Galapagos Part 1

Galapagos.

by Kurt Vonnegut.

In memory of Hillis L. Howie, (19031982) amateur naturalist- A good man who took me and my best friend Ben Hitz and some other boys out to the American Wild West from Indianapolis, Indiana, in the summer of 1938.

Mr. Howie introduced us to real Indians and had us sleep out of doors every night and bury our dung, and he taught us how to ride horses, and he told us the names of many plants and animals, and what they needed to do in order to stay alive and reproduce themselves.

One night Mr. Howie scared us half to death on purpose, screaming like a wildcat near our camp.

A real wildcat screamed back.

In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.-ANNE FRANK (19291944)

BOOK ONE.

THE THING WAS.

1.

THE THING WAS:.

One million years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains. Guayaquil was two degrees south of the equator, the imaginary bellyband of the planet after which the country itself was named. It was always very hot there, and humid, too, for the city was built in the doldrums-on a springy marsh through which the mingled waters of several rivers draining the mountains flowed.

This seaport was several kilometers from the open sea. Rafts of vegetable matter often clogged the soupy waters, engulfing pilings and anchor lines.

Human beings had much bigger brains back then than they do today, and so they could be beguiled by mysteries. One such mystery in 1986 was how so many creatures which could not swim great distances had reached the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago of volcanic peaks due west of Guayaquil-separated from the mainland by one thousand kilometers of very deep water, very cold water fresh from the Antarctic. When human beings discovered those islands, there were already geckos and iguanas and rice rats and lava lizards and spiders and ants and beetles and gra.s.shoppers and mites and ticks in residence, not to mention enormous land tortoises.

What form of transportation had they used?

Many people were able to satisfy their big brains with this answer: They came on natural rafts.

Other people argued that such rafts became waterlogged and rotted to pieces so quickly that n.o.body had ever seen one out of sight of land, and that the current between the islands and the mainland would carry any such rustic vessel northward rather than westward.

Or they a.s.serted that all those landlubberly creatures had walked dry-shod across a natural bridge or had swum short distances between stepping-stones, and that one such formation or another had since disappeared beneath the waves. But scientists using their big brains and cunning instruments had by 1986 made maps of the ocean floor. There wasn't a trace, they said, of an intervening land ma.s.s of any kind.

Other people back in that era of big brains and fancy thinking a.s.serted that the islands had once been part of the mainland, and had been split off by some stupendous catastrophe.

But the islands didn't look as though they had been split off from anything. They were clearly young volcanoes, which had been vomited up right where they were. Many of them were such newborns out there that they could be expected to blow again at any time. Back in 1986, they hadn't even sprouted much coral yet, and so were without blue lagoons and white beaches, amenities many human beings used to regard as foretastes of an ideal afterlife.

A million years later, they do possess white beaches and blue lagoons. But when this story begins, they were still ugly humps and domes and cones and spires of lava, brittle and abrasive, whose cracks and pits and bowls and valleys brimmed over not with rich topsoil or sweet water, but with the finest, driest volcanic ash.

Another theory back then was that G.o.d Almighty had created all those creatures where the explorers found them, so they had had no need for transportation.

Another theory was that they had been shooed ash.o.r.e there two by two-down the gangplank of Noah's ark.

If there really was a Noah's ark, and there may have been-I might ent.i.tle my story "A Second Noah's Ark."

2.

THERE WAS NO MYSTERY a million years ago as to how a thirty-five-year-old American male named James Wait, who could not swim a stroke, intended to get from the South American continent to the Galapagos Islands. He certainly wasn't going to squat on a natural raft of vegetable matter and hope for the best. He had just bought a ticket at his hotel in downtown Guayaquil for a two-week cruise on what was to be the maiden voyage of a new pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p called the a million years ago as to how a thirty-five-year-old American male named James Wait, who could not swim a stroke, intended to get from the South American continent to the Galapagos Islands. He certainly wasn't going to squat on a natural raft of vegetable matter and hope for the best. He had just bought a ticket at his hotel in downtown Guayaquil for a two-week cruise on what was to be the maiden voyage of a new pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p called the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, Spanish for "Darwin Bay." This first Galapagos trip for the s.h.i.+p, which flew the Ecuadorian flag, had been publicized and advertised all over the world during the past year as "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

Wait was traveling alone. He was prematurely bald and he was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria, and he was bespectacled, so that he might plausibly claim to be in his fifties, in case he saw some advantage in making such a claim. He wished to seem harmless and shy.

He was the only customer now in the c.o.c.ktail lounge of the Hotel El Dorado, on the broad Calle Diez de Agosto, where he had taken a room. And the bartender, a twenty-year-old descendant of proud Inca n.o.blemen, named Jesus Ortiz, got the feeling that this drab and friendless man, who claimed to be a Canadian, had had his spirit broken by some terrible injustice or tragedy. Wait wanted everybody who saw him to feel that way.

Jesus Ortiz, who is one of the nicest people in this story of mine, pitied rather than scorned this lonesome tourist. He found it sad, as Wait had hoped he would, that Wait had just spent a lot of money in the hotel boutique-on a straw hat and rope sandals and yellow shorts and a blue-and-white-and-purple cotton s.h.i.+rt, which he was wearing now. Wait had had considerable dignity, Ortiz thought, when he had arrived from the airport in a business suit. But now, at great expense, he had turned himself into a clown, a caricature of a North American tourist in the tropics.

The price tag was still stapled to the hem of Wait's crackling new s.h.i.+rt, and Ortiz, very politely and in good English, told him so.

"Oh?" said Wait. He knew the tag was there, and he wanted it to remain there. But he went through a charade of self-mocking embarra.s.sment, and seemed about to pluck off the tag. But then, as though overwhelmed by some sorrow he was trying to flee from, he appeared to forget all about it.

Wait was a fisherman, and the price tag was his bait, a way of encouraging strangers to speak to him, to say in one way or another what Ortiz had said: "Excuse me, Senor, but I can't help noticing-"

Wait was registered at the hotel under the name on his bogus Canadian pa.s.sport, which was Willard Flemming. He was a supremely successful swindler.

Ortiz himself was in no danger from him, but an unescorted woman who looked as though she had a little money, and who was without a husband and past childbearing, surely would have been. Wait had so far courted and married seventeen such persons-and then cleaned out their jewelry boxes and safe-deposit boxes and bank accounts, and disappeared.

He was so successful at what he did that he had become a millionaire, with interest-bearing savings accounts under various aliases in banks all over North America, and he had never been arrested for anything. For all he knew, n.o.body was even trying to catch him. As far as the police were concerned, he reasoned, he was one of seventeen faithless husbands, each with a different name, instead of a single habitual criminal whose real name was James Wait.

It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait-until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.

So I raise this question, although there is n.o.body around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?

A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere?

My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.

3.

THE HOTEL EL DORADO was a brand-new, five-story tourist accommodation-built of unadorned cement block. It had the proportions and mood of a gla.s.s-front bookcase, high and wide and shallow. Each bedroom had a floor-to-ceiling wall of gla.s.s looking westward-toward the waterfront for deep-draft vessels dredged in the delta three kilometers away. was a brand-new, five-story tourist accommodation-built of unadorned cement block. It had the proportions and mood of a gla.s.s-front bookcase, high and wide and shallow. Each bedroom had a floor-to-ceiling wall of gla.s.s looking westward-toward the waterfront for deep-draft vessels dredged in the delta three kilometers away.

In the past, that waterfront had teemed with commerce, and s.h.i.+ps from all over the planet had delivered meat and grain and vegetables and fruit and vehicles and clothing and machinery and household appliances, and so on, and carried away, in fair exchange, Ecuadorian coffee and cocoa and sugar and petroleum and gold, and Indian arts and crafts, including "Panama" hats, which had always come from Ecuador and not from Panama.

But there were only two s.h.i.+ps out there now, as James Wait sat in the bar, nursing a rum and Coca-Cola. He was not a drinker, actually, since he lived by his wits, and could not afford to have the delicate switches of the big computer in his skull short-circuited by alcohol. His drink was a theatrical prop-like the price tag on his ridiculous s.h.i.+rt.

He was in no position to judge whether the state of affairs at the waterfront was normal or not. Until two days before, he had never even heard of Guayaquil, and this was the first time in his life he had ever been below the equator. As far as he was concerned, the El Dorado was no different from all the other characterless hostelries he had used as hideouts in the past-in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in San Ignacio, Mexico, in Watervliet, New York, and on and on.

He had picked the name of the city where he was now from an arrivals-and-departures board at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. He had just pauperized and deserted his seventeenth wife-a seventy-year-old widow in Skokie, Illinois, right outside Chicago. Guayaquil sounded to him like the last place she would ever think of looking for him.

This woman was so ugly and stupid, she probably never should have been born. And yet Wait was the second person to have married her.

And he wasn't going to stay at the El Dorado very long, either, since he had bought a ticket for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" from the travel agent who had a desk in the lobby. It was late in the afternoon now, and hotter than the hinges of h.e.l.l outside. There was no breeze outside, but he did not care, since he was inside, and the hotel was air conditioned, and he would soon be away from there anyway. His s.h.i.+p, the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, was scheduled to sail at high noon on the very next day, which was Friday, November 28, 1986-a million years ago.

The bay for which Wait's means of transportation was named fanned south from the Galapagos Island of Genovesa. Wait had never heard of the Galapagos Islands before. He expected them to be like Hawaii, where he had once honeymooned, or Guam, where he had once hidden out-with broad white beaches and blue lagoons and swaying palms and nut-brown native girls.

The travel agent had given him a brochure which described the cruise, but Wait hadn't looked inside it yet. It was supine on the bar in front of him. The brochure was truthful about how forbidding most of the islands were, and warned prospective pa.s.sengers, as the hotel travel agent had not warned Wait, that they had better be in reasonably good physical condition and have st.u.r.dy boots and rough clothing, since they would often have to wade ash.o.r.e and scramble up rock faces like amphibious infantry.

Darwin Bay was named in honor of the great English scientist Charles Darwin, who had visited Genovesa and several of its neighbors for five weeks back in 1835-when he was a mere stripling of twenty-six, nine years younger than Wait. Darwin was then the unpaid naturalist aboard Her Majesty's s.h.i.+p Beagle Beagle, on a mapping expedition that would take him completely around the world and would last five years.

In the cruise brochure, which was intended to delight nature-lovers rather than pleasure-seekers, Darwin's own description of a typical Galapagos Island was reproduced, and was taken from his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle: The Voyage of the Beagle: "Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly."

Darwin continued: "The entire surface ... seems to have been permeated, like a sieve, by the subterranean vapours: here and there the lava, whilst soft, had been blown into great bubbles; and in other parts, the tops of caverns similarly formed have fallen in, leaving circular parts with steep sides." He was vividly reminded, he wrote, ".... of those parts of Staffords.h.i.+re, where the great iron foundries are most numerous."

There was a portrait of Darwin behind the bar at the El Dorado, framed in shelves and bottles-an enlarged reproduction of a steel engraving, depicting him not as a youth in the islands, but as a portly family man back home in England, with a beard as lush as a Christmas wreath. That same portrait was on the bosom of T-s.h.i.+rts for sale in the boutique, and Wait had bought two of those. That was what Darwin looked like when he was finally persuaded by friends and relatives to set down on paper his notions of how life forms everywhere, including himself and his friends and relatives, and even his Queen, had come to be as they were in the nineteenth century. He thereupon penned the most broadly influential scientific volume produced during the entire era of great big brains. It did more to stabilize people's volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome. Imagine that! And the name of his book summed up its pitiless contents: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Wait had never read that book, nor did the name Darwin mean anything to him, although he had successfully pa.s.sed himself off as an educated man from time to time. He was considering claiming, during "the Nature Cruise of the Century," to be a mechanical engineer from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, whose wife had recently died of cancer.

Actually, his formal education had stopped after two years of instruction in automobile repair and maintenance at the vocational high school in his native city of Midland City, Ohio. He was then living in the fifth of a series of foster homes, essentially an orphan, since he was the product of an incestuous relations.h.i.+p between a father and a daughter who had run away from town, forever and together, soon after he was born.

When he himself was old enough to run away, he hitchhiked to the island of Manhattan. A pimp there befriended him and taught him how to be a successful h.o.m.os.e.xual prost.i.tute, to leave price tags on his clothes, to really enjoy lovers whenever possible, and so on. Wait was once quite beautiful.

When his beauty began to fade, he became an instructor in ballroom dancing at a dance studio. He was a natural dancer, and he had been told back in Midland City that his parents had been very good dancers, too. His sense of rhythm was probably inherited. And it was at the dance studio that he met and courted and married the first of his seventeen wives so far.

All through his childhood, Wait was severely punished by foster parents for nothing and everything. It was expected by them that, because of his inbred parentage, he would become a moral monster.

So here that monster was now-in the Hotel El Dorado, happy and rich and well, as far as he knew, and keen for the next test of his survival skills.

Like James Wait, incidentally, I, too, was once a teenage runaway.

4.

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHARLES DARWIN, underspoken and gentlemanly, impersonal and as.e.xual and blankly observant in his writings, was a hero in teeming, pa.s.sionate, polyglot Guayaquil because he was the inspiration for a tourist boom. If it weren't for Darwin, there would not have been a Hotel El Dorado or a underspoken and gentlemanly, impersonal and as.e.xual and blankly observant in his writings, was a hero in teeming, pa.s.sionate, polyglot Guayaquil because he was the inspiration for a tourist boom. If it weren't for Darwin, there would not have been a Hotel El Dorado or a Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin to accommodate James Wait. There would have been no boutique to clothe him so comically. to accommodate James Wait. There would have been no boutique to clothe him so comically.

If Charles Darwin had not declared the Galapagos Islands marvelously instructive, Guayaquil would have been just one more hot and filthy seaport, and the islands would have been worth no more to Ecuador than the slag heaps of Staffords.h.i.+re.

Darwin did not change the islands, but only people's opinion of them. That was how important mere opinions used to be back in the era of great big brains.

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be h.e.l.l in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by G.o.d Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next-and on and on.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinions anymore.

White people discovered the Galapagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish s.h.i.+p came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. n.o.body was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there.

This unlucky s.h.i.+p wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm, which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea.

But when the storm lifted, the Spaniards found that they had delivered their bishop into a sailor's nightmare where the bits of land were mockeries, without safe anchorage or shade or sweet water or dangling fruit, or human beings of any kind. They were becalmed, and running out of water and food. The ocean was like a mirror. They put a longboat over the side, and towed their vessel and their spiritual leader out of there.

They did not claim the islands for Spain, any more than they would have claimed h.e.l.l for Spain. And for three full centuries after revised human opinion allowed the archipelago to appear on maps, no other nation wished to own it. But then in 1832, one of the smallest and poorest countries on the planet, which was Ecuador, asked the peoples of the world to share this opinion with them: that the islands were part of Ecuador.

No one objected. At the time, it seemed a harmless and even comical opinion. It was as though Ecuador, in a spasm of imperialistic dementia, had annexed to its territory a pa.s.sing cloud of asteroids.

But then young Charles Darwin, only three years later, began to persuade others that the often freakish plants and animals which had found ways to survive on the islands made them extremely valuable, if only people would look at them as he did-from a scientific point of view.

Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical magical.

Yes, and by the time of James Wait's arrival in Guayaquil so many persons with an interest in natural history had come there, on their way to the islands to see what Darwin had seen, to feel what Darwin had felt, that three cruise s.h.i.+ps had their home port there, the newest of which was the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin. There were several modern tourist hotels, the newest of which was the El Dorado, and there were souvenir shops and boutiques and restaurants for tourists all up and down the Calle Diez de Agosto.

The thing was, though: When James Wait got there, a worldwide financial crisis, a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper, had ruined the tourist business not only in Ecuador but practically everywhere. So that the El Dorado was the only hotel still open in Guayaquil, and the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was the only cruise s.h.i.+p still prepared to sail. was the only cruise s.h.i.+p still prepared to sail.

The El Dorado was staying open only as an a.s.sembly point for persons with tickets for "the Nature Cruise of the Century," since it was owned by the same Ecuadorian company which owned the s.h.i.+p. But now, less than twenty-four hours before the cruise was to begin, there were only six guests, including James Wait, in the two-hundred-bed hotel. And the other five guests were: *Zenji Hiroguchi, twenty-nine, a j.a.panese computer genius; Hisako Hiroguchi, twenty-six, his very pregnant wife, who was a teacher of ikebana, the j.a.panese art of flower arranging; *Andrew MacIntosh, fifty-five, an American financier and adventurer of great inherited wealth, a widower; Selena MacIntosh, eighteen, his congenitally blind daughter; And Mary Hepburn, fifty-one, an American widow from Ilium, New York, whom practically n.o.body in the hotel had seen because she had stayed in her room on the fifth floor, and had taken all her meals up there, since arriving all alone the night before.

The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down. This convention of starring certain names will continue throughout my story, incidentally, alerting readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness.

I was there, too, but perfectly invisible.

5.

THE B BAHiA DE D DARWIN was also doomed, but not yet ready for a star by her name. It would be five more sundowns before her engines quit forever, and ten more years before she sank to the ocean floor. She was not only the newest and largest and fastest and most luxurious cruise s.h.i.+p based in Guayaquil. She was the only one designed specifically for the Galapagos tourist trade, whose destiny, from the moment her keel was laid, was understood to be a steady churning out to the islands and back again, out to the islands and back again. was also doomed, but not yet ready for a star by her name. It would be five more sundowns before her engines quit forever, and ten more years before she sank to the ocean floor. She was not only the newest and largest and fastest and most luxurious cruise s.h.i.+p based in Guayaquil. She was the only one designed specifically for the Galapagos tourist trade, whose destiny, from the moment her keel was laid, was understood to be a steady churning out to the islands and back again, out to the islands and back again.

She was built in Malmo, Sweden, where I myself worked on her. It was said by the skeleton crew of Swedes and Ecuadorians who delivered her from Malmo to Guayaquil that a storm she pa.s.sed through in the North Atlantic would be the last rough water or cold weather she would ever know.

She was a floating restaurant and lecture hall and nightclub and hotel for one hundred paying guests. She had radar and sonar, and an electronic navigator which gave continuously her position on the face of the earth, to the nearest hundred meters. She was so thoroughly automated that a person all alone on the bridge, with no one in the engine room or on deck, could start her up, hoist her anchor, put her in gear, and drive her off like a family automobile. She had eighty-five flush toilets and twelve bidets, and telephones in the staterooms and on the bridge which, via satellite, could reach other telephones anywhere.

She had television, so people could keep up with the news of the day.

Her owners, a pair of old German brothers in Quito, boasted that their s.h.i.+p would never be out of touch with the rest of the world for an instant. Little did they know.

She was seventy meters long.

The s.h.i.+p on which Charles Darwin was the unpaid naturalist, the Beagle Beagle, was only twenty-eight meters long.

When the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was launched in Malmo, eleven hundred metric tons of salt.w.a.ter had to find someplace else to go. I was dead by then. was launched in Malmo, eleven hundred metric tons of salt.w.a.ter had to find someplace else to go. I was dead by then.

When the Beagle Beagle was launched in Falmouth, England, only two hundred and fifteen metric tons of salt.w.a.ter had to find someplace else to go. was launched in Falmouth, England, only two hundred and fifteen metric tons of salt.w.a.ter had to find someplace else to go.

The Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was a metal motor s.h.i.+p. was a metal motor s.h.i.+p.