by Barry Lopez
Many years ago I attended a trial in Delmas, South Africa, during the last years of apartheid. Delmas is about forty miles southeast of Pretoria. The federal government chose Delmas as a venue to make it more difficult for foreign reporters based in Johannesburg or Pretoria to attend. Nineteen black men were being tried for sedition. The charges were trumped-up distortions of the truth, but the court found all nineteen guilty, and sentenced them to death. (With the collapse of the apartheid government several years later, their appealed convictions were reversed and the men were all set free.) A friend in Johannesburg suggested I attend the trial before I left on a long trip into the Namibian outback. He said I would get a feeling for the racist government’s psychopathic indifference to human rights and to truth.
Having attended that trial in March of 1987, I never afterward entered the outback in the same frame of mind. I carried with me the faces of those nineteen men and the spectacle of bigotry that unfolded in that federal courtroom. (I also wondered more often, in those days after Delmas, about my own state of moral oblivion, the indifference in myself that left me blind to injustice in places far from home.)
It’s not difficult to locate the ruins of penal colonies set up on the edges of empires. The British sent their undesirables first to North America, until the American Revolution forced them to ship people to Australia, during the era of transportation. The French used Île du Diable and New Caledonia, the Spanish sent theirs to Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, and the Portuguese, who began the practice of using colonial prisons, built one in Madeira. The question for me is not only who is justly or unjustly condemned, or whom a nation tries to rid itself of, but the capacity of nations to indifferently expunge human life, like Portugal under Salazar, or Panama under Noriega, or Indonesia under Suharto.
Jeffers would have argued, I think, that it is foolish to believe one can actually eliminate the brutality men are capable of; but one can reduce the level and the extent of cruelty. And Galeano would have argued, I believe, that not only must the horror of these places not be forgotten but any effort to suppress these stories must be exposed and discussed openly, if democracies are to function.
If you never pass through Nagasaki, if you never see the ruins of POW camps in North Vietnam, if you don’t walk the Shoshone slaughter ground at Bear River, Idaho, it’s easier to believe that these things are merely historical, or to believe that the era of death camps, penal colonies, and raids on American Indian encampments no longer exists, that these places are now only symbolically important. It is to put forth the idea that autonomous drug cartels in Mexico can be brought to heel by a strong government.
Our guide said no to my going to the prison grounds outside Villamil. “You won’t learn anything out there,” he said. “It’s all overgrown.”
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WHEN WILLIAM BEEBE, a biologist and explorer affiliated with the New York Zoological Society, published Galápagos: World’s End in 1924, he lit up in the minds of many of his readers a vision of Elysium. People inferred from his romanticized account that anyone with the means to get there would be able to pursue a self-sufficient life of tropical leisure. Planning a trip to Galápagos aboard a tramp steamer became a fad, for a while. Several American owners of private yachts refitted their vessels to support scientific exploration in the archipelago, and an unknown number of Europeans set sail for the islands with the hope of leading lives free of bourgeois convention and of establishing small-scale export businesses. Few of these ventures came to anything, but among them were some that burdened the archipelago with stories of tragedy, mystery, and pathos. It’s the rare visitor today who leaves the islands without having heard something of the gossip and speculation concerning the people involved in those misadventures. The best known of these stories is famous all out of proportion to its banal content, but decade after decade it seems to grab the attention of visitors who want to know “what really happened” on Santa María in the 1930s.
A man named Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor with a practice in holistic medicine and an enthusiastic proponent of Nietzschean ideas about male supremacy, arrived at Isla Santa María in 1929 with his companion, Dore Strauch, a German woman with multiple sclerosis who had initially been his patient. They were intent on building an idyllic haven for themselves on the island. Each had walked out on an unhappy marriage in Berlin, and the exotic nature of their new home, together with the bohemian trappings of their relationship, made them the titillating subject of numerous articles in popular European magazines.
Late in the summer of 1932, a more down-to-earth German couple from Cologne, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, arrived on Santa María, and they, too, began homesteading, not far from Friedrich and Dore. Within a couple of months four more people arrived in the area, a ménage à trois and an Ecuadorian man the other three had hired to do their chores. The group was led by a flamboyant self-styled “baroness” who held in her thrall the two men she was involved with. The Wittmers had a respectful but cool relationship with Dore and Friedrich, but the two couples were united in being disapproving of the “Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet” and her two lovers, Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Philippson. The baroness, one suspects, was ultimately to blame for much of the petty thievery and intrigue that came to characterize the small community; and when relationships with their respective lovers began to deteriorate, both Dore Strauch and Rudolf Lorenz began to seek sympathy and comfort at the Wittmers’ farm.
One day the baroness informed the Wittmers that she and Robert were leaving Santa María. They were sailing for Tahiti. No one actually sees them leave, but neither is ever heard from again. At the same time, Rudolf arranges for a ride on a boat bound for Guayaquil, on the Ecuadorian coast. Months later, he and the boat’s captain are found dead on a beach on Isla Marchena, nearly a hundred miles to the north. Friedrich dies on Santa María, claiming to have been poisoned by Dore. Dore returns to Germany. The Wittmers stay on.
Until her death in 2000, visitors who stopped at the Wittmer compound, at Black Beach on Santa María, could socialize with Margret Wittmer. They could sip a glass of her fermented-orange “wine” while she signed their copies of Floreana, her version of what had happened on the island in the thirties. A short, stout woman, Mrs. Wittmer had about her a strange air of self-importance. She seemed to possess a permanent sense of irony about life, believing that most of the people who come thousands of miles to behold this famous Darwinian shrine to biological evolution, the Galápagos archipelago, were actually far more eager to speak with her about the baroness.
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WHEN THE BEAGLE III left Black Beach, after my second encounter with Mrs. Wittmer (we’d met earlier, on my first trip to Galápagos), we doubled the coast to the north and anchored at Bahía del Correo. The famous post office barrel here, refurbished many times, is still used by tourists (though they’re no longer able to have their postcards hand-canceled by Mrs. Wittmer). In a mostly dependable but somewhat haphazard way, mail leaving Bahía del Correo today, bearing the correct amount of Ecuadorian postage, will eventually get to its destination.
The setting for the decorated barrel, a dusty clearing set back from the beach, has the faux charm of tourist kitsch with its many hand-lettered signs affixed to posts in the ground (San Francisco 3452 miles), but it’s good fun to post a letter or a card and nearly everyone does. Our guide tells us how the barrel once served whalers and others far from home, and his words are as poignant as they are historical. He speaks about the tenuousness of this kind of communication in the nineteenth century, the likelihood that a letter would be destroyed in a shipwreck or that a question written out with great anxiety and earnest thought (“Will you marry me?”) might go unanswered for several years. The hopefulness of it all, the desire to be known and heard when so far from home, to be remembered, gave all of us an insight into the vastness of the commercial world nineteenth-century whalers lived in,
the contingency of their emotional lives.
From Bahía del Correo we have a long run to Academy Bay. One of the guests has prevailed on the captain to be allowed to take the helm for part of the crossing. The seas are relatively calm, the weather is good, and there are no hazards between here and there. The captain graciously turns over the wheel. When he does, I ask him if he has time to talk. Yes, he says. We sit on the aft deck beneath an awning. The cook brings us dark Ecuadorian coffee, and I ask Captain Eugénio Moreno about orientation and navigation. How does he know where he is going?
The captain is a private person. He rarely engages with passengers beyond a few polite sentences, but he is not reticent. I got to know him on another trip and learned that he can be very forthcoming and that he also has a good sense of humor. Once, when we were making a fast crossing between two islands together in a panga, a school of flying fish shot over the bow. All but one veered off and that one hit me hard in the chest, knocking me backward off the thwart I was sitting on. The captain laughed so hard he could hardly steer the boat. I laughed, too, a reaction that confirmed our good acquaintance.
Captain Moreno didn’t say anything about the importance of magnetic compasses (though he was trusting the gentleman upstairs to hold a heading of something like 018° magnetic for the next thirty minutes). Instead he followed up on an earlier conversation we’d had about the Hōkūle‘a. He was very interested in what the Hōkūle‘a’s navigators were doing. He told me that a mainland person would automatically be suspicious of such traditional non-Western techniques, but that they made excellent sense to an island person like himself. He told me that after so many years in Galápagos he had a feeling about where to go when the seas got rough and how to get there. It wasn’t in the charts, that information. It wasn’t determined by bottom soundings with sonar or by weather faxes. I told him that some of the Polynesian navigators were able to lie down in the trough of a canoe and sense by the way the water knocked against the hull where they were in the currents. And that a blind navigator once worked in Micronesia. He didn’t doubt it.
With his last sip of coffee the captain looked past me at the line of the ship’s wake, which he had to lower his head to see clearly, underneath the keel of the panga hanging from davits in the stern. He raised his eyebrows quickly and said he would see me later. When I turned to look at the wake, I saw that its shape was serpentine. To steer the course he was asked to keep, the helmsman had been overcorrecting constantly to maintain his heading.
I sat alone at the table after the captain went to the bridge, experimenting with my own sense of orientation. Where was I? Riding very comfortably over the Pacific, in glorious weather, shaded from the sun, enjoying the breeze, glancing at seabirds as they passed. Soon lunch would be served: a crisp salad, fresh fruit, fresh fish. Later I would go back to the Gabriel García Márquez novel I was enjoying. I would also talk with the guide about the biology and ecology of the red-billed tropicbirds circling the Beagle III just then.
I seemed to want for nothing.
But where was here in that moment? The nexus of here, a place like the mail barrel’s, a pinpoint that links a speaker to a listener, the here to some there across an intervening distance—where was this particular here located? I will try to tell you, from my deck chair in the stern of the Beagle III, with the captain now at the helm and three waved albatrosses in the distance, animated specks of white gliding across Wedgwood blue, headed south for their colony on Isla Española.
To the northwest of me at this moment, then, lies the Hawaiian archipelago. To the southwest is New Zealand. To the southeast, beyond Peru, lies Bolivia. To the northeast, Panama. Four points of a compass rose, converging here, on the Beagle III. In Hawai‘i, one finds the still-unresolved matter of a military takeover of these islands by the United States in 1893, in support of American sugar and pineapple growers who wanted the native Hawaiian monarchy deposed and a new and different apportioning of lands in Hawai‘i. Native Hawaiian people, kanaka maoli, continue to bring their story to the attention of the world. In Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, the author, Noenoe Silva, quotes the African historian Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, speaking to the core of the native Hawaiian problem today: “[T]he biggest weapon wielded…by imperialism…is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”
In southern Bolivia, outside the city of Potosí, is a mountain called Cerro Rico. The Inca ruler Huayna Capac, after learning from his men that the mountain had warned them with a terrifying bellow to stay away, had named the mountain potojsi, “a great thundering noise.”
Over the centuries, indigenous Quechua miners took untold tons of silver from Cerro Rico for their masters. Now mostly all they mine there is tin. As many as 8 million Quechua workers have been killed by cave-ins, by accidents with explosives and smelters, and by silicosis, an occupational disease. The Quechua say they used to believe that the mountain was sacred, that it was the home of a personified energy that gave Quechua people life. After the Spanish forced them into making their living as enslaved miners, the personality of the mountain began to shift in the Quechua imagination. Today it is seen as something quite different, a Beelzebub. On El Día de los Compadres, an annual festival day for Quechua men, the miners descend deep into the mines to pay homage to a Quechuan god named El Tío. They explain that the benevolent life-giving force that once resided here has now abandoned the mountain, leaving it to El Tío, a hellion whom they represent with life-size papier-mâché constructions as a spike-eared human with red horns, a large phallus, and a conquistador’s goatee.
The American anthropologist June Nash quotes a Quechua man on this perversion of sacred life-giving energy. It has been reduced to a papier-mâché model, festooned with streamers of colored paper called serpentinas. Its mouth is stuffed with coca leaves and surrounded by gifts of alcohol and tobacco. Today, the miner told Nash, “[w]e eat the mountain, and it eats us.”
In Christchurch, New Zealand, five Native American skulls were once kept on display at the Canterbury Museum, that of an elderly Lakota woman, that of an Arapahoe man, and those of three Salish Indians. The skulls were sold to the museum in 1875 for seven dollars, apparently by an American paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh. At that time, the heads of Native American people were routinely gathered up at the site of a massacre as souvenirs. Native American repatriation committees are working today to locate the appropriated heads of their ancestors and to bring them home for burial. When the late Wiyot painter, sculptor, printmaker, and carver Rick Bartow, an Oregon resident, was invited to Christchurch by Maori artists in 1994, his hosts asked him if he knew about the skulls in the Canterbury Museum. He didn’t. The Maori said they were anxious about the situation but didn’t know how to approach the museum. Bartow didn’t either, but he asked someone on the museum staff for permission to improvise a ceremony and to contact members of a repatriation committee in Umatilla, Oregon.
On the day of the ceremony a museum curator placed the five skulls on a table and stood away. (This was in the hours before the museum opened to the public.) Maori women sang Bartow into the room. He entered shoeless, holding cedar branches he’d gathered in a nearby park and carrying tobacco and water. He was weeping. He recalled later that his tears came partly from his knowledge of human tragedy (such as he had seen while working in hospitals in Vietnam), from his own feelings of unworthiness in that moment, and from the relief he was feeling with the prospect of repatriation. He lit the cedar branches and cleaned the room with their smoke. He bathed the skulls and placed an offering of tobacco in front of them. He picked the skulls up one at a time and cradled them, brushing the forehead with his hand while he wept. He spoke words he does not remember now. Finally, with the skulls all sitting on the table aga
in, he asked them to tell him what they needed. He said he was there to bring them home.
When I spoke with him later, he declined to repeat what they said.
After the ceremony he walked to the River Avon, in the park where he had gathered cedar branches and, praying, placed the remains of the ceremony in the moving water.
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EARLY IN HIS NAVAL CAREER, then-lieutenant Robert Peary developed the idea that in order to succeed in life, he had to find some consequential project or enterprise to associate himself with, and then ensure that his name would be the first mentioned when people referred to the project or event. When military and commercial interests in France and the United States began to plan the building of the Panama Canal, Peary put his name in as a candidate to represent the U.S. Navy. He was selected, but he saw eventually that there were too many others—industrialists, politicians, military officers—involved. He wouldn’t be able to establish himself as the project’s visionary. There were too many decisions to be made that he wouldn’t be able to control.
He resigned his position and shifted his aspiration to the conquest of the North Pole.
To sail through the Panama Canal today, in an era when robots build cars and space probes have entered the sphere of the Oort Cloud that surrounds the solar system, is to be moved to silence by the sheer scale of engineering, by the audacity behind constructing this shortcut to the Pacific. Peary’s instinct about the project was correct. To this day, in the minds of most who see it, something of the miraculous still clings to this series of locks. But no single name.
I made the passage through the canal once from the Caribbean side, aboard an icebreaking research vessel headed for the Weddell Sea, in Antarctica. When we entered the Gatun Locks at the north entrance, Russell Bouziga, the Cajun captain of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, ordered the bridge cleared of all the ship’s supernumeraries, including a small party of scientists headed for Antarctica. (This was the Palmer’s first voyage. When it entered the Weddell Sea a few weeks later it would be the first vessel to do so in winter since Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed there in 1915.) I was leaving the bridge with the others when the captain told me to stay where I was. (A couple of weeks before this, during the ship’s sea trials in the Gulf of Mexico, I volunteered to attend to an urgent problem for him. It involved diving to inspect the Palmer’s inoperable bow thruster. The professional diver on the ship’s crew had gone ashore for the day and my offer to help [I was a certified diver], not knowing what would be required of me, made an impression on the captain during a time when his crew was overworked trying to meet inspection deadlines.) Bouziga, a Vietnam combat veteran, told me the reason he asked those who were not members of his crew to leave the bridge during the Panama passage was because so many laborers had died building the canal. Most were now buried below us in unmarked graves. It was his feeling that only workingmen should be on the bridge for the crossing. For the hours it took us to reach the Pacific, Bouziga asked for complete silence.