by Barry Lopez
Beneath a sky alive with universes, sitting here this May evening on a breakwater by the dark ocean, which sighs now and then in lazy susurrations against the rocks, I feel an urge to get closer to the water, to raise the Pacific out of its thinghood and into the personhood that Cook and others who sailed so very close to it knew. I picture the tracks of their voyages, a spider-web maze of lines drawn on a large map I keep at home, the routes that brought the Pacific out of obscurity for my ancestors: Magellan’s crossing; the passages of the cultured English pirate William Dampier; the voyages of Tasman, Bering, Lapérouse, Roggeveen, Mendaña, Wallis, Heyerdahl, and Charles Chichester; of Spain’s Manila galleons; and the tracks of the pioneering British research vessel Challenger in the nineteenth century. And of the Polynesian double-hulled exploration canoe Hōkūle‘a in the late twentieth century. Lines imposed by me on a surface that maintains no such records, and whose lack of roadways, water courses, and mountain spines compels the imagination to remedy the tracklessness, to make something up.
The Pacific’s inconstant surface—what Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale called its “unpath’d waters”—was once a symbol of the unknowable. I sit before the unknowable then, imagining these years-long voyages. I try to see past what could have been the tedium of Sir Francis Charles Chichester’s single-handed circumnavigation of the planet (he put in at only one port), recalling his harrowing doubling of Cape Horn. I imagine the giant squid, hunted a mile deep by a sperm whale, and Don Walsh sitting on the bottom of the Vitiaz Deep. I think of Halobates, riding the Northern Equatorial Current.
If I were to scribe a line on a map of the Pacific this evening, straight away to the northwest, it would not cut a shoreline but for Galápagos’s for 6,098 miles, not until it came to the Aleutian Islands. If I were to draw another line straight south, it would not encounter a coast until it met the wall of the Abbot Ice Shelf in Antarctica, 4,993 miles distant. If I looked to my left and imagined the far-off Bay of Panama, and then to my right and envisioned the Philippine Sea, the span would be more than 10,000 miles. The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific. If one were truly to comprehend the size of the thing, one would be halfway to imagining God.
I’ve sat still so long here, and my pupils are so dilated, I can make out three brown pelicans dozing on the water, not twenty feet away on Pelican Bay. Sometimes in the presence of such apparent innocence—these birds who are oblivious just now to all that is hidden and potentially threatening in the lightless world we share—I recall that line Conrad gives Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, when he tries to engage Marlow’s imagination around the unaddressed barbaric nature of the jungle reality Marlow has stumbled into: “The horror! The horror!”
I am attuned to this. The seeming innocence of the birds and the starvation camp at Cape Sabine. A lyrical afternoon walking across the Alexandra lowland and the bodies of the luckless stacked like industrial kindling beside the burial pits at Banda Aceh.
The Bay of Panama. It lies below the indecipherable horizon there in the east. I can imagine it, picture Vasco Núñez de Balboa, standing on his historic (though today still unidentified) peak in Darien, toward the end of September 1513. He’s ordered his Indian guides and his soldiers to remain behind, a few hundred feet below the top of this mount. As conquistadores went, Balboa was not as ruthless, not as vain, as hungry for silver as most. But I can see him standing there with the dog, his formidable perro de presa, Berganza. A soldier dog, trained by conquistadores to chase down Indians and tear them to shreds. Perros de presa were raised to be symbols of Spanish virility and prowess. Broad-chested, with short hair and a high, wide forehead above small eyes. The muzzle short, the mouth wide, the canines long. They stood to a man’s knee. They were bred from bull baiters, canids used in the corrida dramas, dogs that created such a spectacle of gore and mayhem they were eventually replaced by human banderilleros wielding barbed picks.
It does not take much in the way of travel or the reading of histories to turn up the barbaric perros de presa nearly every culture has arrayed against those it hates, or those whose possessions it desires. When thinking of the conquistadores, who maintained the trappings of civility while they loosed their dogs to savage people, I think about the bankers in Amsterdam who first underwrote a nascent Portuguese slave trade out of West Africa, as immoral an enterprise as anything the Mongol pariah Timur Lenk ever imagined. And once those slave-based economies began to falter, with the rise of capitalized industrialism early in the nineteenth century, what of the English bankers, who took this for-profit commerce in human beings from Dutch financiers and the Portuguese, but were able to distance themselves later from Britain’s history of rapacious behavior?
The moral oblivion of the slave trade. The piracy and ransacking of Spanish villages by Drake and the other West Country mariners. These things do not seem at all immediate in the modern world, nor any longer even relevant. Indeed, to recall them and to express outrage, regret, or sorrow is regarded by some as unworldly, as if conquistadores like Pizarro and perros de presa like Berganza were part of the West’s uncivilized past, largely gone, or an unfortunate aspect of the human desire to possess, to exercise control. Most people do not wish to hear about what the historian David Stannard calls “the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world,” the elimination of the Indian populations of the Americas.
For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now.
Back in my room in Hotel Galápagos, laid out on a ceremonial cloth with a few other things, is the eight-real piece salvaged from the Nuestra Señora. It reminds me not to forget the ease with which sixteenth-century Spaniards succumbed to the temptation to exploit the native peoples of the Americas, because their deaths did not matter, and, for them, there was no accountability. The coin fills me with wonder and dread whenever I pick it up. It represents the spirit of Leopold of Belgium, centuries later and closer to my own time, holed up in his country estate in Laeken, while his functionaries bled the Congo basin of everything marketable, working to death, murdering, or otherwise doing away with ten million Africans. It reminds me of the soldier-thug Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who collaborated with Belgian intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington in 1961 to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically chosen prime minister. Four years later Mobutu, with American support, staged a military coup in Congo, a country he would rename Zaire and rule as a dictator for thirty years, enforcing policies as indifferent to human suffering and misery as Saddam Hussein’s, and, as Mobutu Sese Seko, amassing a personal fortune of some four billion dollars.
It is easy to misremember the Mobutus, the Batistas, and the others; or perhaps it is not possible to recall them at all clearly if the goal is to facilitate Western-style progress and its twin sister, profit, if the agreement is not to focus on the past but to lament these regrettable and uncommon aberrations, and then to move forward. What the coin tells me, though, nine-tenths of an ounce of Mexican silver, is that it is dangerous to believe the past is behind us, that a remedy for barbarism has been found. Is it not, in fact, barbarism that sits well dressed and well spoken today in a corporate boardroom in Frankfurt, Shanghai, or Delhi, as far from human suffering as the bombardier flying back to Tinian Island aboard the Enola Gay? Or is barbarism a term reserved instead only for those flying planes into the World Trade Center towers?
History tells us that with every great empire comes great barbarism, that the two are inseparable, so that to diminish barbarism you must dismantle the empires. This forces the qu
estion of what, really, civilization brings to people that they did not already have. And why is civilization so hard on the people who turn it down?
The inequity, the memory of it, upends my thoughts. I accept its inevitability, but cannot accept the scope of expression we permit it.
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WHEN I STAND UP, the pelicans are startled. They paddle slowly away. No breeze yet, but it’s cooler now. I’m curious about the town, Puerto Ayora, this late at night, and head somewhat aimlessly in that direction, over the small bridge that crosses the head of Pelican Bay. Two pariah dogs pause in the road to watch me pass. Neither domesticated nor feral, these are the town’s scavenger animals. They make their living within the ambit of Puerto Ayora but are associated with no house. They do not venture out into the countryside, where they fear the feral dogs that travel there in small packs, subsistence hunters of iguanas and feral pigs, dogs not to be put off their hunts by a human with a treat or a handout.
From the bridge I move into town, past shuttered houses and shops. Nothing seems to stir here. I move like a specter through the streets. Laundry hangs limp in the humid air to dry. Children’s toys lie inert on the ground. Eventually I find my way back to the water, at the end of a private dock at the Hotel Delfín. Looking across Academy Bay from here, I can just make out the Hotel Galápagos, though not the cabana beyond it where I am staying. The few lights that still burned on the hotel grounds earlier are now dark, the hotel’s generator having been shut down at midnight.
A crescent moon, late to rise, silhouettes about thirty sailing and motor yachts and several sport and commercial fishing vessels anchored in Academy Bay. I once interviewed a man, Dennis Puleston, at his home on Long Island. He’d sailed to the Galápagos (and all around the Pacific) in the 1930s, while in his twenties. Later he wrote a book about his adventures, Blue Water Vagabond. In his eighties when he spoke to me, he struggled to translate his experience, speaking of it as if trying to reach me from another world, a world without GPS, without onboard radar to penetrate darkness and fogbanks, a person guided solely by his magnetic compass, his charts, by a feeling for the wind and the sea, and the look of a windward horizon. The Galápagos he knew, I understood him to say, is no longer there.
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IN THE 1960S—I’ll tell this story in its shortest form—a group of anthropologists, academics who disputed the idea that Polynesians reached the Hawaiian Islands, the Marquesas, the Societies, and other South Pacific archipelagos by accident, set about trying to prove that Polynesian navigators, departing their homelands in more densely islanded Micronesia, knew exactly what they were doing. The scholars intuited that Polynesian navigators had found their way south to New Zealand, as far east as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and as far north as Hawai‘i by employing a sophisticated awareness of currents and wave and wind patterns; by noting the direction in which transiting birds such as black noddies and fairy terns were flying, early in the morning or late in the afternoon; and by using rising and setting stars to set and hold a course.
What the scholars most needed to know, in order to confirm their ideas and proceed with their work, was what the navigational techniques used by the Polynesians actually were and how they were employed; and what a Polynesian voyaging canoe—thought by them to be a double-hulled, catamaran-style vessel—looked like. Length, beam, draft, architecture of the hulls, design of the steering oar, and how its masts were rigged.
The anthropologists, maritime historians, and other researchers involved in the project eventually earned the respect of native Hawaiians, who joined them as colleagues. Working alongside each other, they settled on the rough dimensions of a practical double-hulled, two-masted vessel; on the canoe’s rigging and the shape of its sails; and on the design of the sailing platform and other details. Then on the island of Satawal, in the Caroline Islands, they located a man still familiar with the techniques of traditional Micronesian navigation. A group of native Hawaiians apprenticed themselves to the Caroline islander, Mau Piailug, and began learning how to read wave patterns, cloud color and shape, ocean currents, changes in water depth, prevailing winds, and the presence of freshwater lenses sitting on the ocean’s surface, the discharge of nearby rivers. These variables, however, were only part of what composed the dynamic system of open-water navigation that Polynesians had historically relied on. The other part was an ability to read the stars throughout the solar year, to monitor their changing positions as the hours, the days, and the seasons passed. The discipline needed to learn and then recall these movements provided the navigator with a “star compass,” a mental construct by which he could set and hold a course. Polynesian navigation was fundamentally different from the system that grew up in the West, where a sextant, paper charts, a magnetic compass, and ships’ rutters (logs) provided the most reliable guidance. The latter depended on instruments, which could be lost overboard, and on paper, which was perishable; and it was a system that was most accurate in stop-time. The Polynesian system was held in the mind, where it could not wash overboard or be misplaced; and its time frame was dynamic, constructed for use aboard a moving vessel.
Pulling together all the information they’d gathered, the group built and, on March 8, 1975, launched from a beach on Maui, the Hōkūle‘a, a traditional 62-foot double-hulled Polynesian voyaging vessel. The crew of young Hawaiians who’d trained under Piailug, who was sailing with them, navigated it unerringly across 2,500 miles of open ocean to Tahiti, using only traditional methods of navigation.2
A year after the Hōkūle‘a’s initial voyage, an archeologist named Yosihiko Sinoto found some parts of an 800-year-old voyaging canoe preserved in a saltwater swamp on the island of Huahine, in French Polynesia. The vessel had apparently been driven ashore and crushed by a tsunami. His examination of the debris—of its 18-foot-long steering sweep, for example—tended to confirm that the design group in Hawai‘i had done an exceptional job of matching the Hōkūle‘a’s design to the design of the original prototype.
Thirty years later, when I visited the swamp where Mr. Sinoto made his discovery with him, the two of us were invited to join several others for dinner. There we were introduced to one of the Hōkūle‘a’s navigators and to some of the vessel’s crew at that time. The crewmen prevailed on their navigator, a young Cook Islander, to show us the tattoo they’d chipped in to get him in Tahiti, after he’d proven himself. The modest navigator was reluctant but eventually pulled his T-shirt up over his head and turned his back to us. From the nape of his neck to his coccyx, the major stars of the Southern Hemisphere were inked across his back in their familiar relationships to each other. Riding the star pattern was a brightly colored marine iguana, the tip of its tail resting at the spot where a man’s tail might have been, its body crossing at an angle over his spine, and its head swiveled to stare out at the viewer from the base of the man’s neck.
Later in the evening, the tattoo now hidden again under his shirt, the young man explained to us what it meant to be able to navigate the Hōkūle‘a. At the urging of a few anthropologists, he said, some of his people had set about rediscovering a way to navigate without conventional Western instruments, across a seemingly empty wilderness of intimidating space. This came at a time, he told us, when dominant cultures around the world had begun to worry that despite their scientific and technological sophistication and their large reserves of material wealth, they were losing their way. They seemed to traditional people like cultures trapped aboard a rudderless ship, sailing very fast over a deceptively calm ocean.
“Once we too, Polynesians, felt lost as a people,” he said. “Now we have something to offer others, a way to regain confidence.”
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IT WAS LATE when I returned to my room. Waiting here for me was John C. Beaglehole’s reverent biography of Captain James Cook, which I was two or three hundred pages into; and my notes from Willi
am Beebe’s Galápagos: World’s End, which I wanted to review, now that I had returned to the islands for a third time. Beebe’s 1924 book had turned many people’s attention toward this Pacific outpost, and a few readers, believing the untrammeled archipelago was the paradise that might finally be their sanctuary, looked for a way to get there.
I’d arrived in Galápagos by myself, a week ahead of a group of fourteen people, mostly strangers, whom I was to join on a tour of the islands. I came early in order to have some time in the evenings just to read, after daytime strolls. But tonight the reading would have to wait. The heat and humidity that had propelled me from my room had abated some, and I’d sufficiently worn myself out now to be able to fall asleep at this late hour. Had the electric power still been on, the blast of light from the room’s overhead bulb would have sent the geckos scurrying, but it wasn’t and they were not alarmed by the beam of my pocket flashlight. I opened the window by the bed, propped the door open with a chair, wove a length of rope across the doorway to keep the pariah dogs out, and slid quickly sideways into sleep.
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MY REGULAR ROUTINE here in the morning is inquiry. Every day I consider how fortunate I am to be free to wander in Galápagos. Not everyone gets to come. Pay attention to small things I tell myself. Look closely at what are clearly not the answers to some of your questions. Do not presume that later you’ll be able to read about something you’ve witnessed today.
Even if I’ve gotten to bed late, I’m usually up at first light, which comes without warning on the equator. Just a few minutes, really, between full night and full day. The hotel generator starts up at six, breakfast is served at six-thirty. I usually go for a walk around Puerto Ayora afterward and watch people come to terms with the day—the unloading of foodstuffs at the market (fruit and vegetables from fincas in the highlands), children escorted to school, someone shouting at a recalcitrant internal combustion engine.