Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The Galapagos Affair

One lucent September morning in 1928, two Germans, a man and a woman, and their worldly possessions, were landed on the beach of Floreana, an uninhabited island in the Galapagos archipelago. The man, Friedrich Ritter, was small, blond and wiry, a doctor and an amateur philosopher with a bent for bizarre, male-supremacist metaphysics. The woman was his lover, Dore Strauch, equally small, dark and somewhat self-consciously bohemian in dress and manner. She adored and venerated Friedrich.

Friedrich and Dore had planned their new life with Teutonic thoroughness. In Berlin during the course of their affair they accumulated a vast supply of stores and provisions and, when the time came for them to leave, they arranged a dinner party and introduced their astonished, respective spouses to each other and told them of their plans. Friedrich suggested to Herr Strauch that, as he was being deprived of a wife, perhaps it might soften the blow if his wife, Mrs Ritter, came to live and work for Herr Strauch as his housekeeper. This completely bizarre proposal was deemed a very satisfactory arrangement by all parties and so Friedrich’s wife duly moved in with Dore’s husband.

Having sorted out their abandoned spouses, Friedrich and Dore travelled halfway round the globe to this small island in the Pacific, their tropical Eden, where they planned to live out their days, far from the corruption and clamour of Europe.

Beyond the jagged lava beach Floreana was and is a lush and plentiful tropical island. Friedrich and Dore struggled up from the shore through the thickly forested slopes of the dominant mountain (Dore with some difficulty, her arthritis had left her with a pronounced limp but Friedrich’s stern philosophy forbade him from giving her a helping hand) until they found a clearing by a stream where they decided to build a house and a garden (designed and laid out upon strictly philosophical lines). They called the house, rather sweetly, “Friedo” and soon they had a rather ramshackle dwelling erected and a garden that was producing sufficient vegetables and fruit for their complicated diet. All, so far, was well.

The mistake Friedrich and Dore had made was to talk about their plans to journalists while they were waiting in Ecuador for passage to the Galapagos. Their story inspired and inflamed other troubled souls who, spurred on by Friedrich and Dore’s example, decided that there was room to spare in this particular earthly Paradise. Soon the first of a series of new arrivals on Floreana took place.

The first to come were an innocuous petit bourgeois family, also German, the Wittmers — Heinz and Margret with their young son Rolf. The Wittmers built their camp a mile away from Friedo and, although there was candid resentment between the two women, the Floreana settlers seemed to coexist with reasonable harmony.

But that equilibrium was soon to be seriously and fatally disturbed by the arrival of the third party of settlers to the island. The Baroness Eloïse Wagner de Bosquet could have stepped straight out of a film noir thriller directed by Erich von Stroheim. Sexually licentious, a peroxide blonde, gun-toting and with a murky and dubious past, the Baroness spoke French and German with an Austrian accent and claimed her great uncles were Liszt and Wagner. She had with her two lovers, a Frenchman, Rudolf Lorenz, and a well-built young American called Robert Philippson. She too had been inspired by Friedrich and Dore’s Edenic dreams but she planned to imbue them with a more practical thrust. She set about constructing what she described as a luxury hotel, to be known as the “Hacienda Paradiso.” Its clientele was to be the many millionaires cruising the Pacific in their yachts. It never really got beyond planning stages and Lorenz appeared to be the one paying for everything. He was completely in thrall to the Baroness and had sold his shop in Paris in order to finance the venture. Initially all three of them slept together in a large bed, but Lorenz soon became the victim of sadistic games played upon him by the Baroness and Philippson and took to spending more time visiting the Wittmers or up at Friedo with Dore and Friedrich. Dore felt particularly sorry for the young man and grew close to him. Lorenz’s abuse provoked in her a violent hatred for the Baroness, who she was convinced was entirely evil.

It was by now 1932 and the main protagonists in the Galapagos Affair were assembled. And in the event the mix proved too rich for one small Pacific atoll. Enmities grew and animosities deepened. The three groups of settlers withdrew increasingly into their own camps.

There was one benign and regular visitor to the island who tried to keep the peace. This was an American multi-millionaire and amateur botanist called Alan Hancock who every year cruised the Galapagos in his luxury yacht collecting specimens of marine life. Friedrich and Dore, who had met him first, regarded him as their special ally.

The bad feeling between the three groups of settlers was fairly generalized — petty squabbles and jealousies, arguments over minor thefts and water sources, and slights and snubs arising over important visitors to the island (the settlers had become remarkably famous, many yachts called in and cruise ships changed course to pass by Floreana in the hope of glimpsing them). But soon the ill nature began to be concentrated around the Friedo/Hacienda Paradiso axis.

What set events moving towards the bloody and mysterious final act is hard to gauge. It seems to have been the frequency with which Lorenz left the Hacienda to seek solace with the Wittmers and Friedrich and Dore but the feuding was also stimulated by the increasing egomania of the Baroness. She claimed to visiting journalists that she was now “The Empress of the Galapagos,” an assertion that particularly enraged Friedrich, and adopted high-minded and imperious manners that went with the self-conferred title. Furthermore the summer of 1934 was particularly hot — there was a serious drought — and Lorenz appeared to be growing weaker as a result of the constant physical abuse he received at the hands of the Baroness and Philippson. Philippson regularly beat him up, with the Baroness occasionally lending a hand with a riding crop. Also, they locked away Lorenz’s few possessions and denied him access to his money.

One day, the date is not clear, in late March of 1934, as the Galapagos Islands suffered their fifth month of broiling, desiccating heat, Lorenz appeared at the Wittmer house and announced that the Baroness and Philippson had “gone away” with some friends who were passing in a yacht en route for Tahiti. He told the same story to Friedrich and Dore, who accompanied him to the Hacienda Paradiso to see for themselves. Dore remembered that the place was like the Marie Celeste, perfectly neat and tidy, with family photographs still in their frames, and, sitting on a table, the Baroness’s most treasured possession, her copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dore found it hard to believe that the Baroness would have gone to Tahiti and left this behind.

But nothing happened; suspicions remained unvoiced and no one investigated further. The drought broke, the rains came in April, visitors and journalists still arived, and life seemed to go on as normal. Then in July, Lorenz decided finally to leave, taking advantage of the visit of a Norwegian fisherman called Nuggerud — who lived on a nearby island called Santa Cruz. Lorenz had become an increasingly morose and haggard figure since the Baroness’s mysterious disappearance, often observed weeping. But he managed to persuade Nuggerud to take him to Chatham Island where he could catch a ship bound for Ecuador. The Wittmers and Friedrich and Dore said farewell with mixed feelings. Dore reassured him that in time his miserable years on Floreana would appear merely as a bad dream.

The Baroness and Philippson gone, and now Lorenz. Three months later the startled Wittmers were surprised one morning by a distraught Dore at the door of their house. Friedrich, she said, was terribly ill, poisoned as a result of eating some potted chicken that had gone off. Dore too, so she claimed, had been sick after eating the meat, but Friedrich’s condition had seriously degenerated.

They found Friedrich in an appalling state, wracked with stomach cramps and his tongue so swollen he was unable to speak. The ever-practical Margret Wittmer rigged up an impromptu stomach pump but found it impossible to operate. Friedrich refused to allow her to inject him with morphine. According to Margret he scribbled a few words on a piece of paper and handed them to Dore. They read: “I curse you with my dying breath.” Friedrich died in the night, his body writhing with convulsions. When he was lifted up they found his back was a livid bluish red. Thick dark blood oozed from his nose. He was buried under a pile of stones in his philosophical garden.

Friedrich died on 21 November 1934. Four days earlier the captain of a tuna clipper, cruising near an uninhabited island in the north of the archipelago called Marchena, saw the beached remains of a small skiff and on going to investigate found the mummified bodies of the Norwegian Nuggerud and Lorenz. It was obvious that they had been shipwrecked weeks earlier and had died of thirst. The news of Friedrich’s death and the discovery of Lorenz’s body reached Alan Hancock in Los Angeles as he prepared another of his Pacific cruises. He sailed straight to Floreana to comfort and ultimately take Dore away. She returned to Berlin, leaving Floreana to the Wittmer family, where their descendants still live today. The final victim of the Galapagos Affair had been accounted for.

No one knows what really happened to the Baroness and Philippson, certainly they were never seen in Tahiti or anywhere else. But the consensus on the island, even at the time, was that Lorenz killed the Baroness and Philippson and dumped their bodies in the ocean for the sharks to dispose of. However it is most unlikely that such a weak-willed and physically wasted man could have overpowered them both single-handedly. His most likely accomplice was Friedrich, whose loathing of the Baroness was intense and who publicly exulted in her “departure.” Moreover, he regarded his relationship with Dore as effectively over and, for the last few months before his death, had been urging her to leave the island. With the Baroness gone, and Dore banished, and the Wittmers no challenge, he could resume his self-appointed role as solitary philosopher king of Floreana.

And Friedrich? In a book Dore wrote some years later she said he died of a stroke but the symptoms all point to botulin poisoning. The Wittmers claimed that Friedrich had told them earlier that the poisoned chicken meat would be safe to eat after it was boiled, and Dore told Alan Hancock she had given the meat “a good boiling.” Did Dore, either through malice or carelessness, not boil the meat enough? My own hunch is that she may have wanted to “punish” Friedrich for his suggestion that she leave him (after all, she had eaten the chicken herself, or so she claimed, and a sick Friedrich might have appreciated the ministrations of a dutiful Dore) but the punishment had gone hideously out of control.

Whatever the truth, the brute facts of the matter are that what began as an idealistic utopian experiment degenerated under the strain of the predictable human emotions of envy, pride, greed, lust and resentment — and a mix of atavistic territoriality and sexual threat — into a mystery that has fascinated and intrigued for over sixty years. Of the original settlers four died: one accidentally, one a victim of a possible crime of passion and the two others almost certainly as a result of cold-blooded murders motivated by fear and hatred. But who really did what to whom and why? The Galapagos Affair continues to enthral and beguile.

1995