175 years and a few months ago a landing party rowed into this
little bay. Their ship, a small, storm-weathered British sloop
was anchored in the distance. As they approached the shore, a
lanky, suntanned, salt-encrusted 26-year-old stepped out with a
splash and clambered up onto a jumble of broken basalt. Charles
Darwin had arrived in Galápagos. I can’t quite believe I took
this picture. It was just a few months ago—October 23rd,
2010—and I was accompanying, as a science guide of sorts, a
group of British teenagers whose reward for winning the Wellcome
Trust’s Survival Rivals competition was a trip to Galápagos. We
had arrived, like most visitors to Ecuador’s ‘Enchanted
Islands’, not by boat but by airplane, landing on a slender
airstrip—once part of a U.S. military base—on the island of
Baltra, just north of Santa Cruz, the principal inhabited island
in the archipelago and our first base of activities there.
Darwin didn’t visit Santa Cruz. So, as wonderful as it was (and
it was) to finally see the plants an