Part 26
They were ushered to the Catholic priest, a Franciscan, whose rope belt dangled behind him tied in two neat knots, as if he wanted to be sure not to forget some important commissions. They spoke to him in English, French, fumbling German, and fluent Japanese (courtesy of Nick), and he answered in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and—presumably—Latin. Anyway, he _did_ understand their mission, and made a sortie through the village to return with Chico, a lad who would serve as guide and who was “bueno muchacho.”
Meanwhile they relaxed on the veranda of the priest’s house and sampled some very uplifting brandy and cups of Galápagos coffee—native grown and very strong and good, which is made by adding hot milk ad lib to thick coffee essence. There was also a basketful of fresh rolls, which made a great hit, being the first fresh bread they had eaten since Panama.
At last, in spite of the priest’s dubious warnings that the journey ahead would be “malo _malo_,” they pushed on, with their young guide loping barefooted ahead. They were confident that the going couldn’t possibly get worse—but they were soon disabused. As they struggled on, Barbara confesses to having cheered herself up with fantasies of their reception:
I conjured up the picture of a large and gracious hacienda with a big living room and deep, comfortable couches and cold drinks and efficient servants who would lead us off to bathe and provide us with clean dressing gowns while other servants, somewhere in the back of the house, set to work washing and pressing our miserable clothes. And then, after a civilized lunch of crisp, fresh salad and perhaps more hot rolls with our hostess, we would be sent back down the mountain on horses so we could keep clean and neat all the way home.
Barbara felt she had some foundation for her daydreams, for we had all read accounts of Karin Cobos, written by successive yachtsmen. We knew she had married the son of the most prosperous plantation owner of the Galápagos, who had later been killed by his own peons, and we had read descriptions of their huge ranch house, their riding horses, and the ease and luxurious living with which the family Cobos were surrounded.
At last Chico stopped and pointed across the valley to the ridge of the next hill, seemingly miles away.
“La casita de la Señora Cobos!” he announced proudly.
They saw a lonely, bleak shoebox sitting foursquare against the skyline, and between them and it a sea of water in which cattle splashed up to their bellies. Obviously, to get to the “casita” they were going to have to swim.
At last they reached the house, wrung out their pants, peeled off their sodden shoes and socks, and were ushered in. Karin turned out to be a dark-haired and dark-eyed Norwegian woman, who looked a handsome thirty-five, but must have been in her fifties—Robinson, for instance, visited here and was smitten by her in 1926. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see them, but accepted her letter graciously and read it at once, while her guests cleaned themselves up, using a pitcher of water and a wash basin. Then they sat down to a plentiful lunch of rice, fried eggs, plantain, and more of that strong, good Galápagos coffee.
Karin spoke surprisingly good English and was happy to talk about former yachtsmen she had met, but not about her life on the island. Barbara gathered that she had divorced her Ecuadorian plantation-owning husband and moved high into the hills, where hers was the only house for miles in any direction. Apparently she liked it that way, and certainly it lessened her former loss of cattle by theft. She made her living by exporting beef to the mainland (Ecuador), where her oldest daughter was at present at college.
This was our first encounter with the rugged and independent breed which is the Galápagos pioneer—but we were to meet quite a few more when we got to Santa Cruz.
The trip down the mountain was considerably faster, though no less sticky, but with the advantage that conditions got progressively better. In Progreso, they dropped off their guide with a gift of some cheese and a couple of cans of V-8 (all they had left), and staggered into Puerto Chico just at dark. Mission accomplished.
When I checked out with the San Cristobal authorities, I was handed a bill for $10 U.S.A. (American money specifically demanded—they did not want Ecuadorian.) The special assessment was for “entering at an extraordinary hour”—namely, 6:00 P.M. local time. When I protested, the port captain shrugged and said, “It’s the law.” I had a strong hunch that had we entered at 10:00 A.M., another law—fresh from the port captain’s desk—would have charged us $10—American—for entering “in the forenoon.” I got part of my money’s worth by delivering an oration of a few well-chosen words. Part of my behavior was normal irritation, but part of it was an act: I hoped that by a vigorous protest and a threat to report the matter to Officials in High Places I could at least keep the shakedown market stable, so that the next yachtsman wouldn’t be faced with a bill for $20—U.S.A.
We left Wreck Bay by the light of a brilliant full moon at 0200, hoping to cover the 50 miles to Santa María (also known as Charles and as Floreana) before dark. By suppertime we were anchored in 4½ fathoms in Post Office Bay, renowned, obviously, for its post office—but one that is a bit different from most and with a special history. Since the days of the whaling ships, a barrel has been maintained here on the beach, where ships outbound for two or three years could deposit letters to be picked up by other ships on their way home.
In recent years this tradition had been carried on by passing yachts, with the help of the sole white family on the island, the Witmers. Mrs. Witmer collects the letters that have been deposited, cancels them with an official rubber stamp marked “Post Office Bay,” and leaves them to be picked up by the next yacht. We had heard that mainland postal services all over the world honor this cancellation.
We had been given a number of letters and packages for the Witmers and were told that they would sight us at once from their “plantation of sorts” in the hills and would come down to the beach to receive us. When no one appeared throughout the next day, we decided that they might be down at their “seaside cottage,” around the island at Black Beach, and in the afternoon we climbed several miles up into the hills, following an old trail and hoping it would lead us to one establishment or another. There are only two or three families living on Santa María, as the population is stringently limited by that vital element—water. The one permanent spring—a slow drip from the rocks—provides an assured source of water sufficient to maintain a very limited group.
Our hike was very different in character from the soggy expedition to Karin’s. Santa María is not high enough to catch much rain. The terrain is rough and sandy, covered with low brush and with frequent volcanic outcroppings. Near the beach at Post Office Bay are evidences of an early attempt at colonization, in the form of neatly laid-out foundation stones and possibly old corrals of lava rock, but the experiment failed before it had progressed very far due to the lack of water. Beyond the abortive settlement a couple of trails had been cut through the scrubby undergrowth and we set off hopefully, but one after another they petered out into goat tracks and then into nothing. At last we gave it up and returned to the beach.
We dropped our own mail into the white post office-barrel, which has been kept painted and in good repair by the crew of Irving Johnson’s brigantine _Yankee_, and added a small signboard with the name _Phoenix_ to the other names which had been recorded through the years. In the process we disturbed a big and lazy seal sleeping in the sun nearby. He was not afraid of us, merely indignant at our disturbing his nap, but when poked with a stick he obliged by cavorting clumsily down the beach with Ted and Jessica in excited pursuit.
Our next call was at Academy Bay, on the south shore of Santa Cruz, 40 miles to the north. Following the directions we had been given back in Balboa, we anchored just off the stone house on the point, which we knew belonged to Carl and Marga Angermeyer. We put out a stern anchor to prevent too much swinging and here we stayed for eight days—among the most enjoyable days of our entire voyage. The settlers we met in Santa Cruz came nearer to fitting our ideas of true pioneers than any other group we had seen. No easy tropical paradise for them—no bananas and breadfruit dropping from the trees, no coconuts. Life is lived very close to the subsistence level and everything has to be done the hard way. Their salt is collected from saltpans; fats and cooking oils must be rendered from giant green turtles that the men go out to catch; bread is “sourdough,” and at each baking time a bit must be kept back as a starter for the next batch; coffee is grown in the hills and prepared by the individual housewife as needed.
Those delicate souls whose coffee must be just so would be interested in the virtuosity required to get a good cup of coffee in the Galápagos. First, you get the beans from where they are grown in the mountains, a round trip which takes a full day. Let them dry for a few days. Then shell and pound them until the hulls are free. Separate beans from chaff—a tedious process unless you do it outdoors in a strong breeze—and roast over a kerosene fire at low heat, stirring constantly for a long time, until properly brown. Grind through the coffee mill. Then make your coffee—and by now you’ll be ready for it.
The principal problem is water, for although there is sufficient rainfall in the hills, the ground is porous, and the water percolates through. At sea level rain is rare, and every drop must be caught and treasured, so that the first step in constructing a new house is to build the cistern, and the second is to erect a properly guttered roof above it. Walls, floor, and any desirable divisions into rooms can come later. Washing and cooking are always done in brackish water collected from shallow wells. In times of drought this is also drinking water. To us, it tasted impossibly salty, but we were assured that one could get used to it.
Of course, there are no doctors here, and no dentists; and certainly nothing resembling a corner drugstore. Whatever supplies must come from outside arrive by yacht, or by infrequent supply ship from Ecuador. On this ship they send out their only cash crop, and it is a skimpy one: fish which they have caught and salted down. The boat also brings their mail—when the captain thinks of it. On his most recent trip, just before we arrived, he had forgotten to pick up the sacks of mail waiting on the dock at Guayaquil, and seemed to think it a great joke. Also, Marga showed us a 100-pound sack, filled with sand, which had been delivered in lieu of the sugar they had ordered. The captain disclaimed any knowledge of the substitution and since there was no way of tracing the theft there was nothing to be done about it—except go without sugar and hope for better luck next time.
There is a strange dichotomy on Santa Cruz: those who have settled at sea level and those who live on the mountain. Only a narrow, rugged trail, impassable in the rainy season, connects the two settlements, and it takes four hours of hard climbing to reach the first of the houses “on the hill.”
The people here live a very isolated and completely agricultural life. They grow vegetables and raise cattle, trading their produce for sea-food products, or for a little cash, with the colony along the shore. Each week, Alf Kastdalen, only son of the most enterprising of the Norwegian settlers in the hills, comes down to shore with a train of burros and distributes the sacks of potatoes, the carrots and onions, bananas, and freshly killed meat for which he took orders the week before. On the return trip the burros carry an equal weight of supplies—anything from sacks of flour to rolls of barbed wire—which must be ordered from Ecuador, stored in a locked shed near the landing, and packed up the hill little by little as needed.
Because we hoped to get some fresh vegetables to take with us, Barbara and I took a trip up to visit the Kastdalens, who have been on Santa Cruz for twenty-three years, having come with one of the first resettlement groups from Norway. The trail into the hills ran for six miles almost straight up and could have been quite as bad as the one on San Cristóbal, except that it was not raining. We took about four hours for the ascent, trudging behind and beside Alf’s string of six tiny burros who were well loaded with supplies. On a later trip these same burros hauled up our small kerosene refrigerator, which we had mistakenly bought in Sydney. As I had feared, it turned out to be useless on the boat, smoking even in a quiet anchorage, but worked fine when absolutely stable. Now the Kastdalens, for the first time, could enjoy the luxury of iced drinks.
We spent the night at the Kastdalens’, where we enjoyed good conversation and a meal of wild pig (plentiful in the hills, along with wild cattle), potatoes, avocados, fried plantain—and plenty of fresh milk, butter, and home-baked bread. It was an amazing contrast to the scanty fare of the equally hospitable Angermeyers on the shore, but in talking with the elder Kastdalen women we realized that they felt keenly their isolation from friends in Academy Bay. Mrs. Kastdalen asked wistfully for news of Marga Angermeyer, whom she had not seen for over a year—the last time being on the occasion of a wedding on Santa María of the Witmers’ son. This event had been a gala affair, attended by almost every European on the islands, all of whom seemed to feel as close to one another’s affairs as if they had been members of a single family.
A few days later Ted and Jessica also made a trip into the hills, this time as the guests of another Norwegian family, the Hornemans. Old Mr. Horneman seemed a gentle and scholarly sort, not at all the type to wrest a living from a complete wilderness, yet it was he who was the first settler on Santa Cruz; with his own hands he had built the solid house, raised on stilts, in which his wife and his teen-age son and daughter lived; and by his own efforts he had reclaimed and fenced in and cultivated many acres of land. He had captured and redomesticated cattle gone wild, and bred a new stock. Now, after many arduous years, he was taken with a very unusual hobby: using selected gourds of the proper shape, he sketched in, painted and decorated remarkably accurate globes of the world.
The Hornemans’ two children, Friedel and Siegvart, were mature beyond their years in responsibilities, but they had a joyous enthusiasm for life and a thirst for knowledge that was challenging. Both of them spoke five languages: English—which was the lingua franca among the European settlers; Spanish—the language of Ecuador; and German and French, in addition to their own Norwegian. Siegvart explained the French as follows: “Mamma and Mrs. Angermeyer used to speak French when they didn’t want us children to know what they were talking about, so of course we learned French!”
Friedel also made a remark which impressed Ted and Jessica deeply. “I had ice cream once,” she told them, obviously savoring the memory. “During the war, when there were Americans on Baltra, they took me to visit the camp one day and I had ice cream!”
“We rode in a truck too,” Siegvart added.
The American Army, during the war, had had a base on Baltra, a small island just to the north, which guarded the Pacific approaches to the Panama Canal. After their departure, the buildings and supplies left behind had gradually found their way to the islands and to Ecuador. Salvaged items are, of course, very important in the Galápagos, and near the Angermeyers’ house, down on the coast, I saw the remains of Joe Pachernegg’s yacht, _Sunrise_, wrecked on the west side of Santa Cruz and brought over piece by piece.
Two yachts called at Academy Bay during our stay—a rather unusual concentration of visitors. The first was _Cle du Sol_, a French yacht, which had the distinction of having a grand piano in the one large cabin, around which the boat had evidently been built; and the day before we left, an American motor yacht, the 110-foot _Valinda_, out of Los Angeles, pulled in. We met the owner of _Valinda_, who planned to return soon to the States and arranged to rendezvous with him at James Bay, on uninhabited James Island, on the morning of February 16. He promised to pick up any mail we had ready and give quick delivery back to California, a wonderful opportunity to get messages home a couple of months earlier than we had expected.
On the day before our departure we had a community party ashore, and with the help of the men rigged up a 12-volt generator, with a 110-volt converter, so that we could give a slide show. This was our farewell gesture to the people of the Galápagos, for although we planned to see more of the islands as we cruised to the north, Academy Bay was the last human outpost.
16 BACK TO HAWAII
“How come change ya mind?”
From Academy Bay, on February 13, we made a short hop around to the east side of Santa Cruz, where we anchored for the night between two tiny islands just offshore, the Plaza Islands. It was dusk when we arrived and we lost no time in launching the dinghy, in order to take a closer look at the multitude of seals that were crowding the banks and disporting in the water. As we drew closer to shore, more and more seals slid from the rocks and swam out to circle about us, yelping excitedly as though urging us to join them. Suddenly we heard a fearful roar and turned to see a large bull seal who had reared himself out of the water. With open mouth and a truly terrifying bellow, he came charging toward our cockleshell. Giving up our vague intention of perhaps landing and kidnaping a baby seal to take along as a pet, we turned and rowed a dignified retreat. We were allowed to depart in peace, but found that any attempt to return from any angle whatsoever would be violently challenged. Reluctantly we returned to the _Phoenix_, swinging gently at anchor in our tiny cove.
All night our sleep was interrupted by the continual bleating, barking, yelping, and roaring of the dozens of seal colonies, which seemed to keep the watch in turns.
The next morning we set out at dawn and sailed on up the coast and across to Bartholomew Island, just off James. The scenery here is rugged and grand. We anchored just off a most distinctive pinnacle of black rock, several hundred feet high, and went ashore to explore a completely arid, sandy, volcanic, cactus-strewn terrain. In a cave in a nearby hill, following directions given us by the Angermeyers, we found the tin can cache in which Robinson, in 1932, and a few others since, have left messages. We entered the _Phoenix_ in the select company and, in the valley beyond, spelled out the name of our ship in rock letters, to add to the other names we found there, including _Yankee_, _Inca_, _Thunderbird_, _Arthur Rogers_, _Nellie Brush_, and _Windjammer_ (soon to be wrecked on Easter Island).
From Sullivan Bay we sailed up the coast of James and around to the lee, in order to spend the night in Buccaneer Bay before proceeding on to James Bay and our rendezvous with _Valinda_. We dropped anchor right in the middle of the bay, in seven fathoms, and Ted and I went ashore with guns to try our luck at varying the diet of canned corn beef. There was no need to hunt for goats here, as we had done on the Barrier Reef—they came to us. A large herd on the beach merely looked curiously at us as we dragged the dinghy up on the land, while on the ridge above, about 200 yards away, a herd of cattle peered down. We walked over to the goats and murdered one. They were standing in shoulder-high grass, and it wasn’t until we had made the kill that we discovered that we now had an orphan on our hands, a very young kid which nevertheless gave Ted quite a run before he was able to chase it down. We carried the carcass to the boat and tethered the baby nearby, while we completed our explorations.
Up the large gully we found plenty of iguanas, so tame they had to be shooed aside. We knew how ubiquitous these creatures were—back at Academy Bay we had once counted twenty-one, sleeping on the porch of Angermeyer’s house, while a couple more had sneaked into the living room! In the shallow caves under the banks we flushed a mother goat and twin babies, who reluctantly rose and made a token retreat until we passed. When we got back to the dinghy, where the kid was tied up, we found a large hawk had alighted on a branch just a few feet away. I picked up a rock and tossed it at him. He shrugged. I tried again, this time from a range of six feet, and hit the branch on which he was sitting. He ruffled his feathers, gazing balefully at me. Then I went up and pushed him off his perch with a stick, at which indignity he squawked angrily and flew to another tree 50 feet away.
Buccaneer Bay is the site mentioned by Heyerdahl, of _Kon-Tiki_ fame, in his monograph on the archaeology of the Galápagos, and it was our desire to get a surface collection of pottery shards to take back to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. We got the collection, all right, and it was a fine one—but it never got out to the _Phoenix_. While we had been busy ashore, the surf had risen and was now breaking heavily. We loaded our knapsack of shards into the dinghy but left guns, goat and kid for a second trip. It was lucky we did, for our first attempt to launch the dinghy resulted in our prompt capsizing. Before we managed to get the boat and ourselves back to shore, we took a considerable beating and finally crawled up onto the sand exhausted. The knapsack full of pottery ended up on the bottom, as did my last pair of glasses—even though I had worn them on a cord around my neck in approved fashion.