TRAVELING IN STYLE : THE SURVIVAL ISLES : A Trip Through the Strange, Legendary Galapagos Islands, with Charles Darwin’s Books as Guides, Is Also a Sobering Study in the Evolution of Tourism

When Charles Darwin landed on an island of black lava on Sept. 15, 1835, in his fourth year aboard the HMS Beagle, he found the scene so weird that he thought he’d arrived on “some other planet.” He complained of the infernal heat, the nauseous smell, the hideous ugliness of the flora and fauna in this “little world within itself.”

He was in the Galapagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago of 19 islands and numerous islets lying on the Equator, in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles west of Ecuador (which owns them). When I landed on these same islands more than a century and a half later, aboard a creaking tub named the Darwin, the scene was still weird--but in ways that the great English naturalist could not have imagined.

The isolation of this “world within itself” provided Darwin with a laboratory in which to study the biological change we now call evolution. But what was an evolutionary lab for Darwin is today an ecological lab, where the issue is not whether, or how, adaptive change takes place, but how fast and how irrevocably.

Darwin’s concept of the “struggle for survival,” as elaborated in his “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” (1859), was generated by his observations of the unique flora and fauna of the Galapagos. Today the islands themselves are struggling to survive an onslaught of humankind. Since the first tour operator began offering organized visits to the islands in 1970, the number of tourists has grown from about 4,000 a year to more than 60,000. Today, 90 cruise boats (larger cruise ships were recently banned) serve the islands and there are 35 hotels--and the once sparsely populated archipelago now has at least 14,000 permanent residents. Anyone who wants to see the little world that Darwin saw here, with a minimum of human overlay, had better hurry.

I went to the Galapagos myself not long ago with my grown daughter, who was keen on snorkeling and hiking around the islands. I intended to laze about with camera and notebook. After a short flight from Quito, the capital of Ecuador, to the island of San Cristobal (the easternmost of the Galapagos), though, I got a look at the “economy motor vessel” that was to be home for the next seven days--and that ended my fantasies of restful observation. On board the Darwin, we found a band of 10 thrift-minded athletic youths--one Australian, two English, two German, five Dutch--and a crew of five Ecuadoreans, including a guide my age, a captain half my age and a cook and boat boys young enough to be my grandchildren. Just boarding the vessel had required a certain agility, and it was clear that if I couldn’t swim, I’d sink.

Charles Darwin survived five years on the poop deck of the Beagle, where he was “a martyr to seasickness.” Our bunks were stacked in the stern in a closet next to the engine and below a porthole boarded shut. One whiff of the diesel fuel and I downed the Dramamine given to us by a kind traveler who’d warned, “If you’re on a small boat, you’ll need it.” Our boat was not only small, it also listed heavily to starboard for reasons that were never explained. Never explained either were the chronic failure of the motor in heavy seas or the frequency with which we took in water, occasioning frantic bailing by the boat boys. During the long hauls between islands (we stopped at eight), only the crew escaped

seasickness. But if Darwin could take it, reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in his hammock “for comfort,” so could we, reading Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle.”

In his diary, Darwin expressed surprise that the islands had not changed more than they had since their discovery in 1535, for they had been “frequently visited by buccaneers and whalers,” not to mention sailors hunting tortoises and, on their way, taking “delight in knocking down the little birds.”

As early as the 1700s, the island’s famous giant land tortoises were being taken by the thousands to Europe and Asia, where they were prized for their oil as well as their meat. Because they could survive for as long as a year aboard ship, they provided fresh meat for the sailors along the way. Because they could store large quantities of water internally, they were also sometimes killed by islanders who, when “overcome with thirst,” Darwin observed, would slaughter one to drink the contents of its bladder.

Today, the Charles Darwin Research Station at Puerto Ayora, on the major island of Santa Cruz, is the chief conservator of the land tortoise in the Galapagos, numbering eggs and nurturing hatchlings. Here tortoises are so tame that we were astonished to see them stretch their necks and beg to be scratched, almost like dogs. To see a tortoise close its eyes in ecstasy at your touch, then sink back into its shell with a sigh, is in itself worth a week of mal de mer .

Darwin is memorialized here in contradictory ways, though. Charles Darwin Avenue, Puerto Ayora’s main drag, numbers tourists instead of tortoises and nurtures them with pizzerias, souvenir shops, seedy discotheques and sad concrete hotels. Worse, the inevitable symbiosis between tourists (at least half of whom are Ecuadorean) and developers--drawn here by the chance to collect quick tourist bucks--is adversely affecting the environment. Divers have ruined the black coral reefs, cutting pieces for souvenirs. Fishermen, overharvesting lobsters and sea cucumbers (for the aphrodisiac markets of Asia), are upsetting the delicate ecology of marine life on which local sea birds depend. All over the islands, water resources have diminished and pollution has increased.

The Ecuadorean government has attempted to control tourism in the Galapagos by banning larger cruise ships, which probably does some good, but not enough. Tourists are reminded to “Take only photographs, leave only footprints”--and though this rule is hard to enforce, most visitors do seem to stick to the marked trails and conscientiously clean up after themselves and others. Even the well-meaning, though, unwittingly transfer pollen, insects and bacteria from the mainland to the archipelago and from island to island--ultimately as threatening to the local ecology as the mainland goats and pigs imported in Darwin’s time to help feed residents of island penal colonies.

IN THE EXTRAORDINARY FORMATIONS OF LAVA ON THE GALAPAGOS, DARWIN saw “a sea petrified in one of its more boisterous moments.” To me, the earth looked as if it had spilled its guts, in intestinal coils of black and red, hardening in ropy strands, fans, globules, braids, pools shiny as molasses. Sometimes the volcanic rock seemed to breathe, when a tidal sea-surge sprayed through a hole and subsided with a groan.

Except in the rain forests of the highlands, most of these islands are so hostile to vegetation that Darwin complained he could collect but a few “wretched-looking little weeds.” What we saw mostly were huge cacti, like the bark-trunked prickly pear, or strange scalesia trees, which shed feathery strings of foliage that litter the ground like dandruff.

Everywhere were reminders that life here is tough. We came in October, a hard time of year in the reverse seasons of the Southern Hemisphere, for it marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. On the Galapagos, this is the season of birth and of starvation and drought. The beaches were packed with baby sea lions nuzzling their mothers, and the seas were full of them somersaulting, diving, playing tag with snorkelers. But we also saw numerous dead sea pups and learned that each mother births but one a year. If the mother dies, so does the pup, because no other mother will nurse it.

We learned that the islands’ clown, the blue-footed booby, lays three eggs on the ground in a nest she encircles with guano. Should a chick fall or be pushed from the circle, neither parent will feed it, and it will die.

We watched a starving young pelican try to snatch a piece of fish from a nesting adult. The adult attacked fiercely, grabbing the younger bird’s neck in its enormous beak and biting it until the bird flopped away and collapsed in a heap of wing and beak.

Even the birds’ mating rituals seemed hostile. On Seymour Island, where the magnificent frigate birds nest, males whooshing their wings and puffing their throats into huge scarlet balloons (to attract the attention of a passing female) appeared ominous against an amazing sunset striped red and black. On Espanola Island (also called Hood Island), the ritual dance of a pair of boobies, webbed feet thumping, necks thrusting, wings hunching, beaks clacking together between whistles and honks, seemed more like a lovers’ quarrel than a courtship.

The comical waved albatross, about 12,000 pairs of which nest on Espanola Island in the world’s last colony of the birds, seemed doomed to extinction by their own goofiness. Chicks stand immobilized for hours, like oiled and feathered beach balls, waiting with their absurdly long necks and beaks to be fed quarts of fish oil regurgitated from their parents’ digestive systems. But the adult birds are so heavy, they can scarcely take off to hunt for fish. We watched one galumph toward the cliff three times and flop in failure before he finally caught a wind current to carry him aloft.

In one mangrove swamp in Black Turtle Cove on the north coast of Santa Cruz, we saw white-finned sharks feed and sea turtles mate with equal frenzy. Our guide rowed us silently at dusk, beneath branches so low they scraped the tops of our heads, to peer into shallows clotted with sharks, swerving back and forth in relentless pursuit of food. In the adjoining lagoon we watched sea turtles, some weighing 100 pounds or more, clamber over each other to mount in succession a single female, who treaded water below the surface, occasionally surfacing for air or, clinging with her flipper to a mangrove root, pausing for a breather between bouts.

While Darwin’s scientific interest lay largely in the birds unique to each island--especially the 13 species of finch that had adapted to different habitats--he was most fascinated and repelled by the iguanas. “Disgusting clumsy lizards,” he called them, “hideous looking . . . of a dirty black colour, stupid and sluggish in (their) movements.” The land iguanas ate cactus, he observed, while their marine cousins fed on seaweed. They were so torpid and so dumb, he reported, that he laughed aloud when he picked them up by their tails.

Of all the islands’ fauna, though, the hideous iguana seems the most thoroughly adapted to its environment. We saw heaps of marine iguanas (found only in the Galapagos) spread-eagled on rocks to catch the sun, their scaly backs encrusted with salt. One day, we climbed for two or three hours up scrabble rock on the volcanic cone on Santa Fe Island to see crowds of land iguanas, even more sluggish than usual now because they were waiting for the cacti to bloom, having stripped the plants of all the pads they could reach. In the shade they looked like blobs of clay. In bright sunlight, they were transformed into op-art designs of black and tan, their faces a parody of reptilian ugliness, with wraparound mouths and hot pink tongues.

AFTER FIVE YEARS ON THE BEAGLE, DARWIN LONGED FOR HIS BILLIARDS table, an English garden, his family--all far distant from “that mystery of mysteries” he’d discovered in the Galapagos. After a week of such mysteries, our group could sympathize. One of my fellow passengers, an Englishman, expressed best what we all felt when we celebrated our impending departure with a final meal ashore. The restaurant had run out of chocolate cake, and while the Germans had offered a bar of chocolate to him, he was not consoled. “Chocolate cake’s different, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s sort of wet and creamy, you know what I mean?” We knew what he meant. He meant home.

GUIDEBOOK: A World Within Itself

Getting there: Continental Airlines flies from Los Angeles to Quito, the capital of Ecuador and jumping-off place for the Galapagos, three times a week via Houston and Panama City. American Airlines has two flights a week via Miami, and Avianca has one with stops in Mexico City and Bogota. Two Ecuadorean airlines, the government-owned TAME and the privately owned SAN, offer flights from Quito to the Galapagos. The best bargain, though, is on another Ecuadorean carrier, SAETA, which flies twice a week from Los Angeles to Quito via Mexico City and Guayaquil, Ecuador, and offers package deals that include transportation to the Galapagos. Getting around: About 90 boats ply the waters of the Galapagos, ranging in size and quality from “economy motor vessels” like the Darwin to more comfortable motorboats or sailing vessels carrying as many as 100 passengers. Accommodations and most meals are on board, and all voyages are accompanied by a trained naturalist. Trips are booked for three, four or seven nights, with prices per person (double occupancy) ranging from about $500 to $800, $700 to $1,300 and $1,200 to $2,300, respectively. An up-to-date list of tour operators appears in “A Traveler’s Guide to the Galapagos Islands,” second edition, by Barry Boyce (Galapagos Travel, $14.95).

For more information: Ecuadorean Consulate, Tourist Information, 548 S. Spring St., Suite 602, Los Angeles 90013; (213) 628-3014.