GALAPAGOS PIONEERS
Jack R. Nelson
Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson
Smashwords Edition
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TOUGH PARADISE
The Galápagos Islands receive thousands of visitors each year on cruise yachts and at modern hotels. But it wasn’t like that forty years ago. We were about 300 colonists on Isla Santa Cruz. There was not a road to the highlands,no cars, no electric company, neither water system, nor communications. No radio, no TV, no telephone. No clinic or dentist, no repair shop, no cinema, no beauty parlor, no supermarket. Is civilization possible without paper towels?
The Ecuadorian Navy represented by a lieutenant was our government. The only airport was the WW II bomber strip on nearby Baltra Island, used occasionally by the Ecuadorian Air Force. The first charter flights to Baltra began in 1969, but over the next several years were cancelled months at a time according to the ebb and flow of tour operations. In a word, we were isolated.
Small cargo ships were usually our only transportation option. The venerable “Santa Cruz” was typical of the near-derelict shipping we relied on. Built of iron in the early 20th century, her classic styling was about the only good quality remaining. Even the main engine was missing a piston, but kept running anyhow in a peculiar back-beat as if the crankshaft got Bossa Nova. This is the way of life in these little republics; you wing it with the tools and materials at hand, whether cooking lunch or crossing an ocean.
This picture is not of the “Santa Cruz”, but represents the type.
All these grubby vessels carried live cattle on the return trip from Galápagos to the mainland. Cows, goats and pigs. The South American Cattle Boat is for real,not just a Hollywood movie gimmick. With over forty cows on deck, a sprawl of pigs, and four hundred fifty goats standing-room-only in the open hold.
Goats are not happy shipmates. That cute baa baa is the vocabulary of cheerful goats in a homey paddock. Only recently captured in the bush, the hundreds of wild goats struggle in a furry moil. They groan and cry, they bray threats and terrors. The cows are miserable beyond voicing at all, tied by the horns at the rail and drooling ferments of four seasick stomachs. The pigs at least are settled, only occasionally screeching murder. There is no way to describe the tangible evolving stink of such a voyage.
I was stranded in Guayaquil and nearly penniless in March of 1971. Finally the freighter “Presidente” announced a trip to the islands. With my last cash I bought deck passage. As there had been no transport for so long, the hold was packed tight up to the hatch, plus heaps of deck cargo. We were over a hundred passengers and crew on a one hundred sixty foot boat. Less living space than your patio. “Presidente” got under way with the flat deck about eighteen inches above the water.
No civilian captain wanted the ship, so the Navy assigned a personable young lieutenant to the job as punishment for some unnamed misdemeanor. He kept himself crisply uniformed and wore his peaked hat proudly throughout the crossing. The rest of us were degrees of scruffy. The water tank held just enough to drink and cook through the expected days on the passage. Nobody bathed. Some didn’t have the habit anyway. One cheerfully grimy old fellow always enjoyed plenty of open space on the crowded deck.
Meals were short commons too. The typical menu was a thin soup, plus rice and plantains. My soup once included a whimsical condiment; a Pepsi-Cola bottle cap. The cook had only a dozen dishes for all of us, so as soon as one finished, the china was snatched away for a perfunctory rinse in a barrel of sea water and then ladled up for the next hungry man in line.
In the early 70s, supplies came sporadically on such dubious little ships. The “Genova” was a stout wooden ark built on a beach in Ecuador, but her bent propeller shaft sent her corkscrewing over the seas as she rolled on her tubby sides. A thousand gallon fuel tank on the main deck occasionally slipped in its chocks, a thudding jounce in the ship’s wriggling dance. Other vessels were rescued from the scrap yard by doughty entrepreneurs to wring profit from the captive Galápagos market. We were so desperate for any transport; no rusty bucket was disdained.
The “Presidente” was a dinky landing craft built to be expendable during WW II. The landing ramp was cut out and a bluff bow and flush deck welded in. The flimsy hull had been so often grossly overloaded that it was bent in the middle like a banana, the bow and stern lower than the more buoyant midships section. It is a common condition of tired ships; sailors say the hull is hogged. The “Cristobal Carrier” was a similar old wreck but managed to keep coming back several times a year for a decade.
These ancient landing craft like the “Presidente” and “Cristobal Carrier” were engined with a Rube Goldberg contraption cobbled in the expediency of WW II, adequate for those heroic days but never intended to be crossing deep blue water thirty years later. Each of the two propeller shafts had four truck engines yammering in synchrony through a single overworked gearbox.
On our epic cruise, the “Presidente” mechanics worked day and night hammering and swearing in the black hole engine room, in a sort of round-robin scavenging of pieces from one expired engine to revive another. There was only one five-hour lapse when they could not keep at least one of the eight clapped-out Diesels howling.
It was almost an entertainment to be adrift. Motor ships are vulnerable if they lose power in bad weather. But March is reliably windless in these waters. We were as on a summer lake, with barely a ripple lapping at the side. Suddenly without the engines’ din, we could hear all the chatter of the mob on board, and the abrupt hissing breath of sea turtles. Above us on the bridge, the lieutenant carried on a cursory conversation with the staticky high seas radio, answering a compressed voice incomprehensible to the rest of us. Curses, laughter, and loud clanking came up the dark well from the engine room. At last, one of the machines stuttered a gout of black exhaust and the ship moved.