Born of fire from the depths of the earth
baked by an infernal sun
home to the strangest creatures imaginable
When people first came here
they thought that they had found a hell on earth
But this is no hell
it is a vibrant crucible of life
In time, one man saw the truth
and changed much more than just our view of these islands
His name was Charles Darwin
This is the story of how the lonely Galapagos islands came from obscurity to change the world for ever
Your sacred Majesty
we had this 6 day calm
the currents were so strong and engulfed us in such a way
that on the 10, March, we were brought to some islands
Thomas de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama was sailing from Panama to Peru
But when winds failed him, strong currents took hold
and he was carried wildly off course
Eventually, the bishop and his men found land
But what a land!
It seems as though at some time God had showered stones
and the earth is like slag - worthless
Both the land and its creatures seemed infernal
They dug a well, but found water saltier than the sea
Two men died
They prayed for deliverance
The winds returned
and the bishop and his men got away to record their tale of a hell on earth
They had discovered the Galapagos
600 miles off the coast of South America right on the equator
the Galapagos are a small group of a dozen or so islands
alone in the vast Pacific Ocean
For millennia, their lava-clad shores and great volcanic mountains
remained unnoticed, uncharted, untainted
until fate brought the bishop of Panama here nearly 500 years ago
At first sight
it's easy to see why the bishop was horrified by this place
From the sea come dragons marine iguanas
slithering onto the land
As black as the lava itself they seemed to spit a curse
as they purge themselves of salt from drinking sea water
In the deserts behind
larger dragons
For 5 days the bishop was forced to survive on cactus pads
these land iguanas eat little else
They bite right through the needle sharp spines to reach the surprisingly juicy flesh
And in the smoldering interior,
there are giants
Tortoises, as heavy as 4 grown men
In their huge bodies
they can store enough fat to go for a year without eating or drinking anything
To survive here
it seems you need to be a monster
Or is it just that you need to be different?
A bird, phoenix-like, emerges from the ashes of this barren coast
A cormorant
But its wings are scruffy and small
It looks like it could never fly
It can't
But there is another world beneath the waves
The ocean is rich
And this is where the flightless cormorant has found its way of surviving
by trading flight for streamlining
With what's left of its wings tucked flat against its body
enlarged feet take over
propelling it on in search of octopus, eels and small fish
A female is on the nest
She makes it from seaweed, expertly weaved into a comfortably bed
protection for her and her eggs from the razor-sharp lava
The male brings a gift for his mate
for the nest and also to bond their relationship
Without the power of flight these birds are marooned here
but they have no predators
and on their doorstep is all the food they need
For the strange creatures that have made the Galapagos home
life is harsh but not hell
If the bishop of Panama had been luckier he might have seen things differently
In January each year
the cold Humboldt current that makes Galapagos so dry, loosens its grip
and gives way to warm water from the north
In good years it brings a remarkable change to the islands
Suddenly, a very different Galapagos appears
From the ash hidden seeds come to life
Palo Santo trees that seem long dead are resurrected
from black and white to color
A Galapagos spring
but even spring here is different
The golden meadows are grazed by land iguanas
relishing a pleasant change from cactus pads
And this female carpenter bee also drawn to the new flush of flowers
visits many different kinds
But strangely, almost all of them are yellow
She is the only kind of bee in Galapagos
If she likes yellow
there's little point in a flower being anything else
The rain has also brought out little birds and all around they start to sing
This male finch tries to entice the female to inspect his nest
Carefully built in the protection of a spiny cactus pad
She likes it and settles in
But even these ordinary-looking birds are extraordinary
On the ground, in the trees where you would expect to find many different birds
Here one kind rules
These are all finches
In Galapagos there are 13 different species of finch taking the place of the other birds
The key is that each has a different beak
Thicker, stronger for cracking seeds
Long and sharp for flowers
Delicate and pointed for winkling tiny creatures from cracks in rocks
There's even a woodpecker finch
But without a woodpeckers tongue
it can't reach grubs that deep inside burrows so it has to use all its canny to get what it wants
It breaks off a twig,
a tool for probing
Not quite right
Yes, just right
Another tool for another burrow
another fat grub
There's a lot more to this world than at first meets the eye
For many years, this brighter side of Galapagos remained completely hidden
Cursed by the bishop of Panama
given no name
Nobody came near
But then nobody was even sure the islands existed
shifting currents, mists, like ghosts
Now you see them, now you don't
In the minds of mariners
the Galapagos were Las Encantadas, enchanted
Then, in the late 1500s
somebody put them on a map
Just 12 crude marks and a name
Isla de Galapagos - islands of the tortoises
Put it on a map and it becomes real
The first to come were pirates
The Galapagos was the perfect base for raids on Spanish galleons carrying gold from South America
But piracy is nothing new to Galapagos
frigatebirds looking for plunder
In these cliffs are the nests of hundreds of thousands of seabirds
With so much traffic, it's not long before something gets into trouble
A storm petrel
But another frigate is in there like a shot and another
two, three white headed juveniles
They harried the all black male
forcing it to drop the petrel
Frigates have a fearsome reputation
but the odds are not all in their favor
If they ditch in the sea
their long wings can get critically waterlogged With every swoop, they risk drowning
In the colony, the males inflate their extraordinary red-throat pouches
They are trying to be irresistible to females passing overhead
He's got one
She soon settles in and tidies up his nest
He watches over her very carefully
After all, he is surrounded by pirates
Another male tries to muscle in
Now she joins in
She's already made her choice and helps drive the newcomer away
Her partner wastes no more time
And when it's all over
she gets a rest on a comfortable pillow
Hidden away from the rest of the world this is a place for pirates to find peace
The next wave of people came to Galapagos not to plunder passing ships
but for the riches of the islands themselves
In the far west
the deep Cromwell current collides with the massive islands and rises bringing nutrients from the abyss deep
These are some of the richest seas on the equator
But it wasn't fish that draw people to these waters
A sperm whale
They dive to over 3,000 feet for squid
It's so deep even the equatorial sun is completely shut out
So they find their food via echo-location
Today, they are protected
We see them as beautiful giants
But not so long ago, the view was very different
These were monsters to be killed for profit
It was the rush for whale oil and stories of battles with Levithians of the deep
that brought the Galapagos to the attention of the world at large
But it wasn't just the whales that were paying the price of discovering
There was one thing that pirates and whalers all wanted -
fresh food
Their rich fat, their giant size made tortoises perfect for the ship's larder
In 200 years
over 200,000 were taken
On some islands tortoises were completely wiped out
But out of the tragedy came some good
As more people came to Galapagos
a clearer picture of the islands began to appear
Each got its own name
Some parts were still deemed infernal
But others had sheltered places to anchor
or a few trees - vital timber for repairing ships
Though still enchanted, the islands took on more recognizable shapes,
More accurately fixed on a map
It was a start of coming to understand them
When His Majesty's Ship Beagle reached the Galapagos on the 15, Sep. 1835
It was a last minute stop before a long journey home
She had been charting the coast of south America for more than 3 years
She now had just 5 weeks to make a modern and accurate map of this little known outpost
But this was much more than just another landfall
It was to change the course of history
On board, was naturalist Charles Darwin
not the wise, grey beareded Darwin we know so well but young, impressionable, just 26
At first, he saw the place much as those before him
Nothing could be less inviting
Nothing more rough and horrid
The black rocks heated by the rays of the vertical sun give to the air a closer sultry feeling
like a stove
But he soon began to see more
The very ground on which he was walking seemed solidified only yesterday
It looks like the sea petrified in its most boisterous moments
On the Beagle, his head had been buried in a new and controversial book, called 'Principles of Geology'
which described a physical world constantly changing molded by nature's forces
And just weeks before, in South America he had been caught in an earthquake
Inspired by what he had read and experienced
fired up by a young and fertile mind
He was opening his eyes to a very different Galapagos
Where others had seen it as hellish, ancient and unchanging
Charles Darwin saw a brand-new land
made fresh from the depths of the ocean by forces still very alive today right beneath him
He was right.
In the west, right under the island of Fernandina is a volcanic hotspot
Here, constantly, islands are being born
But what he couldn't see
was that as each island is created, it is carried off that hotspot on shifting oceanic plates
as though on a conveyer belt
They move slowly, a couple of inches a year
But in geological terms, that is staggeringly fast
Since Darwin saw them, they have now moved about 35 feet further to the southeast
As HMS Beagle moved methodically through the archipelago
Darwin had no idea that the islands they were mapping were moving
or how important that movement was
As the islands go on their journey, they change
They become a touch less infernal
Some turn green
Others become flat and dry
Each is also carried into a slightly different mix of ocean currents
and so gets a slightly different climate
The result is that each island ends up with its own unique character
One of the most remote islands the Beagle passed is also the most unusual
In the far northeast is Genovesa
remote, barren, lava-clad
and home to a million seabirds
The birds forage far out in the Pacific Ocean
but every day once they run the gauntlet of frigate birds
they return to this battered rock, to their nests
Behind the cliff
just the right type of lava has cooled in just the right way
to form a labyrinth of tiny tubes and cracks
into the perfect size for Galapagos storm petrels
Nobody knows how they find which crack is theirs
But as they swoop over the ground they turn upwind
so it's thought they smell their way home
However they find their way it's a miracle
From the middle of the Pacific to a single tiny egg
But it's just now that they are most vulnerable
A short-eared owl
The petrels are too quick in the air
and the owl too big to follow them deep inside their tiny tunnels
So its best chance is to grab a bird coming in or out
First, it uses its sharp eyesight to spot an entrance to an active burrow
It doesn't go for a petrel straight away
but positions itself just outside
It creeps closer, more cat than owl
It listens
It gets away
but the petrel is stunned
The owl spots it trying to get back underground
A second owl is watching but now makes a challenge
It'll have to hunt for itself
It can just squeeze into the entrance hall of one of the tunnels
Now it waits for a petrel coming in
There are short-eared owls on other islands but only on Genovesa have they learnt to hunt like this
And it seems that every island on the map has a similarly strange story to tell
It's not surprising the Galapagos are named after these lumbering giants
Their great dome shells look just like the islands they inhabit
Those islands high enough to catch rain can be surprisingly lush
Here, the round shells are perfect for budging through the undergrowth without getting snagged
But on other lower islands there's almost no rain
And here, the tortoises look very different
They have shells with a curved arch at the front that looks just like a Spanish saddle or Galapagos
The islands were actually named after these tortoises
Here there's so little to eat on the ground
that they need to stretch their necks to reach more suckling vegetation
The curved arch in their shells allows for that extra stretch
On different islands, Galapagos life is taking a different course
As yet, Darwin was unaware of it
But as the Beagle hopped from island to island he took any opportunity to go ashore
On the island of Floreana he was met on the beach at Post Office Bay
by a governor of the first ever settlement in the Galapagos, an Englishman called Lawson
Lawson's tales of the strange Galapagos life
encouraged Darwin to go deep into the interior of the islands
And wherever he went, he collected
He saw the tortoises, though only the dome shelled kind
so didn't see their secret
He saw the little birds with their different beaks but didn't guess they were all finches
He called one a black bird another a wren
There was anothe bird too, the mockingbird
He'd seen them in South America but these were somehow different
For now he had no idea how important that difference would be
As Darwin went further and further into the heart of the islands
He found a sight to Galapagos that no naturalist had seen before
In the highlands of Floreana and Santiego he found enchanted forests
And in a handful of places he found freshwater
the only freshwater for 600 miles
Ducks dabble as though in a park
Tortoises wallow in thick volcanic mud
Frigatebirds come from the harsh world outside to drink
This is no hell on earth but garden of Eden
Darwin asked himself the crucial question
Why are these small islands blessed with such strange and unique life?
But just a breath away from revelation
Darwin was taken away never to return
At sunset on the 20, October, 1835
The Beagle set sail for Tahiti and then home
But all was now lost
the enchanted islands had cast their spell
No sooner had Darwin left the Galapagos than he began to see the truth
As he spent the long hours at sea sorting through his collections
one specimen suddenly caught his attention
not tortoise, not finch, but mockingbird
I have specimens from 4 different islands
On 2 islands they appear the same the other 2 they are different
In each island, each kind is exclusively found
Different islands within sight of each other have different mockingbirds
with slightly different feather and like the finches slightly different beaks
Darwin now remembered something governor Lawson had told him about tortoises
He claimed to could tell which island the tortoise came from just by the shape of its shell
Different island, different tortoise, same thing
He had seen from the dramatic Galapagos landscape that the islands were constantly changing
Could living things be changing too?
He began to see back through time
I fancied myself brought near to the very act of creation
He saw that the Galapagos had been born of fire, sterome from the depths of the ocean
but life had then come from elsewhere
In isolation on the Galapagos
and then further isolation from island to island
it had changed one form into another
Darwin had caught a fleeting glimpse of Galapagos' great secret
New plants, new animals, new life was being made by the islands themselves
He looked for the same pattern in other species
One day, the little finches would be named after him
but though he had the best collection to date with a whole range of different beaks
He hadn't thought to label which islands they came from
So for now, they couldn't help
And as for the tortoises, 45 adults were brought aboard the Beagle
but every one had been eaten
Their shells thrown over board lost for ever
Unable to return, Darwin would never know the true story of the finches' beaks and the tortoises' shells
But in the mockingbirds he had caught a glimpse of evolution
In 1859, 24 years after leaving the Galapagos
Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species' was finally published
It changed the world for ever
Until the end of his days, he always held on to one certainty
that the lonely Galapagos islands were the origin of all his views, the origin of 'The Origin of Species'
Giant tortoises so impressed the ancient mariners that they named these islands after them
Their fat flesh fuels the pirate's plunder
In their shells is a clue to the greatest mystery on earth
But for a tortoise, life is simple
The recent rain draws them to the green meadows on the summit of Alcedo volcano
not just for the lush grazing but to breed
He tries to seduce her
everything in time
This age old ritual may remind us of permanence
but that couldn't be further from the truth
The offspring of these tortoises may have a slightly different shell
that gives them a slightly better chance of surviving on their island
Even these animals that move so slow, and live so long are changing
Since people first came to these islands our understanding of them has changed too
The Galapagos is not hell on earth
but a vibrant, living demonstration of evolution of life
Here on this little world within itself
we seem to be brought somewhat closer to the great fact
that mystery of all mysteries
the first appearance of new beings on this earth
In the next episode
we discover how life in Galapagos is driven by elemental forces of change
Past, present and future
Transcription by Andrew & Hattie