|
 The
Galapagos Islands were discovered in 1535 by Fray Tomas de Berlanga,
bishop of Panama who drifted across them while on a voyage from Panama to
Lima, Peru. They were given their current name by Abraham Ortelier in 1574
after the giant tortoises. Galapagos is Spanish for a saddle a reference
to the shape of the carapace (shell) of the saddleback tortoises found on
some of the islands.
The Islands had been called Las Encantadas or
bewitched islands. This was because of the strong currents that flow
through and around them, so making navigation difficult and also due to
the gaura or mists making it difficult at times to tell whether it
was the islands or the ship that was moving. This name was in continued
use by whalers and pirates for some time after the title of Galapagos was
generally accepted.
There were no native peoples, though doubtless sea-faring
races in pre-history had come across the islands, but kept on going for
more hospitable places to build their communities.
Because of their isolation, the Galapagos quickly became
a refuge for pirates and castaways. Treasures were buried, and stories
grew up around them. By 1792, British whalers had reached the Galapagos
and began to hunt for whales around them. Like many oceanic islands, the
topography of the ocean floor suddenly sweeping upwards causes upwellings
of deep nutrient-laden currents so resulting in a bloom of phytoplankton
and so of animals that are a part of the food chain. The Galapagos are an
excellent feeding ground for whales, with the Islands of Isabela and Fernandina
being a calving place.
The whaling business was lucrative and unregulated, whalers
took whatever they could until their holds were full. They also took the
giant tortoises as living larders to provide fresh meat on the cruise. A
typical whaling ship would take 500-600 giant tortoises in this way to be
stored upside down in the holds to be slaughtered and eaten when fresh meat
was needed. It is thought that the whalers caused the extinction of tortoise
subspecies on the islands of Floreana, Santa Fe and Rabida. In total it
is estimated that whaling ships removed 200,000 tortoises from the Galapagos.
One interesting relic of whaling days is still preserved
on the islands, that is the whalers post-boxes. Whaling ships were away
from port for usually at least 2 years and commonly more, so post-boxes
were erected on islands where they might be seen by other whaling ships.
Letters left in the boxes, often little more than a small barrel raised
on a pole with a roof to keep the rain out, were left with a request that
ships on their homeward journey would take the mail back with them and post
them on arrival.
 The
whalers also caused further problems that would be around long after they
left in the form of feral non-native animals. Black rats, cats, cattle,
donkeys, goats, pigs and dogs are a legacy of whaling and other ships that
called by. Sometimes the animals escaped, sometimes in the case of goats
and pigs, they were deliberately let free to breed and establish a population
that could be used for food by ship wrecked sailors in the future. These
feral animals then competed with native fauna for food and habitat.
Author Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame) visited the
Galapagos aboard a whaler and later wrote about this visit in the story
The Encantadas in 1855.
The Galapagos were largely ignored and considered unremarkable
except to the occasional ship's naturalist until Charles Darwin landed in
1835 aboard HMS Beagle. Darwin was at the time a young man who had embarked
on the exploratory voyage while in the midst of studying for the clergy.
The voyage and especially the experience and collection of animal specimens
from the Galapagos led to the development and crystallization of a set of
ideas that would lead to Darwin's theory of evolution. Surprisingly perhaps,
when Darwin arrived at the Galapagos, he was more interested in their geology
than biology, though this changed when he started to look at what there
was to be found there.
What fascinated Darwin the most was the geographical isolation
and distribution of species. In
Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1845, he documented
his epic natural history journey. His discourse on the subject of evolution
was not published until 1859, when the first edition of On the Origin of
Species emerged in England and forever changed the study of evolutionary
biology.
There were two to three hundred people living on Floreana
at the time of Darwin's visit, he wrote:
"The staple article of animal food
is supplied by the tortoises. Their numbers have of course been greatly
reduced in this island, but the people yet count on two days' hunting
giving them food for the rest of the week. It is said that formerly
single vessels have taken away as many as seven hundred, and that the
ship's company of a frigate some years since brought down in one day
two hundred tortoises to the beach."
The Ecuadorian government used the Galapagos for penal
colonies until the middle of the twentieth century. There were plans to
further exploit the islands for their mineral resources such as coal and
guano, but these foundered for the simple reason that there was insufficient
for it to be viable. Salt was mined from a salt lake on Santiago and was
used for salting locally caught fish and tortoise meat.
The oldest colony on the Galapagos was established on San Cristobal in 1869
and remains the seat of government in the Galapagos today. Other towns that
are still in existence were established in the later years of the 19th century.
Villamil on Isabela where coral was mined and burned to produce lime. Santo
Tomas, 20 km inland also on Isabela was established to mine sulphur from
the volcanic fumeroles in the area. These activities were supplemented by
fishing and cattle ranching on the moist windward slopes of Sierra Negra.
Ecuador declared the Galapagos Archipelago a wildlife sanctuary in 1935.
From about this time, eco-tourism began in the Galapagos, U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited in 1938 for instance.
In 1942, the United States was permitted to construct
a major air base on one of the islands, Baltra, to protect and defend the
Panama Canal. After World War II, the United States returned this base and
its airstrip to Ecuador. Legislation to protect the archipelago had begun
in 1934, but war and politics prevented official protection to take place
until 1959, when Ecuador established Galapagos National Park. In
that same year, 100 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species,
the Charles Darwin Foundation was established under the auspices of UNESCO
and the World Conservation Union. The Foundation's stated goal is "to provide
knowledge and support to ensure the conservation of the environment and
biodiversity of the Galapagos Archipelago through scientific research and
complementary actions." To achieve this goal, in 1964 the Foundation opened
the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) in Puerto Ayora on the island
of Santa Cruz.
The principal partner of the Charles Darwin Foundation is the Galapagos
National Park Service, the government agency that manages the National Park,
and, since the passing of the Special Law for Galapagos in 1998, the Galapagos
Marine Reserve. The Charles Darwin Foundation helped to establish the GNPS
in 1968, and over the years, the Park-Station partnership has become a model
for how conservation science and management can work together.
| Ancient history of the Galapagos
Islands |
The Galapagos archipelago is a group of volcanic islands
born from a meeting point of two submarine ridges, the Carnegie Ridge that
runs westwards from South America and the Cocos Ridge that runs south from
Central America. They meet at a point called the "Galapagos Hotspot" that
itself is at a point on the northern ridge of the Nazca continental plate
which moves east at around 2cm per year. The Nazca plate is responsible
for pushing up the Andes mountains when it dips beneath the South American
continental plate.
While the Nazca plate moves, the Galapagos hotspot is
stationary. A series of volcanic events has made a series of islands which
have then moved away from the hotspot riding on the Nazca plate, thus the
oldest islands in the Galapagos group are to the east, while the youngest
ones are to the west. This is similar in many ways to the Hawaiian islands,
though the progression of ages is not as clear cut as in Hawaii.
The most western islands of Fernandina (1 volcano) and
Isabela (6 volcanoes) are very volcanically active, major events have occurred
in 1968, 1997 and 1998. These are huge shield volcanoes looking characteristically
like upturned soup bowls, the calderas (volcanic cone that has collapsed
back into the volcano) are several kilometres across and up to 1000m deep..
Most of the islands are the tips of large submarine volcanoes
that reach and break the surface, though some are formed of uplifted undersea
volcanic lava.
There are many evidences of the volcanic activity that
built the Galapagos to be seen, different lava types, cones, craters, lava
tubes and other artefacts of eruptions and of ongoing volcanic activity.
Bartolomé island, sunken volcanic crater
in foreground and Pinnacle Rock (middle background) the remains
of an eroded tuff cone - tuff is a form of compacted volcanic
ash, found usually near the coast. |
More on Galapagos geology
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Galapagos
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Santa Cruz
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4/7 days from $1264 |
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90 passengers
5/8 days from $1685 |
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Natural history "lite"
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Santa Cruz
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90 passengers
8/11 days from $2949 |
Celebrity
Xpeditions
5 star vessel, natural
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92 passengers
11 days from $3100 |
Samba
 small motor yacht, snorkelling, diving
options
14 passengers
8/11 days from $1754 |
Eric
small ship vessel, good
guides, diving, kayaking options
20 passengers
8/11
days from $2450 |
Sky Dancer
Dive boat
16 passengers
8/11 days from $3195 |
|
Recommended reading |
Galápagos: A Natural History Guide, Michael Jackson.
Galápagos Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide, David Horwell, Pete
Oxford.
The Beak of the Finch: A story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan
Weiner.
Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin.
A Guide to the Birds of the Galápagos Islands, Isabel Castro and
Antonia Phillips |
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