Absolutely Galápagos

by David Fletcher

  This is exactly what Brian did. He retired to his cabin and he began to ponder. And the first thing he pondered was how so many early authors had produced so many great works of literature before the days of creative writing courses. Because, as far as he knew, when these guys were busy knocking out what we now recognise as classics, there wasn’t a single university in the land offering one of these essential programmes of tuition, and authors just had to rely on their own creativity and sort of make it up as they went along. It was one of the great unresolved mysteries of our time as to how they could possibly have done this. Well, Brian’s pondering got him no closer to finding a solution to this puzzle, so he moved on – to consider the mystery of Fred Goodwin. More specifically, he wondered – not for the first time – why the cured skin of Fred Goodwin is now not on display in the Banking Hall of Shame, but in its uncured state, it still adorns its owner’s well-cared-for body. It was a real and very annoying mystery.

  Not so mysterious was Brian then falling asleep. It was probably that walk up the volcano – and his age. Indeed, he was still rather tired when dinnertime arrived, and he found himself unable to make much of a contribution to the evening’s conversation. This could have augured well for Sandra, in that it might have meant an interlude in Brian’s series of lectures on the nations of South America. But it was not to be, and as soon as they were both in bed back in their cabin, he started. And tonight it was the turn of French Guiana.

  ‘OK,’ he announced, ‘as I’m sure you’ll remember, Guyana is a relatively poor country, and Suriname – formerly Dutch Guiana – is a bit of a problem country. However, their neighbour down the coast, French Guiana, is actually the most prosperous place in South America, with a GDP per capita greater than anywhere else on the continent. And that’s despite it having a very high unemployment rate. So, the obvious question is “why?”’

  ‘To which the obvious answer,’ interjected Sandra, ‘is because it is an overseas Department of France, and it can therefore rely on all sorts of goodies and subsidies from the rest of France – and, no doubt, from all us other kind-hearted citizens of the European Union.’

  Brian was taken aback. After all, Sandra had just stolen his lines. Nevertheless, he regrouped quickly, and asked his wife a question to which he doubted she knew the answer. Just to regain his position at the lectern, you understand. And the question was: ‘Do you know the other two EU territories outside Europe that, with French Guiana, are not islands?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Give in?’

  ‘Brian!’

  ‘It’s those two Spanish enclaves in Africa: Cueta and Melilla.’

  ‘It’s also getting late…’

  Brian acknowledged the warning and left the north coast of Africa to return to the north coast of South America. He did this with another question.

  ‘Do you know what forms a large part of French Guiana’s economy?’

  ‘It must be the Guiana Space Centre. You know, the place that’s now the European Space Agency’s primary launch site. And it makes a really good launch site because by its being so close to the equator, the rockets it fires off get a little bit of extra velocity from the planet’s rotation. Oh, and did you know that the space centre is such an important place, that there is actually a detachment of the Paris Fire Brigade stationed nearby to ensure its protection. Incredible, isn’t it?’

  Brian agreed. It was incredible – that his presentation had been hijacked. And by his audience! He was just trying to compose himself when Sandra then made another observation.

  ‘You know they have occasional votes for independence in French Guiana. And the highest ever percentage voting for independence has been just 5%. Says a lot about their knowing on which side their bread’s buttered, doesn’t it? And, as I think you mentioned a few days ago yourself, it makes you think how other places might regard the opportunity of being a little less independent and a little more supported by somewhere like Europe…’

  Well, that was it. Game, set and match. Brian could only grin and offer his wife a feeble sounding ‘Yes. Errh, yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ Then he just grinned some more. And as he grinned, he thought, and what he thought was how on Earth did she know all that stuff? It was… well, it was another bloody mystery, another unsolved enigma to add to his tally for the day.

  He felt even more tired than he had before dinner…

  12.

  Overnight the Beluga had sailed west from Puerto Villamil and then north and east around the bottom section of Isabela (i.e. clockwise around the seahorse’s egg) to arrive at a visitor site called Punta Moreno. It had been a long voyage and a rough voyage, easily rough enough to overcome Brian’s recently acquired sleeping habits, and on a number of occasions shake him from his slumbers. It was during one of these waking periods that Brian considered how he would be faring if he were not in a bed but in a hammock. He quickly concluded that he wouldn’t be faring at all well. Just as he would be in a seaborne version of hell if he was having to make do not only without a bed but also without a shower, a washbasin, a loo and an adequate supply of loo paper. Yes, there was no getting away from it; being aboard the sort of marine transport used by Charles Darwin rather than being cosseted aboard a boat like the Beluga must have been more than dismal. And that was even before one had factored in one’s ‘unavoidable companions’.

  A sailor on the Beagle, as well as having no bed and no bathroom facilities, would have had to endure for months the close company of a load of not necessarily sweet-smelling males and, for the same number of months, the absence of the close company of even a single female. It couldn’t have made for a very attractive existence. Whereas, Brian not only had the company of his wife but the company of a group of people who were really very nice indeed – and, of course, who were always sweet-smelling. OK, it wasn’t a perfect group, and to start with there was a bit of a language barrier with those in the group who made up the crew. Furthermore, for all his knowledge and application, there was also something of a cultural barrier with the guy who was acting as the guide in the group, Darwin. Then there were Shane and Shelly, who never quite bought into the whole ‘group behaviour’ ethic and also Bill and Andrea who were, for some reason known only to themselves, increasingly isolating themselves from the rest of the Nature-seekers. However, that still left the majority of these Nature-seeker members of the group in the ‘first rate’ category, and that meant for Brian and Sandra, ten other people on their Beluga-sized planet whose behaviour, attitude, generosity and general companionship were making their expedition to the Galápagos a really exceptional pleasure. No arguments had arisen. No cliques had been formed. No fights had broken out in the bar. And nobody had even taken exception to Brian’s rants – at least, as far as he could tell. In fact, it occurred to him – while still on this comparison of life aboard the Beagle to life aboard the Beluga – that there were twelve people here who could probably stand (and actually enjoy) each other’s company almost indefinitely, and if not indefinitely then for long enough for a voyage not just to the Galápagos but even to Jupiter. Hell, if he still remembered these thoughts in the morning he might even make a note to contact NASA.

  He didn’t. So NASA would have to plough on with its search for compatible astronauts for some time to come – and Brian could just get on and indulge himself in all those simply admirable bathroom facilities and thereby ready himself for another day in the company of his similarly admirable companions. Oh, and the day would start with a panga ride to Punta Moreno.

  Brian wasn’t quite sure what to expect here, but the first thing he encountered was a rather rocky approach to the chosen landing spot – and a ‘new’ bird. For here, sitting on the rocky shoreline, were not just some penguins but also some flightless cormorants. Well, these are very rare birds. They are endemic to the Galápagos and occur only on the west and north of Isabela and on the neighbouring island of Fernandina. In total
there are no more than 1,000 breeding pairs and, in the recent past, this figure has been even lower, due principally to the impact of El Niño on their food source. Of course, what marks them out as particularly special among all the twenty-nine species of cormorants in the world is their inability to fly. Their life in the Galápagos has robbed them of this capacity, as it is a life that sees them never leaving the stretch of shoreline on which they were born (and therefore not in need of wings to fly to distant breeding grounds) and a life that involves their feeding very close to the shoreline – and underwater. Here their vestigial wings have no part to play, and it is their powerful webbed feet that provide them with propulsion, allowing them to get to where they want in order to catch octopuses, eels and other fish with their long and very effective hooked beaks. So, not a bad illustration of the operation of natural selection, thought Brian: an animal discarding what was not needed to best recognise the habits it pursued to best exploit its habitat. Even if it meant ending up with a name that somewhat insensitively emphasised nothing positive about this remarkable bird but just something it couldn’t do.

  Yes, Brian thought this was a bit mean. Or he did until he thought of ‘penniless Greeks’, ‘brainless supermodels’ and ‘worthless bankers’, when he then realised that sensitivity sometimes had to be abandoned in the interests of the essential-informative. Anyway, whatever this bird was called, it was still quite impressive, not only in terms of its evolution and its behaviour, but also in terms of its appearance. For the flightless cormorant is a big bird, weighing up to four kilograms (making it the biggest of all the cormorants) and it is black above and brown below and it has that long hooked beak and brilliant turquoise eyes. Not the prettiest bird in the world but, with the help of those stunning blue eyes, one of the most imposing.

  Well, after this non-aerial avian opener, it was time for Punta Moreno itself, and that meant time for a rather challenging dry landing followed shortly thereafter by the realisation that Punta Moreno is essentially an expanse of barren lava. It was Santiago’s Sullivan Bay, Mark II, albeit without Sullivan Bay’s exquisite lava formations. Yes, Punta Moreno’s lava was more ‘fractured tarmac’ in nature and not nearly as beautiful. However, within this huge jumble of ‘tarmac plates’ there was something that Sullivan Bay lacked, and this was a series of water-filled holes. They were the result, Darwin said, of the lava surface collapsing into lava tunnels that lay beneath, and they now constituted little oases in what was otherwise a tract of sterile rock.

  The first of the oases that the Nature-seekers visited clearly had an underground connection to the sea, because swimming around in the clear-water pond at its centre were a couple of sharks! Those further from the shore could not boast the same class of tenants, but they did provide a home to an abundance of plant life and to chaps like pintail ducks, teal and common moorhens, which presumably meant that these oases also supported a healthy population of invertebrates – but fortunately no wildfowl-hunting enthusiasts of any sort.

  Brian enjoyed this expedition, although he would have preferred it if there had been just a modicum of shade available (it had been fiercely hot for the entire two hours of the walk) and if at the end of the expedition there had been a ladder down to the pangas (the vertiginous nature of the descent into the inflatables threatened to turn what was supposed to be a dry exercise into a very wet one). However, Brian was never entirely satisfied, and he would soon have the opportunity to cool down properly – and by choosing to get wet. Because, when the Nature-seekers were back on board the Beluga, it was immediately time for another group snorkel…

  This one was conducted just off the rocks of the shoreline – and, as Darwin had predicted, it was very cold. This was due to some local upwelling of cold water and it made the ambient water temperature so low that for the first time on this expedition, Brian regretted not donning a wet suit. He was in the minority of the Nature-seeker snorkelers who went about their snorkelling business in just swimwear and T-shirts and who, on this excursion into the ocean, divided their time between envying their wet-suited companions and shivering. Nevertheless the excursion was worth it. Not only was the cold water full of all sorts of fish and quite a few turtles, but within the rocks and the seaweed were a number of seahorses! These were not Isabela-shaped seahorses emerging from an egg (!) but real ‘Pacific seahorses’ (a name, Brian understood, that reflected their location and not their no doubt peace-loving nature) and they were a sort of orangey-brown, and at just three centimetres long, hiding within the marine vegetation, not that easy to see. Particularly by those of the group who were shivering.

  However, they were seen, and they prompted a discussion back on board the Beluga concerning the odd appearance of seahorses in general, their even odder reproductive habits (which involve the male hosting the developing young in his front-facing pouch) and their incompetence when it comes to swimming. Yes, seahorses are probably the worst swimmers in the world, preferring instead to remain pretty well stationary, with their prehensile tails wound around something like a convenient bit of seagrass where they can then feed or choose to read the latest Stephen King at their leisure. In fact, Evan was able to illustrate just how poor they are as swimmers by revealing to the assembled company that the title of the slowest fish in the world is held by one species of seahorse known as the ‘dwarf seahorse’, which can manage a top speed of just five feet per hour!

  The Beluga was noticeably faster. It demonstrated this directly after lunch when its captain took it north from Punta Moreno towards their next stop, a place called Elizabeth Bay. This bay was on the west coast of Isabela where it faces its smaller ‘sister’ island of Fernandina, and getting there would take a full two hours. Which meant that Brian and Sandra, from their windowful cabin, had a full two hours to observe the approach of Fernandina and, if they chose to, to brush up on their knowledge of Isabela. Brian but not Sandra chose this option, probably because Brian’s interest in this giant island had been boosted by their earlier visit to Punta Moreno and probably because Sandra knew very well that her husband would, in due course, enlighten her on everything he’d discovered whether she wanted this enlightenment or not. How right she was.

  Yes, ultimately he educated her at length on what he had established from his afternoon reading about Isabela, concerning its vegetation, its tortoises – and its goats. In the first place, he informed her, the island is so young that it does not display the various vegetation zones found on the older islands. This is because the lava fields, such as those at Punta Moreno, and the soils that surround them, have not yet developed all the nutrients required to support a varied flora – and the island has to make do with a rather simpler mix of plants. So it’s a bit like a new Barratt housing estate where there’s just laurel, Leylandii and grass. That said, not many Barratt housing estates come equipped with giant tortoises.

  These chaps are more or less everywhere on the island, so much so that Isabela can claim to be home to more wild tortoises than any of the other islands. Furthermore, because these critters are not best equipped to negotiate really challenging terrain, the island’s topography – and its volcanoes and lava fields in particular – have acted as barriers to their movement. Inevitably, and echoing what has happened on the individual islands in the Galápagos archipelago, this has led to the development of several different subspecies of tortoises on Isabela – and to Brian believing that there was yet another reason to regard the operation of nature as more than just little bit fascinating.

  Then there are – or were – Isabela’s goats, resilient little devils which had been introduced to the archipelago years ago and which on Isabela had grown to a population of 100,000. Not surprisingly, this had more than a minor impact on the ecology of the island, and in 2006 the National Parks Service and the Charles Darwin Foundation were obliged to undertake an eradication programme. This worked, since which time the island’s elementary but natural vegetation has recovered and the endemic wildlif
e has experienced a general uplift in its mood. It was just a real pity, thought Brian, that so many essentially innocent goats had needed to get the chop. What’s more, he thought, if they did have to go, wasn’t it a pity that they weren’t thought suitable to satisfy the demands of traditional Chinese medicine for an ingredient that would cure stuff like wheezing, impotence and night-time urinary incontinence. That way twenty million seahorses wouldn’t have to be killed each year instead and several seahorse species wouldn’t now be facing extinction. And frankly, extract of goat has just as much chance of being effective in stopping you wheezing, flopping and bedwetting as even the most exotic and expensive of seahorses. And it’s a fucking disgrace that the rest of the world tolerates the practice of such diabolical nonsense when it means that seahorses will soon be joining that long list of other creatures that are all destined to disappear down that giant plughole of Chinese depravity.

  Oh dear, he was at it again; getting all self-righteous about the behaviour of people who were probably unaware of the damage they were causing and were basically just very nice. Alternatively, they were all too well aware of the havoc they were wreaking, but they just didn’t give a toss and were probably arrogant to boot. Which is why Brian made a promise to himself that he would never give up on his assault on all those practices that involve the misguided and totally unnecessary murder of so many creatures, no matter how futile this assault might be and how annoying it might be to all those who were called upon to witness and endure it. That said, he felt he could now do with some light relief, and he decided to provide himself with this by another dip into the pool of unsolved mysteries – starting with why the United Kingdom was still nominally united.