PARADISE THREATENED: JOURNEY TO THE GALAPAGOS

It was supposed to be the trip to Paradise: the long-dreamed-of family adventure, at the perfect time. I had just finished a book about tigers. What heaven, to waltz in for ten days on my daughter’s gap year, to a wilderness not threatened – as tigers' jungles are - by mining, logging, poaching, tiger bone, the skin trade, and see wild animals safe in a World Heritage Site protected by the Ecuadorian government.

There were six of us. My mother, her cousin Sophie, two of my brothers, me and - oh, after six months, my daughter Gwen! Long wild blonde hair, brown as hazelnuts, fluent Spanish, handling Latin men as to the manana born. She had taught English and learned tango in Paraguay, played violin at Paraguayan weddings and in Asuncion's symphony orchestra, then trekked up Macchu Picchu and over the Andes on brakeless busses to meet us - on equatorial islands enfolded, like baked alaska, in the chilly Humboldt current. The Galapagos: and this was a Darwin expedition for Hilda, my mother, is Charles Darwin's great grand-daughter.Her mother, Nora Barlow, his grand-daughter, edited his writings.

Gwen is named for another Darwin grand-daughter, woodcut artist Gwen Raverat, whose daughter Sophie was at school with Hilda in Cambridge seventy years ago. They had always wanted to see where he began the trail that led to evolution. But had they left it too late? He was twenty-two when the Beagle set sail. They were eighty-five, with arthritic knees, dodgy breathing, and these islands are rough. You step onto craggy black lava slippery with sea lion shit, or drop from a bucking dinghy into thigh-high waves. But Hilda and Sophie were up for it, and we were here to help. My sister and another brother could not get away. We missed them. But we did have Deborah Moggach, whose parents wrote a children’s book about the Galapagos, and Leonor Stjepic, Director of the Galapagos Conservation Trust, celebrating a hundred and seventy years since Darwin came here; six hundred and seventy since Thomas Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, discovered them en route to Peru. Swept 600 miles off course, this random Bishop became the first man to describe giant tortoises, iguanas, sea lions and the mad abundance of unique sea birds living Edenically side by side asnd quite unafraid, because do not know about land predators, of people.

We entered from Baltra island. The first surprise: it was a military outpost. "Ecuadorian naval conscripts don't care about preserving things," said the guide. "They fine you for not wearing life-jackets in a dinghy, but ignore the rules themselves. We must stick to trails, so as not to trample eggs hidden by iguanas, turtles, sea-birds. But the navy goes where it likes."

Sinister black frigate birds flew above our boat, against jewel-blue sky. It doesn’t do to think of Hitchcock and The Birds, in the Galapagos. We swam from the back of the boat, then landed on a tiny empty islet and stepped over iguanas crested like sticklebacks, all pea-green iridescent smiles and diamanté claws. "Darwin thought they were disgusting," said my mother."But it depends how you look at them." She got a whiff of our first sea lion colony. “I didn’t realize they smelled.”

I worried about sea lions. How would Hilda and Sophie get away fast, over this crazy lava, if one chased us? Debbie's mother was helicoptered out from here, because a bull sea lion took a chunk from her thigh. These bulls, with swollen necks and bumpy foreheads, were deeply into protecting their harems. "I've never had a group so scared of sea lions," said our guide. "We're such wimps," said Debbie, stepping over a slumbering bachelor. But here the top bull was in the water, patrolling the entry to rocks where pups lay waiting to suckle their dams, who were out at sea catching fish to convert into milk. Bigger pups chased each other in and out of pools.

"Shark!" said Sophie suddenly. A huge gold fin glinted close to the play pools. The colony erupted in barks like sheep burping. Bachelors in the waves started harassing the shark. When it turned on them they skittered across the surface like water drops racing down a hot plate. The big bull barked an order; they climbed out on rocks. For ten minutes the shark patrolled the nursery, while sea lions boiled with anxiety over the rocks. Finally the big bull went in and drove it away. One bite from a bull... No wonder Debbie's mother needed surgery. "We were swimming in that water," said Gwen.

Next day, snorkelling, she swam with more sharks. Apparently you can. They only bother sea lion pups. A sea lion blew bubbles in her mask, then tugged at it. I watched turtles, tilting in green-mist water, penguins fishing, trails of blue fish. Then the guide yelled, "Get in quick! Killer whales! They take everything in the water, whales, a white shark"." We tumbled back in, Gwen just in time. Then we were in a shcool of hunting orcas. Sea lions arrowed up to the dinghy, breathed, then closed nostrils and dived beneath us followed by killer whales so close we could see their blow holes. We had no life jackets, we had simply been doing a gentle snorkel. They were harrying the sea lions, stopping them heading to land. Then, heavens, the sea lions were swimming after them, maybe behind was the safest place. Three times they all dived under us, fins scything up, twenty foot of shining black and white muscle arcing below. The last one orca lifted the dinghy, then shot up and looked back. We were a much easier meal than a sea lion. On the boat my mother remembered stories of orcas overturning ships, wondering which of her family they would pick for lunch. Then they were gone. And we saw fins of a hammerhead.

"Hammerheads are nearly fished out," said the guide.
" Fished out?" If fishing were allowed the animals and birds, sea lions, boobies, everything here that depends on the fish, would go. "Shark fishing is the big issue," Leonora said. "And sea cucumbers. The government recently doubled the sea cucumber quota. Fishermen couldn't fill it. There weren't enough left."

"In shark finning," said the guide, "they slice off the fin leaving the shark to bleed to death. Don't eat shark's fin soup!"

How could the park head give permission? Surely he was a scientist – or listened to scientists? Nope. The current one was a political appointment made by Environment Minister to get fishermen's votes. He had not even the equivalent of A-level.

"The government wants to permit longline fishing here too, which kills everything in the sea and contravenes an international agreement signed by Ecuador for conserving sea birds. That would be the endgame for the Galapagos. The main line extends up to 60 miles, with hundreds of thousands of hooks, and has secondary branches. It kills everything, birds, turtles, sharks, sea lions."

Back on the big boat, I tried to stay with the glory of the orcas. And, on Isabella island, the triumph of Ecuadorian scientists and the Darwin Research Station in getting rid of imported goats destroying unique vegetation. We landed at Tagus Bay where Darwin landed and walked up above a peacock green lake. Darwin's Lake. He tried drinking, but it was pure salt. Then up a cindery walk like the last lap of Mordor to a view bubbling with red and black volcanoes. But we had to yield the peak to the next group. Every group had a guide with them, like a collie, and we did feel herded. Eighty thousand tourists are allowed every year; the islands had clearly reached tourist saturation.

"The government wants to double the number of tourists," said Leonor.
That evening a sea lion slept on the boat. My brother Felix, a violinist, played it a Bach Partita. I read out what Darwin wrote in his diary about plankton.

‘Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms and rich colours. It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for so little purpose."

Poor guy. In 1831, when he tried out a hammock his first night out from Portsmouth, he believed like everyone in the divine creation of species. By the time he got here, four years later, he had come a long way in his mind, as well as clocking up sea miles. In Chile he wondered about related birds and animals east and west of the Andes. Here, we read out to each other over gin and tonic, there were thirteen little finches, with different-shaped beaks, adapted to different food on different islands. Nine months afterwards, on the other side of South America, he wrote five crucial pages of ornithological notes, his first admission of evidence that species might change.

The other animals that gave him a clue, of course, were the giant tortoises. A prison governor on the island Floreana (scene of The Galapagos Affair) said he could tell from the shape of its shell which island a tortoise came from.

"Darwin said said thirsty inhabitants killed tortoises to drink from their bladders," said my brother Adam. "He tried it himself. Only slightly bitter, he said. But fluid around their heart was limpid and pure."

Adam is a pathologist. I imagined sipping giant tortoise bladder and pericardial fluid, glad I adapted to poetry and not, like most of my family, to science.

When we saw giant tortoises ourselves they drew in their necks with the hiss of escaping air. Darwin noticed that sound too; the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who loved Darwin, remembered his description when she made her Robinson Crusoe reminisce:

The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,
Hissing like teakettles...
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove
to be more turtles

Those tortoises had good reason to be shy. They can live for two years on no food and no water. Sailors used to collect two hundred a day, as continuous fresh meat for a voyage.

Each night, after the different delights of each island, we revelled in Darwin's writings like sea lions in rock pools, trying to understand, here in this momentous place, our collective perspective on him. Hilda's and Sophie's parents were his grandchildren; we grew up with New Scientist in the bathroom, and the constant asking of why. My grandfather would stop dinner to look up a dictionary. But that very tradition meant I couldn't close my ears any longer. I knew now: this was tigers all over again. he Galapagos was fighting the same war. Short-termist greed, wild nature used up, towards an extinction which will ultimately threaten the people themselves. Corruption, local politicians: Darwin's paradise was threatened by its own success, as conservation which produced tourism, and by its guardian, the Ecuadorian government.

Doubling the number of tourists while allowing longlining would be doubly lunatic. Tourists come for the animals. Longline fishing, a six million dollar industry only possible for a few years until stocks are gone, flies against the longterm interest of tourism, a hundred and fifty million dollar sustainable industry. But the power has shifted. Fishermen formed a political party; their congressman now controls most of the appointments in Galapagos. Ecuadorian tour operators complain the Ministry of Environment is ignoring scientific studies and rules. Park staff held a strike last year over its meddling and mismanagement. 150 of 226 park rangers have not been renewed. Only one patrol boat is operating. The government wants the navy, not trained park staff, to patrol the reserve.

On Santa Cruz Island we met Alan Tye, acting head of the Darwin Research Station. Ten years ago, fishermen angry with fishing controls blocked the entrance to the Station and overturned his dinghy as he tried to get to work that way.

"The local community's divided about fishing. Longterm residents with families are for moderation. But young umarried guys from the mainland, backed by local politicians, want longline fishing, and sharks for the Asian market. We're losing the battle. There's no one to enforce the law." Last year they had six changes of acting director of the park. "When they changed the Minister of Environment, they changed the park director."

Well, our Darwin expedition was wonderful; as a family adventure. No arthritic legs broke, no frail breath was lost. I hugged my lovely daughter as she took the road again in her backpack. We said goodbye to shining sea lion eyes and the iguanas' sphinxy green smiles. But oh, these were the Enchanted Isles, each one a microcosm of survival.They kickstarted understanding of the origin of species, including (icidentally) our own. They were conservation's great achievement. Will Gwen's be the last generation to see them as they were in Darwin's day? If we cannot get it right here, where can we?