A few hundred years ago the bleak, inhospitable oceanic islands known as the Gal¿pagos archipelago were visited only by buccaneers and, later, by whalers and sealers who fed their crews on its giant tortoises. By the mid-19th century, however, these volcanic cones--located 600 miles west of Ecuador on the equator--began to attract such distinguished visitors as Herman Melville, Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz. Now historian Edward J. Larson, author of the Pulitzer Prize¿winning Summer for the Gods (an account of the Scopes trial), invites us to witness the entertaining parade of Gal¿pagos pirates, adventurers, eccentrics, naturalists and other scientists who changed this extraordinary place and were changed by it.

For novelist Melville, who sailed there during the 1840s, the Gal¿pagos appeared to be "evilly enchanted ground," a Dantean purgatory populated by vile, hissing reptiles. Young Darwin, on the other hand, landing in 1835, thought the islands looked primeval rather than hellish: "We seem to be brought somewhat near to ... that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance of new beings on this earth." As Larson reminds us, it was only later, back in London, that Darwin nurtured his heretical conclusion that the distribution of Gal¿pagos creatures and their possible relationship to mainland ancestors "would undermine the stability of species."

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