Paradise Revisited

Photographs and videos by Will Matsuda

My first encounter with a Galápagos tortoise came when the driver of my taxi from the airport attempted a risky overtaking maneuver into the path of an on­coming bus. On the island of Santa Cruz, which is bisected by a single highway, this is a favorite sport: The white Toyota HiLuxes that serve as taxis overtake tour buses, while tour buses overtake trucks. But this time, the driver quickly pulled back behind the slow-moving car ahead of us. “Tortoise,” she explained.

And there it was, a great dome, an overturned bathtub, trying to cross the road. What set of circumstances favored an animal that weighs up to 600 pounds, moves at four miles a day, and takes a quarter of a century to reach sexual maturity? The answer is: a remote island chain formed by volcanoes, with little fresh water and no predators, where life moved at a languid, lumbering pace, ­at least, until humans appeared. The tortoise’s reaction to the traffic was typical of its kind. It retracted its head into its shell and fervently wished for the bus to go away.

The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire on Bartolomé Island

On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;, but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.

Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee, ­up from $100 just two years ago, ­and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.

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A giant tortoise lumbers across Santa Cruz Island. Visitors are no longer allowed to eat them.

The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands, ­discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example, ­as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.

Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.

The mythology of blinding-­inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story, ­the one that drove me here, ­is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”

All of that should make him any writer’s hero.

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A bust of Darwin at the Charles Darwin Research Station, near Puerto Ayora

The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s, Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on, ­although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a bio­security declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.

I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”

One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a direction­less youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.

During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ ­mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”

In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahren­heit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.

On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-­prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.

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Marine iguanas in Puerto Ayora. Darwin called this species, found only in the Galápagos, “imps of darkness.”

Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names, ­York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory, and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.

In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

While on the Beagle, Darwin had to wait months to reach a suitable port to receive the latest packet of letters from home. Nearly 200 years later, I FaceTimed my husband from the deck of an expedition boat, which had excellent Wi-Fi. Most of the archipelago has Starlink coverage.

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Blue-footed boobies on Bartolomé Island

Some of the wildness that Darwin encountered still survives. The walls of my hotel room, up in the misty highlands of Santa Cruz, were flecked with geckos, which dart behind the picture frames if you get too close. Darwin was disappointed that “the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours.” Everything is relative, though, and to me this was a paradise of bugs, evoking fond childhood memories of crickets in the grass, lady­bugs on leaves, and wasps on Coke cans. (Now I can go for days in England without seeing anything more exciting than a bluebottle; terrestrial insect populations in North America and Europe have been declining by 1 or 2 percent a year for a while.) Arriving in the Galápagos was like stepping back in time: A huge antennaed something lay outside my hotel-room door on my first morning, its black-and-red carapace glistening in the dawn. What appeared to be gothic bumblebees flew past my face, Xylocopa darwini, female carpenter bees, fat and inky black. (The males are gold.) Monarch butterflies, with their stained-glass wings, danced in the sun; a smaller, violet butterfly, the Galápagos blue, is endemic to the islands.

Today, even after decades of human intrusion, the abundance of the Galápagos is still what sets them apart, thanks to recent decades of human conservation. The embarrassment of frigate birds, with their red, puffed-up throat sacs. The great flocks of blue-footed boobies, dancing for their mates on Tiffany-tinted toes. The lines of flamingos, their feathers a shocking Millennial pink. The frequent sight of a lava lizard doing push-ups, their way of communicating. The pod of dolphins that swam up to the expedition boat for a spot of bow-riding, using its slipstream to slough away the remora fish that cling to their backs. A furious thrashing in the water that revealed itself as a school of rays, mating, or fighting, or possibly both.

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A pod of dolphins

Tragically for Darwin, he lived before the invention of the modern snorkel, and so never saw the magnificent world under the islands’ waves. As soon as I dipped my mask underwater off Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire not far from where he made landfall, I found myself in an alternate world of pearlescent parrotfish, baby sharks, and vivid blue starfish. The Australian electrician traveling with our party noticed an octopus, and it took a while for my eyes to make out a brown fluidity of fingers, slurping its way along the seabed.

I surfaced to the sound of retching, ­What the hell?, ­only to discover that baby sea lions can nurse with a disgusting noise. Then Isadora, our guide, started barking: arf, arf, arf. She was trying to lure a peng­uin off a rock, she explained, so that we could see it swim underwater. We were rewarded when a black-and-white bullet sped past. (Penguins on land might be comical, but an underwater penguin is no joke at all.) The final surprise came as I swam to the boat ladder and then checked beneath me. Have you ever screamed through a snorkel? Try spotting a full-grown reef shark a few feet below you; that’ll do it. Its sheer bulk and rigidity astonished me, as if I were watching a refrigerator glide through the water.

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A Galápagos land iguana (left) and frigate birds (right) on North Seymour Island

On the four inhabited islands, too, animals abound. In London, the main hazard of being absorbed by your phone is veering into the path of a cyclist. Down at the dock in Puerto Ayora, the town on Santa Cruz, it’s stepping on a drowsy sea lion. Walk almost anywhere and you’ll see a land iguana, perhaps two feet long, colored in burnt sienna, gray, and black. The iguanas molt in patches to accommodate their growth and so are covered with loose, peeling skin. Never mind the thrill of riding a tortoise; exfoliating a lizard would provide the ultimate ASMR.

Their distant cousins, the marine iguanas, are so black that they seem to suck the brightness out of the air: Darwin referred to them as “imps of darkness.” (He carried a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost with him on the Beagle, and you can often feel the effect of its dazzling imagery on his prose.) The iguanas congregate in big crowds, piled on top of one another. At Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz’s south coast, I nearly stumbled over a veritable cuddle puddle of them, with one large specimen in the middle, its arm proprietarily draped over another, as if they were on a third date at the movies.

“Come over here,” I yelled to Will, the hip American photographer who’d accompanied me. “I’ve found an iguana poly­cule.”

He sighed with satisfaction. “It’s like I never left Brooklyn.”

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Marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz Island

The crew of the Beagle treated the iguanas with no more respect than the tortoises. Intrigued by the idea of a lizard that could swim, Darwin caught one, “They do not seem to have any notion of biting,” he wrote, ­and placed it in the water. Despite being gracefully at ease there, the iguana immediately returned to shore. “Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance, that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks,” he observed. (In other words, they felt predation pressure.) Others in Darwin’s party did crueler experiments on these intriguing creatures. “A seaman on board sank one, with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly; but when an hour afterwards he drew up the line, the lizard was quite active.”

The birds did not escape this casual sadism either. Darwin noted their “extreme tameness,” adding that “a gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.” The doves used to be even tamer before the arrival of the buccaneers and the whalers, Darwin remarked, because the “sailors, wandering through the woods in search of tortoises, always take delight in knocking down the little birds.”

To me, these passages are some of the strangest in the Beagle diaries. Darwin lived in a world where, whatever you did, more animals would be along in a minute. When Darwin made camp on what is now Santiago, the land iguanas were so plentiful that he struggled to avoid their nests in the sand. “I cannot give a more forcible proof of their numbers, than by stating, that when we were left at James Island, we could not for some time find a spot free from their burrows, on which to pitch our tent,” he wrote. Three years later, though, a visiting French naval officer was the last person to record any land iguanas on James at all. Feral pigs, descendants of domestic animals introduced by settlers, soon wiped them all out. (A population of iguanas was reintroduced in 2019 from North Seymour Island, and is now thriving.)

All the human eating didn’t help. At Cambridge University, Darwin had belonged to the Glutton Club, which aimed to consume meat “before unknown to the human palate.” In northern Patagonia, he listened to the gauchos tell stories of a rare flightless bird, the petise, ­a type of rhea with feathered upper legs, ­which he became desperate to add to his specimen collection. At Port Desire, farther south, one of his shipmates shot and killed what he assumed to be a young ostrich, and served it for dinner. “It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned,” Darwin wrote. Oh no! The bird was the elusive petise. He did save the skin and a few of the bones, and still managed to get the bird named after him: Rhea darwinii.

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Giant tortoises on the parched islands slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti.

Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve, ­in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se, ­he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.

No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.

After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)

History has recorded this as a victory for the Darwinians, and the framing stuck, ­evolution was an uncomfortable truth promoted by working scientists and opposed by churchmen and aristocrats. Darwinism was a populist revolt, and for progressives, it also had a racial dimension. If all of humanity were descended from a common ancestor, that challenged the hierarchy of races, in which “Negros” and “savages” were deemed to be lower, less advanced species than Europeans. (Origin came out six years before America abolished slavery.)

To many of his contemporaries, Darwinism came to stand for a cold, bleak vision of the universe, what Tennyson had described as “nature, red in tooth and claw” back in the 1850s. Did everything happen for a reason, as Christian tradition had comfortingly taught, or was life a cutthroat struggle for survival? Echoes of the Malthus text that Darwin drew on had also made it into Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, in which the miser Scrooge has no sympathy for anyone who will not go to a workhouse. “If they would rather die,” he tells two men collecting for the poor, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

For Darwin, so much time spent contemplating the natural world subtly changed his attitude toward it. In later life, he was no longer the young man who boasted that killing his first snipe had left him so excited “that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands.” On returning to England, he was captivated by Jenny, an orangutan housed at the London Zoo that played with straw like a “silly listless child.” In 1871, his Descent of Man went further in positioning us as part of nature, rather than set above it. Even though humans had a “god-like intellect,” he wrote, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

Today, the idea that animals are just like us is more apt to be considered mind-expanding than horrifying, ­and sometimes amusingly delightful, too. On a day trip to North Seymour, an un­inhabited island next to Baltra, I watched male frigate birds puffing out their throat sacs to attract a mate. When several of them gather together in a treetop, the Galápagosians call it a “bachelor’s bar.” Asked about the parenting habits of the birds, our guide informed the woman next to me that, no, the male does not help raise the chicks, because “he is off to another lady.” In situations like this, someone will always mutter “typical” from the back.

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A male frigate bird on North Seymour Island puffs out its throat to attract a mate.

Disemboweled tortoises, stoned birds, drowned iguanas, there’s a strange irony about Darwin becoming the world’s best-known naturalist. His Beagle diaries, which amount to an animal-murder manual, have inspired subsequent generations to keep as many animals alive as they can. Then again, that is the power of seeing ourselves as part of the great chain of creation, ­and seeing that chain as easily disrupted rather than divinely ordained.

Just outside Puerto Ayora lies the Charles Darwin Research Station, which supports the many scientists who make a pilgrimage to these islands. Its executive director is Rakan Zahawi, a restoration ecologist who grew up on another island chain, Hawaii, and accessorizes his khaki field uniform with armfuls of silver and beaded bracelets. His special enthusiasm is scalesia, a group of shrubs descended from the same family as sunflowers. Here in the Galápagos, without competition from trees, the plants grow up to 60 feet tall. Although Darwin did not know it, the genus’s 15 species are, ­like the finches, examples of adaptive radiation: One common ancestor produced many variants, reflecting their specific circumstances.

Now, though, the scalesia forests are under threat from the invasive Asian blackberry, Rubus niveus, which was introduced to the islands in the 1960s. The thick vegetation created by the interloper “comes up to the height of this table or even more,” Zahawi told me, gesturing a few feet off the floor, “and blocks out sunlight at the ground level.” The scalesia seeds germinate but cannot grow. The institute’s scientists have studied the blackberry for decades, trying to devise a way to repel it. “The simplest intervention is you take a machete out,” Zahawi said.

But that is hard to scale up across thousands of square miles, in remote conditions, so the institute is looking at a technique called “bio­control”, ­disrupting the life cycle of an invasive species with another organism, countering its competitive advantage. For the blackberry, that might be a fungus. A similar problem is presented by Philornis downsi, another invasive species, “which we call the avian vampire fly,” Zahawi explained, “because part of its life cycle requires a blood meal to complete.” That blood often comes from baby birds; too many parasites can kill every fledgling in the nest. The foundation has collaborated with more than two dozen institutions over more than a decade to crack this puzzle, and one possible solution is to introduce a parasitic wasp to eat the parasitic fly. (Perhaps they’ll die.) What Darwin might make of this effort, ­deliberately trying to restore the flora and fauna of the Beagle era, ­I couldn’t begin to imagine. But I had a sense that he would welcome the humility: Biocontrol is treated with caution because scientists recognize the dangers of further disrupting the ecosystem, as the early settlers of the Galápagos did with their pigs, dogs, and cats.

The research institute is also the final resting place of Lonesome George, the giant tortoise that has become an icon for conservation efforts, ­an endling, the last of the Pinta Island subspecies Chelonoidis abingdonii. He was rescued in 1971, and scientists kept hoping to discover a mate, ­or even a friend, ­for him. But after a few years, it became obvious that George had been condemned to perpetual bachelorhood by the feral goats introduced to Pinta by fishermen in the 1950s. When George died, his 40-inch shell, ­curved upward at the front, ­and leathery skin were sent to a taxidermist, before being returned to a display case in the forest, preserved “in a temperature-controlled box, like Lenin,” as a friend once described it to me. The tortoise’s bones are stored in the institute’s indoor collection.

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The bones of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise that died in 2012, at more than 100 years old

The guide to this scientific charnel house was Andrea Carvajal Román, an enthusiastic entomologist who, in observance of the no-shoes rule in the storage facility, was wearing a pair of slippers with the slogan I LOVE BOOBIES. The insect collection alone numbers more than 75,000 specimens. Upstairs, in the bird-and-­reptile section, Carvajal Román pulled out drawer after drawer of wonders: five dead penguins, lined up like a serial killer’s victims; a plethora of blue-footed boobies, to illustrate that their aqua­marine pigment does not survive taxidermy. And, yes, a white drawer labeled SOLITARIO GEORGE. I asked to hold his vertebrae and leg bones, which weighed as much as a medium-size dog; earlier, I had seen the inside of a tortoise shell and marveled at how the pelvis and ribs were fused to the carapace. (I had imagined a big, wrinkly sock floating freely inside the shell.)

[From the June 2012 issue: X. J. Kennedy’s poem “Lonesome George”]

After four decades in captivity, George died in 2012, at more than 100 years old. If Darwin had landed on Pinta, he might have eaten George’s uncle or aunt.

As we waited to board our return flight at the Baltra airstrip, the guy in front of me stopped to photograph one last land iguana, which was coolly surveying the runway. Haven’t you seen enough wildlife by now? I briefly wondered, before catching myself. Of course not. How could you ever see enough of this?

After Darwin returned to England, in 1836, he took the next mail coach home and never left the country again. But he never stopped looking, paying attention, collecting. Back in Kent, he spent eight years dissecting barnacles, one of the least-prepossessing animals in the world, after becoming obsessed with a particular parasitic species he’d found off the coast of Chile. (He nicknamed it “Mr. Arthrobalanus.”)

Darwin was never happier than when he was engaged in direct observation, writing to a friend that, after years spent recording his geological findings, “it is delightful to use one’s eyes and fingers again.” But there was another reason to lavish so much care on barnacles, ­and on the pigeons that he bred in a loft at his home. He knew that a theory was nothing without evidence, and that gathering examples of natural (and, in the case of the pigeons, artificial) selection was crucial. He wanted his idea of “modification” to be bulletproof. He reclassified the world’s barnacles from scratch, exploring their differences, and he proved to his own satisfaction that domestic pigeons were all descended from rock doves.

One of Darwin’s many admirable qualities is that all of this came at a cost, not just to his health, but to the operation of his mind, ­as he was poignantly aware. By the end of his life, he had lost his taste for poetry, even Shakespeare, and listening to music just made him think about work again. His brain had become, he noted in his autobiography, “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

To me, this is Darwin’s great lesson as a writer: You are what you pay attention to. If he could live his life again, he wrote, “I would have made a rule to read some poetry & listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, & may possibly be injurious to the intellect, & more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” In other words, he wished he was still the young man who’d taken a pocket edition of Paradise Lost on the Beagle, ­just as I sometimes wish I were a little kid, enthralled by a ladybug crawling over my finger.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Sunset at the Charles Darwin Research Station

Travel Notes

Semilla Verde, Santa Cruz

The spendiest hotel on Santa Cruz is Finch Bay, a four-star dazzler with a spa and direct beach access. For a third of the price, however, you can stay at Semilla Verde, up in the highlands, which has giant tortoises roaming freely on the grounds. The staff cooks a communal meal each night, timed for whenever you return from your daily boat trip, allowing you to trade stories of your best sightings with other guests. My top-floor room had views on three sides, across the treetops and down to the sea, making it a spectacular aerie from which to observe the regular thunderstorms that mark the rainy season. I spent a few happy moments before breakfast on my final day, smothered in bug spray, sweating like a Trump nominee at a Senate confirmation hearing, just hanging out with a tortoise down at the pond.

Via a Baltra Km 12, 200350 Puerto Ayora, Ecuador

Darwin’s Arch (RIP)

Charles Darwin got his name on a lot of stuff, not just animals, but places: the city of Darwin, Australia; Darwin Channel, Mount Darwin, and Darwin Sound in Patagonia; and Port Darwin in the Falkland Islands, among many others. In the Galápagos, the naturalist lent his name to Darwin’s Arch, a much-photographed rock formation just off Darwin Island, one of the most remote spots in the archipelago, 100 miles northwest of the main cluster of landmasses. The arch collapsed from natural erosion in 2021 and is now two pillars, but it remains one of the liveliest diving spots in the Galápagos. The spot is reachable only by live-aboard cruises.

Darwin (formerly Culpepper) Island, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

A Murderous History on Floreana

Back in 1931, The Atlantic published three articles by a Nietzsche-obsessed German nudist, Dr. Friedrich Ritter, who had decided to live off the grid on the uninhabited Floreana Island with his former patient Dore Strauch. “From all I could learn, the conditions of soil and climate were such that we could raise enough food for two people, and little more,” he wrote. “That was just what we wanted; only enough for two meant no neighbors.” Unfortunately, their idyll was disturbed, first by another European couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, and then by a self-styled baroness and two male companions. None of these people got along. One day, the baroness and half the harem vanished, never to be seen again. Eight months later, Ritter died from apparent poisoning. Had murder come to paradise? No one knows for sure. The Wittmers survived, though, and their descendants run a guesthouse on Floreana, which has a grisly 3.8 rating on Tripadvisor.

Wittmer Lodge, Playa Negra, 200101, Puerto Velazco Ibarra, Ecuador

The Finches’ Paradise

The island of Daphne Major is what’s known as a “tuff crater,” a collapsed cone of volcanic ash. There are no trees and (usually) no people. Any boat tour heading north out of Santa Cruz will pass it, but access is almost entirely restricted to scientists. In 1973, a British couple arrived for what was supposed to be a two-year study of the island’s finches, but Peter and Rosemary Grant, now both nearly 90 and professors emeriti at Princeton, ended up collecting data for decades. They watched as changing weather conditions favored birds with different types of beaks. Darwin thought in eons, but the Grants discovered that sometimes natural selection could happen very quickly indeed. A 1994 book about them, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Daphne Major, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Drinking Canelazo

After 17 hours of travel from London, I arrived at the airport hotel in the Ecuadoran capital of Quito giddy with fatigue, along with a thumping headache. Assuming that the problem was dehydration, I poured myself a glass of canelazo, a free drink on offer in the hotel lobby. It was delicious, a warm blend of cinnamon and citrus, with soothing caramel tones provided by panela, unrefined cane sugar. What a delicious fruit cup, I thought, helping myself to a second glass. I woke at 1 a.m. with the sensation of a railway spike being driven through my eyeball. What makes canelazo so warming is aguardiente, a strong clear liquor also made from cane sugar. Lesson learned: Never trust a fruit cup. It was delicious, though.

Wyndham Quito Airport, Parroquia Tababela SN Via A Yaruqui, 170183 Quito, Ecuador

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Paradise Revisited.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.