THE ENCHANTED ISLES

Long isolated, undiscovered and uninhabited, the Galápagos offers a rare window into a time when nature reigned supreme.

- CHRISSIE GOLDRICK

TRAVELLERS HAVE BEEN coming to the Galápagos since the early 16th century. Charles Darwin arrived in 1835 and made the volcanic archipelago famous for its wild denizens, which, in the 20th and 21st centuries, Sir David Attenborough turned into television stars.

But there's been a colourful parade of explorers, pirates, buccaneers, whalers, sealers, speculators and colonists who have also weighed anchor here since the first documented arrival by Fray Tomás de Berlanga. He stumbled upon the islands while sailing from Panama to Peru in 1535, ending their long isolation and heralding the start of their exploitation. It's likely that Indigenous sailors from the South American continent visited before Berlanga, but unlike many Pacific islands, the Galápagos wasn't colonised until modern times. By then, thanks to Darwin and forward-thinking Ecuadorian administrators, the archipelago's unique scientific value had been recognised.

Another notable visitor was Herman Melville, who arrived as a young seaman in 1841 aboard the whaler Acushnet. Melville's hard life aboard Acushnet informed his classic novel Moby Dick, with its vengeful white whale and crazed Captain Ahab. The famed piece of literature was inspired by the true story of the whaler Essex, which was rammed and sunk by a whale while the ship was conducting its bloody business in 1820. The Essex's crew had harvested almost all the giant tortoises as a ready source of fresh meat from Floreana in the Galápagos. They set fire to the island as they departed, destroying the remaining animals and sending the Floreana tortoise species extinct. The grim fate of the