Free About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez Page A

over the dark plain. Farther back from the sea, boobies and frigate birds had made nests in the first ranks of low
muyuyo
shrubs. The risk to these lives was apparent. Young birds dead of starvation, or victims of what ornithologists call sibling murder, lay crumpled on the bare ground like abandoned clothing. Detached wings hung like faded pennants in wickets of
Cordia lutea
bushes, the wreckage of fatal bad landings.
    These deaths, one realizes, are all in the flow of natural selection; but the stark terror of it, like the sight of a sea lion’s sharktorn flipper, makes the thought fresh and startling. Images of innocent repose and violence are never far apart in Galápagos and the visitor is nowhere spared the contrast. He or she scans the seascape and landscape at the storm petrel colony acutely aware of the light hold the biological has on the slow, brutal upheaval of the geological.
    T HE FIRST HUMANS to visit Galápagos may have been Indians from the South American mainland, who arrived on oceangoingbalsa rafts in the eleventh century and probably used the islands only as a base for fishing operations. In 1535 Fray Tomás de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, sailing far off course, came on the islands by accident and gave them the name that later appeared in Abraham Ortelius’s atlas of 1570—Insulae de los Galapagos. (The cleft fore-edge of a lowland tortoise’s carapace resembles the sharply rising pommel of a sixteenth-century Spanish saddle, the old Spanish for which was
galopego
.) English buccaneers began using the islands as a raiding base late in the seventeenth century. Struck by the contrariness of local winds, they referred to the place as
las encantadas
, the enchanted ones.
    Early in the nineteenth century whalers began visiting Galápagos regularly. They came to hunt sperm whales west of Isabela but found they were also able to careen their boats easily on the beaches for repairs and to provision them quickly with live tortoises, a source of fresh meat. The whalers turned pigs and goats loose on most of the islands, food for anyone who came up shipwrecked, but, too, animals easy to hunt down on a return visit. They barreled fresh water in the odd year when it was readily available. They idly beat thousands of marine iguanas and Galápagos doves to death with clubs, marveling at how the animals “do not get out of our way.” And they buried their dead among the stones.
    The legacy of those frontier days of whaling (and later of sealing) is still evident in Galápagos. Only 15,000 of an original population of perhaps 200,000 tortoises remain; four of fifteen subspecies are extinct and another is on the verge of extinction. The fur seal population, almost hunted out, is making a slow recovery; and black rats (from the ships) long ago eliminated at least one species of rice rat, the lone native mammals on the islands, aside from bats. Foraging goats have radically altered the structure of some of the islands’ plant communities.
    In addition to the whalers and sealers, three other groups, historically, had an impact on the biology of Galápagos. During World War II, American soldiers stationed on Baltra shot virtually all the larger animals there, and scientists, during the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, collected extensively for zoos and museums. The most deleterious effects, however, were caused by colonists.
    The history of colonization in Galápagos is marked to an unusual degree by violence and periods of wretched, bare subsistence. The early settlements, founded on the hope of trading agricultural products to the mainland, all failed. In due course, each was turned into a penal colony by the Ecuadorian government. Attempts to raise sugarcane, coffee, citrus fruits, melons, and sweet potatoes, and small-scale efforts to export sulphur, seal hides, and tortoise oil, or to make stock-ranching profitable, were all schemes that didn’t take sufficiently into account the thinness of the