gardens; often contaminated their water source. Animals were a 

 nuisance, for these hermits were almost exclusively vegetarians. 



A little waterfall below the spring provided them with a natural 

 shower bath. One of their many annoyances was a shortage of soap. 

 They had not learned to make it. Garden tools were continually 

 breaking, but Dr. Ritter had a grindstone and an anvil; a few 

 necessary tools for repair work, a certain ingenuity and indomitable 

 will to conquer the wilderness. 



As time permitted, he wrote in a philosophical vein, but with- 

 out much orderliness. Some of his philosophy of isolation has been 

 preserved in letters and in Dore's book "Satan Came to Eden." She 

 was not speaking of serpents or apples, nor even horned and hoofed 

 devils, but of human intrusion upon their solitude a deux. 



Heinz Wittmer, another German escapist, arrived on the shores 

 of Floreana in August of 1932 accompanied by a blonde young 

 woman whom he affectionately called "Greta," and a slender 

 stripling of a lad, Harry Wittmer. Margaret was the name of the 

 comely companion of Wittmer who so casually deserted Europe to 

 struggle for existence in a thorny wilderness. 



For a time the Wittmer abode was established in pirate caves 

 strangely hollowed by nature in the face of towering cliffs border- 

 ing a grassy, brush-grown mesa high on the slopes of a broad shelf 

 joining two volcanic cones. Gradually they managed to construct 

 a home from stones and salvaged lumber. 



Rolf Hans — first white child born in the Galapagos Islands- 

 came to brighten life at the Wittmer hacienda just at the close of 

 the "garua" season on the first day of 1933. A little girl, Ingeborg 

 Floreana, was born April 18, 1937. 



The Ritters and Wittmers seem to have gotten on well enough 

 as distant neighbors until the arrival at PostofSce Bay in October, 

 1932 of the Baroness Eloisa Bosquet von Wagner. She was, she 

 said, of the Viennese nobility, latterly from Paris, whence she voy- 

 aged to the Galapagos with two male companions, Alfred Rudolf 

 Lorenz and Robert Philippson. In her retinue too, was Felipe 

 Valdevieso, an Ecuadorian youth engaged to help the Baroness 

 enforce her proclaimed intention to establish herself as Empress of 

 the Galapagos. The newcomers carved out an hacienda near the 

 Wittmers on the slopes of the highest volcanic cone of the island. 208 



