Harriet, The Galapagos Tortoise. Disclosing One and a Half Centuries of History. Reptilia Number 2, March / April 1998.

     This time we pulled it out of the tub and righted it so that the animal could be viewed properly. The most significant thing we saw was painted on its back:

     "Tom Galapagos tortoise Died 1929 Brisbane Botanical Gardens"

     A close inspection of the specimen brought an even more startling identification. Morphological identifications of Galapagos tortoises are always dubious but this one, a female, had some features which may give a reasonable identification. This was a small Galap, about 80cm straight carapace length, it was a domed form, and yet if it was one of the Botanical garden animals it had to be fully grown as it was at least 60 years old going by David Fleay’s earliest arrival date. It was a very healthy tortoise in its growth form, nice and symmetrical, no bossing of the scutes, no obvious deformities. This animal would appear to be a San Cristobal Tortoise (Geochelone nigra cathamensis) and by this I mean the extinct one from the south of San Cristobal not the half saddleback form (actually a new subspecies not G.n. cathamensis) from the north of the island that they find there now. The wild population of this subspecies disappeared at the turn of the century, the other population was found in the 1950’s. Most important of all was that the very existence of this specimen verified part of Ed Loveday’s story.

CHART 2 Chronology of Harriet’s life with significant historical events. CHRONOLOGY Ca. 1830 – 1834: Harriet hatches on Isla Santiago (known at the time as James Island) The first railway is built in the U.S., the Baltimore and Ohio. 1835 – 1836: Harriet is collected by Charles Darwin and taken to England. 1841: Wickham retires from the Royal Navy, moves to Australia and brings three tortoises with him. Lives at Newstead House. 1859: First publication of Darwin’s "Origin of the Species" (Original "On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life"). Ca. 1860: Probable time when the three tortoises are placed in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens as Wickham soon left Australia for France. At this time Abraham Lincoln is elected President. Ca. 1870: Six years before the invention of the telephone by Bell and Edison, we have the earliest first hand account of Harriet. 1882: Charles Darwin dies. 1929: Two years after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, Tom dies and is placed in the Queensland Museum at the time of the US stockmarket collapses. It is held the first ceremony of the delivery of the Oscars. Martin Luther King is born. 1952: Harriet moves to Fleay’s Fauna Sanctuary. The Korean war. In a year’s time Stalin will die. 1987: Harriet moves to the Queensland Reptile Park (Australia Zoo) at about the time when Vincent Van Gogh’s painting "Irises" is sold for $54 million in New York.

     The following day at the Taxon Advisory Group meeting we were actually announcing, for the first time, that we had some information concerning Harriet's history, a rather hasty adit was made about Tom. Since the meeting numerous press releases were made in the hope of obtaining further information from the public, with some success. From all the recent information we were able to deduce how David Fleay arrived at the 1870 date of arrival. We suggest that it was actually the earliest date that he could find first hand evidence that she was actually there. We have first hand evidence going back some 73 years from 1995. David first started studying Harriet in 1936, if he was also able to go back about 70 years also, then he would achieve a date of around 1870.
     So where are we at the moment? We know that Darwin collected from three populations: Santa Maria tortoise (Geochelone nigra nigra). San Cristobal tortoise (Geochelone nigra cathamensis) and the Santiago tortoise (Geochelone nigra darwini). Based on Darwin‘s notes all the tortoises collected were juveniles and based on the few sizes given they were probably between one and five years old.
     We have an account that the three original tortoises were brought to Australia by John Clements Wickham when he moved to Australia and became First Government Resident of Moreton Bay. Wickham was the First Lieutenant of the Beagle under Capt. Fitz Roy, and later Captain of the Beagle. Wickham never went to the Galapagos so he had to obtain the tortoises of somebody else, the most likely person would be Darwin. Currently we are having mtDNA analysis done to confirm the identifications of Harriet and Tom. Tom as a preserved specimen may not work but we feel that he is worth the risk to try anyway. This will be done by Ed Louis of Texas A & M University. We still have to get to the John Oxley Library and Ian Swingland is looking into things from the English end. Well, this is how the story unfolded so far. The difficult thing to conceive is Harriet's age, to bring this into perspective we have constructed a chronology (Chart 2). To do this we interweave some significant human events into a chronology of events Harriet went through, assuming the story is correct. After all, just imagine being some 167 years old!!

First published in "Intermontanus" (Publication of the Utah Association of Herpetologists) Vol. 4. Nr. 5 (1995): 33-35.

 

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