The Blue-footed Booby is a typical representative of the fauna of the Galβpagos Islands. Its name is derived from bobo, the Spanish for dolt. It is so stupid that it does not recognise humankind as a menace.
Ever since the 16th century, when the first Europeans landed on that equatorial, volcanic archipelago 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the local birds have been so innocently trusting that they have been mocked and abused. Edward J. Larson's eminently instructive history of the islands may incite twinges of misanthropy or at least an apologetic blush. On the Galβgagos, there were never any predators before the arrival of men.
The very first report on the Galβpagos, written in 1535, was contemptuously scathing. When the Spanish government sent Fray Tomas de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama, on a visit to Peru to check on the misbehaviour of the conquistadors, he subsequently found himself becalmed and drifting, carried by the Humboldt Current to the Galβpagos, where, evidently, no humans had ever lived. His ship's crew all went ashore in search of water. Unable to find any for two days, they chewed the juice out of cactus. Two sailors and ten horses died of dehydration.
"I do not think that there is a place where one might sow a bushel of corn, because most of it is full of very big stones," Berlanga wrote to the king of Spain, "and the earth that there is, is like dross, worthless, because it has not the power of raising a little grass, but only some thistles." He observed "many seals, turtles, iguanas, tortoises, many birds like those of Spain, but so silly they do not know how to flee, and many were caught in the hand."
Sailors amused themselves by stoning and beating birds to death. Even young Charles Darwin, H.M.S. Beagle's naturalist, initially found nothing to praise in the islands, or in the creatures that were to inspire his theories on evolution, so clearly had isolation altered species from their forebears on the South American mainland.
About the largest island, then called Albemarle, which the Ecuadorians, in accordance with their modern programme of Hispanicisation, have renamed Isabela, Darwin wrote: "I should think it would be difficult to find in the intertropical latitudes a piece of land 75 miles long so entirely useless to man or the larger animals."
He rode on the giant tortoises, los ga1βpagos, but could not guide their direction; he repeatedly threw marine iguanas into the sea, but they kept returning to the land; and he observed that "a gun is here almost superfluous, for with the muzzle of one I pushed a hawk off a branch of a tree". The birds were so imprudent, he noted, that "there is not one which will not approach sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I have myself tried, with a cap or hat". One marvels at the image of the future sage of Victorian England beating a bird with his hat. After publication of Origin of Species in 1859, the Galβpagos were revered as a source of epochal thought. In the estimation of most of the world's scientists and many others, the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark were reduced to metaphors.
Julian Huxley probably did more than any other individual in the past century to persuade the United Nations to recognise the historical scientific importance of the Galβpagos by establishing the archipelago as a "Man in the Biosphere" preserve for UNESCO, one of the UN's first World Heritage Sites. Ecuador protected part of the archipelago as a national park, but for a long time allowed unrestricted Ecuadorian immigration. As Larson points out: "Eco-tourists followed scientists in seeking to see what Darwin saw, threatening those very sites by their numbers and transforming the Galβpagos into a test case for environment protection from the people who love it too much."
The airlines and shipping companies take hordes of visitors to the islands. "Almost overnight," Larson writes, "the Galβpagos became a chic destination." The growing resident population is generating social problems that are reducing the local fauna to endangered species. This admirable book's woeful final chapter, 'Paradise in Purgatory,' reminded me of the misanthropic words of Bishop Heber's hymn, "every prospect pleases/ And only man is vile".
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic