Death in Galapagos

To the Mackay radio station at Los Angeles last fortnight went a halting message from the tight little tuna-fishing schooner Santa Amaro, Manuel Rodriguez, Master. The Santa Amaro, lying off Marchena Island, one of the northernmost of the Galapagos group, had exciting news to report. Passing bleak, barren, fresh-waterless Marchena that morning her crew spied a small skiff hauled high on the rocks of the shore. Swinging closer they saw a tall pole and fluttering from it a few limp rags. On shore they found a dead seal with strips of flesh hacked from it, a few bits of iguana meat, and two human corpses.

One was a man, baldish, his head lying on a pile of clothes with a white coat over his face. Not far away was another, so badly decomposed that it was impossible to determine its sex. It seemed to be dressed in lingerie. There were some baby clothes nearby, a little pile of French money, a German passport issued to Alfred Rudolph Lorenz, No. 211 Avenue Daumesnil, Paris. There was a bundle of letters and photographs, most of them bearing the name of Mrs. Margaret Wittmer. Soon the Santa Amaro was hull down in Mystery.

The Galapagos (literally Great Tortoise and pronounced Galapagos) Islands lie on the Equator about 500 miles due west of Ecuador to which country they belong. Seventeenth Century pirates knew them well. Charles Darwin visited them in his famed voyage of the Beagle. Ever since they have been a special delight for scientists, nature fakirs and wanderlustful millionaires. Within recent years such celebrities as William Beebe, Col. Theodore Roosevelt, John Barrymore, Gifford Pinchot, William K. Vanderbilt and Vincent Astor have visited the islands.

Two years ago a strange trio landed on Charles Island. They were: 1) a lean fanatical young woman known as the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehr-born, latterly of Vienna and Paris; 2) Alfred Rudolph Lorenz, her small, weak, tuberculous lover; 3) Robert Philippson, also a German and their common friend. In their search for an island paradise in the Pacific they had come upon Charles Island only to find it already occupied by two other romantic German couples. Arthur Wittmer and his wife, Margaret Walbrol, practicing nudists, lived with their two children in a corrugated zinc hut. Dr. Karl Ritter and Frau Dore Koervin had abandoned their respective spouses to seek Utopian freedom. Dr. Ritter was a dentist. Thinking of life 800 miles from an electric drill, he had all his own teeth pulled, substituting an indestructible set of stainless steel grinders.

There also was a Norwegian sailor named Nuggerud. No nature lover, he earned a frugal living fishing off the Galapagos and sailing his odorous cargoes back to the mainland.

The baroness and her two friends soon became the talk of the islands. Her favorite costume was a pair of silk panties and a pearl-handled revolver. She liked to wound animals, then nurse them back to health. To visiting Astors and Vanderbilts she was hospitality itself but terrified fishermen from the mainland were imprisoned overnight or chased away at the pistol point. One shipwrecked honeymoon couple from Chile was sent to sea in an open boat, and there were other strange developments. With the changing seasons, the baroness' fancy also changed to Robert Philippson while Lorenz was reduced to a sort of super-scullion.

One night about a year ago a hideous row broke out in the baroness' shack. Scullion Lorenz took shelter with the neighboring Wittmers for several months. After a while he returned to the baroness.

In March there was another row at the baroness'. Scrambling down a rocky path to investigate, the Wittmers found wild-eyed Rudolph Lorenz standing by a deserted disordered shack. There had been a fight, said he, and the baroness and Philippson had gone off "on an American yacht" to start another colony in the South Seas.

The Post Office of Charles Island is an empty barrel on the seashore. In this barrel Lorenz posted a notice begging to be taken off by the first passing ship.

Until the finding of the two starved corpses on Marchena Island, 160 miles north of Charles Island, that was all the outside world knew. The baroness had vanished. Radio Revivalist Phillips Lord ("Seth Parker"), cruising offshore, reported by wireless that he had dined with the Wittmers only the week before, that the second body could not be Mrs. Wittmer's. Soundest theory seemed to be that Rudolph Lorenz (who may or may not have murdered the baroness) was picked up by the Norwegian fisherman Nuggerud for the trip to San Cristobal Island where Lorenz could take schooner passage to the mainland; that Lorenz was taking with him some letters Mrs. Wittmer wanted posted and some of her baby's clothes as size samples for the purchase of more on the mainland. Nuggerud's fishing boat, the Dinamita, was wrecked and he and Lorenz managed to make the shores of waterless Marchena Island where they died of thirst.

All this should have been investigated last week by the Ecuadorean Government, but Galapagos seemed too far away. Meanwhile yet another Galapagos expedition prepared to sail last week from Los Angeles. Its chief was Dr. Waldo Schmitt, curator of marine invertebrates at the Smithsonian Institution. Tiny crabs, polyps and miniscule sponges are Dr. Schmitt's specialty but he bravely promised to do his best as detective as well.

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