The Galapagos Islands in the Pacific were once the main stop for whalers and dating back to the 18th century, whalers spend months and sometimes years working, hunting and processing whales to take oil, only returning when the ship is filled with barrels of whale oil, which was in Time is a valuable commodity widely used in soap making, candle making.

Floreana Island, which was then known as Charles Island, was one such stop. At that time, sailors who were living in houses devised a clever way to deliver letters to their families. They set up a wooden barrel and left their letters there in the hope that the next sailors would head To take their letters, and thus pick them up and deliver them on their way, for more than a century this extraordinary honor-based postal service has been in place.

Daily boats of tourists descend on the Post Office Bay on Floriana Island and, after walking a few dozen meters across the sandy beach, arrive at a cask crammed with postcards and notes left by previous visitors, rummaging through letters for addresses within the delivery distance of their homes to deliver. Any stamps and delivery was manual, although people who pick up letters sometimes put a stamp and mail them instead.

In 1820, the American whaling ship called The Essex landed on the island of Floriana to carry out repairs and to resupply its food supplies, and they seized about 60 giant turtles, from another island in the Galapagos Islands, while the men were seizing the turtles, one of the sailors set a fire as a kind of The joke was at the height of the dry season and soon they lost control of the fire and the entire island was burning.

Several years later, when a sailor—a young boy at the time, Thomas Nickerson, who later published an account of the Essex sinking on the island of Floriana—returned, and found a black wasteland where no trees, bushes, nor grass had since appeared, When Charles Darwin visited the island fifteen years later, life on the island spread but there was no sign of the original giant tortoise because whalers and pirates hunted them to extinction.

With time, Ecuador annexed the island and it was converted into a colony, which led to the destruction of life on the island. Meanwhile, the ship Essex, after leaving the burning island of Floriana, went to search for a new fishing ground in the South Pacific. The ship was rammed again and again until it sank. The crew survived in the open ocean for a month and landed on an uninhabited island where they ate crabs, eggs, and potatoes, and when the island's resources were depleted, the shipwrecked sailors set sail again, and the three of them decided to survive.

For several months, seventeen sailors drifted into lifeboats, the food they had stored before leaving had long been exhausted, and the men began to die one by one, eventually, they began to eat the corpses of their dead comrades in order to survive, and among the twenty original men Only eight survived the ordeal, including the three who chose to remain on the island, and were rescued three months later.

More than a century later, in 1929, a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his lover Dore Strauch arrived on Floriana Island to settle just as the early European pioneers did in North America and elsewhere. Their story was covered extensively in the press, encouraging many others to They followed, and in 1932 Heinz and Margaret Whitmer arrived with their son Harry, and shortly thereafter their son Rolf was born there, becoming the first citizen of the Galapagos.

Later that same year, Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet arrived, bringing with her her lover Robert Philipson and Rudolph Lorenz, and an Ecuadorean butler, and announced her plan to build a luxury hotel, both enjoying a secluded lifestyle. Then one day in 1934, the Baroness and Philippson disappeared. .

The Wittmers and Lorenz claimed that the Baroness and Philippson went to Tahiti with her friends, but the story did not come out, and the Baroness left most of her possessions behind. Soon after, the Wittmers quarrels with Philippson, eager to return to Germany, and hastily left for the island of San Cristobal, but His boat disappeared, and his mummified remains were discovered months later on shore with his boat on Marchena Island.

The strange events did not end there. In November of the same year, Dr. Ritter died, apparently of food poisoning due to eating some poorly preserved chicken. This is strange because Ritter was a vegetarian, according to Margaret Witmer, before he died Ritter said that Strauch He had been poisoned, though Strauch denied the accusation, and he returned to Germany leaving the only residents of Wetimers on the island of Floriana.