There was this storm, which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea.
But when the storm lifted, the Spaniards found that they had delivered their bishop into a sailor’s nightmare where the bits of land were mockeries, without safe anchorage or shade or sweet water or dangling fruit, or human beings of any kind. They were becalmed, and running out of water and food. The ocean was like a mirror. They put a longboat over the side, and towed their vessel and their spiritual leader out of there.
They did not claim the islands for Spain, any more than they would have claimed hell for Spain. And for three full centuries after revised human opinion allowed the archipelago to appear on maps, no other nation wished to own it. But then in 1832, one of the smallest and poorest countries on the planet, which was Ecuador, asked the peoples of the world to share this opinion with them: that the islands were part of Ecuador.
No one objected. At the time, it seemed a harmless and even comical opinion. It was as though Ecuador, in a spasm of imperialistic dementia, had annexed to its territory a passing cloud of asteroids.
But then young Charles Darwin, only three years later, began to persuade others that the often freakish plants and animals which had found ways to survive on the islands made them extremely valuable, if only people would look at them as he did—from a scientific point of view.
Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.
Yes, and by the time of James Wait’s arrival in Guayaquil so many persons with an interest in natural history had come there, on their way to the islands to see what Darwin had seen, to feel what Darwin had felt, that three cruise ships had their home port there, the newest of which was the Bahía de Darwin. There were several modern tourist hotels, the newest of which was the El Dorado, and there were souvenir shops and boutiques and restaurants for tourists all up and down the Calle Diez de Agosto.
The thing was, though: When James Wait got there, a worldwide financial crisis, a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper, had ruined the tourist business not only in Ecuador but practically everywhere. So that the El Dorado was the only hotel still open in Guayaquil, and the Bahía de Darwin was the only cruise ship still prepared to sail.
The El Dorado was staying open only as an assembly point for persons with tickets for “the Nature Cruise of the Century,” since it was owned by the same Ecuadorian company which owned the ship. But now, less than twenty-four hours before the cruise was to begin, there were only six guests, including James Wait, in the two-hundred-bed hotel. And the other five guests were:
*Zenji Hiroguchi, twenty-nine, a Japanese computer genius;
Hisako Hiroguchi, twenty-six, his very pregnant wife, who was a teacher of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging;
*Andrew MacIntosh, fifty-five, an American financier and adventurer of great inherited wealth, a widower;
Selena MacIntosh, eighteen, his congenitally blind daughter;
And Mary Hepburn, fifty-one, an American widow from Ilium, New York, whom practically nobody in the hotel had seen because she had stayed in her room on the fifth floor, and had taken all her meals up there, since arriving all alone the night before.
The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down. This convention of starring certain names will continue throughout my story, incidentally, alerting readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness.
I was there, too, but perfectly invisible.
5
THE BAHÍA DE DARWIN was also doomed, but not yet ready for a star by her name. It would be five more sundowns before her engines quit forever, and ten more years before she sank to the ocean floor. She was not only the newest and largest and fastest and most luxurious cruise ship based in Guayaquil. She was the only one designed specifically for the Galápagos tourist trade, whose destiny, from the moment her keel was laid, was understood to be a steady churning out to the islands and back again, out to the islands and back again.
She was built in Malmö, Sweden, where I myself worked on her. It was