THE STRANGE CASE OF FAILED HUMAN ADAPTION ON FLOREANA ISLAND, GALAPAGOS
Just before dawn on the 9th September, 2010 our sailing vessel the ‘Enchantata’ dropped anchor in Post Office Bay on Floreana Island in the Galapagos Archipelago. The Island is now without human habitation but that was not always so.
When Charles Darwin visited in the 1830s there were several hundred Ecuadorians living in the wetter lush high country. Most had been banished to the islands for their anti-government activities. They lived a subsistence life by eating tortoise, growing maze and vegetables and fishing. They introduced donkeys and goats to the island. Today, the donkeys and goats have been irradiated but the donkey fly remains, adopting the sea lions instead and the lower limbs of unsuspecting eco-tourists.
The Floreana Tortoise is also making a come back having almost been eaten out of existence. Darwin reported in his journal that one naval frigate had taken two hundred tortoises for food in a single day. Since 1971 the Charles Darwin Research Station has been successfully breading and returning this rarest of animals to the island.
But without a doubt it is not the islands animal history that is the most colorful but that of its more recent human settlers. Inspired by early writings of a remote paradise, several European dreamers made Floreana their home. The German psychotherapist, Dr Fredrich Ritter and his one time patient turned lover, Dora Strauch, set sail in 1929 to create their new life on Floreana. Ritter's accounts of gardening and nudism were published after their arrival in magazines back in their native Germany. While the articles recorded the delights of a free and idealistic lifestyle, in reality Dora soon grew tired of Ritter's misogynistic Nietzchean philosophy; according to Julian Smith and Jean Brown's guide to the islands.
In 1932 Eloise Wagner de Bosquet along with her two S&M lovers Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Philipsson set up home at Post Box Bay. Eloise, who claimed to be a baroness, took the only fresh water hole for her own bathing pool and from then on the three were a source of antagonism. Their torrid relationship came to an end when Eloise and Philipsson suddenly sent off without notice one afternoon for Tahiti in a small boat. They were never seen again. In 1934 Rudolf Lorenz, who had taken to long periods of weeping, left the island. His body was found six months later emaciated and washed up on another island nearby. Soon after, Ritter also died from food poising having eaten meat cooked by his lover even though he was a sworn vegetarian.
The last human inhabitants were Japanese shark fin and turtle hunters who set up a processing factory on the island to exploited the rich seas of the archipelago. They were forced out in 1971 as the significance of the island’s wild life gained international attention.
Today, it's only eco-visitors on day trips that call into the bay. They may leave a postcard addressed back to themselves in a wooden post box on a pole a little way inland from the bay. They hope that someone from their own neighborhood will one day call by, find it, and deliver it back to them - a tradition that harks back to whaling days when the crew of a passing ship left mail for those back home to be collected by ships heading back to Europe.
This small and sheltered bay on the northwest of Floreana Island is the spot that explains some of the Galapagos's extraordinary wild life. The cold Humbolt current from the southern Antarctic Ocean hits this bay with full force. The waters are cold and floating in the bay are Galapagos Penguins, the only penguins to live on the equator and only able to do so because of the cold current. Also in the bay are green sea turtles that have drifted in from warmer tropical waters to feast on the rich food supply. This mix of currents brings to the Galapagos sea creatures that in more usual circumstances live and have adapted to survive in quite different marine environments.
It was only the European dreamers, it seems, who were unable to adapt and so came to such tragic ends.