Johanna Angermeyer, author and artist, has sold her art all over the world and her book “My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest” is on its fifth reprint and is soon to be translated into Spanish.
Born in 1948 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Johanna’s widowed mother moved their family to Riverside, California in the 1950’s. Bored in school, eight year old Johanna received most of her education roaming the Public Library where her mother worked in the children’s book section.
In 1960, the family moved back to Quito, Ecuador where Johanna’s mother Emmasha had, in 1936, married Capitan Marco Aguirre, an aristocrat and famous aviator, whom she met in Lincoln, when he attended the Charles Lindbergh Flying School. Tragically, in 1938 Capitan Aguirre’s plane crashed into the Andes while he was rushing to Emmasha’s side after she gave birth to their son.
In 1939 Emmasha met Johannes Angermeyer, one of the first settlers on the Galapagos Islands. They married, had a daughter Mary and planned to live in the remote islands when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and all Americans were transported back to the States. It was during this forced separation that Johanna was born. Shortly afterwards her father, unable to get to his island, sickened and died of tuberculosis in Ecuador.
Young Johanna dreamed of reaching Galapagos and learning more about the father she never knew and in 1961 her family made the four day voyage to from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Santa Cruz Island (Galápagos).
Her father Johannes and his four brothers, all artists and musicians, had sailed out of Hitler’s Germany in 1935 but after shipwreck off the coast of England, only four made it to the sparsely Enchanted Islands where they lived like Robinson Crusoe. Johanna fell in love with her larger than life uncles and the pioneering lifestyle but aged thirteen, she reluctantly returned to school in the mainland.
When Johanna finished her studies at El Conservatorio de Musica, she roamed the hills of the capitol city, giving guitar lessons and teaching at a Kindergarten where she began to write and illustrate picture books for children.
In 1971 she and her family moved to Galapagos and lived in a ramshackle house in Pelican Bay, Santa Cruz Island. Johanna sold paintings, worked as a cook aboard a yacht and then guided on cruises around the archipelago.
As the world began to discover Galapagos and bring so called progress, Johanna moved up to a remote farm, in the lush highlands. It was here that she met her English husband when he helped her catch a wild colt. After marrying, they lost an infant daughter and to get over her grief, Johanna began visiting old timers, capturing their extraordinary tales on tape. These interviews later became part of her first book, “My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest” in which she pieces together her parent’s incredibly romantic lives.
After twenty years in Ecuador and Galapagos, Johanna and her husband moved back to England where they worked on a remote manor house on the moors of Cumbria, managed gourmet cruises on barges floating through Europe and finally landed a job with the National Trust, caring for stately homes across the country.
Author and President of Downing College, Cambridge, Dr. John Treherne (The Galapagos Affair, ISBN: 0394533275) encouraged Johanna to write. It was while living in William Wordsworth’s House in Cumbria, that she finished “My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest” (ISBN: 0954485106). It was published by Viking/Penguin London and then Viking New York, in 1989 and has never been out of print.
Moving south to East Sussex where her husband was Administrator of Rudyard Kipling’s home (Batemans) Johanna resumed painting and exhibited her work which has sold all over the world.
She and her husband now live in the countryside, with a host of animals. After years caring for her aged mother, Johanna has resumed work on her second book and is writing and illustrating a number of children’s books about Galapagos. She works from a cedar cabin at the edge of the woods, entertained by bird song, her dogs snoring at her feet. Concerned with conservation and animal welfare, Johanna and her husband return often to the Galapagos where they have strong family links.
To know more about Johanna Angermeyer and her work, go to her website http://www.angermeyer.co.uk
History of the settlement in Galapagos
The European discovery of the Galápagos Islands occurred when Dominican Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the fourth Bishop of Panama, sailed to Peru to settle a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and his lieutenants. De Berlanga's vessel drifted off course when the winds diminished, and his party reached the islands on March 10, 1535. According to a 1956 study by Thor Heyerdahl and Arne Skjølsvold, remains of potsherds and other artifacts from several sites on the islands suggest visitation by South American peoples prior to the arrival of the Spanish.
The islands first appeared on maps in about 1570 in those drawn by Abraham Ortelius and Mercator. The islands were called "Insulae de los Galopegos" (Islands of the Tortoises).
The first English captain to visit the Galápagos Islands was Richard Hawkins, in 1593. Until the early 19th century, the archipelago was often used as a hideout by mostly English pirates who pilfered Spanish galleons carrying gold and silver from South America to Spain.
Alexander Selkirk, whose adventures in Juan Fernández Islands inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, visited the Galápagos in 1708 after he was picked up from Juan Fernández by the privateer Woodes Rogers. Rogers was refitting his ships in the islands after sacking Guayaquil.
The first scientific mission to the Galápagos arrived in 1790 under the leadership of Alessandro Malaspina, a Sicilian captain whose expedition was sponsored by the King of Spain. However, the records of the expedition were lost.
In 1793, James Colnett made a description of the flora and fauna of Galápagos and suggested that the islands could be used as base for the whalers operating in the Pacific Ocean. He also drew the first accurate navigation charts of the islands. Whalers killed and captured thousands of the Galápagos tortoises to extract their fat. The tortoises could also be kept on board ship as a means of providing of fresh protein as these animals could survive for several months on board without any food or water. The hunting of the tortoises was responsible for greatly diminishing, and in some cases eliminating, certain species. Along with whalers came the fur-seal hunters who brought the population of this animal close to extinction.
Ecuador annexed the Galápagos Islands on February 12, 1832, naming it Archipelago of Ecuador. This was a new name that added to several names that had been, and are still, used to refer to the archipelago. The first governor of Galápagos, General José de Villamil, brought a group of convicts to populate the island of Floreana and in October 1832 some artisans and farmers joined.
The voyage of the Beagle brought the survey ship HMS Beagle under captain Robert FitzRoy to the Galápagos on September 15, 1835 to survey approaches to harbors. The captain and others on board including his companion the young naturalist Charles Darwin made a scientific study of geology and biology on four of the thirteen islands before they left on October 20 to continue on their round-the-world expedition. Darwin noticed that mockingbirds differed between islands, and the governor of the prison colony on Charles Island told him that tortoises differed from island to island. Towards the end of the voyage Darwin speculated that these facts might "undermine the stability of Species".[1] When specimens of birds were analysed on his return to England it was found that many apparently different kinds of birds were species of finches which were also unique to islands. These facts were crucial in Darwin's development of his theory of natural selection explaining evolution, which was presented in The Origin of Species.
José Valdizán and Manuel Julián Cobos tried a new colonization, beginning the exploitation of a type of lichen found in the islands (Roccella portentosa) used as a coloring agent. After the assassination of Valdizán by some of his workers, Cobos brought from the continent a group of more than a hundred workers to San Cristóbal island and tried his luck at planting sugar cane. He ruled in his plantation with an iron hand which lead to his assassination in 1904. Since 1897 Antonio Gil began another plantation in Isabela island.
Over the course of a whole year, from September 1904, an expedition of the Academy of Sciences of California, led by Rollo Beck, stayed in the Galápagos collecting scientific material on geology, entomology, ornithology, botany, zoology and herpetology. Another expedition from that Academy was done in 1932 (Templeton Crocker Expedition) to collect insects, fish, shells, fossils, birds and plants.
During WWII Ecuador authorized the United States to establish a naval base in Baltra island and radar stations in other strategic locations.
In 1946 a penal colony was established in Isabela Island, but was suspended in 1959.
External links
- Galapagos' first settlers - the page also includes much general information on the Galápagos first settlers
- My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest - the page also includes much general information on the Galápagos first settlers
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- ^ Keynes, Richard ed. 2000. Charles Darwin's zoology notes & specimen lists from H.M.S. Beagle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. June – August 1836