| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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feature In Darwin's Wake The Academy sets sail to the Galápagos
Some 650 miles off the western shoulder of South America, the Galápagos Islands rise like the dark backs of tortoises from the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Far from the mainland, these isolated volcanic nubs were rarely reached by floating or flying plants and animals. Yet from the handful of castaway finches and iguanas, cacti and tortoises, there evolved a menagerie of surprising diversity. Its story, read and interpreted by the young naturalist Charles Darwin, set the world abuzz. Though the theory of evolution made the Galápagos famous, it could do nothing to protect the islands’ unique fauna and flora. By 1900, scientists were already fretting that these biological treasures were fading due to hunting, feral animals, and other human insults. In the sorrow of the Galápagos, Leverett Mills Loomis saw a window of opportunity for the California Academy of Sciences. It was high time, the ambitious director thought, for the Academy to take its place among the world’s major scientific establishments. Fifteen years earlier, the San Francisco naturalists’ club had finally found a solid financial footing. A grand headquarters located in the heart of downtown San Francisco had been completed in 1891. The strange stuffed beasts posed about its grand central rotunda drew the curious from miles around. But just having a museum, Loomis knew, wasn’t enough to cement the Academy’s scientific standing among its more established East Coast and European peers. The key to acceptance was to fill those spacious rooms with unique specimens so interesting that scientists everywhere would have to take notice. With such a meaty collection to work on, Academy researchers could build both themselves and their museum an enduring legacy of professional respect. Accordingly, Loomis proposed that Academy collectors make the most exhaustive biological inventory of the Galápagos to date. The expedition would employ scientifically educated young men able to withstand the hard labor of collecting in tropical, mosquito-laden conditions for a solid year. Their mission: to bring back specimens of the tame hawks, the dozen species of Darwin’s finches, the marine iguanas, and most importantly, the big-as-a-bathtub giant tortoises. “At this time, the tortoises were being eaten and taken for oil just like whales,” says Matthew James, a professor of geology at Sonoma State University and Academy Fellow. “They had this notion that species in the Galápagos were fast disappearing, and it was their scientific duty to go and get them and bring them back to San Francisco—even if they had to bring them back dead.” Rollo Beck, a renowned bird specimen collector and veteran of four previous voyages to the Galápagos, is appointed leader of the expedition. Beck writes to scientists throughout the West, eventually recruiting seven robust young men. A few are amateur naturalists like Beck, others are university students with a smattering of field experience. One, ornithologist E.W. Gifford, is only 17. When not scouring the land for eggs and iguanas, they agree to work as able-bodied seamen swabbing decks, climbing rigging and hanging sails. A mate, a cook, and a navigator complete the crew. Their ship to be is a two-masted vessel that had recently been tossed by a storm onto Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. After the damage is repaired and extra water storage tanks are installed, the schooner is rechristened the Academy. Nearly six weeks later, on June 28, 1905, the Academy departs the Mission Street docks and is towed through the bridgeless promontories of the Golden Gate. The neophyte crew is immediately struck down by seasickness. Favorable winds and tides deliver them to Baja California in four days of steady sailing. At Enseñada, they stop to stretch their legs and try their hands at collecting. The few lizards and toads they catch seed a cache that will swell to some 77,000 specimens over the next 17 months. As the ship hops from island to island along the coast of Mexico, a balmy tropical sun makes working topside a great relief from the claustrophobic accommodations below decks. At 89 feet long, the ship is just a few paces shy of a pro basketball court, but less than half as wide. Its cramped hull carries six months’ worth of water and 20 months’ worth of canned food. Each crewmember keeps a record of the expedition in a daily journal. Herpetologist Joseph Slevin notes with some amusement that the boobies of Socorro Island decorate their nests with sun-dried seahorses. A seven-foot shark trails the ship for a handful of days, scavenging the stream of skinned bird carcasses tossed over the side. After the shark is caught on a fishing line, its stomach yields up an old and indigestible pair of slippers discarded hours earlier. Most entries, however, are frustratingly bland, paragons of professional formality, scientific detail and masculine understatement. “The most interesting things are what they didn’t say,” says Barbara West, who is preparing the expedition journals of all the Academy collectors for publication. With so little space, she says, “They had to have been at each others’ throats a lot. Strangely enough, you hear almost nothing about it from their writings.” But before journey’s end, one man would be put off the ship and petty disagreements would swell into lifelong hostilities. A month out, the ship pauses at the teeming tern colonies of Clipperton Island to collect eggs, and tarry at tropical Cocos Island, Costa Rica, for bananas, papayas, water, and pleasantries with the island’s governor-cum-buried treasure hunter. On September 24, 89 days after leaving San Francisco, the Academy makes landfall at Española, the southernmost island of the Galápagos archipelago. The crew wastes no time going ashore to explore and to shoot goats for the table. After so many days at sea, the island and its legendary wildlife are a welcome sight. But the party is less than impressed with the locals. Ecuador had used the Galápagos as a dumping ground for undesirables, so that criminals, slaves, and soldiers make up much of the human population. Living conditions are brutal; the soldiers walk barefoot, and sugar plantation slaves are fed slops poured into a trough. Conditions onboard Academy aren’t much better. By now, the ship’s hold has taken on an unwelcome assortment of tiny stowaways. Bedbugs and mosquitoes, lice and other creatures have taken up semipermanent residence in the ship’s cabin and make sleeping onboard a trial. In desperation, the crew releases a live mockingbird into the cabin in hopes it will dispatch the vermin, but the creature soon comes to an unfortunate end. Slevin, the official chronicler, writes that the bird “got mixed up in a pan of dough and sunk to the bottom in its struggles for freedom.” In the end, they settle for regular fumigations with smoke and cyanide, after which, Slevin notes sadly, “the bedbugs were good as new.” After belatedly establishing diplomatic ties with the island’s leaders, the men turn their attention back to their scientific mission. A steady working rhythm soon emerges. They sail from island to island, relying on Beck’s memory to find safe harbors and good tortoise territory. After anchoring the schooner, a landing party goes ashore and the men fan out. The work is sometimes ridiculously easy. They kill ground doves by swatting them with sticks and scoop up marine iguanas while scrambling across the lava. In some cases, they are even able to capture parent birds, nests, and eggs in one swoop. Onboard, they skin out the specimens, labeling, stuffing, and storing them for the long voyage home. The damage already done to island wildlife is obvious. On Isabela, it’s a direct result of human greed: “saw hundreds of tortoise skeletons scattered along the trail and about the waterholes. No living tortoises were seen below the settlement and the natives report them as having been killed off in the vicinity,” Slevin writes. Species introduced by humans cause just as much damage. Rats eat the birds and bird eggs, while on Floreana, cats have nearly exterminated the lava lizards, and dogs have decimated the marine iguanas. On Española, Beck writes, “I crossed island to look at tortoise ground. Found considerable ground suitable for them but doubt if they could live now as goats eat cactus as it falls. Goat trails to every good sized cactus tree.” The hunt for tortoises takes precedence over everything else. Many days are devoted to bushwhacking through thick jungle and nasty thorn scrub in search of prime tortoise territory. Beck is expert at spotting the low-slung cactus clumps and green vegetation from which the animals draw both water and nutrition. The men kill nearly every tortoise they encounter, as well as hundreds more birds, lizards, iguanas, and eggs. The pages of bird shootings and tortoise butchering can be tough to stomach for modern readers. “The notion of ‘let’s leave a few things behind and help them survive’ just wasn’t a part of their thinking,” says Sonoma State’s James, who is preparing a book on the expedition. “It’s hard to reconcile this today with what we do for the condor and the buffalo and gorillas, but their thinking was that at least these animals will be available for some level of scientific study.” But the tortoises do exact a kind of revenge. After dressing the 500-pound beasts, Slevin writes, the tortoises are then “lashed on poles with a blanket wrapped around each end of the pole so that they could be carried on the shoulder. With two men to a tortoise, we began the journey to the landing place over rough lava and through heavy undergrowth, which had to be cut away at times to make way for the packers. The tortoise packing was worked in relays, as it is hard on the shoulders despite the padding of blankets.” Days of packing tortoise carapaces in the equatorial heat, across lava boulders sharp as glass, leave the men spent, and their shoulders blistered and raw. The hard labor makes observing the Sabbath a matter of physical necessity. In addition to nursing aching bodies, they repair shredded footwear, wash ripe clothing, and entertain visitors from the settlements. In November, a few close calls break up the monotony of their fieldwork. A skiff overloaded with men and tortoises overturns in heavy surf. Three days later, the ship strikes a submerged reef on Santa Cruz’s south coast, in an inlet they name Academy Bay. No serious damage is done to the ship, but the crew begins to question the competency of navigator J.J. Parker. By January, the men have lived together in close quarters for nearly a year. “When you’ve been out that long, on a small boat, you’re bound to get on other people’s nerves,” says Robert Bowman, an Academy Fellow and distinguished researcher of Galápagos finches. “Williams used nothing but cusswords against Stewart years after the expedition.” But only a single record reflects any rancor erupting into real violence. On January 22, Beck writes, “Stewart and Ochsner had a scrap—honors about even, optic discolored on one.” On April 18, the great earthquake and fire nearly destroy San Francisco and ruin the Academy’s Market Street headquarters. “Everyone was totally aware, from the moment the dust settled, that the schooner is what will allow them to rise like a phoenix from the ashes,” James says. “Loomis doesn’t miss a beat. You’d think he’d be a nervous wreck, but he just gathers himself together and keeps going. He took great comfort in knowing that at least they’d have something to start with anew.” The crew of the Academy hear of the disaster from newspapers two weeks later. Beck writes, “Learned of earthquake in San Francisco [that] destroyed 5000 people & 300,000 without homes or food. Famine inevitable according to dispatches.” With the men worried sick over their families and friends, the news tests Beck’s leadership. He knows that if Academy changes course for the mainland to hear more news, his agitated men might not agree to return to the islands. He records his victory with characteristic understatement: “Boys want to start for [G]uayaquil to cable about folks but finally decide to go to Chatham first.” Letters from home finally arrive on July 4 assuring the men that their families are safe. Tensions flare again between the navigator and the rest of the crew in late spring. On May 17, after a misunderstanding over steering, Parker threatens to start a knife fight with Slevin. In August, Parker rams the ship into a rocky ledge. The men sign a letter requesting Parker’s discharge for “incompetence,” and Beck suspends the navigator. On September 5 the crew pens another letter demanding Parker be put ashore. Facing mutiny, Beck has no choice but to leave Parker at Villamil, a coastal settlement on Isabela Island. Parker refuses money for passage back to San Francisco, and never collects the funds Beck leaves for him on the mainland. The once-rotund Parker arrives in San Francisco several months after the Academy, thin and drawn after a grueling trip home. After spending a year and a day in the Galápagos—the longest, most extensive, expedition to the islands ever made—the Academy departs for California. Beck marks the occasion by devoting an entire line in his journal to write “Goodby Galápagos.” On Thanksgiving Day, 1906, on the 519th day of the voyage, they are towed into San Francisco by a crab fisherman—only to arrive too late for dinner. They end up eating more despised canned salmon. In the ship’s hold are 266 Galápagos tortoises, more than anyone had ever collected before, including several live ones. Their prizes include the only known tortoise carapace from Fernandina Island; its extravagant, swooping lines inspired the subspecies name phantastica. They have also amassed more than 8,000 birds, 1,000 invertebrate fossils, 13,000 insects, 10,000 plants, 800 clutches of eggs, and nearly 4,000 reptiles. Says Bowman of the expedition, “It was a roaring success in terms of scientific progress. Hundreds of papers, ten years or more in the making. Fantastic results that have, down the line, been used and valued by many, many people.” Says West of the Academy’s collection, “If you want to study the finches of the Galápagos, you come here to see the whole range of variation in a single species. They really are a treasure.” The legacy of the 1905-06 Academy expedition to the Galápagos continues to this day. In the mid-1930s, Academy researcher Harry Swarth helped the Ecuadorian government write the first laws protecting Galápagos wildlife for subsequent generations. Most recently, the men’s accounts of the plants and animals they saw on each island are helping to guide current efforts to restore native wildlife. Española, the island where Beck noted the destruction of cactus by goats, has been rid of damaging alien species and replanted with the native Opuntia. It is now nearly able to sustain its ancestral population of tortoises—the very animals the sailors of the Academy hoped to save for science. Kathleen M. Wong is Senior Editor of California Wild. |
