human invasion
The first human on the Galapagos Islands was possibly the Incan king Tupac Yupanqui, as there have been stories passed down from generation to generation, telling about the supposed islands of fire that Tupac visited.
The first properly recorded finding of the Galapagos Islands was in 1535, when a guy called Fray Toms de Berlanga, who was the bishop of panama. Panama is a Spanish country, located in Central America. Anyway, Fray found the islands by accident when he got blown off course when sailing to Peru.
Around the start of the 16th century, the Galapagos Islands became a sort of base for pirates and other sea faring ships. In 1684 a pirate guy called Ambrose Cowley made the first full map of the Galapagos. In this time the Galapagos tortoise and subspecies became rare as pirates would keep them in their ship for meat that could be long lasting.
In 1790 whalers came to the islands, and they were worse than the pirates as there were many more of them. They hunted whales, birds, tortoises, iguanas and seals for their fur. As many as 200,000 tortoises were hunted down over the course of the nineteenth century.
In the early 1800s American Captain David Porter, destroyed almost all the whaling ships, but he also released goats on the islands which then became a pest.
Of course the most famous person to have visited the Galapagos Islands was Charles Darwin, who developed his theory of evolution based on the island. Charles Darwin started his journey to the Galapagos in his ship, the HMS beagle (funny name) which was captained by Robert Fitzroy. On the 15 September 1835 Charles Darwin landed on San Cristóbal, where he wrote that the 'The black rocks heated by the rays of the vertical sun like a stove, give to the air a close & sultry feeling. The plants also smell unpleasantly. The country was compared to what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the infernal regions to be.'
There were many iguanas on the island and Darwin thought that they were ugly and stupid, but in the water they were graceful. He was also interested in how tame the birds were; he could even go up to them and poke them. Darwin also got his first hint of evolution when on the island Floreana a man claimed to Darwin that he could tell him which island a tortoise came from by looking at the shape of its shell. Darwin did not take the hint till later, when he came back to England, where he thought about the idea of evolution. Although Darwin did not actually create the idea of evolution, he certainly made it famous.