John Hickman

After two Summer Friday visits to the famous Rose Reading Room to read this book, which cannot be checked out of the New York Public Library, I caved and bought my own copy.

This was the only book I could find (without delving too, too deep) about the human history of the Galapagos islands, which were hinted at in The Beak of the Finch (for which I still haven't finished my review...). To be honest, it never occurred to me that anyone had lived there. I just assumed, based on how everyone talks about how the islands are ideal microcosms of evolution, that there was minimal human presence beyond the whaling "post box" and occasional shore parties. This book demonstrates how thoroughly wrong I was.

Hickman is a lively and engaging narrator, mixing breezy stories with measured facts so that even the dullest chapters--oddly, the one about the islands' geopolitical significance in the 19th and 20th centuries--clip right along. This isn't a super-academic text, so there are no notes or references, though there is a bibliography. There are a few pictures as well, though nothing to write home about. It really is Hickman's writing that carries the work, and we're lucky that the only person who seems to have written at any length about the people on the Galapagos seems to have had quite a way with words.

Highly recommended for anyone planning to visit the Galapagos! There's way more to them than the wonderful wildlife.

Quote Round-Up

Chapter 1: The Inca's Tale
I was a bit impressed here with Hickman's handling of the South American aboriginal cultures. Granted, I'm not totally sure if it's his original thoughts or if he's reciting theories he read about elsewhere, but it seems like it would have been easy for a privileged white man in the 80s to either dismiss Incan legends as nonsense or else take them at face value.

p. 35) The Batchelor's Delight...captured [three Spanish ships] without difficulty but, infuriatingly for the gold-hungry pirates, were found to consist of timber, flour and 'eight tons of quince marmalade'.
It should come as no surprise to those who know me that most of my quotes come from the Golden Age of Sail period. That this should include pirates capturing ships full of jam is just wonderful!

p. 40) Few of the buccaneers had very much formal education, but they were usually men of outstanding ability in one field or another, with enquiring minds and keen eyes.
Shout out to all those far-from-stupid pirates (and sailors)! You don't get enough credit as anything but cannon fodder.

p. 59) In 1846...not a single tortoise was left on Charles' Island. It appears that the tortoise also became extinct at about the same time in Jervis and Barrington Islands. Each of the islands, we now know, had a unique subspecies of tortoise. Three of these races were now utterly extinct.
This was horrible to read about. Hickman explains that ships would take 500 to 600 tortoises in their hold at a time for food or export, and says that there 31 ships stopped at Charles Island in one year alone--for a loss of 15,500-18,600! The fact that such observable species went extinct before conservation efforts stepped in flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about the Galapagos.

p. 68) ...Lieutenant Gamble of the Marines, who was to distinguish himself...by successfully navigating a prize vessel from the Marqueses on an epic voyage of thousands of kilometres to the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii) with a crew of only two able-bodied men.
Um, what? Where is this story? I want to read it!

p. 62-69) No specific quotes here, but the adventures of Captain Porter of the U.S.S. Essex sound an awful lot like the movie Master and Commander: stretched his orders to hang around Brazil in order to go around Cape Horn to the Galapagos, encountered British whalers, took prizes/captives by disguising his ship, divided his crew to take ships to Valapraisio, had one precocious "captain" who was only a 12-year-old midshipman...

p. 72) In 1825, Captain Benjamin Morrell described witnessing the eruption of Narborough/Fernandina Island's volcano: "The Tartar's anchorage was about ten miles to the northward of the mountain, and the heat as so great that the melted pitch was running from the vessel's seams and the tar dripping from the rigging... The mercury continued to rise till four p.m., when the temperature of the air had increased to 123 degrees, and that of the water to 105 degrees."
I can't even imagine how absolutely terrifying this must have been in a *wooden* ship! And I'm amazed none of the men died from heat exhaustion--or maybe that just wasn't in the quoted excerpt.

p. 93) Darwin was not the first visitor to be provoked to speculation by what he saw... The fact that these question occurred to others before Darwin is confirmation that these almost empty heaps of lava in the Pacific contain evidence of evolution in forms which are easier for men to understand than anywhere else.
Some of Hickman's sources tiptoe right up to the edge of making Darwinian statements--only to back down at the last minute and say they'll leave those speculations to the scientists. Really fascinating stuff!

Chapter 15: Murder in Paradise
This chapter, about a few eccentric people who lived on one of the near-desert islands, is absolutely bonkers! I just wish Hickman had this kind of detail about all the events on the Galapagos.
Also, after Hickman's surprising sensitivity about the Incas in chapter 1, I was disappointed to see him using the original title of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None...but a quick Wikipedia check did at least make clear that the book's title wasn't changed in England until the very year that this book was published. Since Hickman is British, I'll let him off the hook for that one.

p. 129) People were aware of the threat to the ecology of the islands but the concept of environmental conservation was still restricted to a few zealots... Meanwhile, continued effort to create settlements on the islands and capitalize on their supposed economic resources led to the introduction of still more alien animals and plants which multiplied the threat to indigenous species.
It's amazing how hard people tried to turn a profit of this lump of rock. After reading about their struggles, I think I made a reasonable assumption that anyone who tried would have simply run away at the first opportunity. As the tourist trade and conservation efforts started to rise, the dedication to these settlements just get even more baffling to me. What is the point of sticking it out?

p. 142) No quote, but I was reassured to read that in the 1970s Ecuador established a council to ensure that environmental conservation and human development complemented each other--so at least there was some acknowledgement that the goals weren't exactly aligning without help.

p. 158) I wasn't going to read the unrelated appendix about animals of the Galapagos, but then I finished this book and I still had quite a bit of subway ride left...and it turned out to be pretty interesting, so I did finish it. The extra details about tortoise tracks scraped into lava flows, albatross birds that can barely function on land, and, apparently, the most beautiful seagull in the world, make it worth it. So does this description of an albatross feeding its babies:
Feeds are few, often days apart, but enormous when they occur. One scientist, Bryan Nelson, found that a chick could take over 1.8 kilograms at a single meal lasting only a few minutes. Admittedly at the end of it the fortunate (or unfortunate) offspring, with its bulging belly, could no longer stand on its feet. High-pressure feeding goes on for week after week until, at the end of five months, the downy, chocolate-coloured chick weighs much more than either of its parents.
Albatrosses are apparently the Augustus Gloops of the avian world!… (mehr)