April 23, 2020 23
tial success in reproduction, constitute
natural selection, yielding elaborate
adaptations. Darwin’s famous pre-
diction about the Madagascan orchid
Angraecum sesquipedale, with its tu-
bular nectar receptacle eleven inches
deep, shows the interconnection most
dramatically. He correctly deduced
that a moth with an eleven-inch nectar-
sucking proboscis must exist to polli-
nate it, because the plant’s manifest
adaptations demand that. Forty years
after Darwin’s orchid book appeared,
the moth was found.
Elizabeth Hennessy’s On the Backs
of Tortoises is the best history of the
Galápagos archipelago that I’ve ever
read, but it’s also something more ar-
gumentative: a postmodern critique
of certain prevailing myths about the
Galápagos Islands and what Hennessy
posits to be the guiding (but misguided)
principles of conservation biology, as
applied to those islands and elsewhere
throughout the world. Her book re-
minds us that the Galápagos have a
history of their own, much broader and
more complicated than their five weeks
as a layover for HMS Beagle and its
gentleman naturalist. She argues that
seeing this place as a proscenium for
one curious Englishman, with his ob-
servations of certain creatures and his
developing evolutionary thought, is not
only reductive but oppressively wrong.
She wants to get to the bottom of the
geographical, biological, and political
realities of the place and its people.
But what’s at the bottom if Earth it-
self (according to myths in several cul-
tures) is supported in space on the back
of a giant turtle? Hennessy revives the
familiar anecdote, “as likely legend as
true,” of some august professor (Wil-
liam James, in her version) being chal-
lenged by an elderly woman after a
lecture on theories of cosmology. The
woman tells James that, as everyone
knows, Earth rests on a huge turtle.
But what’s under the turtle? he chal-
lenges. A bigger turtle, she answers.
And beneath that? he asks. “The old
woman smiled and shook her head,
‘Very clever, Mr. James, but it’s turtles
all the way down!’”
For Hennessy, it’s Foucauldian power
dynamics all the way down:
Galápagos conservation is a place-
based endeavor in which evolution-
ary understandings of life—what
species evolved over hundreds of
thousands of years on which is-
lands—inform a biopower that
values and aims to “make live”
certain endemic species, such as
the giant tortoises.What she means by “make live” certain
species, I think, might also be said as
“privileging” them—over the claims of
people and their cows, for instance. The
word “biopower” is Foucault’s coinage;
its rough sense is that modern Western
societies have found ways of controlling
some groups of humans (and maybe of
nonhuman animals too) on grounds
of mere biological realities. It’s a way
of managing populations. Applied to
conservationists and their efforts to
preserve endemic species of tortoise
and marine iguana and mockingbird
and other fauna and flora unique to the
Galápagos, sometimes at the cost of ex-
terminating rats or feral goats or con-
straining commercial activities such as
fishing or ranching by human settlers,
the word “biopower” is not flattery.
There’s some justice to everything
Hennessy says about these power dy-
namics, and she presents a mountain
of fine historical research to support
her assertions. She takes us from the
earliest known human landfall on the
islands—by the Spanish bishop Fray
Tomás de Berlanga, whose ship drifted
off course on his way to Peru in 1535—
through the years during which, with
their springs of fresh water and their
abundance of meaty tortoises, the
Galápagos were convenient provision-
ing stops for buccaneers and whalers.
The tortoise meat was highly prized
and could be kept fresh for months in
the form of live tortoises, helpless and
doomed, stored upside down aboard a
ship.After the whaling men and pirates,
after Herman Melville (who called
these islands the Encantadas, or en-
chanted, in his novella of that name),
after a team from the California
Academy of Sciences came specimen-
collecting in 1905—killing wildlife
like drunken sailors but with what they
considered higher purposes—and then
after another half-century of settle-
ment by Ecuadoran mainlanders who
wanted to mine guano, or farm, or fish,
plus a few ditzy Europeans hoping to
live out Swiss Family Robinson fanta-
sies, came the era of conservation and
more continuous scientific attention.
That began formally with the establish-
ment of Galápagos National Park by
the Ecuadoran government in 1959 and
the founding of the Charles Darwin
Research Station on the island of SantaCruz. The park, which became an in-
ternational tourist attraction, encom-
passes 97 percent of the land area of
the islands, leaving aside the 3 percent
that had already been claimed by set-
tlers, “as if a boundary fence might be
capable of holding strong this divide,”
Hennessy comments, “so that conser-
vationists can save the tortoises—and
tourists can photograph them too.”
Meanwhile, the settlers, she implies,
get the pauper’s share.
Amid this sweep, Hennessy makes
two points, not original but worth not-
ing, about Darwin’s brief visit in 1835:
he didn’t scruple to eat tortoise meat
himself, and he didn’t conceive his dan-
gerous idea during that stopover, either
while gazing at finches and mocking-
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