Coincidence - Alan May [42]
Juan set to work erasing tire tracks in the sand and gathering up bits of debris to drop into the ocean once they were beyond the cove. When the tender returned for its last trip, Severo hauled the scooter onboard so it too could be dumped. Then, as carefully as they could, Juan and Severo lifted Stefano to his feet and half-carried, half-dragged him to the tender, where Phillip was waiting to pull him over the side.
In spite of the setbacks, the whole operation, from the first sighting of the convoy to boarding the Coincidence, had taken just over an hour. Planning, Juan thought as he popped open two beers, one for himself and one for Stefano. It’s all in the planning, he reminded himself as the cove receded from view. True, it had taken an hour rather than the forty-five minutes he had told the others they were aiming for. But he had planned it that way.
15
The Inspiration sailed through the Isabela Channel in the Galápagos, flanked by volcanic islands of fantastic variety and beauty. The ship made her way to Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz, where it would drop anchor for a three-day stay.
The students had already gotten a taste of the place from reading some of the literature associated with the islands. In addition to excerpts from Darwin’s works, they had read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was based on the adventures of one Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman who had spent four years on one of the islands awaiting rescue. They had read Herman Melville’s description of the islands in his story “Las Encantadas.” And they had just begun Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, a futuristic novel dealing with human evolution set in the archipelago.
For their teachers, the islands were a sheer delight, offering a rare combination of history, oceanography, geology, conservation management, and the evolutionary study of unique species. They loved being on these fascinating islands and showing their students firsthand what most people would never know except from books.
Dave Cameron began his lessons on the social history of the islands before the ship even docked. He told the students the islands were located directly on the equator about six hundred miles west of the South American coast. They were discovered by accident in 1535, when a Spanish vessel known as the Bishop of Panama, sailing to Peru, was becalmed in the equatorial doldrums. It was carried due west by the currents and eventually came upon the Galápagos. Because it was dry season when the ship reached land, the sailors thought the islands were worthless. They saw virtually no vegetation beyond the thistles on the volcanic rock.
Originally called Insulae de los de Galopegos, the islands were renamed Archipiélago del Ecuador after their annexation by that country. The name was changed again in 1892 to Archipiélago de Colón, in honor of Christopher Columbus.
A few decades later, the Galápagos became a base of operations for many English pirates and buccaneers who attacked Spanish galleons returning to Spain from the New World. The Galápagos lay not far from the route between the conquered Inca Empire of the Andes and Panama and New Spain, the center of Spanish activity in the New World. Among the pirates, the islands were known as Las Islas Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles.
Over the years the islands were used as a base for whaling fleets, as a prison colony, and as a salt mine, but many attempts to establish permanent settlements failed. Every new human encounter brought more destruction to the fragile ecosystem of the islands. This was the really interesting part, in Dave’s view, the part he most wanted to impress upon his students.
He stopped