Travels to the Galápagos
Travels to the Galápagos
" After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales,
Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain
Fitz Roy, R.N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The
object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra
del Fuego, commenced under Captain King in 1826 to 1830 - to survey the
shores of Chile, Peru, and of some islands in the Pacific - and to carry a
chain of chronometrical measurements round the World. On the 6th of
January we reached Teneriffe, but were prevented landing, by fears of our
bringing the cholera . . . ."
Thus began the tale of another's journey to the Southern Hemisphere, a journey
that would carry him to the Galápagos Islands. Here is our story.
By the way, there are plenty of pictures further down -- we just didn't take any right at the start of our trip,
so be patient.
Friday, February 8, 2002
New Orleans/Miami/Guayaquil
During a layover at the Miami International Airport.
I had thought about visiting the Galápagos Islands for many years, but always in the sense of "something that would be nice to do someday" -- not anytime soon though: much too expensive. After the tragedy of September 11, the travel industry fell on hard times. In the December/January issue of Natural History Magazine appeared an ad from Lindblad Expeditions that ultimately led to our decision to take this trip of a lifetime. With kids going free, the cost was reduced from "truly exorbitant" to merely "very expensive." After thorough discussions with my wife, son (age 12), and daughter (age 10) to be sure they really wanted to take this trip (which is much shorter than our usual annual vacation), and weren't merely humoring me, we bit the bullet and made our plans to travel over Mardi Gras week, when the kids are (mostly) out of school.
The tame wildlife is a major draw for many visitors, and a considerable amount of bona fide scientific research is conducted there, but my main reason for wanting to visit the islands is historical - the role it played in the development of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
I have read enough about Darwin (e.g., Gould, Sulloway, Browne, Moore and Desmond, Larson) to be thoroughly disabused of the caricature that it all came to him in a sudden flash of inspiration on James Island, while he was resting under a tree and a finch dropping landed on his head . . . .
Still, as Pasteur observed, chance favors the prepared mind. The journey of the Beagle played a substantial role - undoubtedly the single most important role - in preparing the young naturalist's mind to appreciate and synthesize the several lines of evidence and ideas that led him to the concept of natural selection. Galápagos observations and specimens played their part, but I tend to suspect that Darwin would likely have developed his ideas of descent with modification and natural selection, even had the course of the Beagle bypassed the Galápagos archipelago entirely. The entire Beagle journey was indispensable - the five-week survey of the Galápagos was not. Other observations would probably have led Darwin to the same conclusion eventually.
But, as Darwin observed, the Galápagos specimens and his South American fossils, especially the former, were the immediate catalyst to his initial formation of the theory in 1837. The Galápagos' role in the origin of Darwin's views may be only an accident of history, but accidents are the stuff of history (at least when history is viewed on a sufficiently small scale). And the Galápagos, accident or no, did play a major role in the history of humankind's learning how it came to be.
Even if the Galápagos had been no different from any of the Beagle's other ports of call, today it probably resembles more closely its condition in the 1830s than most of the other places surveyed by the Beagle. Thus, even if the entire 1831-36 journey is considered to be the significant event in triggering Darwin's view, and not just the Galápagos stopover, those islands would still be of great interest to those wishing to re-trace the voyage of the Beagle.
In this sense, the Galápagos remain one of the three best places for a Darwin afficionado to visit today. (We visited the other two in July 1999, Down House outside London, and Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey.)
And then there are those blue-footed boobies . . . .
The family took only a few days to decide on this trip once we began discussing the possibility in November 2001. We booked with Lindblad, purchased snorkel gear and the like, and before we knew it the time had arrived.
Yesterday we drove to New Orleans, and stayed overnight at the Hilton on Airline across from the airport. We went to bed early after a rather dismal meal at a greasy Chinese restaurant nearby (at least no one got sick). We awoke at 4:30 since we had a 7:00 a.m. flight, and needed to allow time to go through security. (We would be awakening early for many days to come. We did not know it yet, but ship time was advanced by one time zone, and even so wake-up calls were early by the clock, to get everyone out exploring early, before the day became too hot.)
I'm not convinced that the new airport security measures are anything more than show, meant to make people feel good. What are National Guardsmen, prominent in terminals and carrying rifles, supposed to do when a problem arises inside an airplane? The searches in New Orleans and Miami were totally inconsistent - except for my shoes. In New Orleans, my wife was asked to sip her cup of PJ's coffee - as if that somehow demonstrated there was nothing inappropriate inside it. In Miami, three bottles of water went through unquestioned. In New Orleans my bag was singled out for searching, but not my wife's. In Miami it was the other way around. In New Orleans, an inspector made a great show of rubbing their "magic wands" over most of the items in my pack. (I suspect the four pairs of binoculars in my pack may have appeared unfamiliar on the x-ray.) In Miami, no magic wands were used when my wife's pack was emptied. In New Orleans our film bag, with many rolls of film, was searched by hand with no hassle, which consisted of rubbing the wand on the outside of the lead-lined bag, once. In Miami there was great reluctance to search the film by hand, but when I finally persuaded the inspectors to do so, they made a big scene of opening each canister and giving each the wand treatment. In both airports, I was asked to remove my shoes for the magic wand treatment - as far as I could tell, just on general principal since they were already giving me a hard time anyway. Yes, I'm ever the cynic. Real security, such as employed by the Israeli airline El Al, would be welcome. I can't say that this is only smoke and mirrors -- but it does include a high component of incompletely combusted particulate matter and many reflective surfaces.
We've had a long layover in the Miami airport this morning and afternoon. It's not terribly distinguishable from any other U.S. airport of comparable size, so I won't say more about it. I hope the flight to Guayaquil is on time, and that customs there does not take too long - we had a 4:30 start this morning, and probably won't get to bed until late tonight, even if everything runs like clockwork.
A Lindblad representative at the gate in Miami could not have been friendlier - by contrast to the security yahoos who, for unexplained reasons, decided to pull me out of the line for my third search of the day, just before boarding the plane to Guayaquil. I must have appeared quite suspicious, traveling with a wife and two children, on tickets purchased well in advance (through a tour company), with a proverbial "major credit card." (My wife suspects it was my beard.) I suppose the inspectors were no more rude than most human beings with similar jobs would have been, searching similarly disgruntled passengers in similar situations - but I can tell you I was none too pleased, and uttered some remarks to that effect. Well, that certainly didn't make them any more polite. Heightened airline security is unquestionably a worthwhile goal, but what I saw today doesn't give me much comfort that the great degree of effort being spent on the problem is well-directed. The search itself was laughable - they waved another wand all over me, and unzipped my backpack to peer in briefly. They probably determined reasonably well that I didn't have a knife or gun on my person, but they had no idea what might have been buried in the backpack. Why bother, other than more smoke and mirrors? Many people would undoubtedly consider these rantings unpatriotic, what with September 11 and all still fresh in our collective memory. But if genuine security is the goal (as opposed to feel-good measures), there is a long way to go.
Just kidding - I really do feel safe now after all. The plane will be taking off soon - maybe I'll calm down in a bit.
In Guayaquil Airport
Yes, I calmed down on the plane. We crossed the equator about thirty minutes before landing at Guayaquil Airport. Immigration and customs were about what one would expect when an Airbus 300 unloads an entire jet full of passengers in a South American airport at 10:00 p.m. - chaotic, hot, slow, disorganized, miserable. It made the searches that upset me in the U.S. earlier in the day seem positively joyful in the nostalgic view of hindsight.
We met several people from our Galápagos tour on the plane and while waiting in line at the airport tonight. They seem like nice folks.
The kids haven't picked on each other any more than usual on this long, tiring day.