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.