Plundering Paradise

The midwinter sun has just begun to climb above the flat, blue Pacific, and already the cobbled pavers that form the streets of Puerto Ayora are warm to the touch. Marine iguanas, as common here as house cats, have crawled up from the sea to begin their daylong naps on the black lava crags that rim this island of stone.They are outside Jack Nelson's front door as well, dozing on his concrete stoop as Jack steps into the white morning light. He shuts the door softly behind him, careful not to wake his partner Romy and their young daughter, Audrey. The mottled black reptiles lie undisturbed as Jack loosens the bleached red bandanna knotted around his neck, slips a sweat-stained Panama hat on his head, adjusts his knapsack, and checks his watch.The march is set to begin at nine, but Jack's in no hurry to get there. Nothing begins on time on these islands. If there's one thing Jack Nelson has learned in his thirty-odd years in this place, it's that nothing in the Galápagos happens when it's supposed to. This was one of the first lessons his father taught him when Jack arrived here in the summer of '67. Patience, flexibility, the capacity to adapt -- these are the qualities the old man said a human must have to survive on these islands. They are the attributes that allowed Forrest Nelson to settle this point of land nearly forty years ago, carving a couple of cement-block shelters out of magmatic debris and sun-scorched brush and calling them a hotel. The guests back then were mostly field scientists in search of a cot and some shade, or the occasional yachtsman and his crew bound west to Tahiti, or the hustlers and con men who, to this day, arrive on these islands seeking a place where neither the law nor the truth will follow.Tourists, per se, did not yet exist here in 1961, when the Hotel Galápagos first opened for business. Six years after that, when Jack Nelson showed up, weeks still might pass between one guest and the next. Jack never dreamed he'd stay in this godforsaken place for more than a year or two. There were fewer than one thousand people on this entire island when he first set foot here. The Norwegians on their small cattle farms up the vine-tangled slopes of that extinct volcano had been around the longest, nearly half a century. Then there were the Germans and Belgians in their little hamlet across the harbor; most of them had come just before and after World War II. And here on this side, in what was no more than a scattered settlement, were the Ecuadorians, their fishing dinghies anchored in the turquoise shallows of Ninfas Lagoon.Of course there were the scientists, always the scientists, coming and going from their base camp at the southeastern tip of the island, just beyond Jack's father's hotel. Forrest Nelson had helped build that camp for the scientists in the summer of 1960, kicking up clouds of dust as he gunned his small three-wheeled tractor up and down the dirt trail to the site. The scientists stayed at his hotel while the gravel road was put in and the first Charles Darwin Research Station dormitories were put up.There were no paved roads back then. No electricity. The only fresh water to be found was that which fell straight from the sky, collected in downspouts and barrels and stored beneath layers of scum and dead insects. The closest mainland was six hundred miles east, where the beaches of Ecuador baked in the equatorial sun. A ham radio might be able to pick up a station now and then from Guayaquil or maybe Quito, the deejays chattering in Spanish over the buzz of the static. To hear an American voice, Forrest Nelson had to fiddle with the knobs of his shortwave, typically late at...