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| Pension Wittmer left and right of the tree at the beachfront - the big volcano is Cerro Pajas |
Floreana is one of the Galapagos Islands, which can be reached from Santa Cruz in a little over two hours by boat, sailing against the Humboldt Current may render the crossing rough, though. Thus the island is less frequently visited. Floreana has only 140 inhabitants, while Puerto Ayora already has over 20,000, making Floreana much quieter. Tourism is also much more modest, which is beneficial for the island and its nature. Still there rests more to say about Floreana, which I promised to do so earlier [1].
Floreana, also Floriana, had different names [2]. In Spanish it was called Isla Mercedes or sometimes Mascarenas, also Santa Maria, after one of Christopher Columbus's ships, and of course Charles after Charles Darwin.
Floreana has an area of only 173 km², but is one of the four inhabited islands in the Galapagos archipelago. This may be because Floreana has two springs. Although the island was discovered in 1535 by the Panamanian bishop Tomás de Berlanga, permanent settlement did not take place until the 20th century. In the 17th century, pirates used the island as a hiding place. From the 18th century onwards, English whalers frequently visited the island, which is the origin of the old post barrel in which mail was deposited until a ship in the other direction passed by. Around 1830, the Ecuadorian government started to maintain a prison camp, where the lichen orseille was commercially extracted. Along with the secretion of the purple snail, orseille was considered the most valuable dye since antiquity. In 1870 (?) this venture ended due to the murder of the entrepreneur [3].
Settlement began in 1929 with German dropouts. First, the Berlin dentist Friedrich Adolf Ritter and the teacher Dore Strauch, née Körwin, came to Floreana to found the Frido Farm. They lived in a corrugated iron hut and, in an esoteric form of back to nature they ran around naked. From that time on, the German public was particularly interested in the part of the experiment with the partner exchange, because Ritter's wife moved in with Mr Strauch [4]. Only three years later, the Austrian Eloise Wagner de Bousquet, who posed as a baroness, arrived on the island with two lovers and other goods. She also had 80 hundredweight of cement with her, as she was planning to build a hotel for American tourists called Hacienda Paradiso; yes, I know, it should be Hacienda Paraíso in Spanish, but perhaps that in itself explains the failure of the venture. In the same year, the married couple Heinz and Margaret Wittmer also arrived in Floreana. They came from Cologne; Heinz Wittmer had worked in the office of the later German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had also previously been the mayor of Cologne. The Wittmers' descendants now run a hotel on Floreana, where I stayed and where parts of the island's and family's history are on display.
Naked dropouts were not that new, because around 25 years earlier August Engelhardt [5] had moved to an island in Papua New Guinea. Christian Kracht has written a book [6] about the failure of "cocovorism". I remembered the story of Dore Strauch and Friedrich Ritter from a report I had read as a teenager, but I mistakenly thought it was more about Indonesia/Melanesia. Friedrich Ritter had had all his teeth extracted and traveled to Floreana with a steel set of teeth. He later shared these teeth with Dore Strauch - and that is exactly what I remembered. Ritter died of meat poisoning (possibly botulism poisoning), but Dore Strauch returned to Germany; although there is more darkness than light in her fate; the year of her death was either 1941 or 1942. Ritter and Strauch had a distant relationship with the Wittmers at best, but they occasionally exchanged supplies with each other.
Let's move on to Eloise Wagner de Bousquet, or rather Antonia Wagner, with her two lovers named Robert Philippson and Rudolf Lorenz. They had a tense relationship with the other residents, especially since they stole supplies that luxury yachts left to be used by all residents. Wagner and Philippson disappeared without a trace and Lorenz died in a shipwreck on the island of Marchena. This is where things get exciting and this was probably also part of the 2013 film, which I have not seen [7]. Lorenz felt threatened by Wagner and Philippson. Then, according to Margret Wittmer, these two came to the Wittmers' house. They wanted to continue on to Tahiti on an American yacht, but that was the last sign of life from them; researches later wondered which ship this should have been. Lorenz sold all the property of the group around the "Baroness" and left for San Cristóbal in July 1934 on the boat of the Norwegian fisherman Trygve Nuggerud, but they did not arrive there. Instead, Nuggerud and Lorenz were found dead on the island of Marchena on November 17, 1934. There was no trace of the cabin boy or the boat [8].
However, all analyses of the events on the island of Floreana in 1934 remain speculative, as the British author John Treherne (1929–1989) had to admit in his book "The Galápagos Affair" [9]. And to some his analysis it to be trusted most.
The Wittmers, however, remained on Floreana after an expatriation order and the intervention of the German ambassador. Margret Wittmer died in 2000 at the age of 95. The Wittner guesthouse is still run by her daughter Ingeborg and granddaughter Erika.
The Angermeyer brothers wanted to join the Wittmers on Floreana in the mid-1930s [10]. The parents had sent the five sons to protect them from military service in an impending war. The five brothers set off, but one the brothers returned from England because of illness and homesickness for his fiancée. One of the brothers got married on the way. Their parents, a brother, sister-in-law and nephew were killed in a bombing raid on Hamburg in the Second World War. A book tells the story of the dangers of the journey, which lasted for two years, and why they came to Santa Cruz rather than Floreana[11]. Matthias Stolt essentially sticks to the stories of his great-uncle Karl Angermeyer.
Floreana – away from mass tourism. This still exists if you let yourself go for it.
Links and Annotations:
[1] Overview of my Two Trips to the Galapagos Archipelago
https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2023/09/overview-of-my-two-trips-to-galapagos.html
Oh, that has been nearly one and half years ago.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floreana_Island
[3] According to: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floreana The article does not give any references to a detention/labor camp nor to Orseille. However I found something concerning Orseille and Floreana:
„Sitzungsberichte der niederrheinischen Gesellschaft für Natur- und
Heilkunde in Bonn.Bericht über den Zustand der Gesellschaft während des Jahres 1876.“
The part starts on p. 102 and ends on p.115.
Prof. v o m R a t h las einen Abschnitt aus einem zur Veröffentlichung bestimmten Manuskript des Hrn. Dr. Th. W o l f , Staatsgeologen von Ecuador: » E i n B e s u c h d e r G a l á p a g o s - Inseln. «
On Floreana and Orseille you find on p. 107:
„Von Kryptogamen bemerkte ich nur einige Stein- und Baumflechten, die wichtigste davon ist die Orchilla- oder Orseille-Flechte, welche auf die Zone von 0 bis 300 F. beschränkt zu sein scheint.“
https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Verh-nathist-Ver-preuss-Rheinlande_34_0001-0342.pdf
According to an information board in Wittmer's Hotel (Pension Willmer) the Spaniard José de Valdizán acquired the exclusive rights to harvest Orchilla on Floreana in 1869 and did so until in 1878 he had been murdered due to the constant oppression to his inmate workers.
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos-Aff%C3%A4re
[5]„August Engelhardt (27 November 1875 – 6 May 1919) was a German author. He promoted fruitarianism, specifically the consumption of coconuts and coconut products, and was the founder of a sect of sun worshipers.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Engelhardt
[6] Christian Kracht: Imperium. Kiepenheuer&Witsch, Köln 2012. ISBN: 978-3462041316. / Christian Kracht: Imperium. A Fiction of the South Seas. English Translation by Daniel Bowles. Macmillan 2015. ISBN: 9780374175245.
[7] The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden is a 2013 feature-length documentary directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galapagos_Affair
[8] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos-Aff%C3%A4re
[9] J. E. Treherne: The Galapagos Affair. Random House, New York 1983. ISBN: 0394533275.
[10] Mahnwache für den Frieden und „Kurs: Galapagos“
https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2023/10/mahnwache-fur-den-frieden-und-kurs.html
[11] Matthias Stolt: Kurs Galapagos: Das abenteuerliche Leben der Gebrüder Angermeyer. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2012. ISBN-13: 978-3861083818.
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