A few Ecuadorian businessmen tried to reap a profit on the islands, harvesting lichens and cultivating sugar cane in large plantations. Swathes of the islands were leased to the United States after the construction of the Panama Canal in order to protect that important waterway. The airstrip at Baltra was built by the US originally as an air force base. During this time, more migration to the islands occurred, both from mainland Ecuador and around the world.

In 1957, most of the islands were declared a national park. The flow of tourists began a few years later, but it was a mere trickle until regular air service began in the 1970s. Since that time, the park has been expanded by declaring the waters around the islands to be protected space. As tourism has expanded, the cities of Puerto Ayora and Puerto Baquerizo Moreno have grown accordingly.

One of the biggest impacts of human settlement in the Galápagos has been the introduction of non-native species. Plants and animals that evolved on the islands did not evolve with any protection against many predators, since there were relatively few on the islands. However, early settlers brought a number of species, including goats, dogs, cats, rats and pigs. These species decimated the native plant and animal populations, but steps have been taken to eradicate invasive species.

Poaching and fishing have also been an issue for the islands. The earliest visitors to the islands harvested turtles for meat, while many migrants moved to the islands to fish their abundant waters. In recent years, however, more effort has been made to prevent the misuse of the island's natural resources, and these problems have been abated.

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Travelers in Galapagos

Travelers in Galapagos

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The Galápagos Islands have a much shorter human history than most of the Ecuador, but it is no less fascinating. For centuries, people have been drawn to the enigmatic islands, and the effects that this migration has had on the ecology and biodiversity of the islands has been important in the wildlife of Galapagos Islands.

The Galapagos Islands are the only part of Ecuador that did not have a sustained pre-Columbian population. The islands are believed to date back to six million years ago as a result of volcanic activity generated beneath the ocean's floor. They were uninhabited, although Thor Heyerdahl in 1963 reported findings of pottery of South American origin that suggested earlier contacts, a theory that appears to still be controversial. The archipelago was used as hiding place by the English pirates that pilfered the Spanish galleons carrying gold and silver from South America to Spain. The first confirmed sighting of the islands was by the Spaniard Tomás de Berlanga when he was trying to sail from Panama to Peru in 1535.

For the next two hundred years, the island was visited intermittently by passing sailors. Pirates would use the islands as a base to raid Guayaquil and other coastal cities in Ecuador, Perú and Colombia. Other ships would harvest tortoises from the islands, depleting the population before any permanent settlement occurred. In 1807, the first permanent settler arrived as a marooned seaman. He stayed for several years, cultivating the soil and trading with passing ships.

Ecuador took possession of the islands in 1832, but little settlement occurred during this time. The Voyage of the Beagle brought the survey ship HMS Beagle under captain Robert FitzRoy to the Galapagos on September 15, 1835 to survey approaches to harbors. The captain and others on board including his companion the young naturalist Charles Darwin made a scientific study of geology and biology on four of the 13 islands before they left on October 20 to continue on their round-the-world expedition.

The governor of the prison colony on Charles Island told Darwin that tortoises differed from island to island, and when his specimens of birds were analyzed on his return to England it was found that many different kinds of birds were species of finches, which were also unique to the islands. These facts were crucial in Darwin's development of his evolution theory, which was presented in The Origin of Species.

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