Galapagos Islands  Notes  Source  Whalesite

Friedrich Ritter

Satan Walks in the Garden

Friedrich Ritter

      In my first article I told you how Dore and I came to the desert island of Floreana in the Galapagos, having resolved to turn our backs forever upon civilization and establish for ourselves a solitude in the far Pacific. This spot is ideally suited to our purposes. We enjoy a tropical climate which is warm enough to enable us to go entirely without clothes, like the original Adam and Eve in the first earthly paradise, and at the same time cool enough, because of the constant trade winds, to keep us from becoming sluggish and enervated. We are living in the crater of an extinct volcano that lies high up on the side of a mountain overlooking the ocean. Here we built a temporary shelter to serve as our base of operations while we set about clearing the ground for our vegetable garden.

      All about us lies a desolate waste land of brown bushes, the only plants hardy enough to exist upon the dry and rocky hillsides, but our little valley is a veritable oasis in the midst of this desert. A large spring bubbles up in the centre of it to nourish a lush growth of tropical trees and fruits. We have christened the place Friedo, our Garden of Peace, and it would indeed by a garden of perfect peace if it were not for our only neighbors–some animals that were abandoned here by earlier colonists. there are cows, hogs, asses, dogs, and cats, at one time domesticated; in the long absence of man they have grown wild and now range like savage beasts over the whole island. To protect ourselves against them, one of our first tasks was to erect a fence about our domain.

      We had been here only a few months when a friend in Germany sent us a clipping from a Berlin newspaper which had somehow got wind of our experiment and had published a long article about it.

      The editor, with the omniscience that is characteristic of certain members of his profession, did not hesitate to analyze the motives which had prompted us in our strange flight from civilization. Said he: –

Surely Dr. Ritter must have something of the adventurer in him, something which only the bizarre and sensational could satisfy. His experiment seems to be another way of escaping from the cares and dilemmas of the everyday world–a philosopher's way out. And it is a better way than that which many others have adopted–those who suddenly disappear from their accustomed haunts to roam the streets of distant cities, and finally turn up in a sanitarium or go insane or commit suicide, as so frequently happens nowadays. This Dr. Ritter is just another example of a restless thinker who, not content with life and lacking the strength of will to adjust himself to it, is helpless to face the battle of reality and gives up the struggle. But in this case he seems to have found a new one.

      No doubt many people will share this opinion, and it will probably be a waste of time for me to attempt to correct it. Besides, it matters very little to us what others may think; by coming here we have freed ourselves from the fear of hostile opinion. Just the same, if the reader is to understand the real meaning of our adventure, he must resist the natural temptation to dismiss us as two hysterical people who have gone into "the blue" to find surcease from the struggle with reality. We have not at all withdrawn from life; we have merely withdrawn from a certain kind of life–the too highly mechanized existence of modern society.

      Here in our tropical island we are living more fully, more vitally, then ever, and are not praying to material gods. It seems to us now that the outside world is altogether too poor for us to ever think of returning to it. We are in a new land which has something new to offer us–something which civilization has not. I feel that I am born again, that I have awakened to a new birth. The tyranny of dull routine, of established schedules and programmes, is over for us. Instead, we are now able to live just as we please.

      And nothing could be further from the truth than to say that we have sought to escape from reality. In clearing this wilderness to make of it a suitable dwelling place, we are grappling every hour of the day with a primitive, dynamic reality which civilized man in his cities and towns has all but forgotten. Of our own free will we have taken on a burden of work that keeps us strenuously occupied from morning till night. Surely no romantic dreamer would knowingly take refure in an "ivory tower" such as this!

      I often ask myself why I labor so hard, and what, specifically, is the satisfaction that I get out of it, for I am well aware that the work is intensively satisfying. My answer is that I find in this life an inward consciousness of an urgent duty performed. It makes of the hardest toil a joy. It is a kind of quiet happiness that springs from self-directed endeavor and endures long after each task is finished.

II

      To illustrate the nature of our difficulties, let me describe briefly some of the conditions with which we have had to deal. At one time our Friedo was sea ground, and a fatty white clay collected on the rocky lava. Little by little the land rose out of the sea, and in the process the breakers washed lava fragments of all forms and sizes into the soft mud. Then one day a raging crater split the shore in two and spouted liquid fire high into the glowing air. This rain of melted stone fell hissing into the boiling sea, breaking into gravel and fine sand which covered the clay and the boulders several yards deep. With the passage of time the gravel bed hardened into a layer of natural cement. Titanic powers pushed the island higher and higher above the ocean level, then rain gradually permitted the first pioneers of the flora to gain a foothold. Through the centuries the plants overlaid the gravel bed with the vegetable loam of their dead bodies. This is now exceedingly rich soil, but it is not very deep.

      Impatient man, however, cannot wait until the soil is deep enough for his pretentious cultivated plants. He must forcibly distribute Mother Earth to suit his arbitrary purposes. Here he levels down, there he fills up, for his foot demands a comfortable plain to walk on as he labors. Thus, after the trees and shrubs were cleared, we have to remove lava slabs and great boulders, then cart soil from dawn till sunset to level the surface and make it ready

for planting. Months were consumed in this back-breaking toil.

      When we had so carefully laid in our provisions before leaving Germany it had never occurred to us that we should need a wheelbarrow, so we had to do a great part of our landscape gardening with mere shovels and buckets. Later we were lucky enough to obtain a wheelbarrow from a passing ship; The ship which did us this service was the Mizpah. It was not really a ship, but a pleasure yacht from Chicago, commanded by Commodore Eugene F. McDonald, Jr. He and some of his guests took the trouble to pay us a visit while his vessel lay at anchor in Post Office Bay. They expressed great surprise when they saw how much of the dense jungle we had already subdued with the limited means at our disposal, and the Commodore readily volunteered the wheelbarrow when I mentioned our need of one.

      At my urgent insistence he was also prevailed upon to leave us a quantity of dynamite, together with detonator caps for setting it off. I wanted it to use in blasting out stumps; without it I had only my axe, and the job seemed almost hopeless. The Commodore was troubled by this request, apparently fearing that we should blow ourselves to bits along with the stumps. In the end, however, I overcame his caution by explaining to him that I was not only a student of chemistry but had had practical experience with dynamite, having handled large quantities of it during the war.

      Every day for months, while we were occupied in clearing the ground and leveling it off, our feet had to remain in wet shoes We could not work in bare feet because there were too many small, sharp stones in the mud. The bed of a tiny brooklet served us quite successfully as a track for our wheelbarrow. In this fashion the damp earth of Friedo was dug out of the swamp around the spring and distributed where we wanted it. As for the blocks of lava, they had to be prized up and carried off. I should never have thought it possible that two weak human beings could move such stones with nothing to aid them but patience and a crowbar. When we actually did it, not once but countless times, I understood the exclamation of an ancient Greek physicist, "Give me a firm point and I will lift the earth from its hinges!"

      All along it had been my fixed idea to lay out our guides in an orderly manner, not being content merely to plant seeds hit or miss wherever nature has chanced to provide soil deep enough for them to take root. The plan was exceedingly difficult to execute. Just in the middle of the choicest spots the surly old earth spirits, with the inveterate hatred of any geometric design, seemed to have rolled the largest chunks of lava. Ours was the drudgery of putting their confusion to rights in a more or less intelligent way.

      I know well enough that no other man would have been so stupid as to attempt to correct the bungling of nature. In fact, nature herself seemed to be aware that she had found a foolish one, for she kept whispering in my ear, "The removal of this or that boulder is all that is lacking to make this a paradise"–and I was donkey enough to believe her. But who shall say that she cheated me, now that I have done her bidding and corrected her faults? We cannot expect to find a paradise anywhere unless we are willing to create it.

III

      Too often people with ambitious plans attempt not only to corect nature but also to defy her, and only

learn by sad experience that natural laws cannot be altered to suit the whims of man. I wished to avoid this mistake by imitating the Chinese, who set out their plants and trees where they can grow in their most appropriate environment. To provide a space for our vegetabe garden I had to transplant many of the native fruit trees which I was loath to destroy outright. But even when I sought for them more congenial surroundings than they originally enjoyed, it seemed strange how often my benevolent intentions were thwarted. For example, I would set a tree here, only to have it react in a way which told me as plainly as words, "No, I can't settle my roots deep enough; this subsoil is too stony." Another would say, "This earth is too wet; my roots rot." A third would demand dry, porous soil.

      The bananas and papayas had to be placed within the limited tract that was watered by the spring. To this end heavy rocks had to be dug out to make a place for them, and the pit had to be charged with good earth. Even then our toil was often in vain. We sometimes discovered after the work wa done that the spot we had chosen remained mysteriously dry, while there was plenty of moisture two yards farther off; for the drainage all depends on the slopes and contours of the underlying bed of clay. And so it went. Practical experience taught me much that I did not know, for nature herself became my teacher.

      We laid out two pathways to run the entire length of our garden, one leading down to the eastern coast, the other to the pass over our mountain and thence to Post Office Bay. The garden itself slopes gently toward the open end of the horseshoe-like enclosure of the crater rim, which greatly simplifies our irrigation problems. Around this spring are palms. The water flows from their roots in two parallel streams to enclose our vegetable plot; then the brooklets come together again, and from this point we shall eventually pipe the water into our house. By opening the ditches that run between the rows we can easily regulate the flow.

      In a deep recess of the crater walls we erected an enclosure for our chickens. We chose this spot because it adjoined the rocky ledge, which saved us the trouble of building a fence on that side. At first we had left the chickens roam at will, but this proved disastrous; several of them were devoured by the hungry wild dogs and cats that prowl all about us. Then, too, the chickens themselves began to show signs of running wild. Nature has given them no sense of order and organization; they seemed to delight in laying their eggs all over the place.

      When our plans had taken form to this extent, it was a comparitively easy matter to plant the seeds which we had brought with us from Germany. We had been in no great hurry to get this done, because our supply of food was still ample and the native fruits had been a welcome addition to our stores. It would be several more months before we should actually have to call upon our own vegetables to help us sustain life. And in this warm climate things would grow rapidly once they got started.

      In the end our garden was born with all the pains of motherhood. Just as it is the goal and purpose of all living to give life and reproduce, even so have we given new life to Friedo.

IV

      The native part of the garden contains bananas, papayas, oranges, coconuts, guavas, lemons, and pineapples, as well as a species of yam which grows

very large, often finding it necessary to force its way quite out of the shallow soil, where the huge roots lie half exposed on the surface. The wild swine are particularly fond of these yams. This is one of the reasons why they break through our fence so often, and, once in, they inflict wanton damage upon our other crops.

      In the cultivated section we wave planted all the common varieties of vegetables, including beans, tomatoes, cabbages, peas, beets, potatoes, radishes, cauliflowers, onions, celery, and spinach. To provide outselves with sugar we planted sugar cane. Since Dore and I are both vegetarians, we also had to see to it that we should have a sufficiency of vegetable oils and fats. The native coconut is excellent for this purpose, but for variety we also put in a crop of peanuts and planted some almonds and hazelnuts.

      The first planting was a stupendous success. The warm sun and the plentiful supply of water from the spring acted in combination like some powerful magic. We could actually measure growth from day to day. Before many weeks the tomato plants had reached a height of more than six feet, so that when I walked between the rows their leaves waved above me just as if I were in a thicket of small trees. And they bore fruit in proportion, the average tomato being as large as a baby's head. Most of the other things did almost as well.

      Amid the general fecundity there were only a few notable exceptions. For some reason the almonds and hazelnuts failed to germinate. We did not get a single sprout from them. The radishes, too, were a disappointment. The plants grew magnificently, but the tubers were wormy and often burst before attaining full size. On the whole, however, we had every reason to congratulate ourselves upon the success of our agriculture. We thought we could look forward to an abundance of vegetables for all time.

      The second planting soon revealed the fallacy of this idea. Everything seemed to grow much less well than at first and each plant seemed loath to adapt itself to its new environment. Subsequent plantings have never equaled that first burst of vigor. It was just as if the perpetual sunshine had caused the first crop to dissipate all its strength in growing, leaving not enough vitality for the seeds; when these seeds were planted in their own turn they appeared to get off to a poor start, like sickly children. Now that we have been here eighteen months, long enough to watch several generations of our garden come and go, we begin to realize some of the difficulties in this clime.

      Moreover, all our later plantings have been attended by misfortunes which our first garden miraculously escaped. These misfortunes were of three separate kinds–wind, insects, and the wild animals, chiefly the pigs and the asses. I have never been able to arrive at a wholly satisfactory explanation of our almost complete immunity from these scourges in the beginning and our perpetual trouble thereafter. The wind just bothered us once, it is true, but it did a thorough job while it was about it. It blew down most of our sugar cane and uprooted several of our banana trees. Banana trees have very short roots, which makes it impossible for the top-heavy trunks to stand up before a strong gale. Fortunately for us, the trade winds that blow over the Galapagos are gentle and even-tempered most of the time. Since we have been here they have displayed their full fury only this once, and then it was all over in a few minutes.

      As for the animals, it may be that

they were afraid of us at first and only gradually learned that they could break through our fence and trespass upon us with impunity. The same reasoning will not account for the strange behavior of the insects, but the fact remains that, like the animals, they left us pretty much alone in the beginning and have tormented us incessantly ever since.

V

      The tender shoots of our second planting had hardly peeped through the ground when the insect horders descended upon them like one of the plagues of ancient Egypt. Huge black cockroaches, brilliantly colored beetles, long fuzzy caterpillars, several varieties of plant lice, and two rival armies of ants–great black ones and smaller red ones–marshaled their forces and advanced upon us in platoons and regiments. They concentrated upon our garden as a feeding ground, seeming to prefer the exotic taste of our cultivated vegetables to the monotonous diet of native plants and trees on which they had been bred.

      The bugs are at their worst during the rainy season and the month that follows, when the ground is thoroughly moist. So for half the year we have to contend with these ravaging pests. Anyone familiar with the tropics will understand how we were transported from the joys of heaven to the uttermost depths of hell by such ruthless destroyers. In Northern countries the frosts serve a most beneficent purpose by killing the vermin; here nothing avails to check their overwhelming numbers. We have found it a very serious problem to combat them without chemical aids.

      The best we can do is to catch the insects with our hands and burn them. It is easy enough to collect them by the bucketful, but it is an endless job. No sooner do we wipe out one army than the enemy brings up its reserves, which are inexhaustible–and it all has to be done over again. In this perpetual battle there is no such thing as victory for us; the best we can hope for is a few days' truce, which lasts barely long enough for us to recover our strength for the next encounter.

      Worst of all are the insufferable ants. They cover the green leaves in such numbers that the green disappears completely beneath the black or red of their bodies. They carry with them their aphids, and start colonies of these lice, their "milk cattle," on every plant. Even the tropical banana is not immune from them. And they work quite as effectively underground as they do in the sunlight. With remarkable perverseness they soon discovered that our potato patch and our peanut hills were the best places in all the island for building their nests. Though we pour boiling water down their holes and kill them by the thousands, new settlements spring up overnight. It is a wonder that we can get anything to grow, so frequently have we been compelled in self-defense to soak the earth in scalding water.

      Not at all daunted by our ceaseless warfare against them in the field, they make bold to attack us in our very house. Nothing can keep them out. They swarm all over the place, and with a sure instinct make straight for our food supplies. If they can get at our delicacies in no other way, they will chew holes in the heavy cardboard cartons in which, for lack of anything better, we have had to store a large part of our provisions. They make daring raids upon our sugar, which tempts them more than anything else. We have tried every imaginable expedient to hide it where they cannot get at it, but to no avail. When we suspend it from

the rafters, they come down the cords; when we block this route by greasing the cords, they will climb up a spider's web, using it as the bridge of their desires.

      At night we sometimes awake to find our bedclothes alive with them. Even the large black ants will push their way through the meshes of mosquito netting that surround us, or, if this is too much trouble, their strong jaws will clip the threads and make larger holes. Once in, they attack us savagely, and their bites are exceedingly painful. I can only shudder when I think of what would happen to us if we should become ill and too weak to resist them–by morning our bones would be picked as clean as if they had been boiled. Living so close to them, we don't waste any sympathy on them for their wonderfully organized social system. They are an inexorable enemy, and we deal with them accordingly.

      Even in the garden we need a night watchman. In addition to the tireless ants there are myriads of moths and night butterflies that turn the hours of darkness into hours of destructive work. Though we see much less of them, they do almost as much damage as the other pests. With their long, sharp drills they bore into our fruit, laying eggs from which fat worms will hatch.

      We have certain allies in our war agains the insects–the birds and lizards, of which there are great numbers, but not nearly enough to deplete the ranks of our common enemy. Certain of the tropical flowers have developed a poison of their own for dealing with the moths and bugs, but the domesticated plants are helpless. The struggle to keep alive is almost twoo much for them. Without our constant help in fighting their battles, they would perish in short order.

VI

      In times past, parties of sportsmen from Ecuador used occasionally to come to this island expressly to hunt the wild cattle. Perhaps it is for this reason that these have given us much less trouble than the other animals. The cows remain very shy, rarely coming near our enclosure except under cover of darkness. The other beasts, however, do not seem to share their fears. Our chicken yard tempts the ravenous dogs and cats, and now and then a fowl will be stolen in spite of our precautions. The dogs find it easy enough to jump the fence, and of course any fence is a broad highway to a cat.

      In dealing with all these animal intruders I am handicapped in two directions. First, ever since chilhood it has caused me intense mental anguish to kill any living creature. The fierce struggle to survive in this wilderness has enabled me to overcome these feelings to some degree, but even now I prefer to exhaust all other measures before resorting to bloodshed. Second, I have nothing but low-calibre rifles, fit only for hunting birds and other small game. When I selected this place for our experiment in natural living, I was led by all the books and authorities to believe that no large animals existed on the island; hence it seemed superfluous to bring along powerful guns. In spite of this handicap, we are not left altogther defenseless. The prowling dogs and cats made themselves such a nuisance that I had to do something about it. By persistent efforts I have succeeded in killing many of them with my rifle, inadequate as it is.

      The worst offenders, however, are the asses and hogs, and upon them my weapons have no effect whatever. The asses are a mouse gray in color, gracefully built and somewhat longer

in body than their domesticated type. They can climb the rocks and crags of these volcanic hills with extreme ease and sureness of foot, but in general they prefer to keep to the network of old tortoise trails that interlace over the whole island. They thrive on a diet of thorn bushes, which grow abundantly on the dry slopes where no other green thing can live. The asses travel about in family groups. During the heat of the day they usually stay in some shady place, but the setting sun is their signal to be up and doing. As they venture forth to feed and make love, they shatter the stillness of the night with their trumpet-like brayings.

      Often, in an excess of animal spirits, they will start a stampede–apparently just for the fun of it. We can hear them galloping madly in droves of a dozen or more, their hoofs ringing a loud tattoo upon the stones. Then it is that they may come dashing at full speed down the mountain side to crash through our fence in the darkness. Such stupid beasts I have never seen. As often as they have repeated this manœuvre, they have never learned that the fence is there. Just the same, once they find themselves inside our garden they have sense enough to discover that there are other delicacies in the world besides thorns. The only thing I can do to save our precious work from utter ruin is to rush forth clad in a sheet, yelling to frighten them away. But they always come back–if not to-night, then to-morrow night.

      The pranks of the asses are so typically asinine that we can hardly find it in our hearts to condemn them. They are our comedians–practical jokers, to be sure, but still comedians; and they have given us many a hearty laugh. Not so the swine; they are ruthless destroyers and villains at heart. I sometimes regret that I am a vegetarian; though I dislike the taste of meat, I could find a very real satisfaction of another sort in killing and eating some of this wild pork.

      These Galapagos hogs are coal black, which is doubly fitting since their color matches both the lava rocks of their surroundings and their own diabolical dispositions. In their wild state they have developed formidable tusks. They carry sand flies between their cloven hoofs, and during the dry months, when we pass a place where hogs have chanced to rest, swarms of the plaguish flies fall upon our naked bodies and sting us until the blood flows. Though these wild hogs of ours may differ from their tamer brothers in some respects, they retain that characteristic smell which proclaims a hog a hog the world over. Whenever they chance to pass up the wind from us, one would think our paradise adjoined a stockyard.

      The pigs squeeze through the smallest apertures of our fence and root up everything in sight. For a long time this was almost a nightly occurrence. We were often awakened by the loud smacking noises they make in eating–my cue to go forth and do battle with them. Many times I tried my rifle on them, but though I hit them often enough, as I could tell by their squeals, I never succeeded in killing me a pig.

VII

      Early one morning, just as the sun was peeping above the horizon, Dore went into the garden and was surprised to see what, in the gray shadow of the dawn, she mistook to be a calf browsing in the potato patch. But it was not a calf; it was a huge black boar, the leader of this band of swinish pirates. In a spirit of wanton destruction he had rooted up many of the plants, leaving the growing potatoes exposed on the surface. Apparently he had not

been eating them; he was just having a good time.

      At sight of Dore the vandal made for the hole in the fence through which he had entered, and disappeared in the woods. Night after night following this incident he repeated his visits. Sometimes I would hear him and go forth to chase him off. Then he would withdraw to a thicket where I did not dare pursue him in the dark. Grunting ominously, he behaved like a hostile dog which, driven from his dinner, only waits his opportunity to return to it. Again we would sleep through the night without being disturbed, but the destruction that met our eyes in the morning showed only too plainly that the great hog had paid us his customary visit.

      It soon became evident that I should have to resort to violent measures to rid us of this unwelcome guest. I judged that if I could put him out of the way, that would be the most effective means of discouraging other members of his family as well. Again and again I tried my rifle upon the giant boar, but it was of no use. The noise sent him off in a panic, but the shots rebounded from his thick hide without hurting him. He learned that I was all bark and no bite, and with that he grew still bolder. He no longer waited for darkness, but began a series of daylight raids.

      I attempted to kill him with poisoned bananas, but he must have detected the odor of the deadly concoction, for he refused to touch them. Next I made some large pear-shaped pellets of flour and oil, with which I mixed another poison, and left them overnight where he was wont to feed. The following morning some of the pills were missing. I computed that enough had been devoured to kill two hogs outright. But lo! before the day was over the brute was back again, none the worse for his new diet. Dore thought this a huge joke and improvised a song for the occasion, which she sang to the tune of an old nursery jingle. The double insult was too much; I really could n't permit it. I had to bethink myself of new plans to destroy the impudent ravager. I decided to trap him.

      Accordingly I erected a figure-four trap and baited it with choice food. The device was quite ingenious. It was so arranged that when the robber entered he would not only ensnare himself, but at the same moment release a heavy log which, suspended above the bait, would deal him a crushing blow. I experimented and tried it out until it worked perfectly. Everything was now set to catch the marauder. At last we were to be rid of him. It seemed almost too good to be true. As the sun went down I placed the bait very carefully and retired to the house await results.

      I awakened repeatedly during the course of the night and listened intently for the slighest noise. I strained my ears, expecting every moment to hear the drop of the log and the squeal of my victim. No sound disturbed the silence of the tropical night. At break of day I hastily went to see what had happened. The device had functioned–functioned perfectly. The trap was sprung and the log had fallen. The thing had worked while I slept. But when I looked inside there was no hog! He was n't in the snare, nor had he been crushed by the heavy timber. He had sneaked through and with devilish cunning had stolen the bait, sprung the trap without doing himself any damage, and then–brazenly, defiantly–had rooted up part of the mechanism and trampled upon it.

      I was angry, chagrined. It did n't help matters when Dore repeated her taunting song, and I reflected that the boar was probably lurking in the nearby thickets waiting to repeat his tricks.

VIII

      Then a new idea occurred to me. "I shall have to employ hellish instruments against this hellish beast," I said, and set about it forthwith. I still had several sticks of dynamite and three electric detonator caps left over from clearing the stumps. I resolved to blow the hog to bits. I dug a hole, buried two sticks of dynamite, imbedding a detonator in each, and adjusted my wires. At nightfall I placed some tempting food over the explosives and withdrew into a thicket to be ready when the boar appeared.

      Sure enough, he came. I restrained myself until I heard him smacking away with great gusto as he devoured the bait, then I crossed the wires. Nothing happened. Again I crossed them, and a third time. Still there was no explosion. I could not understand it. The dynamite had always worked before. With a lantern I approached the spot to find out what was wrong. The bait was gone and the ground was rooted up all about the spot where it had lain. On the surface I found the dynamite–that is, what was left of it. The omnivorous hog had eaten up half on one stick!

      I listened. I could hear the boar breaking through the thorn thickets as he made his escape. I felt helpless, inconsolable. I ran my fingers through my hair. I racked my brain; it was all useless. My enemy led a charmed life. I could arrive at no plan shrewd enough to outwit him. I wished that I could somehow place a detonator cap in the beast's stomach to set off the dynamite he had consumed and was now carrying in his belly, but that would be a more delicate undertaking than that of the mice who wanted to hang a bell on the cat. It was imperative to do something. The garden could n't last much longer if these raids continued.

      Finally, as a last resort, I determined to fight cunning with cunning. I began to leave food for the hog during the middle of the day, and before long he was coming for it regularly. In the course of a few weeks he would even tolerate my presence, although he watched me constantly out of the corner of his evil red eyes and would never let me approach too close. After he had grown thoroughly accustomed to this routine I again buried some dynamite under his regular feeding place. This time I wanted to finish the job completely, so I planted four sticks, together with a quantity of black powder, and took great pains to see that the percussion caps were properly inserted. Over the dynamite I placed a number of stones as big as a man's fist, so that when the explosion occurred they would assist in the complete annihilation of the hog.

      When all was ready, I set out the food on top of the pile and moved just far enough away to be able to see and yet be out of danger. At his usual time the boar approached without any hesitation and began to eat. Now it was daylight and I could make sure that he would not again root up the explosives before my very eyes. "The last meal for you, my pig," I muttered under my breath, "so you had better make the most of it." Then I crossed the wires.

      Wham! The roar shook the earth. Thick black smoke rolled heavenward and rocks rained down everywhere. Not waiting for the smoke to clear, I ran forward to examine the results. What was that scuttling away through the thickets? It was our hog making his escape, apparently unscathed. We who had envisioned hams and sausages hanging from the trees found only a great hole in the ground, while the pungent smell of saltpeter stung our nostrils.

      Truly, we concluded, this creature must be of the Devil. We are power-

less to harm him. He is bewitched. To justify our impotence against him we name him Mephistopheles, King of the Devil Pigs.

      The explosion, however, must have done him more damage than we first thought, for he has never returned to invade our garden again. But from time to time we have seen him in the woods. He still lives. He must have taught his family that we are more dangerous than we look, for the pigs have given us much less trouble ever since.

IX

      From this series of incidents one can see how the most insignificant trifles become for us problems of great proportions. A hunter would have dispatched the giant boar with one shot. A pioneer would have had a faithful dog to help him. An ordinary settler would have used steel traps or a pit. For us it remained a problem to tax our utmost ingenuity. We do not have a heavy gun, we have no dog or any traps, we lack the implements to dig in this hard, cement-like subsoil a pit large enough to hold Mephistopheles.

      Thus it goes with us in the abandoned solitudes of this remote island. We must live by our wits, matching them constantly against new and unexpected difficulties. By this time it ought to be manifest to the reader that in describing our experiment I have not yielded to the temptation to make it seem a bed of roses. We did not expect that it would be, and we have not been disappointed. Still we are amply content. We know at last those solid satisfactions that come to man from patient, honest, self-directed toil.

      We cannot find it in our hearts to pity Adam and Eve for being thrust from their Paradise of slothful ease and forced to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. Though Genesis suggests the opposite, we suspect that they discovered before very long that they were the gainers by the change. Like us, perhaps they learned that there is another Paradise, with joys more enduring, from which one who has attained it cannot be ousted–the Paradise of contentment through work, of mental peace, of love. Truly this is the genuine lesson to be learned from that old folk story about the fall of man.

      We have now been here a year and a half. In this warm clime, where the pulse of life beats quick and fast, the battle to survive becomes an unending state of war between man and the wilder forces of nature. Each passing day convinces us anew that there are lasting satisfactions to be derived from this natual strife, which for us has taken the place of the sordid and unnatural struggle beween man and man that marks so-called civilization. Each day provides us with some thrilling drama to save us from the blighting curse which the mechanization of life has inflicted upon the human race–the infinite border of monotony.

      To prove this point I shall send you a final article next month. In it I shall keep my promise to have you as our guest in Friedo for just one day, so that you may see with your own eyes how we live. I shall carry you through our new and permanent house, which is now nearing completion. And I shall invite you to laugh with us at the tricks we have had to play upon several queer people who, hearing of our experiment, have come here thinking they were conferring upon us the greatest imaginable favor by attempting to join our little settlement. None of them has stayed very long, I can assure you.

      Auf Wiedersehen!.

      Use of the centered roman numerals in all three articles follows the Atlantic Monthly style applied to its feature articles as noted in John Woram's now defunct website – galapagos.to, which was the source used for this transcription.

      Dr. Friedrich Karl Ritter of Berlin was a dentist who longed for a retreat where he could indulge his raw food theories and complete his magnum opus, a philosophical theosophist treatise. He was accompanied by his devoted disciple and girlfriend, Dore Koerwein, who was known to island visitors as Dore Ritter, although their respective spouses had been left in Germany with instructions to take care of each other.[ Smithsonian Institution Archives.]

Friedrich Ritter.
      "Satan walks in the garden."
Atlantic Monthly.
Vol. 148 (November 1931)
p565-575.

Galapagos Islands  Notes  Source  Whalesite