, GIANT
hen Admiral D avid Porter, commander of the ship USS Essex, anchored in the G alapagos Islands in the spring of 18 13, he wro te: "Every one appeared desirous of securing as large a stock of this provision as possible fo r the cruise.?':"'"""- . c: They were brought the distance offrom three to fo ur miles, through thorns and over sharp ~~~H rocks; yet it was no uncommon thing for them to make three and fo ur trips a day, each with tortoises weighing fro m fifty to a hundred weigh t." T h e sa ilors capru red living tortoises and loaded them aboard their sh ip? Fresh meat of any kind was a rare treat for sailors durin g lo n g voyages in warm climates, mostly because they co uld not keep these perishable foo ds safe before there was such a thing as refrigeration at sea. M ariners sailing in the Pac ific discovered that Galapagos giant tortoises can survive for perhaps as long as a year without water, so th ey co uld be stowed in a ship's h old like cargo. Pirate ships, merchant vessels, naval frigates, and especially whaling sh ips, all anchored at the Galapagos Islands to help themselves to these massive, slow-moving, vegetable-munching reptiles. ('G al apago' is a Spanish word fo r 'to rtoise' or 'turtle.') Using methods that seem cruel to us today, sailors dragged th e animals on the ground or carried them on thei r backs with straps they made from sailcloth. For an especially h eavy tortoise-so me have been recorded as weighing over 65 0 pounds-men hoisted the an imal on oars and trudged it to the beach . Sometimes sailors lowered tortoises down into boats from cliffs hundreds of feet high.
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Unfortunately, over time, the m en of these ships took too many. Historians believe they gath ered more than 100 ,000 tortoises over the centuries. Both inten~ ,... ' • tionally and sometimes accidentally, the crews of visiting boats also set fire to some of the islands and introduced other animals, such as rodents and pigs, that destroyed the native plants and /) ate the tortoises' eggs and young. Different Galapagos giant tortoise ~ 1/.~ species, living on separate islands, - · · evolved unique sh ell shapes and - • - neck lengths, adapting to the am ount of moisture, the terrain, and the type of plants in each of their specific habitats. When the yo ung C h arles D arwin visited the Galapagos during his voyage aboard ~~HMS Beagle (1 83 1-6), he h eard about these different species of tortoises: it . ·was one of the first seeds in his mind that led to his later earth-shaking ideas about natural selection and evolution. Visiting ships that removed the animals from the islands or damaged or des troyed the natural habitat of those left behind, forced a few species of giant tortoises into
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This giant Galapagos tortoise walked the decks of USS Albatross in 1891 until its services were required at the dinner table.
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Pll OTO BY C.11. TOWNSEND
SEAHIST<ORY 131, SUMMER2010