The weavers of memories (08)
V. An archive in the Galapagos. The shuttle on the loom (A)
[This post is the eighth of a series in which I will share a text entitled Los tejedores de memorias (“The weavers of memories”), which I produced as the final work for my master’s degree in Historical Archives and Memory at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota (Colombia). All posts can be viewed on my website, while the original text, complete with quotes and notes, can be downloaded here].
From the point of view of critical archival science — rogue, emancipatory and speculative, if one wishes to use those controversial adjectives — the documents preserved in an archive cease to be dead and passive material, and become a wealth of information for which abundant possibilities open up: opportunities to understand the past (and to see the present, and to move into the future) in different ways, to enrich histories with other opinions and experiences, to evaluate learning and concepts that are not so definitive, and to feed new investigative and creative processes.
The archive can thus cease to be a space of retrospective glances, reserved for history and its practitioners, and become a place from which to create, challenge, devise, build. A corner from which to weave other narratives and other results.
Collecting all these ideas and placing them on the board of natural science archives opens the door to a real current of fresh air that invades a world that is usually closed, in every sense of the word.
To test how relevant such a current can be, this text will apply the critical archival notions reviewed so far to an archive and its collection. And for this purpose, a space has been chosen that is obviously related to the natural sciences, at the same time possessing a history, a documentary collection, a public and a reduced scope of action: conditions that make it manageable and that allow for review and experimentation.
A unique site has been chosen, located on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by giant opuntias, mangroves and marine iguanas. An archive in the Galapagos Islands.
***
The Galapagos Islands or Archipelago of Colon are a group of 19 islands, 42 islets and 26 rocks belonging to Ecuador, located in the Pacific Ocean, about 900 km from the nearest mainland, the western coast of South America. As the naturalist William Beebe put it in the title of his famous book (1925), they are a sort of “end of the world”.
An “end of the world” protected, today, by strict laws and regulations. For the islands are an Ecuadorian National Park, a Natural World Heritage Site and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Curiously, they are also a place affected by intense tourism and migratory movements, as well as the focus of heated debate around conservation policies and environmental struggles.
The relationship of human beings with the Galapagos was never simple. The first Spanish navigators called them “enchanted islands”: unable to place them on their charts, they believed them to be bewitched, that is, subject to an evil enchantment that made them appear and disappear. Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick (and crewmember of one of the many whaling ships that fished in the archipelago) immortalized this ancient name in one of his best literary works, The Enchanted Islands (1854). His description of the islands was not exactly flattering: he referred to them as “twenty-five heaps of ash” in the middle of the sea. Charles Darwin, who transformed the Galapagos into the object of desire of biologists and conservationists around the world, was not much kinder. In The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), he spoke of scorched soils and smelly bushes. Even the Spanish “discoverer” of the islands, the Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga, who accidentally landed on its shores in 1535, spoke of a place where God had rained stones.
Indeed, Galapagos is far from a typical tropical paradise: it is a volcanic landscape, with arid, stony lowlands and a few highlands usually hidden in the clouds. Despite such rugged landscapes, they are still dreamlike territories: mangroves mingle with giant opuntias, and coal-black basaltic lava flows plunge into a sea populated by sharks and colorful reef fish. The relative isolation of the islands and their particular geographic location turned them into a sort of biological laboratory, within which a very peculiar flora and fauna developed: from the famous giant tortoises that gave the Galapagos their name (an archaic Spanish way of naming chelonians) to the only marine iguanas and flightless cormorants on the planet, passing through forests of Scalesia, giant migrating albatrosses, sea lions and equatorial penguins, and much more. So much so that the islands have become the subject of hundreds of field studies and research articles.
They are also a place with a unique human history that oscillates between the strange and the tragic: legendary Inca navigators share the pages of Galapagos chronicles with Spanish conquistadors, English pirates and buccaneers, American whalers, Ecuadorian prisoners and foremen, Robinsons and castaways… And, almost inevitably, with Darwin, the Beagle, and dozens of other scientific expeditions.
The interaction between that extraordinary natural environment and the no less extraordinary human presence produced a history fraught with conflict. One that is still unfolding, and that led, among other things, to the creation of the protected area that is the archipelago today. And to conservation practices that are still being debated.
***
The “enchanted” reputation that the islands had among the Spanish during the Latin American colonial period allowed buccaneers and pirates to make them their refuge during the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, the author of the first reliable map of the archipelago was an English privateer, William A. Cowley (1684).
A century later, after the end of the pirate era, the place of those famous outlaws was occupied by whalers and sea lion hunters, who abused the local natural resources to the point of almost extinguishing some species. Thirty years after their arrival, when the sperm whales, seals and giant tortoises had all but disappeared, and the iguanas and penguins were seriously threatened, the hunting and fishing vessels left the area and headed for other lands and other waters. The Galapagos then became part of Ecuador’s national territory (1832) and, after Darwin’s visit in 1835, became a place of study and research.
During the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, countless scientific expeditions visited the islands. And, paradoxically, they depredated their fauna and flora to inconceivable levels, to feed the almost insatiable hunger for specimens in zoos, museums and private natural history collections in Western Europe and North America. At the same time, a good number of Ecuadorian settlers arrived from the mainland to work, under quasi-slavery conditions, for ruthless landowners. Thus, by 1930 the degradation of the Galapagos landscape was brutal. In addition to the damage caused by introduced animals (dogs, cats, goats, pigs, rats), overexploitation of resources by settlers had brought most of the endemic species to the brink of extinction.
In 1958, the open concern expressed by the international scientific community regarding Galapagos biodiversity led to the creation of the Galapagos National Park by the Ecuadorian government. The Park was officially inaugurated on July 20, 1959, and since then has protected 97% of the archipelago’s land area. Three days later, with the support of UNESCO and IUCN, the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands (CDF) was established in Brussels to support (inter)national efforts to conserve the islands.
In 1960, under particularly harsh conditions, the CDF began building a scientific station near Puerto Ayora, on the southern coast of Santa Cruz Island. Inaugurated on January 20, 1964, the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) immediately became a space where scientists and researchers developed their projects, trying to describe and understand the Galapagos ecosystems and, at the same time, identify threats to their survival.
From that moment on, the CDRS grew into a modern and well-equipped institution where an international team of professionals carries out its activities. And, at the same time, it became the place where the entire history of such work was preserved: the large and small narratives of scientific achievements, but also the social memory of the protection and conservation of Galapagos, with all its efforts, struggles, successes and failures over the decades.
[To be continued…].
