’t kept them away. Their owners know how laughably limited the Park Service resources are. The way the fisheries in Manta look at it, losing a Mary Cody here and there is a small price to pay for the many more boats that are able to enter these waters, fill their holds, and leave without being detected.

This is the kind of thing Eliecer Cruz and his park wardens are up against. It’s helped to have Godfrey Merlen lending a hand. For years, Merlen’s alerted them to local poachers he’s come across out among the islands as he’s doing his fieldwork. When the Park Service got use of a light plane not too long ago to patrol the archipelago from the air, they asked Merlen to fly along as a spotter, which he happily did. There have been times when he’s taken matters into his own work- worn hands, boarding an illegal boat that he’s happened upon, cutting the nets, and, if possible, releasing the catches. He’s faced a machete or two, he says, but such “incidents,” as he calls them, have not yet gone beyond threats.

If they did, that wouldn’t stop Merlen. There comes a point, he will tell you, where talking to people and hoping they’ll change is not enough. He’s attended more meetings than he can remember— with the Park Service staff, with political groups, with the fishermen themselves—and all that those meetings amount to in most cases are mere words, for which Merlen has a low tolerance.

“Talking and talking in circles when you know people are camped at that very moment on a beach over in Fernandina—that can become infuriating,” he says. “I find it deeply disturbing when people make a mockery of the innocence of these islands. Sometimes you’ve just got to’do something.” He’s in deep water now, midway across the mouth of the bay, the throttle wide open as a white spume of seawater sprays from the stern of his launch.
Abruptly, he cuts the engine to idle. The sounds of the breakers on the ocean reefs to the south are carried in with the afternoon breeze. The clouds have grown thick. The bay water is dark but still clear. To the right, from the harbor, a small fin appears, slicing the surface as it slides toward the skiff.

It closes to ten yards, then sinks. Then another appears, off to its right. This fin, too, is bound straight for the boat and also disappears just off the bow. Merlen leans over the side, peering into the water as a massive shadow glides directly beneath. The shadow is almost as wide as his dinghy is long, with tiny twin horns jutting from its head, a long whiplike tail in the back, and to the sides, a broad sweeping pair of black, batlike wings. Merlen knew what this creature was when that first “fin” appeared: a large manta ray, about eight feet across.

“Ah, he’s a good one,” Merlen says, moving to the boat’s other side as the diablo del mar (“sea devil”) moves away. In the distance its pectoral wing tips again split the surface as it turns back toward Merlen. “Curious, are we?” he says, as if the thing understands him.

The ray slides under the dinghy once more, then heads off toward the sea. Merlen guns the engine and in minutes he’s rounding a jetty of cactus and stones—Angermeyer Point, gateway to the “other side.” Here he turns toward a large, quiet cove, Bud’s Bay, where a lone boat is anchored. The boat, a gray, fiberglass-hulled work vessel, is Merlen’s.

“Mm, looks like the birds have been busy,” he says, pulling himself up onto a nonskid deck spattered with guano. “I don’t begrudge them that,” he says, knotting the skiff’s rope to a railing. The water is green here. So are the mangroves. The rain clouds have veered east, and the sun has appeared. The roar of the surf out past the point can hardly be heard in the cove’s tree-sheltered still-ness. Merlen ignores the splash of a booby dive-bombing nearby, but he raises his head at the screech of a heron somewhere in the man- groves. Another screech and he’s into the wheelhouse, from which he emerges in seconds, gripping a pair of binoculars. “Ah, there it is,” he says, training the glasses on the thick, shoreline foliage. “They’ve got a nest going there, haven’t they?”

A yellow-and-blue tarp is stretched over the stern of the deck. Merlen sets down his field glasses, takes off his cap, and moves into the shade. A pelican glides past, skimming the cove’s glassy surface. This is the Ratty, a forty-two-foot line-fishing boat built in Norway in the late 1970s. Merlen bought it nine years ago, after the Ecuadorian fishery that owned it went bankrupt. He rigged a mast to the wheelhouse—”I wanted to use the wind a bit”—and has taken it since into just about every nook of these islands. He’s done seismograph studies, charted seawater temperatures, and taped the deep- water sounds of fur seals feeding at night. But the boat’s primary purpose is finding and following whales.

“That’s what this is,” Merlen says, stroking his beard as he studies the clouds to the east. “A whale hunter.”
The hunting he’s focused on lately is a survey of the more than 1,500 sperm whales known to exist in these waters. The study was begun in 1985 by a professor of marine biology in Halifax, Canada. That was six years before Merlen bought this boat. Now he and the professor are partners in a project that may, like much of the fieldwork Merlen conducts, last the rest of his life, or at least as long as the funding doesn’t run out.

The subject of money is a sore spot for Merlen. It’s no revelation that money is at the root of the problems that have come to plague the Galapagos: the poaching, the development, the influx of immigrants. But the fact that money has also become the determining factor in how those problems might be solved is more than just bothersome to him. It makes him feel ill.

“My first impression of the Galapagos,” he says, pulling his knees to his chest as he leans back against a hard metal hatch, “was of an incredibly low-key place. I didn’t have any money, and nobody else had any money. And that was fine. It was all the more striking for that, because it was so beautifully.“ He hangs on the silence, gazing out at the cove. Then he looks down at the deck. “Remote,” he finishes.

It was in 1970 that Merlen first came here, as a crewman on a sailboat called the Golden Cachelot, one of the earliest vessels to tour the islands. He was twenty-five then, with an agriculture degree from his native England, a degree for which he’d developed a strong distaste. “I was very disillusioned with a lot that was going on in that industry, just pouring a lot of chemicals on the soil. So I decided to have a look at the ocean and see what was happening there.”

He began as a volunteer at the Station, and over the ensuing decades, through tireless fieldwork, established himself as a bona fide marine scientist. Today he is known as one of the leading authorities on the biota of the Galapagos, albeit one without an academic degree. “I’ve sort of taken my own route in things,” he says, cracking the smallest of smiles. “I’ve found it can be just as effective, maybe more so, to come around from the rear and make your way up that way.”

The career he’s established is truly a labor of love. And like deeply felt love of any kind, there is pain that comes with it. The cascading events of the past decade or so distress Merlen in the same way that they disturb others who have watched the Galapagos they once knew turn inside out.

“Introduced organisms, increasing population, demands for resources, demands for tourism: Everybody’s making demands on these islands in one way or another, and the pace of those demands has been exponential, catastrophically so.”

A thump from above interrupts his thought. He jumps up to find a gull perched on the tarp. “No, it’s all right,” he coos, as if soothing a lover, “it’s all right. You don’t have to go.” And it doesn’t. The bird sits and listens as Merlen continues. “Ideology or philosophy alone is no longer enough,” he says. “What happens here in the Galapagos is determined now by who has more money. We can’t simply say, ‘This is an extraordinary thing we have here, and why can’t we just be altruistic enough to leave it alone?’ No, we have to fight over it, and the weapon becomes money. We’ve wound up with huge sums of money being spent on both sides to determine the fate of these islands. And it all, in the end, costs the planet.

“That’s something people tend to forget, that money does not come from nowhere. It comes from one resource or another. The more that we spend, the more those resources, somewhere, are used up.” He stops. He’s self-conscious now, aware that his words might sound a little. . . self-righteous. He looks at his sneakers and at his ship. He scratches his beard.

“One has to be careful not to be two-faced about all this. I mean, I make my demands on the resources of the Earth, like anyone else. Maybe not as much, but I have a camera. I have a boat.” He pauses again, hunting for just the right words. “It’s all about balance,” he finally says. “I think we need to try, always, not to be too demanding. And when we do make demands, I think we must match them with an equal amount of care and responsibility.”
That’s it, the equation he’s looking for.

“This isn’t just true for the Galapagos and pepinos, or for Ecuador and what’s going on there. It’s true for any place, with any natural resource, anywhere in the world. If you want to get your hands on a resource, you ought to be responsible for looking after it and not squandering it. At the moment, at least, the attitude here in the islands is if I don’t take it, the next boat will. And they’re right.”

And Merlen doesn’t entirely blame them. He writes more than just scientific papers. Sometimes he writes opinion columns for the popular press, for newspapers back on the mainland, or for the Research Station’s newsletter, the Noticias de Galapagos, which is mailed worldwide to members of the Charles Darwin Foundation. In one of those columns, Merlen boils the pepino trade down to its essence: If I had been born in the Guasmo of Guayaquil, into the abject poverty that occurs there, into a world of harsh survival, into a world without trinkets and fancy toys such as television, Beta-max, and gaudy clothes, I would jump with glee to be offered ten thousand sucres a day to pick animals from the sea floor, to be able to join the wealthy elite, gaining the power to buy my own baubles and vodka and Nike shoes.

That column was written six years ago, when the “Pepino War” first began. Those ten thousand sucres a day now sound quaintly archaic compared with the $200 or more a day earned by the pepiñeros licensed to hunt during the most recent, two-month “season” okayed by the government. The “season” was an experiment, an attempt to appease local fishermen by allowing limited fishing of the pepinos. The result was a travesty of disastrous proportions. What was intended to be a controlled compromise turned into a feeding frenzy. Before they could begin diving, each fisherman had to secure a cédula de colono (a permit) from the government. The idea was to limit the fishing to islanders. The result was that more than 20,000 permits were issued—more than the official population of the islands. Nearly $4 million worth of pepinos were hauled out of the waters during those two months.
“And those,” Merlen notes, “were just the legal sales.”

There are pepiñeros in Puerto Ayora, and in Puerto Baquerizo as well, but their numbers are miniscule compared with the population of poachers in Puerto Villamil, on the southernmost tip of the western island of Isabela. Galápagans call Villamil “Tierra de Nadie” (“No-Man’s-Land”) because of its almost complete absence of authority. While Puerto Ayora and Baquerizo present the facade of regulations and rules, in Villamil anything goes.
“That’s the way it’s always been over there,” Merlen says. “People do what they want. It used to just be a slow, lazy, peaceful, little town. Now it’s like the Wild West.”

Villamil was a penal colony until 1959, the same year the Park was created. Its dusty streets are still unpaved today. There are a few small hotels, but their rooms typically sit empty. The Research Station runs a bare-bones outpost operation there, with a staff of ten who are typically out doing fieldwork. Villamil is so far away from the hub of the
islands (sixty ocean miles west of Puerto Ayora) that none but the most adventuresome of travelers go there. There is no tourist “attraction” to see, except for, perhaps, the Muro de las Ldgrimas—the “Wall of Tears”—a monument to pointless brutality standing deep in the bush, four miles from the village. It is nothing but a wall of rough volcanic stones, piled fifty feet high, some twenty feet wide at its base and a hundred or so yards in length. It was built by those prisoners, back in the 1940s and ‘50s, who were force-marched each day into the island’s interior and made to pile lava boulders and rocks atop one another. The reason, according to one written account, was “to subdue the criminal instincts of the prisoners as well as their depraved passions.”

Officially, no more than a thousand or so people live in Villamil today. Almost all are involved, in one way or another, with pepinos. The place is Just too far away for the Park Service to effectively police, and so the poachers operate openly, unabashedly. There is a café in town called the Barra Pepino. The skiffs tied to the village’s wharf each carry a gasoline-powered compressor and long, coiled lengths of bright-blue rubber tubing. The compressors run air through the tubes to the divers’ regulators, which the divers hold in their mouths as they crawl on the ocean floor stuffing their sacks with pepinos. Safety concerns, training, even the most elementary precautions, are ignored, and with predictable results. Last year more than fifty divers from Villamil wound up in Ecuador’s only decompression chamber, on the mainland in Guayaquil. Six died. And no one has counted the number of this village’s men who lie nearly unconscious in the shade of the town’s sun-beaten buildings or who lurch through its streets, their brains addled by the bends and by the oil and gasoline fumes sucked through those dive hoses.

It’s from Villamil that most of the islands’ illicit fishermen embark to the outermost beaches of Isabela and Fernandina, where they build their camps and cook their pepinos. While the pepiñeros of Puerto Ayora have been known to rent the entire Quatro y Media for an evening, thus closing the place to the public, the Villamilans have no such luxury within reach. So they import their women, bringing out speedboats of prostitutes to their fishing camps, where the women are paid in pepinos, which they eagerly accept.

“A hundred pepinos a go,” says Merlen, who not long ago encountered a boat called the Michelle off a Fernandina beach known as Punta Mangle. Merlen asked the Ecuadorians onboard if this wasn’t the boat people have heard so much about, the one known to carry prostitutes out to the pepiñeros. “No, señor,” answered one of the men. “They are cocineras.” Cooks. “Cooks, indeed,” Merlen laughed.

He was able to help break up a camp that day, but there are so many more camps. And lately the pepiñeros have been turning to lobsters, shark fins, sea urchins, and anything else for which there might be a market. In that battle of money which Merlen bemoans, the cash flowing into the hands of the fishermen—from the pepiñeros of Villamil to the trawlers based out of Manta—js a deluge compared with the relative trickle of funds coming in to the Park Service and the Station and the organizations and agencies around the world devoted to saving these islands and the islanders from themselves.

Even this high-minded purpose is a sticking point for Merlen. “It’s easy for most of us—the scientists and the people who care about the Galapagos and who are trying to get the people to do certain things to protect it—it’s easy for us to prescribe solutions because we can afford to do so. If we were in these people’s shoes, it wouldn’t seem quite so simple.”

This is where Merlen turns back to philosophy, which, in the end, is the one place he finds hope. The sun is now setting, the sky to the west turning purple and pink as he unties the skiff’s rope from the railing. “Someone once said that we live by love, by hope, and by example,” he says, “and the greatest of these is hope. I think that might be true not just for man, but for animals as well.” He turns his head toward the shore, where the heron’s nest sits. Beyond it, barely visible through the foliage, sits a sad, weatherbeaten old home. “Life isn’t necessarily easy for any of us,” he says, “man or animal.” With that he starts the skiff’s engine and points it toward home.

Paradise
The woman is choosy about her soft drinks. She and her tour group, all Americans, just arrived in Jack’s lobby a few minutes ago after a midmorning hike to the Station. They’re hot, tired, and thirsty. Jack’s more than willing to oblige, asking them each what they’d like in the way of a beverage.
“Ginger ale,” says the woman, as she sighs deeply and drops her fanny pack on a chair by the window. She gives Jack no more than a glance as she unzips the bag and searches for something. As far as she knows—as far as she cares—this man in his flip-flops and T-shirt and shorts is part of the help at this hotel, just another employee. Which bothers Jack not in the least.

“We don’t have ginger ale,” he says pleasantly enough, moving toward the bar to fetch the others their drinks.
“Mm,” says the woman, still not looking up. “Have you got Seven-Up?” “No Seven-Up,” says Jack, lifting a handful of cold bottles from the cooler. “We’ve got Sprite.” The woman stops, lifts her head, and with exquisite deliberation turns and gazes at Jack. “Sprite,” she says flatly, as if he’s just tossed her a foul-smelling bone. She purses her lips, turns her eyes back to her bag, gives her hair a quick flip, and repeats the word. “Sprite.”

Jack doesn’t need this grief, not this morning. Nuñez and the surfers checked out an hour or so ago, and indeed, the ex-president’s nephew skipped on part of the bill. “There’s an old Ecuadorian saying,” Jack said with a shrug after the surfers had left: “It’s the same shit; they just change the flies.”

Maybe, after all these years, Jack’s finally had enough of the flies. Maybe it’s his dad’s illness—the old man’s mortality shoving itself in Jack’s face so close he can smell it. Whatever it is, the way Jack feels right now, he’d sell this hotel in a minute if a buyer just happened along. “If someone walked in with a suitcase full of cash and a couple
of tickets out of here,” he says, setting up a sewing machine on a lobby table after the tour group has finished their drinks and moved on, “I’d be gone. Not immediately, not forever, but I’d be gone.”

He fetches some swatches of neon-bright fabric from a room in the back. The scuba boat he owns with his dive shop partner, Mathias, needs some new flags, so Jack’s doing what’s always been done with such needs around here: He’s making them himself. The hum of the sewing machine blends with the sound of the surf floating in through the lobby’s screen door.

“Two million,” says Jack. That’s what he figures the place ought to go for. If someone laid that kind of cash on the table, he’d take it. Then at last he’d be able to settle up with his wife, Patricia, finalize their divorce and move ahead and get married to Romy. He’d love to tie up the loose ends with Romy and Audrey. It would clean things up as well for his daughter, Noell, whom Patricia took with her to California when she and Jack split back in 1992. Noell was two at the time. She’s ten now. Jack can’t wait to see her next month when he stops in L.A. on the way to pick up his father in Thailand.

California remains a touchstone for Jack, even after all this time. It’s where he grew up, of course. It’s where his mother still lives. It’s where Patricia and he met, before he first came to the Galapagos. And it’s where he looked up Patricia two decades later, after she wrote him a letter that arrived out of nowhere. They got married shortly thereafter, in 1987, and she came down to the islands with Jack to help run the hotel. Two years after that, Noell was born. Nearly three years later, Patricia had had enough—of the Galapagos, of the hotel, of the marriage—and went home.

Then came Romy. It’s easy to look at the three of them—Jack, Romy, and Audrey—and mistake Jack for Audrey’s grandfather. Happens all the time. Jack doesn’t care. In fact, he kind of delights in the surprise on a hotel guest’s face when they discover that Audrey is Jack’s daughter and that the striking Peruvian beauty beside Jack is his wife.
Actually, Romy’s only part Peruvian, on her mother’s side. The other parts—Italian and Austrian—come from her father, whose family fled northern Italy during World War II and wound up in Lima, where Romy was born in the summer of 1962.

Five years after that—the same year Jack first came to the Galapagos—Romy’s dad, Armando Antonio Alfredo Hartmann, took his family to South Bend, Indiana, where he spent the next five years at Notre Dame earning his Ph.D. in chemistry. Then he moved his family back to Peru. That explains Romy’s fluent English and dead-on American accent.

 
Romy arrived in Puerto Ayora in early 1986, after a short stint in Germany as a perfumer and a couple of years as a museum guide in Guayaquil. The Galapagos trip was a lark, with a friend who’d gotten a wild hair to visit the islands. For Romy, it was love at first sight— “no traffic, dirt streets, everyone barefoot”—and she wound up staying. She did “the hippie thing,” as she calls it, for a couple of years, painting T-shirts and making sand-cast candles to sell to the tourists. Then she went to work at Jack’s hotel. She and Jack were “just friends,” she says, until Patricia moved out. “Then,” she says, “we became more than just friends. I realized I loved him.” They moved in together that year. Audrey was born three years later, in 1995.

Now Audrey’s four, and Romy’s getting a bit edgy about the future, about how life—Audrey’s life—will develop if they stay on this island. Audrey’s close to school-age now—in fact, that’s where she is at the moment, at a little preschool up in the village, where Romy will fetch her in a half hour or so.

Right now Romy’s enjoying the downtime, relaxing on a lobby sofa with a hot cup of coffee before returning to being a mom. Her thick dark hair’s up in a bun. Her strong, shapely figure is draped in a loose T-shirt and shorts. She’s got paint on her hands from a still life she’s working on back at the house, a big painting she hopes to have framed and ready to hang by next week. The portrait of Darwin on the wall, the one with the window frame, is Romy’s. If all she had to do was paint and pass her days here on this island for the rest of her life, she’d be perfectly happy. That’s part of the reason she’s stayed for the past fourteen years. This island life, she admits, can be hypnotic, seductive, easy to settle into without even knowing you’ve done it.

But now there’s Audrey to worry about. It would be nice, for starters, says Rorny, if she and Jack could get married, which is something Jack’s wanted from the beginning. “I don’t really care much, myself,” Romy says. “I’m not crazy about marriage. But I would do it for Audrey’s sake because of social reasons.”

Beyond the issue of marriage, the question of raising Audrey in such an insular place is beginning to press on both Romy and Jack. “If we keep her here,” Romy says, taking a sip from her cup, “it’s like we’re keeping her in a,ubbleShe needs abetter education than what she’s going to get here.”

She takes another sip. “Shit, man,” she says, setting the cup down and turning to look out the window at the glimmering bay, “she needs to know there’s a world out there, even if it’s falling apart.” It does indeed feel as if the world—at least Ecuador’s little corner of it—is imploding. The volcanoes around Quito are continuing to blow; newspapers publish eruption alerts every morning. The Colombians are making louder anti-U.S. noises. And the capital city is now under siege from the Indios, with hourly news updates barking out of radios perched in windows and on store counters throughout Puerto Ayora.

But up at the National Park headquarters, just off the road to the Station, it’s as if nothing is happening, as if the mainland is as tranquilo as the finches perched on the pads of the cactus that surround this compound of sea-green, cinder block buildings.

The front door to one of the buildings is open, the sound of a radio drifting from inside. But the radio’s not tuned to the news. It’s playing rap music—Tupac Shakur chanting and whoofing from a tiny transistor as a woman sits at a computer typing a letter. She’s Eliecer Cruz’s secretary, and the director is in, if you’d like to have a seat. He’ll be free in a couple of minutes.

Which he is. The door opens, a squad of Park lieutenants files out, and Cruz returns to a desk strewn with memos, reports, and fresh faxes. It could seem very hectic, but Cruz is unruffled. The same quiet calmness he displayed when he spoke to the mob from the steps of Judge Avellan’s building last year, the easy confidence he exudes whenever he’s in public, is here, when he’s alone in his office. His English is sketchy, so an assistant is called in to translator as Cruz explains how in the world he can be so relaxed when his job, this Park, the very nature of these entire islands might be completely transformed at any moment.

Cruz settles back in his chair and half-smiles. “Anything is possible in situations like this,” he admits. He counts on his fingers the number of Ecuadorian presidents who have come and gone in the four years he has directed this Park. “. . . dos, tres, qua tro.” He smiles. Four.

“I am always walking a tightrope,” he says. There are politicians both here on the islands and certainly on the mainland, he says, who would love nothing more than to see him removed. There are local businessmen and fishermen who would pay for the freedom to pursue their vocations unhindered by aggressive Park wardens enforcing Park laws. Each time the government changes hands, the hopes of Cruz’s detractors are kindled. And each time— so far—he has survived.

“Gatos. . . ,“ he says. “Cats,” repeats the translator. “They have nine lives.” Cruz nods and stands. He’s not concerned with the minute-to- minute accounts of upheaval on the mainland. He’s in continual contact with Roz Cameron’s boss, the head of the Research Station, an Englishman named Robert Bensted-Smith. And he’s in touch as well with the U.S. Embassy in Quito. But all Cruz will say about these conversations—all that needs o be said, he says as he smiles—is that “they have promised me they will ‘fight like the tiger’ for us.”

That leaves him free to focus on his job, on the problems at hand, which at the moment include a nasty little situation that’s been developing since early last year. It seems that an imaginative entrepreneur from the mainland has put together a unique Galápagos tour package and has begun advertising it on the Internet. Cruz pulls a printout of the Web page from a folder and slides it across his desk. The page is adorned with photos of seals, tortoises, and iguanas. But its title is what catches the eye:

ANDEAN OUTDOOR OUTFITTERS

Conservation Through Hunting
The description of what these tours offer is even more arresting:
See Charles Darwin’s legendary islands and hunt the extensive populations of feral game. The price for six nights and five days, including airfare from Miami, is $4,800 per person. Two telephone numbers are provided, one a U.s. 800 number in Boca Raton, the other a number in Guayaquil. It seems that last March, the company’s first customer arrived here, an American who flew in with his wife. The couple was met by two “guides” who took them by truck, boat, and on foot for a five-day foray into the islands that exceeded the clients’ wildest expectations—at least according to an account of the trip written by the husband, an attorney from Iowa named Richard Meyer, who summed up his experience for a newsletter called The Hunting Report, published out of Miami.

The excursion, wrote Meyer, was an anniversary gift for himself and his wife, Lynn. It “allowed us to get off the beaten path and really see the Galapagos,” he explained at the start of his piece. Then he went into detail:
The experience is not really a sport hunt as such, nor is it a “drive- the-Suburban-out-to-the-pasture” prairie dog shoot.

Travel to the first shooting area I visited on Santa Cruz Island involved at least a one-hour trip by truck and another hour by open boat powered by a 50 hp outboard. We saw sea lions, sea turtles and manta rays on the boat trip. While I walked inland and shot 13 feral donkeys in 372 hours, my wife snorkeled with her guide, who caught fresh lobsters and prepared a midday luncheon.

That was the first day. The journey went on:
I spent another day in the Galapagos trying to shoot a wild boar that we hunted with the locals’ hunting dogs. The boar was so large that the dogs were unable to turn or stop it, so I did not get a shot. A pleasantly surprising aspect of this hunt was the jolt you got seeing the 400-pound tortoises meandering along in the bushes.

Then came two eventful days on Santiago Island:
The landing on the beach here was rugged and wet. Once through the surf, we set up a traditional “Galápaganian fishing camp” consisting of a suspended tarp to shade the sun and a campfire. In the late afternoon heat, I shot 17 feral goats. The bushes and grass on the island had been stripped by them, leaving little vegetation for the land tortoises and other native fauna.

My wife and her guide snorkeled, hiked, and photographed marine iguanas, pink flamingos, sea turtles and other wildlife. That night, she and I slept in a nylon pup tent on the beach. We were awakened after midnight by a sea turtle throwing sand on our tent as she dug a nest for her eggs. The next morning, I shot 51 goats in about 3 1/2 hours.

On our last day, we traveled two hours by open boat to the west side of Santiago. We attempted to find wild boar while my wife and her guide snorkeled for lobster. After an hour of unsuccessful searching for boars, we went back toward the beach, where I shot 24 feral donkeys in 1’/2 hours. We then went back to the landing site for a wedding anniversary luncheon of wine, fruit salad, and fresh lobster ceviche. After lunch, we boated back to the hotel. That evening, we were treated to a delightful anniversary dinner at a rural restaurant.

In conclusion, wrote Meyer:
A trip there organized by Escobar, even without shooting, would be far preferable to the canned offerings of the tour operators. Indeed, says Cruz. He recites just a few of the laws broken here: hunting without permits, transporting tourists in open craft between islands without license, camping on Park land without permits, camping in a turtle nesting area, and fishing for lobster out of season without permits. “It is blatant,” says Cruz. “Very blatant.”
He doesn’t blame the American and his wife, who Cruz assumes were unaware that what they were doing was illegal. But the man who set this all up, the owner of Andean Outdoor Outfitters, an American-born Ecuadorian named Braden Escobar, knows just what he is doing, says Cruz. And if things go as Cruz plans, the next time Escobar arrives for such an outing, he will be placed under arrest.

It’s one thing, says Cruz, for the Park Service to struggle with the complex problem of getting rid of the chivos—the goats—as well as the wild pigs and other introduced species disrupting these islands. He recognizes that the locals were hunting these goats and pigs long before the Park even existed. He is a local himself, born on Floreana thirty-four years ago. He respects the needs of his fellow Galäpaguenos, he says, both the fishermen and the people who live in the hills. For the former, a licensing system and limited fishing seasons have been created. The latter are allowed to hunt wild game in similarly controlled circumstances.

But outsiders like Escobar, says Cruz, are no better than the mainland industrial fishing fleets who pillage the Galapagos waters with no regard for the future of the animals that live in those waters nor for the Galápaguenos who depend on those animals for their very existence.

It’s a high-wire act, Cruz admits, controlling the outside invaders while appeasing the people who live here—especially the fishermen. This has become possibly the most critical part of his job: keeping the people who live on these islands happy while educating them about why they must help manage and protect the rich resources that surround them. It’s not easy, he admits, to teach people to take the long view in a culture like Ecuador’s, a country that has become so conditioned—and understandably so—to living for today rather than preparing for tomorrow.
With the fishermen, it’s an admittedly complex problem to deal with, says Cruz, especially with all the recent arrivals from the mainland who have no feel or affection for these islands. But the issue of hunting is much simpler. While thousands of Galapagans’ lives depend upon fishing, he says, very few, if any, are as dependent on hunting. Bagging goats and wild boars is a supplemental activity at best for the farmers and cattlemen who live in the highlands. As for the claim made by people like Escobar that they are performing a public service by helping the Park get rid of these unwanted animals; well, says Cruz, that claim is as absurd as it is insincere.

To begin with, he explains, there are tens of thousands of wild goats on these islands—250,000 to be somewhat precise, nearly half that number on Isabela alone. With the kind of hit-and-miss excursions run by freelancers like Escobar, their “customers” wind up shooting maybe a few dozen goats at best, and in a completely random fashion. What use, Cruz asks, is that?

This is a science, he says, getting rid of animals like this. It must be systematic. It requires planning and preparation, which Cruz’s people, working with advisors from the Research Station, have been applying for quite a few years now. Cruz is proud to point out, as are the people at the Station, that the feral goat and pig populations on several islands—Espanola, Plazas, Santa Fe, Rábida—have been completely eradicated during the past two decades, thanks in large part to Park wardens like a man named David Sales, who just returned from a fifteen-day pig hunt on Santiago.

Men like Sales are called matar-chanchos—”pig stickers”—and they are proud of the title. Sales has been part of a pig-hunting team for four years now, since he joined the Park Service at age twenty- six. He was born and grew up here in the highlands of Santa Cruz, where his family still raises cattle today. He’s a good-humored man with an easy smile that spreads widely beneath his Zapata-like moustache. And he is in tremendous physical condition, which is easy to understand once his job—”one of the most dangerous jobs in the Park,” he points out—is explained.
The chanchos—the wild pigs, which ravage sea turtle, tortoise, and iguana nesting grounds—are hunted separately from and, critically, prior to the goats, says Sales. This, he explains, is because the Still ahead (once Sales and his team have completed their job) are the 80,000 or so goats that now roam Santiago. At the moment, however, the focus of the Park Service’s goat-hunting efforts is the island of Isabela, where an assault on the scale of the invasion of Normandy is soon to be launched. Eliecer Cruz, like his counterparts at the Station, is careful about talking too much about this one. It’s politically touchy, the image of helicopter gunships carrying crews of sharpshooters with automatic weapons spraying death on herds of wild goats. Cruz would prefer that his brother, Felipé, talk about this, which Felipé is more than happy to do.

Felipé Cruz’s office is in a building beyond Eliecer’s, back at the rear of the Park Service compound. On this early afternoon, Felipé’s outside having a smoke. Behind him are two large, horned skulls mounted to the bars of a window. “Ah, yes,” he says, glancing up at the trophies, “the last two goats—big ones—from Pinta.”

These were the last two of 38,000 killed on that island in the mid-1970s. That’s the kind of clean work that makes Felipé smile. Dealing with nonindigenous species is his specialty. It’s what he studied in college in the United States, in Hawaii, and in Colorado, where he went on a Fulbright Scholarship to learn, as he puts it, “how to efficiently kill varmints.”

Felipé actually began his education pursuing an undergraduate ornithology degree in the early 1980s from the University of Connecticut. As a boy, he loved watching the dark-rumped petrels skim the waves that washed up on the beaches of his home island, Floreana. As a young man, he saw those same birds nearly wiped out by rats, cats, pigs, dogs, and donkeys that had infested that island and others. Midway through his college career, he had an epiphany, which led to the Fulbright.

“I decided that, shit, as just a scientist studying this stuff, I wasn’t going to get anything actually done. I realized, hey, in order to save my birds, I’m going to have to learn to destroy these animals.” Felipé is the seventh of his parents’ twelve children, eight years older than his brother Eliecer. “Lucky seven,” he says with a grin, flicking an ash and taking a seat on a bare picnic table. The landscape around him is overgrown desert, thick brush and cactus stretching off toward the north where the highlands are framed against a bright, turquoise sky. He wears a Park Service ball cap, a white T-shirt and shorts, and thick, hand-sewn sandals on his tough, calloused feet. He’s lean, sinewy, perpetually restless. He hates meetings, of which he’s attended two already today. He’d much rather be here, with his men and their weapons, or out in the field.

He stubs out his cigarette and moves into his office, where a wall- sized relief map of Isla Isabela looms over his desk. The map is a prism of colors: forest-green volcanic craters and cones ringed by orange and yellow mountainside slopes, edged by coastlines of pink, and, surrounding it all, a deep-cobalt-blue sea. Beyond the map stands a bookcase of binders with handwritten titles: “Chivos Santiago”; “Chanchos Santiago”; and, most conspicuously, “Isabela Sur: Animales Introducidos.”

The sanitary term for Felipé’s specialty is “eradication.” His title at the moment is Technical Director of the Isabela Project, whose goal, he explains, again using sanitized biospeak, is the “ecological restoration” of the northern half of that island. Boil it down, his job is to kill all the goats.

If there is one place in the Galapagos that illustrates the nightmare of introduced species, it is Isabela. By far the largest of the archipelago’s thirteen main islands—eighty miles long from north to south, fifty miles wide at its thickest—Isabela is home to the Galapagos’ largest population of giant tortoises. The animals feed and nest on the slopes of the island’s spectacular volcanoes—Wolf, Darwin, Alcedo. Eighteen years ago, in the summer of 1982, when the first comprehensive study was made of the wild goats on Isabela, only ten of the animals, apparently left by fishermen, could be found on the island. Today there are more than 100,000.

“Goats are born for one thing,” Felipé says flatly. “To reproduce.” That reproduction, he explains, is explosively exponential. A wild female goat reaches sexual maturity when she’s seven months old. The typical nanny gives birth to two kids at a time. She does this, on average, three or four times a year for the length of her life. “Do the numbers yourself,” says Felipé. “They multiply fast.”

The havoc these animals wreak as they devour the landscape is difficult to describe with mere words, says Felipé. This is why he carries a set of slides when he speaks to visiting tour groups or scientists. The photographs, taken by Tui de Roy, show specific locations on the rim and slopes of Volcán Alcedo, the island’s largest volcano and a prime tortoise feeding ground. The first set of photos, taken in the mid-1980s, shows lush verdant foliage, Amazonian in its richness. The second, taken just ten years later in the same locations, shows a landscape of death, utter defoliation, barren, eroded dirt slopes with hardly a bush or a tree to be seen. “Like in Vietnam,” says Cruz, “after they used Agent Orange.”

It was the shock of such devastation that prompted the Darwin Foundation, through both the Station and the National Park, to launch an unprecedented counterattack on these animals. With funding from a group called the Global Environmental Facilities—a branch of the World Bank—funneled through an arm of the United Nations called the U.N. Development Project, the pieces are now almost in place for the most expansive and expensive governmental assault on wild animals in the history of man.

It will last for two years, with another year of follow-up study. It will use two helicopters brought in from either New Zealand or Australia—the bid is still out—with flight crews and sharpshooters supported by ground teams of Galapagos Park Rangers. It will cost $6 million. And in charge of it all is Felipé, who now steps outside into the midafternoon heat, lights another cigarette, and crosses a small dirt courtyard that leads to a bunkerlike building and a locked metal door. He pulls out a key with the pride of a parent showing off a new baby.
Inside is an arsenal worthy of Patton.

Eight AR-l5 .223-caliber semiautomatic rifles, each in its own cushioned carrying case—”a military-caliber, assault-type weapon,” says Felipé, lifting one of the gleaming, unfired long-guns from its container. “Very efficient.”
Eight Benelli twelve-gauge shotguns with “box-shot” ammunition—”just one big piece of lead,” he says, pulling one of the shells from its carton and flipping it into the air, “rather than many small pellets.”

Four dozen Ruger .223-caliber, bolt-action rifies—”f or the ground crews,” he says. He opens a closet containing hundreds of boxes of bullets. He pulls down from a shelf one of twelve velvet-soft sacks, each containing a sleek rifle scope. On wooden, warehouselike shelving that runs from one end of the room to the other are arranged dozens of pairs of gleaming black combat boots, radio chargers, portable generators, solar panels, sleeping bags, cases of insect spray, GPS monitors—all that his rangers could possibly need as they work their way over those hills and ravines, shooting every goat they see.

“This is the largest area in the world where an eradication program has ever been attempted,” says Felipé. “And I know we are going to get hell for it. That is what happened in Hawaii, where they had a tremendous problem with feral pigs. They used snare traps there, and the animal rights people were very upset.”

He steps back outside, locks the door, and lights another cigarette. “I know these animal rights people are going to try to do some hassle with us,” he says. “They want more humane ways of killing these animals? Come on! I mean, pigs are not human. Goats are not human. And the point is, they don’t belong here. Look at the damage they’re doing.”

He shakes his head. “Let’s be real, man.” He takes a seat back on the table behind his office, gazing up at the hills, where a bank of cottony cumulus clouds have now gathered. It’s funny, he says, that someone like himself should become a target of animal lovers. No one has lived with and loves wild animals more than he. “Being a naturalist,” he says, waving an arm at the landscape before him, “it’s in my blood.” And in his brother’s. And in the blood of the other ten children raised by Emma and Eliecer Cruz Sr. on the island of Floreana. Floreana. To Galapagos tour groups with nothing to go on but their guidebooks, this southern island with the lyrical name is known for two things: the beach-mounted mailbox used by David Porter’s warship, the Essex, during the War of 1812 (a replica of that box still stands on the same spot today, offering visitors a novel way to mail a postcard home), and the scandalous multiple murders that transpired there in the mid-I 93 Os. The tale of those murders—of nude farming, sex slaves, and poisoned meat—is told eagerly to enraptured tourists by guides who embellish its edges with their own imaginations. As with many such stories massaged over time by both memory and myth, it’s hard to tell where fact blurs into fiction.

This much is known: A Berlin doctor named Friedrich Ritter, along with his lover, a woman named Dore Koerwin Strauch, left Germany in 1929, bound for the Galapagos, about which Ritter had read in a best-selling book of the time called Galdpagos: Wor1ds End. Published in 1923 by a writer named William Beebe, that book brought more attention to these islands than anything that had come before it, including Darwin’s writings. Beebe painted a portrait of a tropical paradise, albeit with a few unpleasant realities; still, more than a few readers envisioned a heaven on earth. It was Beebe’s book that lured the first Norwegians to the Galapagos in the l920s, and it had the same effect on Dr. Ritter.

A vegetarian, nudist, disciple of Nietzsche, student of Lao Tzu, and an avid astrologer, Friedrich Ritter had decided by the late 1920s that Berlin was not for him. Nor was Germany or Europe or any place on the planet where people were living. He was sick of society and envisioned life as an Adam in his own self-made Eden. So he sought out an Eve, whom he found in a former patient, Dote Koerwin Strauch.

Strauch happened to be married at the time, as was Ritter. But their utopian vision overwhelmed such a minor inconvenience. They informed their respective mates that they were leaving for the Galapagos Islands and offered the somewhat stunned spouses an invitation to come along if they’d like. Ritter’s wife and Strauch’s husband, not surprisingly, refused, and so the doctor and his lover turned to their preparations, which, according to some accounts, included the forty-eight-year-old Ritter pulling out all his teeth and forging himself a set of stainless steel dentures. He intended this to be a permanent stay.

It turned out to be, at least for the doctor. It wasn’t easy carving a farm and a home on the slopes of a dorment volcanano in Floreana’s tangled highlands. When the couple arrived, they soon learned why this island, which had once housed a penal colony, was now uninhabited. Wild cows, bulls, and pigs—the progeny of the animals once raised by the prisoners—feasted on whatever Ritter and Strauch tried to grow. When the couple built fences, the animals tore them apart. True to his vegetarian beliefs, Ritter had brought no weapons. But he had brought cases of dynamite to blast the volcanic rocks from the fields he was planning to farm. He soon found that the explosives were handy for blasting wild animals, too.

But nothing could hold off the mosquitoes, cockroaches, and ants that infested the couple’s home. The house itself, a geodesic dome of sorts built of logs cut from the surrounding forest, looked fine, solid, positively Germanic—until the first rainy season arrived. The logs warped, green shoots began to sprout from the walls, and tree branches grew up from the floors.

Still, with time the couple settled into their Eden and began to enjoy the fruits of success: bananas, papayas, oranges, coconuts, guavas, lemons, pineapples, and plums, all of which grew abundantly in the soil Ritter was able to clear. Vegetables were plentiful, too, as was fresh water from a trickling spring. They called their rustic estate Friedo—a combination of the couple’s first names. Flush with pros- perky, they began writing letters back home, which were delivered by sailors and yachtsmen who passed through the islands.

The Berlin press, which was well aware of the doctor’s scandalous departure, eagerly published the accounts, which soon drew curious visitors to the island to see the place for themselves. Among the first was an Englishman named J. F. Schimpff, who for a time lived in a cave not far from Ritter and Strauch. Schimpff wrote of his experience in a 1932 article published in a magazine called American Weekly: Naturally I felt somewhat embarrassed at intruding on these people, and thought it best to announce myself. I did this by singing the German national anthem, in honor of the fact that Dr. Ritter is from Berlin, and his Eve, Dora Koerwin, I had heard, was the wife of a Dresden school teacher. Before I had finished the second line, two absolutely naked figures, beautifully tanned, ran out of the roundhouse, stared at me a moment with open mouths, and then darted back again.

The doctor soon reappeared, dressed in canvas pants and a white shirt. Eve soon followed in a light blue cotton dress, under which there was nothing but Eve. Afterward I learned that this Adam had also paused to insert his false teeth. . . . I have read of savages losing their wits at the sight of a white man taking out his glass eye—well, these teeth had almost that effect on me. They were not made of porcelain, to resemble human teeth, but of glittering stainless steel.

Visitors were the last thing Ritter wanted. He treated guests rudely, but they continued to come to check out what a Time magazine reporter at the time described as “a free-love, back-to-nature colony.” Most of the visitors quickly left, turned away by the island’s brutal realities or by the brutal temper of the good doctor himself.

In the late summer of 1932, a German named Heinz Wittmer and his young wife, Margaret, arrived on the island and stayed. They built a home far enough from the Ritter estate that the doctor was not too disturbed. Less than three months later, however, in the autumn of that same year, a newcomer arrived who would turn out to be more than merely disturbing to both the doctor and Strauch, as well as the Wittmers.

She called herself a baroness, though her credentials were suspect and never confirmed. A Newsweek magazine account of this woman’s arrival on Floreana—culled from reports relayed by passers-through to the islands, as most Galapagos news was at this time—reads like pulp fiction, with the hint of a titter on the part of the writer:
The most recent newcomer is not even mildly annoyed by Ritter snubbings. She is Baroness Bousequet de Wagner of Vienna. With her she brought three men known only as Philipson, Alonzo, and Arends.

As she stepped ashore, the Baroness removed all her clothing except a pair of pink silk panties, flourished a .22 caliber revolver, and proclaimed herself Empress of Floreana. Since she had the revolver and no one else wanted to be Empress, her reign is undisputed. Ecuadorian officials, sent to investigate strange goings-on. were shocked when they first saw the Empress. They caught their breath a second time when they found the Ritters wearing nothing but hip boots to keep thorn bushes from scratching their legs. When the investigators submitted their report, Ecuadorian Government officials sadly shook their heads, carefully put the report away, and forgot about the whole matter.

The matter, however, was far from concluded. Over the course of the next year and a half, the friction among the neighbors increased. The baroness built her own highland dwelling, not far from Friedo, and gave her place a much more dramatic—and, she hoped, commercial—name: Hacienda Paraiso. Never mind that the hacienda was in fact hardly more than a hut. The baroness had plans to build a resort hotel here, to turn Floreana into “a sort of Miami,” as she put it in a quote published in Newsweek.

She never got quite that far. In November of 1934, two years after the baroness’ arrival, a news report burst from the Galapagos Islands that both shocked and captivated the world’s reading public. The remains of two bodies had been discovered on a beach of an island called Marchena, 120 miles north of Floreana. Photographs of the small, shriveled corpses, cooked by the sun and curled up like mummies on the black lava sand, were dispatched to newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and the United States. A flurry of news stories soon followed in publications ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Times of London to the great, gray New York Times, each rife with speculations about the identities of the bodies and whispers of murders of passion on this tropical island.
Over the ensuing weeks, a string of facts began to emerge from the fog of innuendo and rumor. A long-running feud had indeed developed among the baroness and her neighbors. The woman had clashed with both Ritter and Strauch, and with the Wittmers as well. To make matters worse, the doctor and his mate were not the best of friends with their neighbors, the Wittmers.

Events had begun escalating when one of the baroness’ house- mates, the man they had called Arends, was wounded in late 1933 in an unexplained shooting accident and was evacuated from the island. The following spring, in late March or April, the baroness vanished along with her housemate Philippson (whose name now had three ps in updated news reports). That July, the baroness’ third housemate, the aforementioned Alonzo—now identified as Rudolf Lorenz— turned up missing as well. Finally, that December, not long after the discovery of the bodies on the Marchena beach, Dr. Ritter fell dead from a sudden case of botulism after eating, of all things, a pot of bad chicken.
The string of strange deaths prompted wild speculations and questions that remain unanswered to this day—questions not only encouraged by guides and debated by tour groups, but also explored over the years by a slew of would-be detectives and novelists.

Among the most obvious puzzles: What happened to the baroness and Philippson? Were they lost? (This is quite possible in a place such as this.) Or were they killed in an accident? (This is just as conceivable.) Did they commit suicide? The baroness, according to both Dore Strauch and Margaret Wittmer, who were questioned by government investigators in the wake of the deaths, had grown increasingly distraught as her vision of a booming resort on this island faded with each passing month. Suicide was not out of the question.

Or were the pair murdered? If so, by whom? Lorenz emerged as the prime suspect here. He and the baroness’ other two housemates had, in Strauch’s words, been “slaves to the woman, even to the extent of sleeping together with her in one bed when commanded to do so.” After the exit of Arends, Lorenz had apparently been rejected in favor of Philippson, and in a fit of jealous rage might have murdered them both.

This would explain Lorenz’s hasty departure that July. In an agitated state, he managed to hail a passing Galapagan fisherman and persuaded the sailor to give him a lift. No one will ever know Lorenz’s ultimate destination. A heavy sea blew the small boat off course, its motor failed, and then the wind stopped, leaving Lorenz and the unfortunate fisherman at the mercy of the tides and sun. These were the two bodies found that November on the sand of Marchena.

As for the death of Dr. Ritter, the first question everyone asks is, How in the world did this avowed vegetarian wind up eating a plate of cooked chicken? It turned out, according to Strauch, that the doctor was a closet meat eater and had been for years. He had potted that fatal chicken himself and ate it with relish the day before he died. Strauch herself was a suspect in this one. Margaret Wittmer, who had seen Strauch and the doctor squabbling many times over the years, arrived at Ritter’s bedside during the man’s final hours and witnessed, at least according to her account, Ritter cursing Strauch with his last dying breath.

Strauch’s account differs. It throws the light of suspicion on Frau Wittmer, who had had her own run-ins with the doctor several times, at least according to Strauch. Dote Strauch left Floreana that December of 1934 and sailed home to Germany, where she wrote a book on the affair, titled Satan Comes to Eden. Margaret Wittmer wrote a book of her own, Floreana, which is still sold today in the souvenir shops in Puerto Ayora. Frau Wittmer will sign a copy for the occasional tourist lucky enough to catch the old woman at the small seaside hotel that her family still runs on the same Floreana beach that Margaret and Heinz first arrived at in 1932.

The hotel was built in the late 1940s with the best of the pine from the air base at Baltra. Some tourists today mistake the elderly woman who serves meals on the hotel’s screened-in patio for Margaret, but that’s actually her daughter, Floreanita, born here in 1937. Margaret’s upstairs in bed most of the time. She’s in her nineties and not doing well.

Floreana remains to this day little more than a remote outpost, the smallest by far of the four Galapagos Islands where people are permitted to live. Fewer than eighty souls make their home in the island’s seaside village of Puerto Velasco Ibarra. Most of them are Ecuadorians who have drifted here over the past several decades, settling into a cluster of small houses arrayed near the shore, around the Wittmers’ hotel, by the village’s simple cement wharf. Some of them fish. Some of them farm. And one of them emerges from a house near the wharf when the whine of a boat engine tells him visitors are arriving.

His name’s Walter, he’ll tell you, extending his hand as he helps tie up your boat. Walter Cruz. He looks like a native, an old-time islander with a thatch of white hair on his darkly tanned chest and a salt-and-pepper beard and wild random curls framing his round, ruddy face. But he sounds like an American, which he might as well be, after spending the past two dozen years in Miami. He just returned to Floreana last month, two days after Christmas, to resettie this house by the beach and a farm in the highlands, the place where he and his siblings grew up.

Walter knows they think he’s gone nuts, his younger brothers Felipé and Eliecer and the others. They can’t understand why Walter’s come back to this island at this stage in his life. He’s fifty-four, with a wife and two kids and a professional career in America. What in the world, they all want to know, is he doing back here? “I know, it seems crazy,” he says, leading the way up to his house. But his children are grown, he explains. And his wife, a schoolteacher, will soon join him when she wraps up her obligatioris back in Miami. As for that professional career of his, well, fixing boat engines for wealthy yacht owners around Biscayne Bay might have fattened his wallet, but it did not feed his soul.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he says, walking barefoot and shirtless across the dirt of his yard. “The city life, driving a car every day, running the rat race. I’m not made for that. Now this,” he says, lifting a coconut from a pile drying out at the end of his porch. “I am made for this,” he says, hacking the fruit open with a heavy machete.
A vehicle appears off in the distance, churning up dust as it descends from the highlands. It’s a four-wheel-drive Jeep with a man at the wheel: Walter’s younger brother Claudio. The three little boys chasing each other around the back of the house are Claudio’s kids. Walter has to explain this because, unlike himself, Claudio— the eighth of the Cruz children, born just after Felipé—has never moved off this island and speaks only Spanish.

The Jeep pulls up to the house, the engine shuts off, and the boys rush out to leap into the arms of their father. Whereas Walter is short, Claudio stands tall. Whereas Walter is thick, his brother is thin. Whereas Walter’s beard is speckled with gray, Claudio’s is black through and through. But they share the same wide, easy smile. “Twice a day he goes up to the farm,” explains Walter, as Claudio and the boys head into the house. “The rest of the time he’s down here,” meaning the village with its seventy-five residents. “Seventy-six,” Walter says, “counting me.”

There’s not much to this community, just three dirt lanes, a single small schoolhouse, the Wittmers’ hotel, and the homes, which are laid out along a mile of waterfront. There are a couple of power lines, fed by a generator in a small building down by the beach, that Claudio tends when he’s not up at the farm. “He’s the technician,” says Walter, not just for the village’s electrical system but for Floreana’s telephone system as well, which last month expanded from one phone line to eight. “Hey,” Walter laughs, “we don’t have to line up to make outgoing calls anymore. Now we can even call each other.”

Walter’s laughter is brief. Those new telephone lines are a harbinger of more changes to come. There is talk that an airstrip might soon be put in for Park Service use, which has most Floreanans quite excited. “They think it’s fantastic,” Walter says. “But I don’t like it. I’m probably the only one opposed to it.” He draws a deep breath and smiles.

“But then,” he says, “I was one of the few idiots against putting that road across Santa Cruz.” Another deep breath.
“But then,” he says, “look what has happened to the Galapagos after they built that.” Walter and Claudio are all that’s left here of the clan that some argue is truly the first family of Floreana, perhaps even the first f amily of the entire Galapagos. Enough of the Wittmers, they say. They’re history. And the Angermeyers as well. Now the Cruzes, they say, there’s a family that has really made something of themselves. Look at Eliecer and Felipé and their Park Service success. And their brother Augusto—Georgina Cruz’s husband, the father of Sebas—look at that cattle farm Augusto and Georgina have got over on Santa Cruz, and their own tour boat business and the beautiful house they live in above the barranco, perched right there on the harbor, looking down at the town.

Even Walter’s is a success story of sorts, how he was one of the island’s first tour guides, helping lay out and mark the first landing sites and Park Service trails back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And how he worked with the scientists up at the Station and how he finally met his wife and moved with her to Miami.

So maybe Walter knows what he’s doing, coming back here to the island this way. He certainly seems to be happy, hiking down to the water at lunchtime and grabbing a couple of lobsters with his bare hands, bringing them back to the. house and sautéing the buttery meat on his small kitchen stove. It doesn’t take much to get him to drive you up to the chacra—the farm, which happens to be the old Ritter estate. The drive is a rough one, on a gravel and dirt road rutted by rain. It takes a while to get up there, which gives Walter time to tell his family’s story—or at least a small part of it.

It begins, naturally, with the patriarch, Eliecer Cruz Sr. He was born, says Walter, in the Ecuadorian province of Ibarra in 1916. After finishing school, he went to work as a typographer in Quito. “But he didn’t like sitting in an office,” says Walter, “so he went looking for adventure.” He found it for a while in the early 1930s working a farm in the northernmost coastal province of Esmeraldas. One day, however, a wealthy landowner showed up and told Eliecer, as wealthy men often did at that time, that this land was rightfully his, not Eliecer’s. “What could he do?” Walter asks. “There was nothing he could do. But my father had heard of the Galapagos, and so he came here.”
That was in 1935.

Eliecer spent two years fishing on San Cristobal, then sailed over to Floreana to try his hand once again at working the land. It was now 1937, three years after the baroness mess had blown over. There were only three families on the island at that time: an American couple named Conway, the Wittmers, of course, and an Ecuadorian named Zavala with his wife and children. “Them,” Walter says, “and from time to time a few soldiers.”

He downshifts and slows and turns off the road onto a rugged dirt drive sprinkled with fresh horse droppings. The surrounding gullies and brush resemble Texas hill country. Ahead is a makeshift barbed wire fence, a thick stand of trees, and a small wooden gate. Walter parks the truck, climbs out, opens the gate, and steps into.. . paradise.
High-arching scalesia and acacia branches drape cool shadows over a well-tended path rimmed by pink and white pansies. A freshwater nh trickles through a carpet of emerald ferns and moist, spongy mosses. Splashing the greenness are bursts of roses, dahlias, and lilies. Blood-red hibiscus, pink bougainvillea, and broad, green banana leaves point the way up the slope to a small, one-story house ringed by fruit trees—papayas, mangoes, guavas, and plums. The house was built by Walter’s uncle, Eduardo, in the late 1950s, on the same soil Ritter and Strauch had cleared decades before. These flowers were theirs. They planted the fruit trees. But the only trace left of their actual hands is a small mound of vine-covered stones and a rough wooden cross up past the plum orchard, in the dark of the forest beyond the barbed-wire fence. A barely legible number is etched into one of the stones: 1934. “Dr. Ritter,” says Walter. “That’s where he’s buried.”

By the time Eliecer Cruz Sr. fetched his wife, Emma, and brought her to this farm in the late l930s and they had their first baby, Walter, in 1945, Ritter and Strauch and all the others were ghosts. That’s how Walter remembers the stories of these strange German people who once lived here. To him they were ghost stories. But Frau Wittmer was no ghost. The photo of Hitler that hung in her living room in the late 1930s was taken down by the time Walter was born. But Mrs. Wittmer was just moving into the prime of her life, and she became Walter’s flesh-and-blood godmother. “She convinced my mother to call me Valter,” he says, grabbing a ripe plum from a low-hanging branch. “Valter, Valter, Valter. I finally said ‘I don’t like Valter. My name’s Walter.”

Once he was born, he says, it was as if the floodgates were opened for Eliecer and Emma. The babies Icept coming. And coming. And coming. “It got to a point where I said, when is this going to end?” It ended with twelve, enough little Cruzes to keep the place going. The family raised livestock. They grew corn and cabbage and carrots and coffee. After a while they became fishermen, too, trading some cows for a boat and an engine. “A Briggs and Stratton,” says Walter. “Three-horsepower, bronze shaft, homemade prop, direct-forward drive, no neutral, no reverse, Just crank up the engine and go.”

There was no formal tourism yet, but the occasional yacht would pass through, and little Walter would run down with a sack of fresh oranges and trade them for bullets for his .22 rifle, He could speak English, which stunned more than a few of the yachtsmen, this barefooted Ecuadorian island boy chatting them up. “My Uncle Eduardo taught me,” he says. “He learned by reading books. He had cases of books, a very literate man. I said if my uncle can learn English like this, from just reading a dictionary, so can I.”

Until he was ten Walter was homeschooled by his uncle, his mother, and sometimes Margaret Wittmer. Then he began taking classes in the small port-captain’s building down by the beach, The port captain was the only government official at the time on the island, the only one other than Eliecer Sr., who, because of his reputation throughout the Galapagos and because of the respect of his neighbors, had early on been named Floreana’s intendente—a loose blend of mayor and judge. One of his first official acts was to throw the police off the island.
“They were more trouble than anything else,” Walter says. “All they did was grow grapes and get drunk and fight. My father finally kicked them out. He said we don’t need any police here. And the government agreed.”

There are photos of Walter’s father all over this house, old, faded snapshots of a bony, barefoot, shaggy-haired man with a beard just like Robinson Crusoe’s, eyes as warm as the sun and a smile even warmer. In most of the photos he stands beside a short, portly woman, caressing her as if they are teenage lovers. Eliecer never left Emma, not even for a quick chore, says Walter, without kissing her full on the mouth. “You’ve never seen two people who loved each other so much.”

In the spring of 1956, near the end of Walter’s first year in the port captain’s “classroom,” two Ecuadorian Navy warships showed up off the island’s shoreline. The massive vessels dropped anchor, and one sent a motor launch into the village. Aboard the launch was the nation’s president, His Excellency Dr. Valasco Ibarra, whose name would soon be given to this village.

“They had us line up to greet him,” Walter recalls. “Eight kids. We sang the national anthem to him. Then he took my sister Rita out of the line and said, ‘I promise you a schoolhouse.” They eventually got it, though it took several years. “The materials were first shipped to San Cristobal,” says Walter. “And they stayed there for quite a long time, until my father finally traded some of our cattle to get the stuff here.”

There were other Ecuadorian presidents after Ibarra who dropped in at Floreana over the years. Celebrities stopped in as well—movie stars, sports heroes, all eager to meet these islanders, Emma and Eliecer Cruz, who became celebrities of sorts themselves. They were fun to sit with and laugh and drink a glass of Emma’s famous vino de naranja—orange wine. In 1970, she carried a jug of the wine with her, along with some jars of plum marmalade, when she went to the marnland to visit the leader of the nation’s new ruling military junta at the time, a general named Rodriguez Lara. “Everyone,” says Walter, “loved my mother’s wine.”

The year he turned nineteen, Walter’s life was changed by a visit to Floreana from some scientists from the Research Station on Santa Cruz. Among them was Dr. Robert Bowman, the American who had been one of the Station’s earliest trailblazers. Beside Bowman was a geologist from Berkeley named Alan Cox. Cox asked Walter if he’d like to work with him as a field assistant. “The next thing you know,” Walter says, “1 was out on the islands drilling holes in solid lava sites for core samples. You can still see my little holes here and there.” Walter moved to Santa Cruz later that year, 1965, and lived in the highlands with old Mrs. Hornemann on her family farm. “Mutti,” he says. “She was my second mother.” When he wasn’t out drilling with Cox, Walter earned extra cash guiding small groups up to the tortoise reserve in the Santa Cruz highlands, an all-day trip by horseback from Academy Bay.

By the late l960s Walter had hooked up with Karl Angermeyer and began taking some of the first tour groups out onto the islands. “We decided where were the best places to take the people, then we went there,” Walter says. “A lot of the trails the tour groups use today, we made them back then.” He worked on tour boats—the Lina, the Iguana, the Encantada— into the mid-1970s, which is when he ran into a particularly difficult pair of clients, a couple from France. “They were the first vegetarian passengers we had ever had. I can tell you, they were a pain in the ass.” The husband spent each day off taking photographs while the wife wound up hanging around Walter. “They left, and the next thing I knew, I received a letter from her, from New York. I almost didn’t answer it. This crazy passenger. And she was married.”

He answered the letter. One thing led to another. And by the following summer, the woman was back in the Galapagos, this time as a crew member aboard Walter’s boat. A year after that the two were married and she became pregnant. A year after that, in November of 1976, they moved to Miami.

“Which pretty much brings us to where we are now,” Walter says, taking a bite of the plum. He’s done with the tour. It’s starting to cloud up. By the time he’s back down by the beach, the rain’s falling in sheets. He hustles inside the house, where Claudio’s boys are watching TV. There’s lobster left in the fridge, which Walter pulls out and broils. The boys have no interest. “They don’t like lobster, they’re sick of it,” says Walter. “They’d rather have eggs.”
Which Claudio is frying right now. Then everyone sits. The men eat their lobster, and the boys eat their eggs.
The afternoon rain that’s moved down from the mountains sets the village palms swaying. It wets down the dust and sweeps over the rooftops of this house, of the others, and of the hotel down by the beach, where Margaret Wittmer lies sleeping.

Cigars and Wine

It’s Valentine’s Day, and Jack Nelson’s cozied up with a late- evening scotch and a week-old Wall Street [ournal left by one of the guests who checked out this morning. Romy and Audrey have drifted off to bed. Jack will be joining them soon, but right now it’s time to relax. He’s got Billie Holiday cued up on the stereo, the lamps are turned low, no one else is around. If it weren’t for the palm and the muyuyo tree framing the view out the lobby’s rear window, the twinkling deck lights of those cruise ships anchored out in the harbor could pass for the Manhattan skyline. Or, muses Jack, an oil refinery.

He’s finally leaving tomorrow to get his father in Thailand. And, truth be told, it will be a relief to get out of here for a while. It’s been a long week, one thing after another, beginning with a yacht sinking over at San Cristobal.
It happened last Sunday. Jack was asleep when the VHF radio he keeps tuned by his bedside to an open marine frequency crackled to life with an emergency transmission at about three A.M. The voice was frenetic, shouting in Spanish, calling f or help from the waters off Cristobal.

It was hard for Jack to hear clearly over the static. San Cristobal is at the extreme edge of his radio’s range. Closer to home, on Puerto Ayora’s local frequencies, you can hear everything—and you will, if you listen in long enough. There are people in town who keep these radios on day and night, for sheer entertainment, eavesdropping and sometimes joining in with whatever comes over the air. Some people like to get on and make obscene sounds or tell dirty jokes. Some set up their radios in their bedrooms and broadcast the noise of their lovemaking. But for Jack, this is business, part of his job as the islands’ U.S. consulate warden. And what came across his radio last Sunday woke him up in a hurry.

Apparently, a yacht had run aground at the south end of Cristobal, hitting a reef in the dead of the night. The boat, apparently American, had gone down with two men on board. There may have been a fatality; Jack couldn’t be sure. The voice on the radio came from an Ecuadorian naval speedboat racing from the site of the sinking back to Puerto Baquerizo. It was calling for oxygen and medical supplies to be ready when it arrived. A victim, seriously injured, was aboard, bleeding heavily from the head.

This was all Jack could gather from the radio. By sunrise, he’d spoken with the comandante of the naval base in San Cristobal. The sunken boat was indeed American_the Pacijic Star, out of San Diego. A father and son were aboard: a retired doctor named Vernon Koepsel, in his eighties, and Koepsel’s fifty-yearold son, Edward. The father was apparently at the helm when the boat hit the reef. The sea was calm at the time, so weather had not been a factor. The old man may have dozed off, figured Jack. Or he may have had a heart attack. There’s no telling.

In any event, the son was asleep down below when the boat hit the rocks. The father was thrown over the side by the impact, which broke open the hull. The ship went down almost immediately, leaving the father dead and the son fighting for his life, buck naked in the roil of the sea breaking over the reefs. “No money,” says Jack. “No documents. Not even any clothes.”

The son suffered only mild injuries. A young Ecuadorian naval lieutenant, however, was hurt badly during the rescue. The radio alert Jack had overheard was for him. By late morning, there was concern the lieutenant might die.

The younger Koepsel had by then been stabilized, somewhat in shock, but other than that, doing fine. The primary problem was how to deal with the father’s body—a question Jack discussed at length during the day in a series of phone conversations with the U.S. Consulate’s office in Guayaqujl. The issue, in nuts-and-bolts terms, was how to keep the corpse from rotting on this remote tropical island.

“Look,” Jack told the government official on the other end of the line, a woman named Carla. “This man is already fourteen hours dead. It’s hot here, and there’s no place on that island to keep the body. No morgue. No freezer space.”

There would have to be an autopsy, he told her. “So you’re going to have this body cut up. And there’s no embalming, nothing like a professional mortuary.” A coffin would have to be found for shipping the body to the mainland, and a mere wooden box would not do. “You can’t just ship a dead body in a wooden box,” Jack explained, “certainly not by air. You have to get an air-transport casket, a large, hermetically sealed, aluminum casket.”

In the last of several phone calls to and from Carla and her colleagues—who by late afternoon had spoken by phone with the younger Koepsel himself—Jack summed things up. “They’ll probably find somebody over there with a large enough freezer to keep that body for four or five days while everybody gets their act together,” he said. “After that, you’re gonna have a stinker on your hands.”

By that evening, the navy personnel on San Cristobal had managed to find a makeshift holding facility for the elder Koepsel’s body—in the base’s small movie theater. As for the lieutenant, he was still alive, but just barely. It looked like he’d have to be medevaced to the mainland.

Any flight to the mainland has now become dicey, with the nation still reeling from the coup just two weeks ago. The Indians have refused to recognize the new president, Noboa, after he announced his intention to carry through with the dollarization changeover begun by Mahuad. Indio leaders have told Noboa he has three to six months to change his mind about that. They’ve presented a list of demands: increased spending on education for their children; N bilingual training; prosecution of bankers and politicians who had profited from the nation’s most recent economic crisis; and an end to this dollarization nonsense, which the Indios point out will penalize poor, rural Indians who’ve never seen a dollar in their lives. If these demands are not met, warn the Indios, there will be real revolt, even a civil war. Those are the very words they are now using—” civil war.” “This time it was peaceful, the next time blood will be spilled,” one Quechua was quoted in newspapers this week.

“The situation is still hot,” agreed Indio spokesman Antonio Vargas. “The next uprising could be much more radical, much more hard-line.” Michael Bliemsreiderwould not argue with that. The Galapagos INGAL1 director just got back last week from the mainland, from ‘Cuenca, where he happened to be the day the mob seized the presidential palace. He spent the ensuing thirty-six hours with a telephone pressed to his ear, talking with government officials as the pieces on the Ecuadorian political chessboard were madly rearranged. On the night of the coup alone, Bliemsreider figures, he spent at least three million sucres on cellular phone calls.

“It has been crazy, like a frenzy,” he said last Monday morning, the day after the Pacific Star sinking. Vernon Koepsel’s body was still on San Cristobal. Ed Koepsel was there as well, waiting while Navy and government officials figured out what to do with his father. Meanwhile, the injured lieutenant had been sent to a Guayaquil hospital, where a day later he died.

In the shade of a palm at the edge of Pelican Bay, Bliemsreider assessed the typhoon of events swirling over the mainland and blowing through these islands. He is not a man who is easily ruffled. At thirty-three he’s a seasoned political player here in the Galapagos, having run everything from the National Park to INGALA. His father is German; hence the last name. But he’s all Ecuadorian, born and raised in Guayaquil, like his mother. Trim, tall, and athletic, he could pass for a professional soccer player in this country where, as in all South America, soccer is a religion.
Bliemsreider is that rarest of creatures, a bureaucrat who actually gets something done, a man respected by most Galápagans as part of the glue that has held these islands together in the face of the onslaught they’ve faced in recent years. It’s people like Bliemsreider who have fed information and advice to the Ecuadorian government for years now, helping shape such legislation as the recent Special Law.

Bliemsreider knows as well as anyone how difficult it is to get such statutes passed. He also knows how, in the hands of this new Ecuadorian presidential administration, the laws may be changed or even erased in the bat of an eye. The way things have shaken themselves out since the coup, he’s afraid that’s exactly what might happen. He looked so relaxed, leaning against that palm tree with his arms crossed on his chest and a smile on his face as soft as the fronds waving over his head, but his words were severe.

“Let’s see,” he said, glancing out at the harbor. “This new government took office on a Saturday. By Sunday, Noboa had scratched the Ministry of Environment, This was one of the first things he did. That’s a pretty clear signal.
“Just look at the new ministers he has named,” he continued. “They’re all industrial people—fishing, mining, forestry. Noboa’s son-in-law is Gustavo Gonzales. He owns several ships in Manta. It’s pretty obvious that environmental protection is not this government’s priority.”

In fact, said Bliemsreider, it is only because of outside pressure— most notably from the United States—that things are not worse. The flurry of phone calls Bliemsreider made while in Cuenca included several to Ecuadorian ministers in Quito, who told him that the U.S. Ambassador herself, a woman named Gwen Clare (who stepped into this ambassadorship just five months ag ilaidit on the line with Noboa.

“What’s that typical U.S. Embassy phrase?” Bliemsreider asked. ( “‘Lo veriamos con buenos ojos...’, or ‘It would be nice if. . .‘ It’s a ‘llj5idmatic way of putting it, but it means: ‘You better watch out.’ That’s how I was told that she said it to him. That no matter what happened, the Park here in the Galapagos needed to be left alone.”
Apparently, Noboa got the message. “He issued a statement privately to the local politicians here in the Galapagos,” said Bliemsreider, “that the Park is not to be touched.”

Everything else, though, is apparently up for grabs. Including, Bliemsreider said with that smile and a shrug of his shoulders, his job. Fanny Uribe, it seems, has been out to get him for some time. The ongresswoman hasn’t forgotten that Bliemsreider was with Mathias Espinosa in that raid on her house, the one where they shot the video footage of the pepinos up on her roof. “That woman just hates me,” Bliemsreider said. “She has been a pain in my ass from the beginning. But I always had the government on the mainland behind me. Now I have no political support at all.”

Bliemsreider knows his days are numbered, but until he’s replaced he intends to show up at the INGALA headquarters each morning, if for no other reason than to make sure the building’s furniture and equipment are not looted. It’s no joke, he says. Right now his job is that basic. “I’m just watching over the office so no one carries anything away.”

The next morning, Tuesday, thin plumes of oily smoke could be seen coiling up from the waterfront near the wharf. The intersection outside Sarah Darling’s art studio had been blocked off with a crude barricade of black lava rocks, and a pile of truck tires had been set afire by a small, angry crowd. The same scene was transpiring at the north end of town, where traffic from Bellavista and Baltra—trucks, taxis, buses—was backed up by protesters refusing to allow any vehicles into the village. Bewildered tourists were unloading their luggage from the buses and taxis and were hiking from there into town.

It turned out that TAME had raised its airfare for islanders in the wake of the sudden shutdown of Saeta airlines the weekend before. Saeta had been struggling lately, not just financially, but in terms of literally keeping its planes in the air. A number of near-accidents in recent months had prompted the government to ground a large portion of the airline’s fleet for mechanical inspections. One of its planes bound for San Cristobal just a few weeks ago had lost an engine and plunged several thousand feet toward the sea before the pilot was able to pull out of the dive. Another had been forced by mechanical problems to turn back to the mainland just a half-hour before landing at Puerto Baquerizo. With half its planes now on the ground, Saeta finally decided to throw in the towel, which left TAME in business by itself. And so came this price increase. A ticket to Quito, which until this week had cost 700,000 sucres—$28—was now 1,700,000, an increase of $40. Airfare to Guayaquil had been raised the same way, and the townspeople were furious.

While groups of men and young boys manned the barricades at both ends of town, a crowd of two dozen women—some of them TAME employees—had gathered in front of the airline’s downtown offices on Darwin Avenue. They were seated on long wooden benches they’d pulled into the street. They laughed and joked, sipping bottles of soda and munching bags of potato chips, chatting with friends passing by while a van parked at the curb blared a pop song from a pair of speakers mounted on its roof.

“Believe me when I say how much I love you, believe me when I say how much I care It was the mayor who had called for the people of Puerto Ayora to boycott TAME. The voice of the town’s comisario, the mayor’s chief lieutenant, barked from a radio held by one of the women. The comisario was urging the people to protest. Word was that a small caravan of protesters was speeding toward Baltra to set up barricades there.

“They won’t get too far,” said Jack that afternoon. He was out on his hotel’s back patio, in the shade of a rough wooden arbor, dabbing some paint on a mobile of fish designs he’d cut out from old copper mesh window screens salvaged from the U.S. barracks at Baltra. The radio in his office was tuned to the local station. News of that morning’s strike rattled out through the window.

Jack could understand the people’s anger at this rate increase, but this barricade nonsense made no sense at all, he said. The town’s bread and butter is those tourists, who couldn’t be too happy lugging their own baggage by foot into town, sweating like sherpas. They couldn’t be too impressed by that flaming pile of tires or the unsettling sight of townspeople protesting in the streets. These tourists didn’t pay thousands of dollars apiece to be caught up in the theatrics of some third-rate banana republic.

The mayor should know better, said Jack. He should know the townspeople are harming only themselves with this so-called boycott. But what does the mayor care? He’s out to get votes, said Jack. He wants the people to know he’s on their side, by God. The next election is less than two months away, and the mayor is seizing the moment, greying on fear and emotions for political capital, as all good populists do. Bucaram did it. The presidents before and after him did it. And the mayor is doing it right now.

“That’s the way populism works,” said Jack. “You don’t do what’s effective. You don’t do what’s right. You don’t do what will truly produce positive change. You do what’s popular. You shoot for the lowest common denominator, and, as in this case, you almost always wind up shooting yourself in the foot.”

That caravan headed toward Baltra? They’re running on sheer emotion, said Jack. They’re not even thinking about the reality of the situation, he said, about what awaits them at the airport. But they’ll find out soon enough, the same way they did last year when they tried the same thing after a similar airline-rate increase. Baltra is a military base, for God’s sake. There are soldiers armed with automatic weapons. These yahoos in their Hondas won’t get any farther than the canal, said Jack. The soldiers on the other side will see to that. There will be a lot of shouting and posturing. Then everyone will get hot. And they’ll get tired. And then they’ll get bored. And then they’ll finally turn around and come home.

Jack was right. By that evening, the protesters were back in their homes watching television. The next day the barricades were pulled away and traffic began flowing as usual. The TAME rate hike remained in effect. And it was on a TAME airliner that Vernon Koepsel’s body was finally flown back midweek to the mainland in an air-transport casket shipped from Guayaquil.

So Jack is now able to leave for his trip in relative peace. The next morning, he’ll take a cab to the airport, where he’ll catch the day’s first flight to the mainland. Then it will be on to California. Then, finally, to Thailand.
Even as Jack is on his way up to Baltra the following morning, a small crowd has gathered outside the police station jail. Inside are six boys, all teenagers, arrested on charges of possible murder.

The details are sketchy right now, mostly rumors. There was apparently some trouble late last night, at a small weekend rodeo up at Bellavista. Someone was killed. No one’s sure if there’s been one death or two. Word is the police have drawn a pair of chalk outlines of bodies on the road near the turnoff to Quatro y Media.

The crowd at the jail are families and friends of the boys in the cell. There are about two dozen people, mostly women. They’re chattering at the kids, passing them food and bottles of soda through the door’s bars. A rusted white pickup truck—hauled in, it turns out, with the suspects—is parked outside the chief’s office. But the chief is not here, says a police lieutenant, who is happy to share what he knows.

A body was found this morning about six A.M., on the road near Bellavista. “It was destroyed,” says the lieutenant. “The head, the legs, everything.” The boys in the cell, says the lieutenant, were among the last to leave the rodeo last evening, at about four A.M. They hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. An older man also hitched a ride in the same truck, a fisherman from San Cristobal who had come over this week to see his daughter graduate from school.
The man had been drinking, says the lieutenant. The boys got into some kind of argument with him. Then they decided to rob him. They beat him, then pushed him out of the truck, leaving him on the road. One of the kids said that they threw rocks at the man’s body as the truck drove away, but the lieutenant says he can’t be sure of this. In fact, he’s not certain of anything here. He says the people at the hospital would know more, at least about the dead man.

They do. Max Parédes has been in his office for hours doing the paperwork on this . . . incident. He says the body was brought in by the police early this morning, at about a quarter to eight. Parédes was not here at that time, but he heard that the body was in pretty bad shape. “Part of the brain was gone,” says Parédes. “The head was—” Parédes stops himself and sends for the doctor who was on duty when the body was brought in. Her name is Paola Vargas. Parédes gives her the seat at his desk. She’s young, twenty-seven, smallframed, with thick, dark, shoulder-length hair. She’s calm and straightforward, peering over the tops of her eyeglasses whenever she’s making a point.

 
She was at the end of a twenty-four-hour shift, she explains, that began yesterday morning at eight A.M. She was exhausted, ready to head home when the hospital doors burst open and the police brought in this body, found on the road up near Bellavista just after dawn by a man driving in to work in Puerto Ayora. The body had been run over sometime during the night, Vargas says, crushed badly by an oncoming vehicle.

“The head looked like a coconut split in half,” she says. “There was no brain. It was empty. And the legs, one was not there.” This was the first autopsy she has ever done, says Vargas. Her finding, she says briskly (the cause of death, as she has reported it), is “a transport accident.” That’s it. No more details. Parédes dismisses the doctor and excuses himself.

By the next afternoon, candles have been lit outside the house of the dead fisherman’s relatives, up in the village. Black crepe paper hangs from the home’s door and windows as the family observes the velorio, the wake.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Proáno will answer no questions, not yet. “The investigation,” he says, “is continuing.”
The next day is the same. And the next. Finally, on Friday, the chief is ready to talk. All but one of the six boys have been released. Still behind bars is an eighteen-year-old, the “leader” of the group.

“Let me summarize the accident,” says the chief, settling behind his desk and opening a thick folder. “It’s just another one of so many accidents. What has magnified it is the fact that this group of kids is underage.” The kids ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. “The victim,” says the chief, “was totally drunk” when he began walking home from the rodeo at about 3:30 AM. The kids were walking as well and fell into step with the victim. “He started offering drinks to the older ones,” says the chief. “The younger ones noticed. ‘Ah, he’s got some money.”
It was the eighteen-year-old who “tried to rob the man,” says the chief. None of the other boys took part in the attempted robbery, he says. “They felt bad and were afraid and felt sorry for him.”

The victim wrestled himself away, says the chief, and “ran into the vegetation” in the darkness of night. The kids kept on walking and were soon picked up by a passing truck. The victim says the chief, then rushed out of the bushes, desperate. “He asked the driver for help from this assault,” says the chief. The victim climbed into the cab. “He started misbehaving,” the chief says. “Just a typical drunk. Very excited and loud.” The driver grew tired of the man and stopped the truck. “He made him get out and told him to ride in the back.”

The man had no idea the boys were back there, says the chief. Before he could flee, the boys attacked him and heaved him out of the truck. “The older one,” says the chief, nodding toward the cell where the eighteen-year-old is still being held, “he kicked him in the face.”

The group has sworn that the victim was conscious when they drove away. The eighteen-year-old swears it. “He said, ‘Okay, I kicked him in the face,” says the chief. “But when we left,’ he said, ‘he was standing up.” The chief unfolds a large map on his desk. It shows the road south of Bellavista. The shapes of two human figures are drawn on the map, just as the two chalk outlines were drawn by the chief’s investigators on the actual blacktop road. The outlines show the position of the body before and after it was struck by whatever vehicle ran over it.

“You see,” says the chief, pointing at the drawings. “It crashed into him here and dragged him 3.37 meters, to there.” This, says the chief, is why it was rumored at first around town that there had been two deaths. Two chalk outlines, two deaths. An easy assumption to make, says the chief, if you don’t have all the information.
The vehicle that ran over the victim has not yet been found, says the chief, and he holds out little hope that his men will ever find it. “I would very much like to know where it is,” he says, “but it is not an easy thing, not with the body lying down as it was. If he were hit standing up, it would be entirely different There would be visible damage to the vehicle that we could look for. But with this, at most this might have damaged the suspension and that could easily be repaired somewhere up in the highlands.

What the chief is left with is a charge of “attempted assault” against the eighteenye0 What bothers him about all this, he says, is the absence of information from the hospital. He can’t do his job, he says, if they don’t do theirs. And in this case, he says, they didn’t do theirs.

“The autopsy report was of no use to me,” he says, “It is no good because it doesn’t specify if this man died before he was run over or after, it doesn’t tell me how long he had been dead. It doesn’t tell me anything.” The chief folds up his map and sticks it back in the folder. “It’s amazing, just incredible” he says, “not to have the right kind of doctors to give a specific, professional autopsy.”

He doesn’t blame Dr. Vargas, though. “It’s not her fault. There are doctors with a lot of experience here, Why didn’t they do it? If I, as a Police officer, don’t do my job the way they didn’t do theirs, then we’re all screwed.” To hear Michael Bliemsreider tell it, these islands are screwed, at least at the moment Just yesterday morning, Bliemsrejder resigned from his INGALA Position, as he had said just last week he would. But he doesn’t seem too upset, not about that. He’s certain he’ll land on his feet. He always has. What bothers him is what’s going to happen to this town and these islands with virtually everything but the Park up for grabs and with people like the mayor and Fanny Uribe and their lot smelling OPPortunity and power and all that comes with it. Just a few months ago, Bliemsrejder had several international agencies with a special interest in the future of the Galapagos lined up to spend millions of dollars on improving the town’s school system, its water, sewage, and social services But with the coup and the unrest that has followed, those millions are all on hold.

And Bhiemsreider doesn’t hold much hope that that money will be seen here anytime soon. “We were getting there,” he says, “but now it’s scratched, back to zero. The Park is the only keyhole of hope right now, not just for the islands, but for the people on these islands. The Park is going to be okay, but the town now is a mess. And it’s going to be worse with the upcoming election.”

There have been rumors around town the last several days that a gambling casino is about to open in the basement of the Hotel Palmeras, the hotel owned by the mayor’s family. “Oh really?” says Bliemsreider. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that, But I’ll tell you this,” he says with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t play there if I was you.”

He’s not sure if the casino is anything more than mere gossip. But the luxury resort that a local entrepreneur named Furio Valbonesi is said to be building up in those hills above Bellavista— Bliemsreider has seen that project with his own eyes. It’s far from finished, but it’s definitely taking shape, he says. And he has mixed feelings about it.
“On the one hand, this can be a good thing,” he says. “If Furio succeeds in filling this hotel, it will bring new boats, big boats, which will stay a while, which is not necessarily bad. That would be a lot of money for the Park. And in terms of the other businesses that exist in this town, I don’t think this will do any harm. The people who want to spend $1,200 a night for one of Furio’s rooms— none of these people would stay at the other places that exist here right now. The other hotels will not be hurt by the competition, because this is not competition. If anything, it may raise the standards in town.

“However,” he says, “I don’t know if that is what the Galapagos wants to become. This is supposed to be a natural environment in which you learn about an incredible legacy. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a rich person’s playground, like in the Caribbean.”

Through Furio Valbonesi’s eyes, that is precisely what the Galápagos is supposed to be: a playground for the rich. Furio is unabashed about this, sitting up on the veranda of his open-air restaurant, among the peaks of the highlands. A glass of chilled white wine is in his hand, and a dish of gnocchi sits on the table before him. Pavarotti is piped through the sound system, the strains of “Come Back to Sorrento” floating out into the afternoon mist.

Furio surveys the ocean far below. The Galapagos Explorer II is in port, and a man named Felipé Dégel, an officer on the Explorer, is up here, wearing his white crew member’s uniform but speaking and acting like Furio’s right-hand man. Dégel’s own glass of wine is almost finished, and he wants to know if the boss is going to drive up to the work site in his own cai or if he needs Felipe to take him.

“I’ll drive myself,” says Furio, lighting a cigarette as a young Ecuadorjan woman removes his lunch plate. A small tour group has just left, after finishing their own lunch—$ 14 apiece—and are taking a tour of the lava tunnel located just a short hike uphill from here. The “tunnel visit,” as priced on the restaurant’s menu, costs $4 a person, which the guests here at Mutiny, which is what Furio calls his restaurant, are happy to pay. “Mutiny,” says Furio, in clipped English laced with an Italian lilt, “is a very good hotel-discotheque in Coconut Grove, in Miami. I like the place. I like the name. So I use it here.”

Furio looks like he belongs in Miami, perhaps playing golf. He’s wearing an electric-blue Lacoste sportshirt and plaid shorts. And deck shoes, no socks. A pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses dangles from a cord looped around his neck. He’s slim, tanned, bald. To hear him tell it, he’s always been quite the bon vivant. He’s had his share of lovers, for example, but he’s never been married.

“Hey, I’m crazy,” he says, “but I’m not stupid.” That’s one of his favorite lines. He uses it often. “There are three billion women in this world,” he says. “That speaks for itself. There is alwas another one nicer than the one you are with, and that nicer one always comes along.”

Ask him about his background, and Furio hardly knows where to begin. He’s fifty-four, he says, born in Tuscany, into a family whose fortune has seen him through more than a few failed business ventures. He studied medicine, he says, in Paris, and worked for a time as a doctor in the early 1970s in New York. He traded steel for a while in Quito he says. He owned a shipyard in Brazil with a partner who he says wound up betraying him. “He had the know-how,” says Furio, “and I had the money. Then he disappeared. Now he has the money, and I have the know-how.”

It was in the mid-1970s, says Furio, that he first visited the Galapagos and bought this property, about two hundred acres. “No matter what has happened to me, I have always had this land,” he says. “In the worst of situations, I have never sold it.”

According to Furio, there have been some bad situations over the years. He owned a couple of tour boats here in the 1980s, but “they tended to sink.” By 1990, he says, “I’d had it with tourists.” Or at least he’d had it with tourists on boats. So he moved up here and opened this restaurant, which, three years ago, burned to the ground. “People were thinking I must have done it for the insurance,” he says. “But I had no insurance.” He was able to rebuild this place, he says, only because the Franciscans in town allowed him to live in one of their church’s outbuildings while he pulled things together. “I lived the monk’s life,” he says, smiling and sipping his wine. “I can be realistic when I need to be.”

And he apparently can seize an opportunity when it presents itself, which is how he fell into the money both to resurrect this restaurant and to finally begin building his personal Xanadu up in a 400-acre section of forest at the top of this property. He has “a very rich friend” who made a fortune publishing a magazine called Auto Trader in England. The friend, says Furio, gave him the rights to publish the same magazine in Latin America and Malaysia.
“Both were big successes,” he says, grabbing a couple of issues from behind the bar. The magazines are replete with photos and descriptions of used cars and trucks for sale by their owners. It’s not rocket science, says Furio, but it’s lucrative. So much so that he not only was able to reopen this restaurant two years ago, but late last spring he finally broke ground for his dream palace, which, though it’s still more than a year from opening, has reached a point where he can show it to visitors.

“Let’s go take a look,” he says, climbing behind the wheel of a latemodel Jeep Grand Cherokee. He settles into the soft leather seat, flips the air conditioner on high, and heads up a dirt road toward the hotel. A couple of copies of Architectural Digest are tossed in the backseat. One features Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs. The other displays David Bowie’s lagoon-side estate on an island in Bali.

Furio’s hotel right now has no name, he says. “The Nameless Hotel, I call it,” he chuckles, downshifting as the rock-rutted road becomes steeper. “I will give one thousand dollars to someone who gives me the right name.” A thousand dollars, he says smiling, would not mean much to the kind of clientele he expects to fill his hotel’s rooms. “They’re successful, Youngtomidd1eagd people, full of energy, but they don’t want to be wearing a backpack. If they ride a horse, someone is there to take care of that horse for them. If they have a picnic, someone is there to lay it out.

“You get the adventure,” he says, “but you get all the comfort and luxury, too. You get your wine, your caviar, your smoked salmon, whatever. Successful, achieving people, but not with the intention of sweat,” he says. “That is who this experience is for. Soft adventure, that is what this is.”

As the road levels off in a grove of crimson1eafed cinchona trees—an introduced species that has become a nightmarish pest for surrounding farmers_the hotel grounds appear up ahead, terraced and sodded, bedecked with flowers and ferns. More than fifty workers, all Ecuadorian, scramble in and out of half-finished buildings like aroused ants, in a meticulously bucolic setting as carefully manicured as a botanic garden.

A waterfall tumbles down an arrangement of boulders, cascading into a grottoljke swimming pool. A tennis court has been cleared in the woods to the left. To the right is where the golf course and airstrip will sit. Up the tree-shaded slope to the rear are the guest quarters themselves, each its own private residence, each built in a distinctive, exotic, “indigenous” style designed by Furio’s architect.

The bungalows are cozy, stuccoed, painted bright peach, each with a cone-shaped thatched roof. “Authentic, indigenous,” Furio says of the roofs. “The Indians from the mainland, we brought them out to do the weaving.”
The “cabins” boast fireplaces, private Jacuzzis, copper bathroom fixtures from a metaismith in Cuenca, hand-forged iron door fittings with massive medieval keys from antique shops in Guayaquil, ceramic-tiled floors, and hardwood beams and rafters. “The best of everything,” says Furio. “Is exquisite, no?” he asks. Rooms and rates range from the “Imperial” suite, at $1,200 per evening, to what Furio calls the “Victor Hugo” rooms—two of them—which go for a mere $150 per person per night. “They are for the ‘miserables,’ get it?” he says.

He’s proud of the rooms, but Furio is even prouder of the resort’s central complex of buildings—thatch-roofed as well—where the guests can dine, drink, play, and be pampered. There is a gymnasium—”With the big mirrors, you know? “—and a spa, Turkish bath, dry sauna, and massage room. There is a library with leather sofas and chairs, a wet bar, a computer and fax machine. “And a printer,” says Furio smiling, “so you can work.”

There is no air-conditioning, “except for the cigars and the wine.” But there is an observatory, which will soon have its computerized telescope installed. “So you can take the picture of the star if you’d like,” says Furio, his voice echoing off the tiled floor of the dome-ceilinged room, as a worker by the doorway slaps paint on the wall.
There is a chapel—”multidenominational, of course,” says Furio. There is an underground art museum where three wooden crates of pre-Colombian pieces have already arrived. “I have several contacts,” Furio says of his source for the artwork.

There is a rooftop terrace with a sweeping view of the ocean and of Isabela Island on the western horizon. And there will soon be a helipad, not far from the swimming pooi, “so you can come in on your boat with the helicopter and then fly straight up here,” Furio says. The clientele he’s prepared for would just as soon not be bothered with the “hassle,” as he puts it, of making their way up through the town. “That is not how people like this travel,” he says. “They are accustomed to comfort. From the boat to here, that’s what they want. If they want to see the town, they can go see the town, but that should be their choice.”

The hotel has seventeen rooms for thirty-four guests at most. Furio’s staff—” Maids, cooks, bartenders, reception people, massage girls, everything”—will number forty-five. And they will all be kept busy by what Furio has no doubt will be a booked-up hotel from the first day it opens, which he hopes will be by the end of 2001.

Furio steps out onto the central lodge’s rooftop terrace. The air is cool. The sounds of the forest—the insects and birds and the swish of the wind through the leaves of the trees—drift down from above, from the peaks to the east. Furio is flush with the mood of the moment. He is a philosopher, he says, even a poet, as much as he is a doctor and a hotelier. He has mused about many things, and right now he is considering the fate of such places as Bali, the Greek Islands, Belize, and, yes, the Galapagos. “In Europe, in the States, in the Caribbean,” he says with a sigh, “you see everything being changed and destroyed. So fast.”

Felipé Degel appears, in case Furio needs something. The boss waves him away and continues his thought. “Here in these islands, things change not so much,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Especially up here.” He stops, leans on a rail, and looks out over the hillside that slopes to the sea. “I knew down there would become what it has,” he says, tossing his head in the direction of Puerto Ayora. “But up here is still different.”

Down there, in the harbor, the empress of the Galapagos tour fleet sits at anchor. White as milk from bow to stern, it’s as long as a football field and tall as a six-story building, with a warshiplike array of radar beacons and antennae on its top deck. It dwarfs the yachts and tour boats around it, boats like Bico Rosero’s Symbol. It makes them look like mere toys. In every respect, with its piano lounge, five-level elevator, and VCRs in each room, the Galapagos Explorer II aims to impress.

And it does. Shoppers and strollers down by the waterfront stop and pull out their cameras. Sure, there are a few locals—like Christy Gallardo, for example—who turn their backs, even pull their windowshades at the sight of the thing. They look at that black smoke curling from the Explorer’s massive twin funnels, and they know full well it comes from the bunker fuel that feeds the ship’s engines. They know that at night, while its passengers are sleeping and it moves in the dark from one island to the next, the Explorer’s crew sometimes dumps the waste from its toilets straight into the sea—or so some of the crew say.

But the tourists don’t know this, or maybe they don’t want to know. This is supposed to be a richer, more environmentally intimate experience than the traditional cruises vacationers book to the Greek Islands or the Bahamas or Alaska. This is ecotouring. Roughing it a bit. Hiking with backpacks and water bottler Getting your feet wet when you climb from those wave-tossed dinghies onto the slick, shoreline rocks of these islands. Granted, if you’re on the Explorer, you’ve got all the shipboard comforts you could desire. But it’s an honest-to-god adventure you’re getting here as well, communing with the plants, animals, and fish in this natural setting.

It’s FeiipePéBcl’S job to see that the Explorer’s guests get it all— the roughness and the comfort. He’s the ship’s “expedition leader,” the head honcho in charge of the Explorer’s battalion of guides. Right now his troops are ashore, shepherding their groups to the Research Station. After that, they’ll stop at some shops, buy a few souvenirs, then maybe grab a bite or a drink at a restaurant.

The Explorer’s brochure, a glossy pamphlet filled with color photographs, features quite prominently the ship’s many amenities. Images of the islands and animals are almost an aside to the wide-angle shots of the vessel’s lavish cabins, its sumptuous meals, its piano lounge’s gleaming brass fittings, recessed lighting, and gold brocade curtains.
The Explorer II was built in Italy nine years ago for Mediterranean cruising, which it did until the company that owned it went bankrupt. Nearly two years ago, after the first Explorer ran aground at Wreck Bay, the Conodrqs corporation, the largest ecotour com- - pany in Ecuador, leased this vessel and named it the Explorer II. Conodros had already made somewhat of a name for itself back in 1996 by launching an “ecolodge” resort deep in the Amazonian rain forest in southeast Ecuador. The compound, called Kapawi_designed and built by the same architect who created Furio Valbonesi’s place— was built with the agreement and cooperation of the local, indigenous Achuar Indian tribe, to whom ownership of the land and lodge will revert in 2011. Until then, for a fee of $2,000 a month, which Conodros pays the Achuars, the company is permitted to fly in up to forty tourists at a time—each paying Conodros $1,260 for a one-week stay.

The guests arrive in small planes at a private landing strip in the jungle. The lodge compound consists of twenty lushly furnished, thatch-roofed cabins built on stilts and overlooking a jungle lagoon. “Isolation from the rest of the world doesn’t mean a lack of comfort,” reads the company’s brochure, “at least not in Kapawi.” Each room has a private bath with electricity and a hot shower. Meals are served in an open-air veranda. The bar is open till midnight. Canoe trips and hikes are led by Achuar guides, accompanied by Ecuadorian translators, and include a visit to a nearby Achuar village, which has aroused some controversy among those who consider such activity an intrusion.

No such controversy exists here in the Galapagos. The Explorer’s guests expect the best, and they get it. They pay top dollar for the ship’s choicest suites ($525 per person per night at the height of the season, which it is at the moment).

They are ferried ashore twice a day with military precision. The outboard launches that carry the guests in small groups to each island’s landing site are code-named Alpha and Delta and are dispatched in half-hour intervals. Each morning, the Alpha groups hit the shore while the Delta groups tour the coastline from the water. In the afternoon, they rotate. “That way,” explains one of the guides, “everybody gets to do both things, and it’s not too crowded.”
It’s midafternoon now, and there’s some commotion out on the deck. The Explorer II’s guests are returning from town, three pan- gas full, and the crew is taking their places to greet them—help them up the ladder, hose off their feet if need be, remove their life vests, and let them know dinner will be served at six.

“There are not that many people today,” says a woman watching the guests climb aboard. She is young, in her twenties, short and stout with a tight ponytail. She wears an officer’s uniform: white blouse, white shorts, white shoes. Her name is Camila Aroseména, the Explorer’s director of public relations. “We have only twenty-three passengers right now,” she says. “Friday we pick up ninety-one, a charter group of Americans. I think they are flying up from Easter Island.”

About seventy percent of the Explorer’s business is American, says Camila. “Then comes probably the Germans,” she says. “Then the Japanese and the Netherlands. And Switzerland. Switzerland is coming on strong.” The average guest’s age on this ship is about sixty, says Camila. “It makes sense,” she says. “It is mostly older people who have the wealth.”

The ship’s crew, says Camila, numbers seventy, and all, like herself, are Ecuadorian. There is, she says, pressure to hire Galapagans. That was part of the deal when the boat was first brought here, she says. That’s part of the deal with almost all business enterprises here on the islands—that jobs should be provided to locals whenever possible. But it’s been tough, says Camila, who is from Guayaquil.

“The problem,” she says, “is if people are not educated enough, it is difficult to do this work where you are dealing with tourists. So many people from the Galapagos hardly speak English and are culturally deprived. They haven’t been exposed to the computer, to the Internet, to TV. These things are all new to them. I was born with these things. They were not.”

The result is a caste system among the Explorer’s crew that literally follows the waterline: The higher one climbs on this vessel, the fewer Galapagan employees one finds. The men steering the ship’s fleet of motor launches are almost all islanders. Down in the heat and grease of the engine room, a few local mechanics can be found as well. But up here on deck, except for the guides, everyone hails from Guayaquil, Cuenca, or Quito. The maids, the waiters, the cooks, the bartenders, the front desk staff, and of course, the ship’s officers, are all from the mainland.
That’s where Giovanni Ccli, the Explorer II’s captain, is from.

Heads turn as he enters the dining room for dinner, and rightfully so. He’s a dashing man, with a sly smile and a neatly trimmed, salt- and-pepper goatee. His uniform, with four bright gold braids on each sleeve, only makes him look more swashbuckling. It was, in fact, the sailor’s uniform that first drew Celi to dream of the sea.

“From the time I was a boy, always I liked the uniform,” he says, settling into his seat at the table of honor. Each evening, several of the Explorer’s passengers share their meal with the captain as guests at his table. This night, the chosen include Don and Abby, a husband and wife from Atlanta. Don’s a pilot with Delta; Abby’s an internist with the Centers for Disease Control. They’re young for this crowd, in their thirties, newlyweds, married just nine months ago. They had planned to make this trip for their honeymoon, but the ship was in dry-dock at the time. “So we went to Tahiti,” says Don. Now they’re finally here, and they’re loving it, says Abby. “He’s the water guy, the diver,” she says nodding at Don. “I’m the bird-watcher.”

Don is peppering the captain with questions, which Celi gracefully answers as the waiters silently move among the tables, the silverware tinkles, and soft, piped-in music floats through the air. “My father is from Florence,” says the captain, explaining his surname. “But I was born and raised, like my mother, in Quito.” He entered Ecuador’s Naval Academy as a teen in the late ‘70s, then spent seventeen years in the merchant marines. “It is interesting,” he says as the waiter removes his soup, “that most of the people in our country’s navy come from the highlands, from the mountains, not from the coast. Highland people in Ecuador tend to obey more easily than those from the coast.”

He now lives in Guayaqujl with his third wife and children. “It is very difficult,” he says, “for a seaman to keep a marriage. You are away so long.” It was normal, says Celi, to be gone for more than two years at a time when he was sailing cargo and container ships around the globe. That’s why he leaped at Conodros’ offer in early 1998 to bring the Explorer II from Istanbul to the Galapagos and to stay on as its captain. “Now I am home much more often,” he says. But these past two years have been strange times in Ecuador, says Cell, both here in the islands and back on the mainland. “All the animals were dying when I came here,” he says, “because of El Niño. Then came the crisis with the dollars. Then the .vol canoes. And then this coup.”

He shakes his head at the current state of his nation. “We never go all the way to the bottom because we are so rich in the things we have,” he says. “In much of our country, you need an orange, you reach up and there is an orange. You put a hook in the water, there is a fish. So we do not really know what deprivation is.” He takes a bite of his salad. “But with people moving so much to the cities, we are learning. The people want what they see on TV. And they are angry when they don’t have it.”

What, asks Don, does the captain think can be done? “Well,” he says, “maybe something like how Pinochet did in Chile.” Don can’t believe the captain has invoked a despot like Pinochet. But the captain is unruffled, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “Look at Chile today.” Celi smiles. “It is one of the best countries in South America. It is doing much better than Ecuador.”

He leans back while the waiter sets down the main course. “Our democracy is not like your democracy. Sometimes”—he shrugs—”is necessary to die innocent people along with the guilty.” After dinner, the guests move to the bar or out onto the deck to look at the stars. Then they head to their staterooms and beds. While they are sleeping, the ship lifts its anchor and moves to the north side of the island, off a spot called Cerro Dragon. The next morning’s 6:30 A.M. wake-up call comes in the form of gentle whale cries and dolphin trills drifting down from bedroom-wall-mounted speakers. Breakfast is a buffet, with a chef cooking custom-made omelets, and an array of every imaginable fresh fruit except for bananas piled high on the table beside him.

“I can’t believe they are out of bananas,” says a wife to her husband. “Out of bananas in Ecuador?” Breakfast is brisk, then the guests file onto the deck, where they split off into small groups of seven or eight, each with a guide who helps them into their life jackets. Don and Abby’s group includes a couple, Marcelle and Sibylle, from Luxembourg; a thirtytwO-Year old financial consultant from Connecticut named Sylvia; and a seventyfourYeat0M retired cardiologist from Pasadena, Robert Peck, who, with his wife Ruth, is making his second trip to the islands.

Dr. Peck has been all over the world, he says, but not as a typical traveler. He’s more what one might call a witness to history. He went to Zimbabwe just after the revolt in Rhodesia. “It was wonderful,” he says. “Uplifting.” He visited Nicaragua when the Sandinistas finally, as he puts it, “had the contras on the run.” He was in Berlin when the Wall came down—”to cheer them on.”

“I’m a human liberationist,” explains Peck. “I like to go where the fires are.” He’s been that way all his life, he says, from his days as a self-described leftist premed student at USC in the ‘40s (“We formed a club called We Are One, which allowed the only four Negro students on campus to have lunch on a regular basis with some good- hearted white kids”); to his stint in the ‘SOs as a resident at the University of Chicago hospital, where he refused to sign a McCarthy-era “loyalty oath.” In the ‘60s, he treated poor coal miners in West Virginia, spent the “Mississippi summer” of 1964 caring for poor blacks in that state, and worked with war-injured Vietnamese children toward the end of the decade. Even now, he’s still active with Physicians for Social Responsibility, of which he’s been a member since the group was started.

“I’m no utopian,” he says. “But I do believe that every act we do, and everything we are as human beings, either makes things in this world better or worse.” That’s why, Peck explains, he has always vacationed as he does, either in a place where people are changing the world for what he believes is the better or in a place where man is dwarfed by the power of nature and time.

“To go someplace and get away from the technology, from the settings of our modern lives, and just feel the magnificence of the Sierras, or share the reverence of a Navajo guide or an old Hopi woman, to be in touch with the ancestry and eternal flow of man and nature,” he says. “There’s nothing that compares to that kind of experience.”
That, says Dr. Peck, is what’s great about the Galapagos. “It’s a natural. Darwin. The theory of evolution. The sense of time before time. It’s a powerful place.”

It’s time now to go ashore. Don and Abby’s group’s guide, an elfish young woman named Colette, ushers them into a dinghy and in a matter of minutes they’re on land, following Colette up a narrow trail that winds through cactus and shrubs to a muddy lagoon. Don has his video camera out, taping the scenery with a running commentary of jokes and asides.

“Shh,” says Colette, stopping and pointing. There, halfway out in the broad, shallow pond, stands a flamingo.
“It’s not very pink,” says Marcelle. “Like the ones in the zoo?” says Colette with a wink. “They feed carotene to the ones in the zoo, to bring out the pink.”

The group moves on as Colette leads the way. While the guests all wear hiking boots or tennis shoes, Colette walks barefoot as she climbs over rocks and tree roots. “You get used to it,” she says, giving Sibylle a hand up a steep section of stones.

Colette Moine is one of Puerto Ayora’s more colorful residents, pedaling around town on her unicycle. She’s got a tightrope as well, a trapeze, and a well-worn set of juggling pins, all from the two years she spent as a young teenager at a circus school in her native Paris. She left there eight years ago, at age fourteen, to join her father in Quito. Her parents had split up when Colette was two, and her father had moved to South America. Colette came to the Galapagos to stay six years ago, moving in with one of her father’s three ex-wives. The woman, an Italian named Sylvana, ran a popular waterfront restaurant called The Four Lanterns. Colette worked there as a waitress, but soon found herself managing the place when Sylvana suddenly took off for Tahiti.

“Good-bye, I’m going.’ Just like that, I was in charge,” says Colette with a heavy French accent. “I was sixteen,” she says, smiling and shaking her head. Since then the restaurant has closed, and Colette has become a certified naturalist guide and a dive master. Her friends are pushing her to become the Galapagos’ first female tour boat captain, but she’s not sure if she’s ready for that, at least not yet. “I’d like to get on a sailing boat_the right boat,” she says, “and go anywhere in the world and see what’s happening At the moment however, Colette is here, guiding the group up a bluff overlooking the sea. The view below broadens as the trail climbs higher. The ocean spreads out, brightbu and sparkling. A dirt-orange land iguana the size of a terrier stands motionless under a tangle of brush. At an outcrop of rocks, the group takes a break, kicking back in the blaze of the midmorning sun. The coolness of the breeze on their sweat-soaked skin, the tweets and whistles of birds in the foliage around them, the soft whoosh of the surf far below: It’s a transportive moment.

Until Don begins talking about the price he paid for a chateau. brjand dinner with wine at a hotel in Quito. He wonders aloud if his and Abby’s flight home on Friday will be leaving on time. When he asks if anyone here knows that David Letterman just had a heart attack the other day, Dr. Peck has finally had enough. “Colette,” the doctor says gently. “There’s an old saying: Seize the day. Can we stop this talk about ailanes and schedules? Let’s move back into this island.”

And they do. Marcelle takes a hit in the arm from the thorns of a cactus. Dr. Peck struggles a bit with One of the trail’s rockier stretches. But all in all, it’s a magical morning. When the group gets back to the ship, lunch is ready, a lavish spread served outside by the pool.

That afternoon the group does Seymour Island, where the foliage is thick with a colony of male fragatas (frigate birds) displaying their lust-inflated, ruby-red throat sacs to the females soaring overhead The boobies are here, too, doing their odd, little courtship dance among the low-lying shrubs and stones, oblivious to the cameraclicking humans.

The day winds down leisurely as smooth sets of translucent, green waves roll in from the west, backlit by the setting sun. Outlined against the flame-orange sunset are the rugged Contours of Daphne Majo the island where Peter and Rosemary Grant are still at it after thirty years, Continuing the ornithological research described in The Beak of the Finch. As a dinghy waits to return the group to the ship, Sibylle hangs back. Mesmerized by the vista from a cliff overlooking the waves, she’s silhouetted by the last of the day’s sunlight.

That evening, Dr. Peck and his wife join the group at the captain’s table, The conversation wends its way to the captain’s vision of his own future. “My dream,” he says, “is to have a sailboat and just go on it, go around the world, alone or with my son.”

What about his wife? someone asks. He frowns and shakes his head. “The woman on board is bad luck,” he says. “The Greeks, if they had a woman on board, they would throw her over.” It’s hard to tell if the captain is joking. No one presses the point. The evening moves on. The next day the sun rises over Española Island, where the ship has now dropped anchor. The morning is spent in a motor launch, puttering along the island’s wave-washed cliffs. Colette points out the bird life, the blood-red barnacles, and the bright-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttling over the rocks. After lunch, the group goes ashore for a two-hour hike along the crests of those cliffs.

That evening, it’s time for farewells. The ship’s “master musician”—the same pianist tinkling Beatles tunes in the bar two nights earlier—plays “The Shadow of Your Smile” on the lounge’s piano as the captain, flanked by Camila and the rest of the Explorer’s officers in full dress uniforms, raises a toast to the guests.

“We salute you,” he says. The lights dim, the chairs and tables are pulled back, the disco ball in the ceiling starts spinning, and taped salsa music begins thumping from the room’s speakers. But it’s late. No one feels much like dancing. Camila and one of her shipmates give it a whirl, but within a half-hour the party is over and the room empties out. A half-hour later, the chairs and tables have been moved back into place, ready for the next day, when this load of passengers will check out and the charter tour of Americans will check in.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and Jack Nelson’s cozied up with a late- evening scotch and a week-old Wall Street [ournal left by one of the guests who checked out this morning. Romy and Audrey have drifted off to bed. Jack will be joining them soon, but right now it’s time to relax. He’s got Billie Holiday cued up on the stereo, the lamps are turned low, no one else is around. If it weren’t for the palm and the muyuyo tree framing the view out the lobby’s rear window, the twinkling deck lights of those cruise ships anchored out in the harbor could pass for the Manhattan skyline. Or, muses Jack, an oil refinery.

He’s finally leaving tomorrow to get his father in Thailand. And, truth be told, it will be a relief to get out of here for a while. It’s been a long week, one thing after another, beginning with a yacht sinking over at San Cristobal.
It happened last Sunday. Jack was asleep when the VHF radio he keeps tuned by his bedside to an open marine frequency crackled to life with an emergency transmission at about three A.M. The voice was frenetic, shouting in Spanish, calling f or help from the waters off Cristobal.

It was hard for Jack to hear clearly over the static. San Cristobal is at the extreme edge of his radio’s range. Closer to home, on Puerto Ayora’s local frequencies, you can hear everything—and you will, if you listen in long enough. There are people in town who keep these radios on day and night, for sheer entertainment, eavesdropping and sometimes joining in with whatever comes over the air. Some people like to get on and make obscene sounds or tell dirty jokes. Some set up their radios in their bedrooms and broadcast the noise of their lovemaking. But for Jack, this is business, part of his job as the islands’ U.S. consulate warden. And what came across his radio last Sunday woke him up in a hurry.

Apparently, a yacht had run aground at the south end of Cristobal, hitting a reef in the dead of the night. The boat, apparently American, had gone down with two men on board. There may have been a fatality; Jack couldn’t be sure. The voice on the radio came from an Ecuadorian naval speedboat racing from the site of the sinking back to Puerto Baquerizo. It was calling for oxygen and medical supplies to be ready when it arrived. A victim, seriously injured, was aboard, bleeding heavily from the head.

This was all Jack could gather from the radio. By sunrise, he’d spoken with the comandante of the naval base in San Cristobal. The sunken boat was indeed American_the Pacijic Star, out of San Diego. A father and son were aboard: a retired doctor named Vernon Koepsel, in his eighties, and Koepsel’s fifty-yearold son, Edward. The father was apparently at the helm when the boat hit the reef. The sea was calm at the time, so weather had not been a factor. The old man may have dozed off, figured Jack. Or he may have had a heart attack. There’s no telling.

In any event, the son was asleep down below when the boat hit the rocks. The father was thrown over the side by the impact, which broke open the hull. The ship went down almost immediately, leaving the father dead and the son fighting for his life, buck naked in the roil of the sea breaking over the reefs. “No money,” says Jack. “No documents. Not even any clothes.”

The son suffered only mild injuries. A young Ecuadorian naval lieutenant, however, was hurt badly during the rescue. The radio alert Jack had overheard was for him. By late morning, there was concern the lieutenant might die.

The younger Koepsel had by then been stabilized, somewhat in shock, but other than that, doing fine. The primary problem was how to deal with the father’s body—a question Jack discussed at length during the day in a series of phone conversations with the U.S. Consulate’s office in Guayaqujl. The issue, in nuts-and-bolts terms, was how to keep the corpse from rotting on this remote tropical island.

“Look,” Jack told the government official on the other end of the line, a woman named Carla. “This man is already fourteen hours dead. It’s hot here, and there’s no place on that island to keep the body. No morgue. No freezer space.” There would have to be an autopsy, he told her. “So you’re going to have this body cut up. And there’s no embalming, nothing like a professional mortuary.”

A coffin would have to be found for shipping the body to the mainland, and a mere wooden box would not do. “You can’t just ship a dead body in a wooden box,” Jack explained, “certainly not by air. You have to get an air-transport casket, a large, hermetically sealed, aluminum casket.”

In the last of several phone calls to and from Carla and her colleagues—who by late afternoon had spoken by phone with the younger Koepsel himself—Jack summed things up. “They’ll probably find somebody over there with a large enough freezer to keep that body for four or five days while everybody gets their act together,” he said. “After that, you’re gonna have a stinker on your hands.”

By that evening, the navy personnel on San Cristobal had managed to find a makeshift holding facility for the elder Koepsel’s body—in the base’s small movie theater. As for the lieutenant, he was still alive, but just barely. It looked like he’d have to be medevaced to the mainland. Any flight to the mainland has now become dicey, with the nation still reeling from the coup just two weeks ago. The Indians have refused to recognize the new president, Noboa, after he announced his intention to carry through with the dollarization changeover begun by Mahuad. Indio leaders have told Noboa he has three to six months to change his mind about that. They’ve presented a list of demands: increased spending on education for their children; N bilingual training; prosecution of bankers and politicians who had profited from the nation’s most recent economic crisis; and an end to this dollarization nonsense, which the Indios point out will penalize poor, rural Indians who’ve never seen a dollar in their lives. If these demands are not met, warn the Indios, there will be real revolt, even a civil war. Those are the very words they are now using—” civil war.”

“This time it was peaceful, the next time blood will be spilled,” one Quechua was quoted in newspapers this week.
“The situation is still hot,” agreed Indio spokesman Antonio Vargas. “The next uprising could be much more radical, much more hard-line.”

Michael Bliemsreiderwould not argue with that. The Galapagos INGAL1 director just got back last week from the mainland, from ‘Cuenca, where he happened to be the day the mob seized the presidential palace. He spent the ensuing thirty-six hours with a telephone pressed to his ear, talking with government officials as the pieces on the Ecuadorian political chessboard were madly rearranged. On the night of the coup alone, Bliemsreider figures, he spent at least three million sucres on cellular phone calls.

“It has been crazy, like a frenzy,” he said last Monday morning, the day after the Pacific Star sinking. Vernon Koepsel’s body was still on San Cristobal. Ed Koepsel was there as well, waiting while Navy and government officials figured out what to do with his father. Meanwhile, the injured lieutenant had been sent to a Guayaquil hospital, where a day later he died.

In the shade of a palm at the edge of Pelican Bay, Bliemsreider assessed the typhoon of events swirling over the mainland and blowing through these islands. He is not a man who is easily ruffled. At thirty-three he’s a seasoned political player here in the Galapagos, having run everything from the National Park to INGALA. His father is German; hence the last name. But he’s all Ecuadorian, born and raised in Guayaquil, like his mother. Trim, tall, and athletic, he could pass for a professional soccer player in this country where, as in all South America, soccer is a religion.
Bliemsreider is that rarest of creatures, a bureaucrat who actually gets something done, a man respected by most Galápagans as part of the glue that has held these islands together in the face of the onslaught they’ve faced in recent years. It’s people like Bliemsreider who have fed information and advice to the Ecuadorian government for years now, helping shape such legislation as the recent Special Law.

Bliemsreider knows as well as anyone how difficult it is to get such statutes passed. He also knows how, in the hands of this new Ecuadorian presidential administration, the laws may be changed or even erased in the bat of an eye. The way things have shaken themselves out since the coup, he’s afraid that’s exactly what might happen. He looked so relaxed, leaning against that palm tree with his arms crossed on his chest and a smile on his face as soft as the fronds waving over his head, but his words were severe.

“Let’s see,” he said, glancing out at the harbor. “This new government took office on a Saturday. By Sunday, Noboa had scratched the Ministry of Environment, This was one of the first things he did. That’s a pretty clear signal.
“Just look at the new ministers he has named,” he continued. “They’re all industrial people—fishing, mining, forestry. Noboa’s son-in-law is Gustavo Gonzales. He owns several ships in Manta. It’s pretty obvious that environmental protection is not this government’s priority.”

In fact, said Bliemsreider, it is only because of outside pressure— most notably from the United States—that things are not worse. The flurry of phone calls Bliemsreider made while in Cuenca included several to Ecuadorian ministers in Quito, who told him that the U.S. Ambassador herself, a woman named Gwen Clare (who stepped into this ambassadorship just five months ag ilaidit on the line with Noboa.

“What’s that typical U.S. Embassy phrase?” Bliemsreider asked. ( “‘Lo veriamos con buenos ojos...’, or ‘It would be nice if. . .‘ It’s a ‘llj5idmatic way of putting it, but it means: ‘You better watch out.’ That’s how I was told that she said it to him. That no matter what happened, the Park here in the Galapagos needed to be left alone.”
Apparently, Noboa got the message. “He issued a statement privately to the local politicians here in the Galapagos,” said Bliemsreider, “that the Park is not to be touched.”

Everything else, though, is apparently up for grabs. Including, Bliemsreider said with that smile and a shrug of his shoulders, his job. Fanny Uribe, it seems, has been out to get him for some time. The ongresswoman hasn’t forgotten that Bliemsreider was with Mathias Espinosa in that raid on her house, the one where they shot the video footage of the pepinos up on her roof.

“That woman just hates me,” Bliemsreider said. “She has been a pain in my ass from the beginning. But I always had the government on the mainland behind me. Now I have no political support at all.” Bliemsreider knows his days are numbered, but until he’s replaced he intends to show up at the INGALA headquarters each morning, if for no other reason than to make sure the building’s furniture and equipment are not looted. It’s no joke, he says. Right now his job is that basic. “I’m just watching over the office so no one carries anything away.”

The next morning, Tuesday, thin plumes of oily smoke could be seen coiling up from the waterfront near the wharf. The intersection outside Sarah Darling’s art studio had been blocked off with a crude barricade of black lava rocks, and a pile of truck tires had been set afire by a small, angry crowd. The same scene was transpiring at the north end of town, where traffic from Bellavista and Baltra—trucks, taxis, buses—was backed up by protesters refusing to allow any vehicles into the village. Bewildered tourists were unloading their luggage from the buses and taxis and were hiking from there into town.

It turned out that TAME had raised its airfare for islanders in the wake of the sudden shutdown of Saeta airlines the weekend before. Saeta had been struggling lately, not just financially, but in terms of literally keeping its planes in the air. A number of near-accidents in recent months had prompted the government to ground a large portion of the airline’s fleet for mechanical inspections. One of its planes bound for San Cristobal just a few weeks ago had lost an engine and plunged several thousand feet toward the sea before the pilot was able to pull out of the dive. Another had been forced by mechanical problems to turn back to the mainland just a half-hour before landing at Puerto Baquerizo. With half its planes now on the ground, Saeta finally decided to throw in the towel, which left TAME in business by itself. And so came this price increase. A ticket to Quito, which until this week had cost 700,000 sucres—$28—was now 1,700,000, an increase of $40. Airfare to Guayaquil had been raised the same way, and the townspeople were furious.

While groups of men and young boys manned the barricades at both ends of town, a crowd of two dozen women—some of them TAME employees—had gathered in front of the airline’s downtown offices on Darwin Avenue. They were seated on long wooden benches they’d pulled into the street. They laughed and joked, sipping bottles of soda and munching bags of potato chips, chatting with friends passing by while a van parked at the curb blared a pop song from a pair of speakers mounted on its roof.

“Believe me when I say how much I love you, believe me when I say how much I care It was the mayor who had called for the people of Puerto Ayora to boycott TAME. The voice of the town’s comisario, the mayor’s chief lieutenant, barked from a radio held by one of the women. The comisario was urging the people to protest. Word was that a small caravan of protesters was speeding toward Baltra to set up barricades there.

“They won’t get too far,” said Jack that afternoon. He was out on his hotel’s back patio, in the shade of a rough wooden arbor, dabbing some paint on a mobile of fish designs he’d cut out from old copper mesh window screens salvaged from the U.S. barracks at Baltra. The radio in his office was tuned to the local station. News of that morning’s strike rattled out through the window.

Jack could understand the people’s anger at this rate increase, but this barricade nonsense made no sense at all, he said. The town’s bread and butter is those tourists, who couldn’t be too happy lugging their own baggage by foot into town, sweating like sherpas. They couldn’t be too impressed by that flaming pile of tires or the unsettling sight of townspeople protesting in the streets. These tourists didn’t pay thousands of dollars apiece to be caught up in the theatrics of some third-rate banana republic.

The mayor should know better, said Jack. He should know the townspeople are harming only themselves with this so-called boycott. But what does the mayor care? He’s out to get votes, said Jack. He wants the people to know he’s on their side, by God. The next election is less than two months away, and the mayor is seizing the moment, greying on fear and emotions for political capital, as all good populists do. Bucaram did it. The presidents before and after him did it. And the mayor is doing it right now.

“That’s the way populism works,” said Jack. “You don’t do what’s effective. You don’t do what’s right. You don’t do what will truly produce positive change. You do what’s popular. You shoot for the lowest common denominator, and, as in this case, you almost always wind up shooting yourself in the foot.”

That caravan headed toward Baltra? They’re running on sheer emotion, said Jack. They’re not even thinking about the reality of the situation, he said, about what awaits them at the airport. But they’ll find out soon enough, the same way they did last year when they tried the same thing after a similar airline-rate increase. Baltra is a military base, for God’s sake. There are soldiers armed with automatic weapons. These yahoos in their Hondas won’t get any farther than the canal, said Jack. The soldiers on the other side will see to that. There will be a lot of shouting and posturing. Then everyone will get hot. And they’ll get tired. And then they’ll get bored. And then they’ll finally turn around and come home.

Jack was right. By that evening, the protesters were back in their homes watching television. The next day the barricades were pulled away and traffic began flowing as usual. The TAME rate hike remained in effect. And it was on a TAME airliner that Vernon Koepsel’s body was finally flown back midweek to the mainland in an air-transport casket shipped from Guayaquil.

So Jack is now able to leave for his trip in relative peace. The next morning, he’ll take a cab to the airport, where he’ll catch the day’s first flight to the mainland. Then it will be on to California. Then, finally, to Thailand.
Even as Jack is on his way up to Baltra the following morning, a small crowd has gathered outside the police station jail. Inside are six boys, all teenagers, arrested on charges of possible murder.

The details are sketchy right now, mostly rumors. There was apparently some trouble late last night, at a small weekend rodeo up at Bellavista. Someone was killed. No one’s sure if there’s been one death or two. Word is the police have drawn a pair of chalk outlines of bodies on the road near the turnoff to Quatro y Media.

The crowd at the jail are families and friends of the boys in the cell. There are about two dozen people, mostly women. They’re chattering at the kids, passing them food and bottles of soda through the door’s bars. A rusted white pickup truck—hauled in, it turns out, with the suspects—is parked outside the chief’s office. But the chief is not here, says a police lieutenant, who is happy to share what he knows.

A body was found this morning about six A.M., on the road near Bellavista. “It was destroyed,” says the lieutenant. “The head, the legs, everything.” The boys in the cell, says the lieutenant, were among the last to leave the rodeo last evening, at about four A.M. They hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. An older man also hitched a ride in the same truck, a fisherman from San Cristobal who had come over this week to see his daughter graduate from school.

The man had been drinking, says the lieutenant. The boys got into some kind of argument with him. Then they decided to rob him. They beat him, then pushed him out of the truck, leaving him on the road. One of the kids said that they threw rocks at the man’s body as the truck drove away, but the lieutenant says he can’t be sure of this. In fact, he’s not certain of anything here. He says the people at the hospital would know more, at least about the dead man.

They do. Max Parédes has been in his office for hours doing the paperwork on this . . . incident. He says the body was brought in by the police early this morning, at about a quarter to eight. Parédes was not here at that time, but he heard that the body was in pretty bad shape.

“Part of the brain was gone,” says Parédes. “The head was—” Parédes stops himself and sends for the doctor who was on duty when the body was brought in. Her name is Paola Vargas. Parédes gives her the seat at his desk. She’s young, twenty-seven, smallframed, with thick, dark, shoulder-length hair. She’s calm and straightforward, peering over the tops of her eyeglasses whenever she’s making a point.

She was at the end of a twenty-four-hour shift, she explains, that began yesterday morning at eight A.M. She was exhausted, ready to head home when the hospital doors burst open and the police brought in this body, found on the road up near Bellavista just after dawn by a man driving in to work in Puerto Ayora. The body had been run over sometime during the night, Vargas says, crushed badly by an oncoming vehicle.

“The head looked like a coconut split in half,” she says. “There was no brain. It was empty. And the legs, one was not there.” This was the first autopsy she has ever done, says Vargas. Her finding, she says briskly (the cause of death, as she has reported it), is “a transport accident.” That’s it. No more details. Parédes dismisses the doctor and excuses himself.

By the next afternoon, candles have been lit outside the house of the dead fisherman’s relatives, up in the village. Black crepe paper hangs from the home’s door and windows as the family observes the velorio, the wake.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Proáno will answer no questions, not yet. “The investigation,” he says, “is continuing.”
The next day is the same. And the next. Finally, on Friday, the chief is ready to talk. All but one of the six boys have been released. Still behind bars is an eighteen-year-old, the “leader” of the group.

“Let me summarize the accident,” says the chief, settling behind his desk and opening a thick folder. “It’s just another one of so many accidents. What has magnified it is the fact that this group of kids is underage.” The kids ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. “The victim,” says the chief, “was totally drunk” when he began walking home from the rodeo at about 3:30 AM. The kids were walking as well and fell into step with the victim. “He started offering drinks to the older ones,” says the chief. “The younger ones noticed. ‘Ah, he’s got some money.” It was the eighteen-year-old who “tried to rob the man,” says the chief. None of the other boys took part in the attempted robbery, he says. “They felt bad and were afraid and felt sorry for him.”

The victim wrestled himself away, says the chief, and “ran into the vegetation” in the darkness of night. The kids kept on walking and were soon picked up by a passing truck. The victim says the chief, then rushed out of the bushes, desperate. “He asked the driver for help from this assault,” says the chief.

The victim climbed into the cab. “He started misbehaving,” the chief says. “Just a typical drunk. Very excited and loud.” The driver grew tired of the man and stopped the truck. “He made him get out and told him to ride in the back.”

The man had no idea the boys were back there, says the chief. Before he could flee, the boys attacked him and heaved him out of the truck. “The older one,” says the chief, nodding toward the cell where the eighteen-year-old is still being held, “he kicked him in the face.”

The group has sworn that the victim was conscious when they drove away. The eighteen-year-old swears it. “He said, ‘Okay, I kicked him in the face,” says the chief. “But when we left,’ he said, ‘he was standing up.” The chief unfolds a large map on his desk. It shows the road south of Bellavista. The shapes of two human figures are drawn on the map, just as the two chalk outlines were drawn by the chief’s investigators on the actual blacktop road. The outlines show the position of the body before and after it was struck by whatever vehicle ran over it.

“You see,” says the chief, pointing at the drawings. “It crashed into him here and dragged him 3.37 meters, to there.” This, says the chief, is why it was rumored at first around town that there had been two deaths. Two chalk outlines, two deaths. An easy assumption to make, says the chief, if you don’t have all the information.

The vehicle that ran over the victim has not yet been found, says the chief, and he holds out little hope that his men will ever find it. “I would very much like to know where it is,” he says, “but it is not an easy thing, not with the body lying down as it was. If he were hit standing up, it would be entirely different. There would be visible damage to the vehicle that we could look for. But with this, at most this might have damaged the suspension and that could easily be repaired somewhere up in the highlands What the chief is left with is a charge of “attempted assault” against the eighteenye0 What bothers him about all this, he says, is the absence of information from the hospital. He can’t do his job, he says, if they don’t do theirs. And in this case, he says, they didn’t do theirs.

“The autopsy report was of no use to me,” he says, “It is no good because it doesn’t specify if this man died before he was run over or after, it doesn’t tell me how long he had been dead. It doesn’t tell me anything.” The chief folds up his map and sticks it back in the folder. “It’s amazing, just incredible” he says, “not to have the right kind of doctors to give a specific, professional autopsy.”

He doesn’t blame Dr. Vargas, though. “It’s not her fault. There are doctors with a lot of experience here, Why didn’t they do it? If I, as a Police officer, don’t do my job the way they didn’t do theirs, then we’re all screwed.” To hear Michael Bliemsreider tell it, these islands are screwed, at least at the moment Just yesterday morning, Bliemsrejder resigned from his INGALA Position, as he had said just last week he would. But he doesn’t seem too upset, not about that. He’s certain he’ll land on his feet. He always has. What bothers him is what’s going to happen to this town and these islands with virtually everything but the Park up for grabs and with people like the mayor and Fanny Uribe and their lot smelling OPPortunity and power and all that comes with it. Just a few months ago, Bliemsrejder had several international agencies with a special interest in the future of the Galapagos lined up to spend millions of dollars on improving the town’s school system, its water, sewage, and social services But with the coup and the unrest that has followed, those millions are all on hold.

And Bhiemsreider doesn’t hold much hope that that money will be seen here anytime soon. “We were getting there,” he says, “but now it’s scratched, back to zero. The Park is the only keyhole of hope right now, not just for the islands, but for the people on these islands. The Park is going to be okay, but the town now is a mess. And it’s going to be worse with the upcoming election.”

There have been rumors around town the last several days that a gambling casino is about to open in the basement of the Hotel Palmeras, the hotel owned by the mayor’s family. “Oh really?” says Bliemsreider. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that, But I’ll tell you this,” he says with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t play there if I was you.”

He’s not sure if the casino is anything more than mere gossip. But the luxury resort that a local entrepreneur named Furio Valbonesi is said to be building up in those hills above Bellavista— Bliemsreider has seen that project with his own eyes. It’s far from finished, but it’s definitely taking shape, he says. And he has mixed feelings about it.

“On the one hand, this can be a good thing,” he says. “If Furio succeeds in filling this hotel, it will bring new boats, big boats, which will stay a while, which is not necessarily bad. That would be a lot of money for the Park. And in terms of the other businesses that exist in this town, I don’t think this will do any harm. The people who want to spend $1,200 a night for one of Furio’s rooms— none of these people would stay at the other places that exist here right now. The other hotels will not be hurt by the competition, because this is not competition. If anything, it may raise the standards in town.

“However,” he says, “I don’t know if that is what the Galapagos wants to become. This is supposed to be a natural environment in which you learn about an incredible legacy. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a rich person’s playground, like in the Caribbean.”

Through Furio Valbonesi’s eyes, that is precisely what the Galápagos is supposed to be: a playground for the rich. Furio is unabashed about this, sitting up on the veranda of his open-air restaurant, among the peaks of the highlands. A glass of chilled white wine is in his hand, and a dish of gnocchi sits on the table before him. Pavarotti is piped through the sound system, the strains of “Come Back to Sorrento” floating out into the afternoon mist.

Furio surveys the ocean far below. The Galapagos Explorer II is in port, and a man named Felipé Dégel, an officer on the Explorer, is up here, wearing his white crew member’s uniform but speaking and acting like Furio’s right-hand man. Dégel’s own glass of wine is almost finished, and he wants to know if the boss is going to drive up to the work site in his own cai or if he needs Felipe to take him.

“I’ll drive myself,” says Furio, lighting a cigarette as a young Ecuadorjan woman removes his lunch plate. A small tour group has just left, after finishing their own lunch—$ 14 apiece—and are taking a tour of the lava tunnel located just a short hike uphill from here. The “tunnel visit,” as priced on the restaurant’s menu, costs $4 a person, which the guests here at Mutiny, which is what Furio calls his restaurant, are happy to pay. “Mutiny,” says Furio, in clipped English laced with an Italian lilt, “is a very good hotel-discotheque in Coconut Grove, in Miami. I like the place. I like the name. So I use it here.”

Furio looks like he belongs in Miami, perhaps playing golf. He’s wearing an electric-blue Lacoste sportshirt and plaid shorts. And deck shoes, no socks. A pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses dangles from a cord looped around his neck. He’s slim, tanned, bald. To hear him tell it, he’s always been quite the bon vivant. He’s had his share of lovers, for example, but he’s never been married.

“Hey, I’m crazy,” he says, “but I’m not stupid.” That’s one of his favorite lines. He uses it often. “There are three billion women in this world,” he says. “That speaks for itself. There is alwas another one nicer than the one you are with, and that nicer one always comes along.”

Ask him about his background, and Furio hardly knows where to begin. He’s fifty-four, he says, born in Tuscany, into a family whose fortune has seen him through more than a few failed business ventures. He studied medicine, he says, in Paris, and worked for a time as a doctor in the early 1970s in New York. He traded steel for a while in Quito he says. He owned a shipyard in Brazil with a partner who he says wound up betraying him. “He had the know-how,” says Furio, “and I had the money. Then he disappeared. Now he has the money, and I have the know-how.”

It was in the mid-1970s, says Furio, that he first visited the Galapagos and bought this property, about two hundred acres. “No matter what has happened to me, I have always had this land,” he says. “In the worst of situations, I have never sold it.”

According to Furio, there have been some bad situations over the years. He owned a couple of tour boats here in the 1980s, but “they tended to sink.” By 1990, he says, “I’d had it with tourists.” Or at least he’d had it with tourists on boats. So he moved up here and opened this restaurant, which, three years ago, burned to the ground. “People were thinking I must have done it for the insurance,” he says. “But I had no insurance.” He was able to rebuild this place, he says, only because the Franciscans in town allowed him to live in one of their church’s outbuildings while he pulled things together. “I lived the monk’s life,” he says, smiling and sipping his wine. “I can be realistic when I need to be.”

And he apparently can seize an opportunity when it presents itself, which is how he fell into the money both to resurrect this restaurant and to finally begin building his personal Xanadu up in a 400-acre section of forest at the top of this property. He has “a very rich friend” who made a fortune publishing a magazine called Auto Trader in England. The friend, says Furio, gave him the rights to publish the same magazine in Latin America and Malaysia.

 
“Both were big successes,” he says, grabbing a couple of issues from behind the bar. The magazines are replete with photos and descriptions of used cars and trucks for sale by their owners. It’s not rocket science, says Furio, but it’s lucrative. So much so that he not only was able to reopen this restaurant two years ago, but late last spring he finally broke ground for his dream palace, which, though it’s still more than a year from opening, has reached a point where he can show it to visitors.

“Let’s go take a look,” he says, climbing behind the wheel of a latemodel Jeep Grand Cherokee. He settles into the soft leather seat, flips the air conditioner on high, and heads up a dirt road toward the hotel. A couple of copies of Architectural Digest are tossed in the backseat. One features Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs. The other displays David Bowie’s lagoon-side estate on an island in Bali.

Furio’s hotel right now has no name, he says. “The Nameless Hotel, I call it,” he chuckles, downshifting as the rock-rutted road becomes steeper. “I will give one thousand dollars to someone who gives me the right name.”
A thousand dollars, he says smiling, would not mean much to the kind of clientele he expects to fill his hotel’s rooms. “They’re successful, Youngtomidd1eagd people, full of energy, but they don’t want to be wearing a backpack. If they ride a horse, someone is there to take care of that horse for them. If they have a picnic, someone is there to lay it out.

“You get the adventure,” he says, “but you get all the comfort and luxury, too. You get your wine, your caviar, your smoked salmon, whatever. Successful, achieving people, but not with the intention of sweat,” he says. “That is who this experience is for. Soft adventure, that is what this is.”

As the road levels off in a grove of crimson1eafed cinchona trees—an introduced species that has become a nightmarish pest for surrounding farmers_the hotel grounds appear up ahead, terraced and sodded, bedecked with flowers and ferns. More than fifty workers, all Ecuadorian, scramble in and out of half-finished buildings like aroused ants, in a meticulously bucolic setting as carefully manicured as a botanic garden.

A waterfall tumbles down an arrangement of boulders, cascading into a grottoljke swimming pool. A tennis court has been cleared in the woods to the left. To the right is where the golf course and airstrip will sit. Up the tree-shaded slope to the rear are the guest quarters themselves, each its own private residence, each built in a distinctive, exotic, “indigenous” style designed by Furio’s architect.

The bungalows are cozy, stuccoed, painted bright peach, each with a cone-shaped thatched roof. “Authentic, indigenous,” Furio says of the roofs. “The Indians from the mainland, we brought them out to do the weaving.”
The “cabins” boast fireplaces, private Jacuzzis, copper bathroom fixtures from a metaismith in Cuenca, hand-forged iron door fittings with massive medieval keys from antique shops in Guayaquil, ceramic-tiled floors, and hardwood beams and rafters. “The best of everything,” says Furio.

“Is exquisite, no?” he asks. Rooms and rates range from the “Imperial” suite, at $1,200 per evening, to what Furio calls the “Victor Hugo” rooms—two of them—which go for a mere $150 per person per night. “They are for the ‘miserables,’ get it?” he says.

He’s proud of the rooms, but Furio is even prouder of the resort’s central complex of buildings—thatch-roofed as well—where the guests can dine, drink, play, and be pampered. There is a gymnasium—”With the big mirrors, you know? “—and a spa, Turkish bath, dry sauna, and massage room. There is a library with leather sofas and chairs, a wet bar, a computer and fax machine. “And a printer,” says Furio smiling, “so you can work.”

There is no air-conditioning, “except for the cigars and the wine.” But there is an observatory, which will soon have its computerized telescope installed. “So you can take the picture of the star if you’d like,” says Furio, his voice echoing off the tiled floor of the dome-ceilinged room, as a worker by the doorway slaps paint on the wall. There is a chapel—”multidenominational, of course,” says Furio. There is an underground art museum where three wooden crates of pre-Colombian pieces have already arrived. “I have several contacts,” Furio says of his source for the artwork.

There is a rooftop terrace with a sweeping view of the ocean and of Isabela Island on the western horizon. And there will soon be a helipad, not far from the swimming pooi, “so you can come in on your boat with the helicopter and then fly straight up here,” Furio says. The clientele he’s prepared for would just as soon not be bothered with the “hassle,” as he puts it, of making their way up through the town. “That is not how people like this travel,” he says. “They are accustomed to comfort. From the boat to here, that’s what they want. If they want to see the town, they can go see the town, but that should be their choice.”

The hotel has seventeen rooms for thirty-four guests at most. Furio’s staff—” Maids, cooks, bartenders, reception people, massage girls, everything”—will number forty-five. And they will all be kept busy by what Furio has no doubt will be a booked-up hotel from the first day it opens, which he hopes will be by the end of 2001.

Furio steps out onto the central lodge’s rooftop terrace. The air is cool. The sounds of the forest—the insects and birds and the swish of the wind through the leaves of the trees—drift down from above, from the peaks to the east. Furio is flush with the mood of the moment. He is a philosopher, he says, even a poet, as much as he is a doctor and a hotelier. He has mused about many things, and right now he is considering the fate of such places as Bali, the Greek Islands, Belize, and, yes, the Galapagos. “In Europe, in the States, in the Caribbean,” he says with a sigh, “you see everything being changed and destroyed. So fast.”

Felipé Degel appears, in case Furio needs something. The boss waves him away and continues his thought. “Here in these islands, things change not so much,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Especially up here.” He stops, leans on a rail, and looks out over the hillside that slopes to the sea. “I knew down there would become what it has,” he says, tossing his head in the direction of Puerto Ayora. “But up here is still different.”

Down there, in the harbor, the empress of the Galapagos tour fleet sits at anchor. White as milk from bow to stern, it’s as long as a football field and tall as a six-story building, with a warshiplike array of radar beacons and antennae on its top deck. It dwarfs the yachts and tour boats around it, boats like Bico Rosero’s Symbol. It makes them look like mere toys. In every respect, with its piano lounge, five-level elevator, and VCRs in each room, the Galapagos Explorer II aims to impress.

And it does. Shoppers and strollers down by the waterfront stop and pull out their cameras. Sure, there are a few locals—like Christy Gallardo, for example—who turn their backs, even pull their windowshades at the sight of the thing. They look at that black smoke curling from the Explorer’s massive twin funnels, and they know full well it comes from the bunker fuel that feeds the ship’s engines. They know that at night, while its passengers are sleeping and it moves in the dark from one island to the next, the Explorer’s crew sometimes dumps the waste from its toilets straight into the sea—or so some of the crew say.

But the tourists don’t know this, or maybe they don’t want to know. This is supposed to be a richer, more environmentally intimate experience than the traditional cruises vacationers book to the Greek Islands or the Bahamas or Alaska. This is ecotouring. Roughing it a bit. Hiking with backpacks and water bottler Getting your feet wet when you climb from those wave-tossed dinghies onto the slick, shoreline rocks of these islands. Granted, if you’re on the Explorer, you’ve got all the shipboard comforts you could desire. But it’s an honest-to-god adventure you’re getting here as well, communing with the plants, animals, and fish in this natural setting.

It’s FeiipePéBcl’S job to see that the Explorer’s guests get it all— the roughness and the comfort. He’s the ship’s “expedition leader,” the head honcho in charge of the Explorer’s battalion of guides. Right now his troops are ashore, shepherding their groups to the Research Station. After that, they’ll stop at some shops, buy a few souvenirs, then maybe grab a bite or a drink at a restaurant.

The Explorer’s brochure, a glossy pamphlet filled with color photographs, features quite prominently the ship’s many amenities. Images of the islands and animals are almost an aside to the wide-angle shots of the vessel’s lavish cabins, its sumptuous meals, its piano lounge’s gleaming brass fittings, recessed lighting, and gold brocade curtains.
The Explorer II was built in Italy nine years ago for Mediterranean cruising, which it did until the company that owned it went bankrupt. Nearly two years ago, after the first Explorer ran aground at Wreck Bay, the Conodrqs corporation, the largest ecotour com- - pany in Ecuador, leased this vessel and named it the Explorer II.

Conodros had already made somewhat of a name for itself back in 1996 by launching an “ecolodge” resort deep in the Amazonian rain forest in southeast Ecuador. The compound, called Kapawi_designed and built by the same architect who created Furio Valbonesi’s place— was built with the agreement and cooperation of the local, indigenous Achuar Indian tribe, to whom ownership of the land and lodge will revert in 2011. Until then, for a fee of $2,000 a month, which Conodros pays the Achuars, the company is permitted to fly in up to forty tourists at a time—each paying Conodros $1,260 for a one-week stay.

The guests arrive in small planes at a private landing strip in the jungle. The lodge compound consists of twenty lushly furnished, thatch-roofed cabins built on stilts and overlooking a jungle lagoon. “Isolation from the rest of the world doesn’t mean a lack of comfort,” reads the company’s brochure, “at least not in Kapawi.” Each room has a private bath with electricity and a hot shower. Meals are served in an open-air veranda. The bar is open till midnight. Canoe trips and hikes are led by Achuar guides, accompanied by Ecuadorian translators, and include a visit to a nearby Achuar village, which has aroused some controversy among those who consider such activity an intrusion.

No such controversy exists here in the Galapagos. The Explorer’s guests expect the best, and they get it. They pay top dollar for the ship’s choicest suites ($525 per person per night at the height of the season, which it is at the moment).

They are ferried ashore twice a day with military precision. The outboard launches that carry the guests in small groups to each island’s landing site are code-named Alpha and Delta and are dispatched in half-hour intervals. Each morning, the Alpha groups hit the shore while the Delta groups tour the coastline from the water. In the afternoon, they rotate. “That way,” explains one of the guides, “everybody gets to do both things, and it’s not too crowded.”

It’s midafternoon now, and there’s some commotion out on the deck. The Explorer II’s guests are returning from town, three pan- gas full, and the crew is taking their places to greet them—help them up the ladder, hose off their feet if need be, remove their life vests, and let them know dinner will be served at six.

“There are not that many people today,” says a woman watching the guests climb aboard. She is young, in her twenties, short and stout with a tight ponytail. She wears an officer’s uniform: white blouse, white shorts, white shoes. Her name is Camila Aroseména, the Explorer’s director of public relations. “We have only twenty-three passengers right now,” she says. “Friday we pick up ninety-one, a charter group of Americans. I think they are flying up from Easter Island.”

About seventy percent of the Explorer’s business is American, says Camila. “Then comes probably the Germans,” she says. “Then the Japanese and the Netherlands. And Switzerland. Switzerland is coming on strong.” The average guest’s age on this ship is about sixty, says Camila. “It makes sense,” she says. “It is mostly older people who have the wealth.”

The ship’s crew, says Camila, numbers seventy, and all, like herself, are Ecuadorian. There is, she says, pressure to hire Galapagans. That was part of the deal when the boat was first brought here, she says. That’s part of the deal with almost all business enterprises here on the islands—that jobs should be provided to locals whenever possible. But it’s been tough, says Camila, who is from Guayaquil.

“The problem,” she says, “is if people are not educated enough, it is difficult to do this work where you are dealing with tourists. So many people from the Galapagos hardly speak English and are culturally deprived. They haven’t been exposed to the computer, to the Internet, to TV. These things are all new to them. I was born with these things. They were not.”

The result is a caste system among the Explorer’s crew that literally follows the waterline: The higher one climbs on this vessel, the fewer Galapagan employees one finds. The men steering the ship’s fleet of motor launches are almost all islanders. Down in the heat and grease of the engine room, a few local mechanics can be found as well. But up here on deck, except for the guides, everyone hails from Guayaquil, Cuenca, or Quito. The maids, the waiters, the cooks, the bartenders, the front desk staff, and of course, the ship’s officers, are all from the mainland.
That’s where Giovanni Ccli, the Explorer II’s captain, is from.

Heads turn as he enters the dining room for dinner, and rightfully so. He’s a dashing man, with a sly smile and a neatly trimmed, salt- and-pepper goatee. His uniform, with four bright gold braids on each sleeve, only makes him look more swashbuckling. It was, in fact, the sailor’s uniform that first drew Celi to dream of the sea.

“From the time I was a boy, always I liked the uniform,” he says, settling into his seat at the table of honor. Each evening, several of the Explorer’s passengers share their meal with the captain as guests at his table. This night, the chosen include Don and Abby, a husband and wife from Atlanta. Don’s a pilot with Delta; Abby’s an internist with the Centers for Disease Control. They’re young for this crowd, in their thirties, newlyweds, married just nine months ago. They had planned to make this trip for their honeymoon, but the ship was in dry-dock at the time. “So we went to Tahiti,” says Don. Now they’re finally here, and they’re loving it, says Abby. “He’s the water guy, the diver,” she says nodding at Don. “I’m the bird-watcher.”

Don is peppering the captain with questions, which Celi gracefully answers as the waiters silently move among the tables, the silverware tinkles, and soft, piped-in music floats through the air.

“My father is from Florence,” says the captain, explaining his surname. “But I was born and raised, like my mother, in Quito.” He entered Ecuador’s Naval Academy as a teen in the late ‘70s, then spent seventeen years in the merchant marines. “It is interesting,” he says as the waiter removes his soup, “that most of the people in our country’s navy come from the highlands, from the mountains, not from the coast. Highland people in Ecuador tend to obey more easily than those from the coast.”

He now lives in Guayaqujl with his third wife and children. “It is very difficult,” he says, “for a seaman to keep a marriage. You are away so long.” It was normal, says Celi, to be gone for more than two years at a time when he was sailing cargo and container ships around the globe. That’s why he leaped at Conodros’ offer in early 1998 to bring the Explorer II from Istanbul to the Galapagos and to stay on as its captain. “Now I am home much more often,” he says.

But these past two years have been strange times in Ecuador, says Cell, both here in the islands and back on the mainland. “All the animals were dying when I came here,” he says, “because of El Niño. Then came the crisis with the dollars. Then the .vol canoes. And then this coup.”

He shakes his head at the current state of his nation. “We never go all the way to the bottom because we are so rich in the things we have,” he says. “In much of our country, you need an orange, you reach up and there is an orange. You put a hook in the water, there is a fish. So we do not really know what deprivation is.” He takes a bite of his salad. “But with people moving so much to the cities, we are learning. The people want what they see on TV. And they are angry when they don’t have it.”

What, asks Don, does the captain think can be done? “Well,” he says, “maybe something like how Pinochet did in Chile.”

Don can’t believe the captain has invoked a despot like Pinochet. But the captain is unruffled, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “Look at Chile today.” Celi smiles. “It is one of the best countries in South America. It is doing much better than Ecuador.”

He leans back while the waiter sets down the main course. “Our democracy is not like your democracy. Sometimes”—he shrugs—”is necessary to die innocent people along with the guilty.”

After dinner, the guests move to the bar or out onto the deck to look at the stars. Then they head to their staterooms and beds. While they are sleeping, the ship lifts its anchor and moves to the north side of the island, off a spot called Cerro Dragon. The next morning’s 6:30 A.M. wake-up call comes in the form of gentle whale cries and dolphin trills drifting down from bedroom-wall-mounted speakers. Breakfast is a buffet, with a chef cooking custom-made omelets, and an array of every imaginable fresh fruit except for bananas piled high on the table beside him. “I can’t believe they are out of bananas,” says a wife to her husband. “Out of bananas in Ecuador?”

Breakfast is brisk, then the guests file onto the deck, where they split off into small groups of seven or eight, each with a guide who helps them into their life jackets. Don and Abby’s group includes a couple, Marcelle and Sibylle, from Luxembourg; a thirtytwO-Year old financial consultant from Connecticut named Sylvia; and a seventyfourYeat0M retired cardiologist from Pasadena, Robert Peck, who, with his wife Ruth, is making his second trip to the islands.

Dr. Peck has been all over the world, he says, but not as a typical traveler. He’s more what one might call a witness to history. He went to Zimbabwe just after the revolt in Rhodesia. “It was wonderful,” he says. “Uplifting.” He visited Nicaragua when the Sandinistas finally, as he puts it, “had the contras on the run.” He was in Berlin when the Wall came down—”to cheer them on.”

“I’m a human liberationist,” explains Peck. “I like to go where the fires are.” He’s been that way all his life, he says, from his days as a self-described leftist premed student at USC in the ‘40s (“We formed a club called We Are One, which allowed the only four Negro students on campus to have lunch on a regular basis with some good- hearted white kids”); to his stint in the ‘SOs as a resident at the University of Chicago hospital, where he refused to sign a McCarthy-era “loyalty oath.” In the ‘60s, he treated poor coal miners in West Virginia, spent the “Mississippi summer” of 1964 caring for poor blacks in that state, and worked with war-injured Vietnamese children toward the end of the decade. Even now, he’s still active with Physicians for Social Responsibility, of which he’s been a member since the group was started.

“I’m no utopian,” he says. “But I do believe that every act we do, and everything we are as human beings, either makes things in this world better or worse.” That’s why, Peck explains, he has always vacationed as he does, either in a place where people are changing the world for what he believes is the better or in a place where man is dwarfed by the power of nature and time.

“To go someplace and get away from the technology, from the settings of our modern lives, and just feel the magnificence of the Sierras, or share the reverence of a Navajo guide or an old Hopi woman, to be in touch with the ancestry and eternal flow of man and nature,” he says. “There’s nothing that compares to that kind of experience.”

That, says Dr. Peck, is what’s great about the Galapagos. “It’s a natural. Darwin. The theory of evolution. The sense of time before time. It’s a powerful place.”

It’s time now to go ashore. Don and Abby’s group’s guide, an elfish young woman named Colette, ushers them into a dinghy and in a matter of minutes they’re on land, following Colette up a narrow trail that winds through cactus and shrubs to a muddy lagoon. Don has his video camera out, taping the scenery with a running commentary of jokes and asides.

“Shh,” says Colette, stopping and pointing. There, halfway out in the broad, shallow pond, stands a flamingo. “It’s not very pink,” says Marcelle. “Like the ones in the zoo?” says Colette with a wink. “They feed carotene to the ones in the zoo, to bring out the pink.” The group moves on as Colette leads the way. While the guests all wear hiking boots or tennis shoes, Colette walks barefoot as she climbs over rocks and tree roots. “You get used to it,” she says, giving Sibylle a hand up a steep section of stones.

Colette Moine is one of Puerto Ayora’s more colorful residents, pedaling around town on her unicycle. She’s got a tightrope as well, a trapeze, and a well-worn set of juggling pins, all from the two years she spent as a young teenager at a circus school in her native Paris. She left there eight years ago, at age fourteen, to join her father in Quito. Her parents had split up when Colette was two, and her father had moved to South America. Colette came to the Galapagos to stay six years ago, moving in with one of her father’s three ex-wives. The woman, an Italian named Sylvana, ran a popular waterfront restaurant called The Four Lanterns. Colette worked there as a waitress, but soon found herself managing the place when Sylvana suddenly took off for Tahiti.

“Good-bye, I’m going.’ Just like that, I was in charge,” says Colette with a heavy French accent. “I was sixteen,” she says, smiling and shaking her head. Since then the restaurant has closed, and Colette has become a certified naturalist guide and a dive master. Her friends are pushing her to become the Galapagos’ first female tour boat captain, but she’s not sure if she’s ready for that, at least not yet. “I’d like to get on a sailing boat_the right boat,” she says, “and go anywhere in the world and see what’s happening.

At the moment however, Colette is here, guiding the group up a bluff overlooking the sea. The view below broadens as the trail climbs higher. The ocean spreads out, brightbu and sparkling. A dirt-orange land iguana the size of a terrier stands motionless under a tangle of brush. At an outcrop of rocks, the group takes a break, kicking back in the blaze of the midmorning sun. The coolness of the breeze on their sweat-soaked skin, the tweets and whistles of birds in the foliage around them, the soft whoosh of the surf far below: It’s a transportive moment. Until Don begins talking about the price he paid for a chateau. brjand dinner with wine at a hotel in Quito. He wonders aloud if his and Abby’s flight home on Friday will be leaving on time. When he asks if anyone here knows that David Letterman just had a heart attack the other day, Dr. Peck has finally had enough.

“Colette,” the doctor says gently. “There’s an old saying: Seize the day. Can we stop this talk about ailanes and schedules? Let’s move back into this island.” And they do. Marcelle takes a hit in the arm from the thorns of a cactus. Dr. Peck struggles a bit with One of the trail’s rockier stretches. But all in all, it’s a magical morning. When the group gets back to the ship, lunch is ready, a lavish spread served outside by the pool.

That afternoon the group does Seymour Island, where the foliage is thick with a colony of male fragatas (frigate birds) displaying their lust-inflated, ruby-red throat sacs to the females soaring overhead The boobies are here, too, doing their odd, little courtship dance among the low-lying shrubs and stones, oblivious to the cameraclicking humans.

The day winds down leisurely as smooth sets of translucent, green waves roll in from the west, backlit by the setting sun. Outlined against the flame-orange sunset are the rugged Contours of Daphne Majo the island where Peter and Rosemary Grant are still at it after thirty years, Continuing the ornithological research described in The Beak of the Finch. As a dinghy waits to return the group to the ship, Sibylle hangs back. Mesmerized by the vista from a cliff overlooking the waves, she’s silhouetted by the last of the day’s sunlight.

That evening, Dr. Peck and his wife join the group at the captain’s table, The conversation wends its way to the captain’s vision of his own future. “My dream,” he says, “is to have a sailboat and just go on it, go around the world, alone or with my son.” What about his wife? someone asks. He frowns and shakes his head. “The woman on board is bad luck,” he says. “The Greeks, if they had a woman on board, they would throw her over.” It’s hard to tell if the captain is joking. No one presses the point. The evening moves on.

The next day the sun rises over Española Island, where the ship has now dropped anchor. The morning is spent in a motor launch, puttering along the island’s wave-washed cliffs. Colette points out the bird life, the blood-red barnacles, and the bright-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttling over the rocks. After lunch, the group goes ashore for a two-hour hike along the crests of those cliffs.

That evening, it’s time for farewells. The ship’s “master musician”—the same pianist tinkling Beatles tunes in the bar two nights earlier—plays “The Shadow of Your Smile” on the lounge’s piano as the captain, flanked by Camila and the rest of the Explorer’s officers in full dress uniforms, raises a toast to the guests. “We salute you,” he says.

The lights dim, the chairs and tables are pulled back, the disco ball in the ceiling starts spinning, and taped salsa music begins thumping from the room’s speakers. But it’s late. No one feels much like dancing. Camila and one of her shipmates give it a whirl, but within a half-hour the party is over and the room empties out. A half-hour later, the chairs and tables have been moved back into place, ready for the next day, when this load of passengers will check out and the charter tour of Americans will check in.

Cerado

The muffled heaves of a child’s sobbing float through the warm evening air over the lantern-lit path from the Red Mangrove Inn. Polo Navarro is there, in the apartment above the hotel’s lobby and bar, where he and his wife Monica and her three daughters make their home. But Monica’s gone, flew out of Baltra this afternoon with a man named Ulysses, a young Venezuelan surfer Polo hired not long ago to help put up a “sports club” across the road from the hotel.

The club—the Mangrove Adventure, Polo calls it—is actually more of an open-air bar, with a durable pooi table and a cooler stocked with sodas and beer. Candlelit tables and chairs sit under a thatch- roofed outdoor arbor. They rent surf boards and bicycles during the day to the tourists, and there’s a tree-shaded racquetball court of sorts off to the side. So it’s fair enough, the townspeople figure, to call it a sports club.

This time of night, there are typically at least a few people there. Polo is usually among them, wearing one of his bright, flowered tropical shirts unbuttoned to his belly to show off his tanned chest, whacking the pooi balls around, laughing, listening to music, having a few beers. But tonight the place is empty, dark, and deserted.

It was only this morning that Monica stopped into the TAME ticket office down by the police station and booked two seats on the day’s second flight to the mainland. By the time the plane lifted off, the entire town knew Monica was on it with her lover, Ulysses, headed for Cuayaquil and.. . well, who knows what their plans will be after that.

Some saw this coming. After all, hasn’t Monica had a history with this sort of thing? Three daughters by three different fathers. Her first girl, the nineteen-year-old, she had with that guy Norman, a languid character who lay around in his hammock nine or ten hours a day. People still laugh about the day Monica finally got fed up with Norman’s routine, marched right OUt with a large kitchen knife and cut the thing down, with Norman asleep in i. Then came the musician from Boston with whom Monica had her second daughter who’s now fourteen. And then there came Poio, with two kids of his own from a previous marriage, who now live in the United States with their mother.

Lest anyone be too quick to judge Monica for leaving, the fact is that Polo has been no more faitJ,j than she. Neither has he been gentler: Monica has had to explain away the occasional black eye or bruise during the years they’ve been married She and Polo have one child together who turned seven not long ago. It’s she, the sevenyear old, who is up there in the bedroom above the hotel crying so deeply because there are no words to console her, no way to explain why her mother has left.

Down the road, in town, where the bars and restaurants are busy on this early March evening, a squad of camouniformed Police officers a half dozen of them led by a baseballcapped lieutenant, is sweeping in and out of each nigh tclub checking the passports and papers of the people inside. They are checking the patrons as well as the employees sPotcheclcing for undocumented nationalsEcudi without IDs or papers It’s the authoritjes way of sending the message that the laws will be enforced here in the Galapago5 least some of them. They already shut down one business about an hour ago, the Galapason and no one knows when it will reopen. The CERRADO sign hung on the club’s padlocked front gate doesn’t say.

Farther downtown, a few blocks from the waterfront a crowd is gathered outside the Hotel Palmeras No Police are in sight. And they won’t be, not tonight, not tomorrow not as long as the mayor’s family is running the Place. The crowd is waiting to get inside You can hear it out on the street, a vibrant hum filling the stairwell inside the front doors, rising from the building’s basement where the El Bucanero gambling casino is now Open for business. A large, bearded man wearing a red soccer jersey, baggy swim trunks and flip-flop5 stands Outside the front door, looking like a bouncer. His name is Luis Solis Macias, but most people in town call him Galaxy. Or so he says. He points to the sign hanging over his head, over the hotel’s front door, with a bearded pirate and the words “El Bucanero” drawn on it.

“I did that,” he says. That’s what Galaxy does for a living, he says. He paints signs. “Is like a Las Vegas,” he says, sweeping an arm toward the commotion inside. “You like?”

Galaxy shows the way downstairs, where a bank of five glittering slot machines leads into a brightly lit, cavernous room festooned with twinkling Christmas lights. Japanese lanterns and ornate Asian fans are displayed on the high, whitewashed walls. A crowd is standing three-deep at the green-felt poker table, where the game is five-card stud and the minimum bet is 20,000 sucres (eighty cents).

The roulette and blackjack tables are even busier, with waitresses in white blouses and black miniskirts fetching mixed drinks and fresh packs of cigarettes for the players. Behind the metal bars of the cashier’s cage in the corner, a redheaded woman hands out cups of slot-machine tokens and poker chips to a line of men waiting for their turn to play. Above the din, out of stereo speakers mounted up near the ceiling, drifts the sound of a love song—the theme from Titanic.

“Here you are, my friend, please,” says a small Korean man, holding out a glass of iced Coca-Cola. “Free, for you.” The man is the casino’s manager and part-owner, which explains the decor on the walls. The mayor’s connection to this business is unclear. The Korean man shrugs and won’t answer when asked. He just smiles and asks if you’d like a refill on your Coke.

Winter is winding down, spring is coming on, and Carnaval has arrived with its tradition of soaking passersby with buckets or jugs of cold water. The locals all know at this time of year that they’re in for it if they venture outside during the day. They take the precaution of wrapping some plastic around anything they don’t want to get wet. They walk the backstreets, avoiding the busier thoroughfares, where the kids and teenagers lie in wait to ambush their prey.


The tourists are the primary victims of the dousings, which have taken a nasty turn in recent years. Used motor oil and sacks of flour are dumped on the unsuspecting pedestrians, as well as on their cameras and belongings. Still, things are not nearly as vicious here as they are on the mainland. Walk down the wrong street in Guayaquil during Carnaval, and you’re apt to get battery acid thrown at you. Or a bucket of urine. Or worse.

The mainland is in a state of suspension right now, with the Indios maintaining their threats to Noboa, and Noboa still pushing ahead with the dollarization, although it’s become clear after a mere six weeks in office that he’s no trailblazer. He’s just an interim figurehead, a bridge between the coup two months ago and the next presidential election two years from now. Noboa’s always been a survivor, and that’s what he aims most to do between now and that next election—survive.

But it won’t be easy. The political stakes are rising each day. Not only are the Indios continuing to turn up the heat, but the Colombians are pushing to force Noboa’s hand as well. Everyone knows it was the Colombians who were behind the mail bomb that blew up two weeks ago in the office of a Guayaquil newspaper reporter and former politician named Rafael Cuesta. A group calling itself the People’s Liberation Army claimed credit for the bombing, which sent Cuesta to the hospital with face and hand wounds. The group says it’s Marxist, says it’s Ecuadorian, but the leaflets it mailed out following the incident read like a laundry list of the Colombians’ agenda, with a pointedly anti-American tone. “No U.S. citizens can circulate quietly in the country,” the leaflets proclaimed. The U.S. Embassy in Quito has responded by issuing yet another warning to American travelers to stay clear of Ecuador.

That’s put a bit of a damper on tourism in Quito and in the Amazon, but oddly enough numbers are up around the Tungurahua volcano— “Little Hell,” as the people who live in its shadow call it—which has been erupting for weeks now, prompting an entirely new tourist market. Even as thousands of Ecuadorians who live in the volcano’s shadow have been evacuated, hundreds of foreign visitors have arrived to hike up the mountain and even camp overnight on its slopes. Tour companies are now packaging trips to the craters of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo as well. “A whole volcano industry appears to be developing,” one newspaper recently reported, quoting a Quito tour agency selling the Tungurahua climbs. “It’s a pure adrenaline experience,” said the agency’s spokesman, “to feel the earth rumbling and hear rocks falling down the sides of the ravines.”

No matter that the Ecuadorian government is advising all travelers to beware in this region, warning that they might be killed on the slopes by rock slides, lava, or raining debris. Despite the danger—or because of it—business is booming.

It’s booming in the Galapagos as well. Academy Bay is packed as the tourist season peaks with this first week of March. The boats anchored out in the harbor are almost completely booked. There are more private yachts passing through than have been seen since last spring. And more tour boats as well—ninety at last count.

Just this morning one of the newer ones pulled in, a gleaming 210-footer with three eggshell-white decks stacked like a sandwich on its navy-blue hull. The Eclipse is its name. On board is the American movie star Michael Douglas with his partner, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is seven months pregnant. They were in town this morning, hiking up Darwin Avenue just like any other tourists. There was no mob scene, just a couple of nervous requests for autographs from a group of Americans. When the pair got to the Station, Roz Cameron gave them a personal tour. They were both “lovely people,” says Roz. “Very pleasant, very down-to-earth. She didn’t even bother with makeup.”

 
At this peak-season time of year, a boat like the Eclipse charges each of its forty-eight passengers between $3,890 and $4,475 for a six-day stay in one of its twenty-seven cabins. It’s that kind of cash that Braden Escobar—who’s still running his hunting expeditions in defiance of the Park Service—will tell you is behind everything that is happening in the Galapagos these days. Everything.

The hammer finally came down on Escobar just one week ago. He arrived in Puerto Ayora on a morning flight from Quito with a couple of American customers, a husband and wife named MacCollum from Phoenix. The husband was a surgeon in his late sixties. He’d been to Africa a half-dozen times, and he’d hunted in Mongoha, and Spain. But this was his first trip to the Galapagos. He’d read about it in The Hunting Report and booked this vacation for himself and his wife.

The day they arrived, the doctor, his wife, Escobar, and a few local men took off in a boat for the northeastern part of the island. Mter a morning of shooting they headed back toward town for some lunch. Halfway there, they were stopped by a boat carrying Park Service wardens and Ecuadorian naval personnel. The doctor thought it strange that Escobar and the others scrambled to stow their rifles and spear- guns as the government speedboat approached. And he was a little upset when the wardens asked to see his and his wife’s papers right there on the boat.

But what really aggravated the doctor was when he and his wife got into town and were taken, albeit politely, to the Naval Station down near the wharf, where their bags and equipment were searched. By then the doctor was wondering if this Escobar fellow was on the up-and-up. When the authorities let the doctor and his wife go back to their hotel—although they held on to the doctor’s rifle for the night—the couple noticed that Escobar wasn’t released. He was under arrest. Or so it appeared.

“It felt like an arrest,” says Escobar. “Actually, I was just detained by the navy. They put me in a room, but after they saw I was no criminal, I just hung around outside and slept on the beach.” He’s not apologetic at all. And he’s not afraid of the Park Service or their laws. “If we want to get nasty,” he says, “I could tell you some stinking shit about Eliecer Cruz.”

Escobar doesn’t say what that “shit” might be. He’s happy to talk about his agribusiness degree from Louisiana State University, about his childhood in New Orleans, where he was born, and about Ecuador, where he’s spent most of his twenty-seven years and where he makes his home today. He’s eager to describe his outfitting business, the hunting and fishing tours he leads on the mainland. And he’ll tell you that his motivation to start such tours in the Galapagos is “with the sincerity of wanting to help.” Help the local people who need jobs and money, he says. Help get rid of those goats and wild pigs that breed in the highlands like rats. But he also admits he’s in this to make money.

“The Galapagos isn’t what people make it out to be,” says Escobar. “All this stuff about saving the animals, that’s bullshit. It’s all about money. The big boats, the tour companies, the Park Service. It’s a moneymaking machine, that’s what it is.”

His overnight stay—call it an arrest or a detention—doesn’t deter Escobar one bit. He says he was “set up” by Cruz and his people, by Johannah Barry and those bleeding-heart conservationists with the Darwin Foundation. “She called me herself and pretended she was a tour operator wanting to get her clients lined up with me,” he says. “I had no idea it was a trap.” Barry saVs that’s ridiculous, but Escobar insists that it’s so.

Cruz has warned Escobar and hopes that will be enough. Cruz doesn’t need the hassle of a full-scale arrest any more than Escobar does. The Park Service has much bigger fish to fry. But Escobar says he has no intention of stopping, no matter what Eliecer Cruz does.

“He can throw me in jail as many times as he wants,” says the young businessman, “and I’ll keep going.”
And so comes the spring. March turns to April, and finally Jack Nelson returns home from Thailand—alone, without Forrest.

Jack had thought this might happen. He knew before going that the old man had no desire to leave Chiang Mai, even though he could hardly stand anymore because of the arthritis riddling his knees. But Jack had hoped he might be able to convince his father to face the facts once Jack arrived, to acknowledge that both Ken Calf ee and Forrest were close to the point where they could no longer care for themselves. As Forrest himself put it more than once in recent conversations with Jack: “The only problem with living so long is you get so damned old.”

This was the third time Jack had visited his father since the old man had moved to Chiang Mai, but this was the first for the purpose of bringing him back to the islands. When Jack got there, however, and saw once again the life his father had carved out, the same kind of charming, idyllic retreat Forrest had created with the Hotel Galapagos so many years ago, Jack could see it wasn’t going to be easy to pry the old man away. One look at the flower-festooned compound Forrest and Ken had built on their own rai of land—a small, tree- shaded estate 120 feet on each side, each man with his own deck- rimmed geodesic home linked by a common veranda, with ferns and hibiscus and a private fishpond out back, and even an in-ground swimming pooi, where the Thai kids from the orphanage two doors down came every day to the delight of both Forrest and Ken—one look at all this, and anyone could see Forrest Nelson had found just what he was looking for when he’d fled the Galapagos fifteen years ago. Books, music (Ken had his own radio program on a local Thai station, playing Beethoven and Bach CDs one hour a week), and a circle of friends, most of them female; young, neighborhood women who would visit with Ken and Forrest each day, sharing food, drinks, and laughter. Who in his right mind would leave something like that?

Not Forrest. Jack made the most of the visit. He saw a bit of Chiang Mai, enjoyed the time with his father, then flew back to the islands knowing chances were good that it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to make this same trip again, under less pleasant circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Galapagos are changing at warp speed. In late March, while Jack was making his journey to Thailand, Margaret Wittmer passed away. Not long after that, Steve Divine flew his mother, Doris, to Guayaquil, where she moved in with some friends while Steve and his wife and kids prepared to make that move to the United States—not to Arkansas, after all, but to Plantation, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.

By late spring there are BellSouth pay phones along Darwin Avenue, an oddity that puzzles more than a few townspeople. Many have never seen such machines, and the phones take only U.S. quarters, not sucres. There are now cell phones as well, with a new satellite linkup activated just for the Galapagos. Some guides have taken to carrying the cellular phones with them on boat tours to keep track of families and friends back in town. The tourists are discouraged from using theirs, though a few can’t resist, checking their voice mail back home in Munich or Montreal while riding one of those pan gas to shore.

Out in Academy Bay, visiting yachtsmen are facing an odd little crime wave: the theft of their anchors. Eight yachts have had anchors stolen in the past two weeks. Word is spreading among traveling boatsmen to keep someone on watch if they visit this port or to simply steer clear of the Galapagos altogether.

The town has a new mayor. Franklin Sevilla was defeated in April’s election by a man named Alfredo Ortiz. There’s actually hope that Ortiz, a fairly sensible sort who may actually have the balls to stand up to the fishermen, might turn a few things around.

Fanny Uribe, meanwhile, kept her congressional seat. There’s a new port captain now, who’s been handing out fishing permits and tour-boat licenses as if they were candy. Jack’s convinced the guy’s either corrupt or “just doesn’t give a shit.” Either way, the “pickle- heads,” as the pepiñei-os have come to be called, are having their way. And still they want more, threatening each day to take drastic action if the gates to the cucumbers—and the sharks, and the lobsters— aren’t thrown wide open.

In late May the government-sanctioned pepino season begins. Within five weeks six divers are dead and dozens more are permanently disabled by decompression accidents. In mid-July comes word that Ken Calfee has passed away. Forrest is in emotional shock when Jack speaks to him on the phone. The old man is fuzzy about the facts, but apparently he and Ken had a group of friends over and were getting ready to go out. Ken went to lie down for a few minutes to rest. When Forrest checked on him, Ken was sprawled out on the floor in his bedroom.

From that point on, Forrest’s story gets disjointed. All Christy and Jack know is that Ken was cremated a few days ago, his ashes scattered on Chiang Mai’s Ping River. Now Forrest is all by himself, with only a Burmese woman named Pin to care for him. Pin has worked for Ken and Forrest for ten years now, riding through the city each morning on the motorbike Forrest bought her. She comes at dawn, sweeps the yard, cleans the house, runs errands, and cooks before leaving each afternoon to go home and tend the bar her family runs in the house.

 
From: Christy Gallardo
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000, 10:15 am.
Subject: Disaster in Galapagos
Dear Friends of Galapagos:
Today we have the worst news of years, for both obvious and more subtle reasons. The “fishermen” in Isabela are “protesting” limits on lobster fishing in the same way as they did against limits on sea cucumber fishing, plus other matters they do not agree with. They have destroyed both National Park and Darwin Station offices, cars, equipment, records, removed all the tortoises (we don’t know to where) from the Centro de Crianza (tortoise raising center), and even rammed dinghies full of tourists to prevent landings (so far as I know, no injuries). Of course, the State Department has already been informed and will undoubtedly issue a travel advisory against any Americans coming here, which affects absolutely everybody EXCEPT the fishermen, including all conservation projects (because the funding disappears almost immediately). My news is only a couple of hours old, at most, so I will try to revise as more comes in, and I cannot yet guarantee all details, but I will.
In the long term, I would say the effects are even worse than they first appear. If the President of the Republic himself is not willing and able, at this point, to send in the troops to haul these criminals off to the continent and pitch them in the pens, it will be yet another lesson to them, one in a long line of EXACTLY the same lessons, that they can get whatever they want by acting against the law There is nobody left at a lower level, UNLESS IT IS THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, who can undo these lessons because all other authorities right up to his level are heavily compromised by the industrial fishing sector. The local authorities—our own mayor, our own deputies to con-
gress —have fishing boats and march and protest right along with the fishermen, supporting them in EVERY way, right
up to using the trucks of the municipality to block the
roads. If any among you know of anyone at all who might raise his voice—in the newspapers or anyplace else, be my guest. Tourism, and our own business, will be shot regardless, so I am only hoping to see some radical action which will be a help five or ten years down the line. I only have
another hour now before we close the store so our family and employees can go form up with the few others who
understand what is happening and have our own little protest march, but it is useless. I cannot TELL you how
many of these bleeding marches I have participated in, and the result so far has been DIDDLY SQUAT
Sincerely Yours, Christy
The protest march ends up canceled. Those who planned to take part have been threatened, even a group of schoolchildren who wrote a letter to Ecuador’s minister of the environment criticizing the fishermen. The children were promptly denounced as “puppets of the scientists and conservationists” by none other than the Galapagos’ provincial director of education, one Clemente Vallejo Velasco, who demanded that the names of all teachers involved be turned in to him. The next morning, Christy types out yet another dispatch.

From: Christy Gallardo
Sent: Saturday, November i8, 2000, 9:43 a.m.
Subject: Update
Dear Friends of Galapagos:

Yesterday I promised to update you all. So here it is, and it is only worse. The terrorism in Isa bela yesterday took place mostly around midnight. The marines were flown in to Isa bela, but did not arrive until about 4 am, too late. And, of course, they are only there to prevent further obvious depredati0fl5 but no arrests so far as 1 know, by the police or anybody else. The damage was far more extensive than I had thought—even the private homes of the directors of park and station operations were totally destroyed, right down to breaking up the toilets and burning all their clothes and istributiflg the Christmas presents (that were stored in one of their homes) to everybody in the streets. The Park sent a couple of boats over there to rescue their employees, and this was totally cessary—they had been hiding in the mangroves and actually had to swim out to the boats. In other places, including at Hood, divers and tourists have been prevented from landing or leaving their boats by the flotillas of terrorist- ‘fishermen.” I still have no reports of injuries. We are without regular phone connection to the mainland because the repeater on Cristobal has been damaged, so the cell phones are in heavy use. Here on Santa Cruz we have escaped the worst of it because we have the largest populatiofl 0tnumbering the ‘fishermen” by far, and also larger numbers of police and nai and so on. Still, it has not been pretty. I have no idea whether anything will be done to the perpetrators of all this, but the track record indicates that it will NOT. We have not seen the last of it. I will keep you all posted, if I can.
Please pass it on. Christy

None of this surprises Jack. He’s watched the number of licensed fishermen in San Cristobal and Villamil nearly double in the past year—from 500 to over 900_courtesY of the new regime of local authorities. The fishermen many of them recent arrivals from tough towns on the mainland coast—feel the strength of their numbers and have become more aggressive than ever. “Storm troopers,” Jack calls them. They’ve never directly threatened tourists before, but tour pan gas were actually rammed during this isabela attack, with Ecuadorian naval personnel firing tear gas to push the protesters back. A ramming even took place here in Academ Bay, an assault described in a report sent to the Galapagos Tour Operators Association by a tour group from Ithaca College:

A group of 11 tourists and 2 crew left our boat on our panga to go to the Darwin Station to see giant tortoises, the Station, and then take a bus trip into the highlands. But that was the morning the local fishermen went on strike. A fast motorboat of 4 or 5 fishermen then swooped over to cut us off, partially rammed us (side-swiped us with a hard hit), and grabbed the rope of our panga to pull us over to a place along the shore where they wanted to take us. Our boatman realized what was happening and reversed the outboard motor enough for us to pull the rope free, leaving a fisherman with rope burns. We quickly pulled in the rope, turned around, and returned to our boat midst lots of yelling in Spanish.

Local civic leaders brave enough to raise their voices against these “lobster mobsters,” as some townspeople have taken to calling the fishermen and the professional thugs brought in by the fishing companies in Manta to support them, have received death threats. As Thanksgiving passes and the month comes to an end, the renegade fishermen are enjoying their celebrity. They’ve become front-page news as far away as Great Britain. At least four of them were captured clearly on videotape burning and looting Park and Research Station property in Villamil. Thirteen arrest warrants were issued based on witness reports and photographic evidence. But only one arrest has actually been made. In fact, the government’s response, rather than prosecution, has been appeasement: The lobster season has now been extended through the end of the year, and catch limits have been raised. As Christmas approaches, word comes from the United States that reinforcements are about to arrive, the ecocavairy, as it were, riding down to the rescue. The Sea Shepherd, it seems, is now on its way.

Godfrey Merlen’s been working on this for some years now, quietly, behind the scenes. For nearly a decade, he and another longtime scientist with the Station, an Englishman named David Day, have been exchanging letters and e-mails with a Canadian named Paul Watson, founder and director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the oceangoing vigilantes famous for ramming and sinking illegal fishing vessels all over the globe. Godfrey and Day, along with Eliecer Cruz and his Park Service staff, have been exploring the possibility of bringing what Eliecer calls “an international voice” to the Park Service’s battle with the islands’ illegal fishing fleet.

Godfrey has known all along that it’s a dicey decision asking a man like Paul Watson to come help the Galapagos. On the one hand, Watson is not unlike Godfrey himself—a creature of action, impatient with words. Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of environmental activism knows Paul Watson cofounded the Greenpeace organization in 1972, then quit five years later because the group had become too bureaucratically meek for his taste—”Avon ladies of the environmental movement,” is what he called them—Watson subsequently turned to the ocean, creating the Sea Shepherd in his own image with a hell-bent-for-leather, ecovolunteer crew of bearded young men and braided young women. They took an overhauled fishing trawler, rechristened it the Rainbow Warrior, and began going mano a mano against the world’s pirate industrial fisheries.

The Sea Shepherd’s motto, printed on T-shirts its crew passes out wherever they drop anchor, is “Sailing Into Harm’s Way.” This is all well and good, but this cottage-industry kind of success and the massive celebrity that comes with it worry some here on the islands. Wherever Watson goes, the press follows, and frankly he loves it—some say a little too much. Just last year Time magazine declared Paul Watson an environmental hero of the twentieth century. Just last month, it was announced that Paramount Studios will begin production this summer on a $60-million film about Watson and the Sea Shepherd, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Aidan Quinn, and Paul Watson’s real-life pals, Martin Sheen and Pierce Brosnan. Rumor has it that Quinn, in the name of research, is at this very moment aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel Sirenian, bound for the Galapagos with Watson and a volunteer crew.

Four days before Christmas, the ninety-five-foot Sirenian, with a nine-member crew aboard, pulls into Puerto Ayora, dropping anchor in Academy Bay not far from the Park Service patrol boat, the Guadalupe River, just off the point where the Hotel Galapagos sits. Aidan Quinn is indeed aboard, but he jets off immediately upon arrival. Paul Watson, however, hangs around town for three weeks, doing some diving with Mathias’ Scuba Iguana staff and spending a few nights holding court at the newest hot spot in town, a place called the Bongo Bar, up a flight of stairs from the Panga Discoteca. When Watson takes off in mid-January, he leaves behind the ship and one crew member and an autographed photo of himself for the Bongo Bar’s owners to hang on their wall.

The crew member’s name is Sean O’Hearn Giminez, a twenty- seven-year-old Sea Shepherd volunteer and former Wall Street computer engineer from Brooklyn. O’Hearn looks fittingly Irish: pale skin burned bright pink by the sun, close-cut coppery hair. But he speaks fluent Spanish—with a Caribbean lilt, no less—thanks to a childhood spent in Puerto Rico. “Deception by perception,” he says, introducing himself with a well-practiced smile.

For the next God-knows-how-many months, O’Hearn will be the face and voice of the Sea Shepherd Society in the Galapagos. The arrangement hammered out with Eliecer Cruz and the Ecuadonan government is that the Sirenian will be “loaned” to the Park Service for five years. It will be manned by a Park Service crew, with Ecuadorian naval personnel aboard, and with O’Hearn riding along as an “objective observer” (O’Hearn’s term). The idea is to raise the ante in this war with the poachers, adding muscle to the Park Service resources—a speedy, agile patrol boat—as well as providing the international spotlight that follows the Sea Shepherd Society wherever it goes. O’Hearn is poised to tap out a slew of e-mail press releases following each raid and capture.

It’s a nice concept, but O’Hearn and, from a distance, his boss Watson soon learn it won’t be quite that easy. The Park Service may want the Sea Shepherd here, but the powers-that-be on the mainland—government officials with ties to the fishing magnates in Manta, even some of the top brass with the Ecuadorian Navy and the Merchant Marine themselves are not so excited. They can’t simply throw the foreign interlopers out; too many people are watching, and the Park Service is within its legal rights to bring the Sirenian here. But the authorities can certainly make things difficult for these outsiders.

Before the Sirenian is allowed out on patrol, it must be inspected by Ecuadorian naval officials. Is it any surprise that it flunks the initial inspection? Or that the ensuing paperwork takes weeks to process? And then comes another inspection, and another denial. There is no portable water pump to be found on the ship, although no one was told such a pump is required. The labels on the control panel are written in English, not Spanish, although again no one was told such translation is needed.

O’Hearn can see he’s being sandbagged, and he’s furious. As the days pass, he bides his time, handing out Sea Shepherd T-shirts all over town and hanging out at the Bongo Bar, where a Sea Shepherd videotape_provided by O’Hearn—has replaced the standard surf tapes as a favorite on the bar’s TV sets. The video, titled “Blue Rage,” mixes shots of ship-rammings with footage of extreme sports—snowboard ing and surfing. The crowd_tourists and locals alike—loves it. O’Hearn is champing at the bit to get out and go hunting, but Watson’s orders are to hang loose and sit tight, at least for the time being. And then comes the spill.

The first message sputters across marine radio channels a few minutes past ten on the evening of Tuesday, January 16. An oil tanker, the Jessica, radios that it has run aground at the entry to San Cristobal’s Wreck Bay, eight hundred yards off the island. The vessel, owned by an Ecuadorian shipping company called Acotramar, is carrying 160,000 gallons of diesel fuel bound for a dispatch station on Baltra, and 80,000 gallons of bunker fuel to be delivered to none other than the Galapagos Explorer II. The Jessica reports that it’s grounded on a sandbar but that surf conditions are calm and that no oil has spilled. Not yet.

By Wednesday, the next morning, Cruz’s Park Service people have begun arriving, intent on removing the fuel from the ship as swiftly as possible before a spill occurs. Ecuadorian Navy and Merchant Marine crews arrive as well, and it soon becomes clear that they’re here at the behest of PetroEcuador, the state-owned oil company to which the fuel in that ship belongs. PetroEcuador is more concerned with salvaging its product by removing the fuel and oil slowly and carefully so it’s not contaminated with seawater, than with protecting the surrounding waters and land from disaster.

It’s clear to Cruz’s people—more than sixty of them have arrived at the scene by late Thursday morning—that they’re working at cross-purposes with the Ecuadorian military personnel. By Thursday afternoon, only 20,000 gallons of fuel have been removed from the ship and now, according to the latest weather reports, rough seas are on the way.
Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian Ministry for Environment and the U.S. Embassy in Quito are hammering out details to allow a U.S. Coast Guard oil-spill emergency strike-force team to come down from Mobile, Alabama, and join in the effort. But the talks are laborious, held up by protocol, politics, and, in no small measure on the part of the Ecuadorians, by pride.

Another day passes, and the Jessica begins listing. The surf becomes rougher. By the time the ten-member U.S. strike team gets the green light and arrives Friday with high-capacity pumps and inflatable oil-containment barges—state-of-the-art equipment compared with the Ecuadorians’ improvised gear—the tanker’s cargo hold has cracked open and thick ribbons of black, viscous bunker fuel have begun oozing out into the clear turquoise Pacific.
By then, Roz Cameron’s office computer is clogged with more than one thousand e-mails, offers from volunteers all over the world to come help with the cleanup. Most of those well-meaning souls, says Roz, have no idea there are twenty thousand people who live on these islands, hundreds of whom are already preparing to fan out at various beaches, readying themselves to scoop and soak up whatever oil might come their way with buckets, towels, rags, whatever thy can get their hands on.

Dozens of other islanders are already making their way over to San Cristobal, by boat or by air, to do what they can to help. Mathias Espinosa shuts down his dive shop to fly over on Saturday and can’t believe what he sees as he looks down at the ocean between Santa Fe and San CristobaL The glistening, crystal-blue water is laced by inky tendrils of oil snaking northwest, directly toward Santa Cruz, directly into the heart of the archipelago. A fuel tank split here, a faulty valve cracked open there; the [essica is falling apart faster than the cleanup crews can surround it. It’s a blessing the spill hasn’t moved east into San Cristobal. That damage would be devastating, perhaps permanent. As it is, only a handful of sea lions, pelicans, and boobies around Wreck Bay have been hit by the oil, and Park Service staff have rescued and cleaned each one of those animals. But worse could lie ahead on the other islands, depending on where the currents and winds carry the spill.

Mathias has heard that there are already quite a few foreign newspaper and television reporters over at San Cristobal, but he’s blown away when he actually gets there. He’s seen plenty of press come through Puerto Ayora over the years—when a volcano blows or when the El Niños hit. He got a close look at a world-class film operation when the IMAX teams dug in to make their Galapagos movie, which features Mathias himself in one of the film’s early sequences. But he’s never seen anything like what confronts him when he lands at Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. Reporters are everywhere in the village, interviewing everyone. Cameras on tripods are set up along the length of the waterfront. Every person who passes—locals and tourists, adults and children—is stopped and asked to comment on the catastrophe.

MathiaS is stopped by a film crew from National Geographic He’s struck by how long the reporter, a woman, takes to prepare her makeup before giving a nod to the cameraman and beginning the interview. This is an image that will stay with him forever. Here is this horrible catastrophe, just beyond this lady’s shoulder, the ocean clouded black with a carpet of oil, and all she can think of is how her lipstick looks.

The whole sceiie is weird to Matbias. Puerto BaqueriZo’s little motels, so sleepy and empty most of the time, are booked solid right now, every one of them. And that’s not nearly enough. Townspeople have taken to renting out rooms in their homes to reporters. Some of them are charging fifty dollars a night, and the reporters are gladly paying it. The reporters aren’t footing these bills; their bosses are. The reporters’ only concern is to get the story, to deliver the drama.

“IT IS AS IF A BOMB DESTROYED THE LOUVRE,” reads a dispatch in a London newspaper. “HOW COULD WE ALLOW BLACK TIDE TO THREATEN WORLD’S FRAGILE EDEN?” trumpets a front-page Scottish newspaper headline.
“BLACK DEATH THREATENS THE UNIQUE BEAUTY OF GALAPAGOS’ LABORATORY,” declares a large Irish daily.
“GALAPAGOS IN PERIL,” says the Chicago Tribune. “FOR HUMANITY, SAVE THE GALAPAGOS FROM HUMANITY,” writes the Los Angeles Times.

Some take a different spin on the story. A Galapagan fisherman named Washington Escarabay is described in a British newspaper as angry because the spill has kept him on dry land all week. Never mind the birds and the water, says Escarabay. What about people like him, people for whom this oil spill is just one more thing getting in the way of making a living?

Others tell the reporters this whole thing’s been blown out of proportion. They point out that the Jessica’s load was—what?—a quarter million gallons or so of fuel and oil? That’s nothing, they say, compared with the Exxon Valdez. Eleven million gallons, that’s what the Exxon Valdez spilled up in Alaska. Now that was a disaster. This is what a vice admiral named Gonzalo Vega, the director of DIGMER (an acronym for Ecuador’s merchant marines), tells the press as the weekend passes and the spill slowly spreads west from San Cristobal toward the other islands. This is not a big deal, insists Vega.

By now, details have emerged about the Jessica’s background. The thing is a rust bucket, a decrepit twenty-eight-year-old wreck of a ship, hardly seaworthy at all. Its deck is riddled with gaping holes. Many of its valves are so corroded they cannot be closed. Some of its cargo-tank hatch hinges are rusted so badly the covers break off when opened. As the surf pounds the ship and it continues to list, the sound of its bulkheads popping can be heard from the shore. The U.S. Coast Guard team is aghast at the shape this ship is in. When they ask how the thing passed inspection, they’re told by sheepish Ecuadorian officials that the ship was not inspected at all. This was interesting for Sean O’Hearn to find out, considering that the Sirenian is still sitting at anchor in Academy Bay, awaiting permission from its inspectors to take to the seas.

The Jessica wasn’t even supposed to make this trip. The tanker that normally carries these oil shipments was drydocked for emergency repairs, and the Jessica was hastily sent in her place. The Jessica’s captain, a fifty-eight-year-old Ecuadorian named Tarquino Arevalo, it turns out, is certified only for coastal shipping, not for the high seas. He and his thirteen-man crew are currently under arrest at the Puerto Baquerizo naval base. Arevalo has already admitted that this is his fault, that he mistook a signal buoy for a lighthouse and steered the ship straight toward a beacon intended to warn him away.

All these facts are reported by the international press, as well as investigations into the “cozy”—as one press report puts it—relationship between the Acotramar company, which owns the Jessica, and the Ecuadorian Navy department responsible for inspecting all ships in these waters. Allegations of corruption within PetroEcuador are being explored as well; charges that the company has been routinely shipping illegally resold oil (stolen fuel secretly transferred at sea under false documentation), including the very fuel spilled by the Jessica.

By Thursday the twenty-fifth, a week after the spill began, a good amount of the 180,000 gallons of fuel and oil in the water has been corralled by floating booms and barricades. But tens of thousands of gallons have escaped, reaching the beaches of Santa Fe and Floreana. Slick, black ribbons of fuel can be seen from the air snaking their way toward Santa Cruz.

Sean O’Hearn’s been going nuts sitting tight with the Sirenian, so he’s understandably excited when a call comes from the Ecuadonan authorities asking him if his ship could carry a group of dignitaries over to San Cristobal. O’Hearn’s been dying to get to the scene of the spill, to do what he can to help out. But his excitement abates when he learns that the “dignitaries” are a group of local musicians hired to play at an annual municipal celebration in Puerto Baquerizo. Nevertheless, the Sirenian goes, and so this becomes the Sea Shepherd’s first action in the Galapagos: ferrying a band to a street party.

The spill does eventually reach Santa Cruz, coming ashore at the beach at Tortuga, where several hundred townspeople line the shore, wielding towels, blankets, and shovels, chasing down the thick globs of oil as the waves carry the stuff in. The townspeople do a good job, but some of the mess still reaches the shore, where it will remain for years as black layers of goo buried beneath the beach’s sugary white sand.

By the end of the month, the crisis has passed. The islands have been spared the brunt of the Rhode Island—sized spill by the currents and wind, which steered most of the oil out into open seas. The fierce equatorial sun helped as well, evaporating much of the diesel fuel as it floated on the surface. Visible damage to the animals and land is minimal, although it will take thirty more months, according to the Darwin Foundation, to complete the cleanup at a cost of about $1 million. As for the effect on the ecosystem of the untold amount of bunker fuel that has settled to the ocean floor in the shallows around the archipelago’s islands, only time and long-term scientific study will tell.
Of immediate concern is some kind of assurance that this won’t happen again. The Ecuadonian government has agreed to rewrite its regulations to require double hulls on all merchant ships entering Galapagos waters. Others say there should be no commercial vessels whatsoever allowed among these islands, a protest that has been heard since the Galapagos were first opened to tourism. This suggestion brings the same response it always has, that the Galápagos cannot survive in today’s world without tourism.

An even more extreme suggestion, which has hovered for years in the background of the debate over how to protect the Galapagos, is to finally say “enough” to this negligence and corruption and to simply take the islands away from Ecuador altogether, to put them under a United Nations trusteeship whereby the Galapagos Islands  would be managed and protected by all nations and owned outright by none.

Even those who embrace this idea know it is not realistic. Fundamental rights of national sovereignty would be violated. But the very fact that this concept is even discussed—in newspaper stories that quote outraged Darwin Research Station scientists who are, understandably, not identified by name—indicates the severity of the shock of this spill.

As the spill subsides, the Jessica’s captain, Arevalo—the only crew member still being detained—holds an emotional press conference and takes fnll responsibility for the worst man-made disaster in the history of these islands. “It was overconfidence on my part,” he says, his eyes shining with tears. “I am completely to blame.”

Shortly after the conference, Arevalo is taken to San Cristobal’s naval base medical clinic, where he is treated for what a clinic spokesman calls “nerves.” The spokesman tells the press that Arevalo is “psychologically not stable.” At the same time, the merchant marine admiral, Vega, has grudgingly acknowledged the spill’s severity and announces he is now pursuing criminal charges against the Jessica’s captain. If found guilty, Arevalo faces four to five years in prison.

As February begins and the oil disperses and the newspaper headlines abate, the Galapagos is left with a new tourist attraction:

the hull of the sunken tanker, which cannot be moved. The wreck is already beginning to crust over with coral, attracting perching birds and schools of curious fish. “Over time it will become a terrific place to dive,” says Captain Edwin Stanton, the head of the U.S. Coast Guard response team. “It’s a new habitat,” Stanton tells a room full of reporters. “We have a new island in the Galapagos,” he says with a small smile. “Isla Jessica.”


Grandeur

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Darwin Avenue is sleepy, almost I silent. Just yesterday the roadway was clogged curb to curb with men, women, and children laughing and shouting, waving Ecuadonan national flags. Some were dancing and leaping; others were piled atop the hoods of slow-moving cars and trucks. The drivers gleefully blasted their horns in rhythm to the passengers’ chants of “Ecuador! Ecuador! Ecuador!” as an impromptu, half-mile-long parade snaked its way along the waterfront and up through the town.

Ecuador had just beaten Peru two to one in a World Cup qualifying match that meant much more to both nations than mere soccer. National pride, at a time when both countries have precious little to be proud of, was at stake here, the bragging rights between anciently combative neighbors. Only six years ago, these two countries were at war.

Just three weeks before the match, the coach of Ecuador’s national team had been beaten and shot in a confrontation with four men in the lobby of Guayaquil’s Hilton Colon Hotel. One of the attackers, JoselO Rodriguez, coaches Abdala Bucaram’s overweight nineteen- year-old son, Dab, in an Ecuadorian under-twenty-year-old junior soccer league. When sel