the archipelago’s grandeur, scouring for details our naturalist guide had overlooked. On the island of Genovesa, Bass held a slender mangrove seed as the rest of the group moved down the path. He peered at it under the bill of his cap. “It’s torpedo-weighted,” he said. And so it was. Bass converted findings like this into lines of chicken-scratch on scraps of folded, loose-leaf paper. Back on the Samba, he transferred his exhaustive field notes to a lined notebook, and then once more to his computer. The labor helped him internalize the writing, he said, but it also made him vulnerable: One afternoon, he lost an entire page of notes off the side of the boat. He let out a wail as the wind carried his thoughts away, and afterward he transcribed indoors. For Peacock, the intimacy of human-animal interactions in the Galapagos was unnerving. As a wildlife activist, he is wary of human predation, but the fur seals, sea lions, turtles, tortoises, penguins, iguanas and sea birds of these islands have never learned to fear it. Our group could swim alongside a whale shark for almost a half hour. For most on board, drifting near the 30-footlong shark was an experience that would define the trip forever. Peacock watched us from the front deck, seeing only a cluster of snorkel tubes encircling a glimmering dorsal fin. That evening on the Samba’s stern, foamy ice still clinking against the sides of his glass, he wrestled aloud with the concept of wildlife watching for leisure. He directed his words at Bass, as if no one else was around. “It’s the same reason I didn’t want to swim with the whale shark today,” he said. “It’s about the dignity of the animal.”
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Bass nodded slightly and smiled, his cheeks and neck covered in stubble. Tucked inside his breast pocket was a folded stack of chicken-scratch notes about the whale shark, the mangrove, and every other secret the Galapagos had given him. Jacob Osborne grew up in Vermont and is now a rising junior at Yale University. His father and stepmother arranged this Galapagos trip with family friends Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams, who then invited Peacock and Bass along for the ride.
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