This tantalizing information does not report just why he felt the need to kill them all, but Myrtle, of course, asked the question that was probably on everyone’s mind: “Did he eat them?”

Guayaquil is 747 miles from the Galapagos Islands, and the trip would take three to four weeks of rowing 12 hours a day. It certainly is conceivable that Watkins either tossed the people overboard because they were eating too much of his food rations, or he decided they could be his food.

The Baroness’ story about 100 years later is not about possible cannibalism, thank heavens, but only possible murder, or murders.

It seems that a young and attractive Austrian woman who assumed the title “Baroness” Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet came to the island in the 1930s accompanied by her two German lovers Robert Philippson and Rudolf Lorenz. They brought along an Ecuadorian, one Manuel Valdivieso, as their servant.

When this party of four arrived on Floreana, there were already a few people living there: Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his lover Dore Strauch, who had moved there in 1929, and Heinz Wittmer with his teenage son and pregnant wife who had moved there in 1931.

Others over the years had tried to live on Floreana but never stayed long because of the hard life.

Dr. Ritter had abandoned his medical practice in Germany and absconded with Dore, who was one of his patients, both leaving their spouses behind. They established a true homestead on Floreana, moving heavy lava rocks from the soil, planting fruits and vegetables and raising chickens.

As word of their success spread, they became famous and received visitors.

Heinz Wittmer and his family also set up a successful homestead, partly with help from Dr. Ritter, and they, too received some visitors. The two families, however, seem to have had little to do with each other socially and preferred their solitude and independence.

Onto this quiet island dropped the Baroness bombshell. The Baroness set up a small homestead that she named Hacienda Paradise and then made plans to build a grand hotel.

By all accounts the Baroness had a flamboyant personality ratcheted up quite a few notches. She carried a pistol and a whip everywhere she went; she in short order seduced the Governor of the Galapagos; she immediately let it be known that her correct title was “Queen of Floreana;” and perhaps most disruptive of all, she very quickly established such a notoriety that passing ships and yachts would go out of their way to make a stop on Floreana just to meet her and hear her amazingly grandiose and elaborate stories.

It seemed that everyone who sailed anywhere near the Galapagos wanted to return home and boast of having met the famous Queen of Floreana Island in the Galapagos.

She did not get along well with the Ritter or Wittmer families, and before many months had passed, Dr. Ritter thoroughly despised her and made no secret of that fact.

Before too many more months had passed, the green-eyed serpent raised his head in Hacienda Paradise and Philippson started beating up on Lorenz, who unsurprisingly did not appreciate that.

Lorenz packed his small bag and begged for room and board with the Wittmers, who accommodated him. Before long, however, the Baroness, perhaps in a bored moment or desperately needing her fix of drama, enticed him back to Paradise, and the cycle started all over again.

In the meantime, a prolonged drought befell the island. Crops failed and tempers flared. Dr. Ritter and his lover Dore began to quarrel openly. The Wittmers became incensed when they started suspecting the Baroness of stealing their mail and badmouthing them to visitors who came to the island, who in turn repeated all the juicy gossip to the international press.

Then one night, Philippson stole the Ritter’s donkey and let it loose in the Wittmer’s garden, where, as we can imagine, it did what donkeys will always do when free and easy food is set before their little noses.

In the morning Heinz Wittmer shot the donkey. The story is he thought it was a feral donkey, but that story was not well received.

Then the plot thickened. On March 27, 1934, the Baroness and Philippson disappeared. Margaret Wittmer seems to be the only one who had anything to say about that, and her report was that the Baroness had appeared at her door that morning and told Margaret that she and Philippson were leaving that day with friends on a yacht that would take them to Tahiti, leaving everything behind for Lorenz.

However, no one on Floreana remembered any boat at all coming to the island that week, and the Baroness and Philippson were never spotted in Tahiti. In fact, they were never seen again, anywhere.

Dore Strauch insisted that the story told by Margaret could not be true because she was certain that the Baroness had left behind things that the Baroness would never have left behind, even for a short journey. Dore and Dr. Ritter both believed that the Baroness and Philippson were murdered by Lorenz, and the Wittmers covered it up. Dore even insisted that the bodies must have been burned because the acacia wood available on the island would burn hot enough to burn bodies and bones.

Lending credence to the murder theory was the fact that Lorenz was in a great hurry to get off the island. He convinced a Norwegian fisherman named Nuggerud to take him to San Cristobal Island where he could take a ferry to Guayaquil.

Lorenz and Nuggerud got as far as Santa Cruz Island but then disappeared, never arriving on San Cristobal. Many months later their desiccated and mummified bodies were found on Marchena Island, a small island in the northern part of the Galapagos and nowhere near either Santa Cruz or San Cristobal. No one can speculate how they got there.

So now we have two confirmed deaths and two suspected deaths. But the story continues.

Dr. Ritter died some months later, and the coroner ruled the death food poisoning from chicken meat that had been poorly preserved.

This was considered strange by those remaining on the island because Dr. Ritter was a known vegetarian and was experienced in food safety practices in a tropical climate. Many of the islanders believed that Dore had poisoned him slowly over time because his treatment of her had gotten progressively worse as the antagonism between the couple increased. Margaret Wittmer reported that with his dying words Dr.Ritter cursed Dore.

In short order, Dore returned to Germany, where she wrote a book about her years in the Galapagos. The book sensationalized the sordid tales and the hardships of island living but did little to add solid information about the mysteries.

That left the Wittmers as the only family of the early settlers remaining on Floreana, and Margaret Wittmer the only witness willing to talk about the mysterious happenings on Floreana.

Her version of the stories prevailed, and the Wittmers prospered with tourism and became wealthy.Until her dying day Margaret stuck by her stories, even though it is said she often hinted that she knew more than she was telling.

At that point my clever Myrtle asked the question that some of us were thinking: Where was Manuel Valdivieso during all those months, and why didn’t anybody ask his opinion about the disappearances and strange happenings? To tell you the truth, if I were Manuel, I think I would have hightailed it back to Guayaquil on the first available boat. Sometimes in life you just have to cut your losses. No one knew where he had gone.

On the way back to the boat clever Myrtle sang to us another of her witty adaptations of a nursery rhyme:

A biscuit, a basket,
The Baroness de Bosquet,
She sent a letter to Lorenz
But Robert did not like it,
So he bopped him,
He bopped him,
And then Lorenz got even,
The Baroness and Phillipson
Went bloodily to heaven.

Myrtle even had a pretty good Ella Fitzgerald warble going.

Well, that set everyone to merrily singing A-tisket, a-tasket as a round. Sadly, half of us were singing the original nursery rhyme words that Ella sang, and half of us were garbling Myrtle’s words. And all of us were getting louder and louder until our Favorite Travel Mate (NOT) dramatically covered his ears, glared at us, and bellowed, “For Christ’s sake, STOP IT!” I must admit that I sort of agreed with him.

By then we were all a little sick of it anyway, and his behavior served only to provide us with a perfect excuse to continue being annoyed at him. We were quite talented at that.

To be continued…