Dimensions
138 x 216 x 18mm
The strange calamities that took place on the Galapagos island of Floreana in the 1930s have teased and mystified investigators ever since.
It was a dark, Nietzschean romanticism which inspired the German doctor Friedrich Ritter to enact his role as philosopher-superman in the remote Pacific haunts of Charles Darwin. Ritter's "fellow pilgrim", Dore Strauch, wasn't to learn of his orthodox Nietzschean contempt for women until the couple were already scrabbling over the volcanic slopes in search of a dwelling amidst the wild boars. Even Dore's lyrical accounts of their grand experiment cannot conceal the fact that Friedrich was a fierce and selfish bully.
What was Olympian in theory turned out more ramshackle in fact, but romantic magazine articles filtered back to Germany about the Ritters' "idyll" and enticed the comparatively prosaic Heinz Wittmer, his wife Margaret - who was five months pregnant - and their ailing son.
Next to arrive (brandishing a riding crop) was a platinum-blonde, sex-mad "Baroness" with a retinue of adoring young men. Having washed her feet in Margaret's drinking water, the Baroness announced that the island was hers and she planned to transform it into something like Miami, though her luxury hotel for American millionaires conspicuously remained a corrugated-iron hut.
The scene was set for trouble. One American millionaire who did turn up to investigate the increasingly outlandish reports of life on Floreana (nudism and experimental stainless-steel dentures were mentioned) was Captain Allan Hancock, whose personal records and cine film of the inhabitants provided some of the most reliable clues to the disasters which were to follow.
John Treherne has expertly picked his way through the plethora of facts, fantasy and dogged mystery that surrounded this extraordinary episode for over fifty years, brought together an amazing collection of photographs and produced a book of compelling fascination.
