278 THE GALAPAGOS TORTOISES. 
“ About the middle of July, 1814, the ship Essex Junior, Lieutenant Downes, of the U. S. 
Navy, arrived in New York. He had been on a cruise, by order of government, along the 
coast of Brazil, and round Terra del Fuego, and off the land of Chili and Peru, in quest of 
British traders and whale-men. He served under Commodore David Porter, of the frigate 
Essex, a vessel of war which had almost broken up the enemy’s navigation and commerce, 
in the tract of ocean lying between Cape Horn and the Gallapagos Islands. 
After visiting Valparaiso and Lima, in March, 1813, Capt. Porter proceeded to the 
neighborhood of this group, and cruised there between April and October, for English vessels, 
where he captured twelve, which were chiefly occupied in the chase of the spermaceti whale. 
He describes the Gallapagos Islands as “being perhaps the most barren and desolate of any 
known,” and so utterly destitute of fresh water, that he was obliged to touch on the coast 
of America, during the time, to procure a supply of that necessary article. They are chiefly 
volcanic piles, and the water that condenses on their summits is absorbed by tufa, slag, and 
ashes, before it can reach the sea. 
From the Gallapagos the crew took a number of the native tortoises for food. These 
creatures are very large, and frequent there. They inhabit the land, and seldom or never 
enter the water from choice. Two of them were brought alive to New York. They bore 
the voyage of between two and three months without taking any food. They have been 
carefully examined, and described. Both were females. The larger had the following 
characters. 
The colour of the buckler and skin was a deep and uniform black. 
The head was rather small in proportion to the body, and at pleasure could be drawn 
out of sight, and concealed behind the fore legs, approximated for its protection. 
The back was very convex. The sides prominent and capacious; but the gibbosity was 
without knobs, asperities, or processes; and merely marked by dividing lines, among the 
pannels. There were five of these pannels along the back, four on each side, and twenty- 
three in the circumference, making thirty-six in the whole. 
The length, measured over the elevation of the buckler, between head and tail, was 
about two feet and a half. The distance from side to side over the back was almost as great, 
or nearly twenty-nine inches. The height, as the animal rested on the belly or sternum, 
was about two feet. 
The weight, when she arrived, poor, lean and famished was eighty pounds. 
The fore part of the legs was covered with a thick and hard skin, that by deep indenta- 
tions resembled the scales of an alligator’s hide. Each of her fore feet had five claws; of the 
hinder, four, and the balls of her feet were promment and puffed, as if for walking over the 
ground, and not for creeping, or crawling. Such is the length of her legs, that her erect posture 
adds about a foot to her stature. 
This individual, weak and exhausted as it was, could move with the weight of a man 
on its back. 
The fore part of the crown of the head was rough, like the legs. 
It arrives in its native region, to the magnitude of three hundred pounds, and even more. 
When full grown and strong, it can travel away with the weight of three or four men. It is 
very prone to accumulate fat. In cooking the flesh there is no need of employing butter. 
It can live, as is said, a year, without food or drink. 
The sailors travelled two miles and more inland upon the Gallapagos Islands in search 
of these tortoises, or turpins as they called them. When they catch the animals, they carry 
them in their arms, or on their shoulders, to the boat. There were more than two hundred 
on board the Essex. The English whaling vessels that were captured, mostly had some of 
them. Navigators prize them highly for food, and esteem them as savoury and wholesome. 
One of the men told me he had seen the same sort of tortoises on the Isles Tristan d’Acunha 
