“The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” presented under the name of one Salvator R. Tarnmoor, is constructed of several “sketches,” each of which is titled, begins with a short poem, and then leads to a vignette or short anecdote about the Galapagos Islands. In the first sketch, the narrator describes the Enchanted Isles as the most desolate place on earth, and one of the most solitary, and all that magnified by the fact that the place is utterly changeless and without season.
He then explains that the islands are uninhabitable, and
refuse to harbor even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found:—tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the iguana. No voice, no low, no howl is heard, the chief sound of life here is a hiss.
Funnily enough, then, most of the rest of the sketches go on to discuss the inhabitants of the islands, some human but many animal. To be sure, the tortoise, a reptile, is a major focus. The narrator gives us just the tiniest version here of Moby-Dick‘s whale-worship. Reading and interpreting the tortoises is irresistible: “Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does not fail to enhance the impression.” He even sees tortoises crawling despondently through drawing-rooms back home, never able to shake the feeling they give him that he has “indeed slept upon evilly enchanted ground.” Shiver.
The second sketch is all about tortoises, and the third is about Rock Rodondo, an outcropping that is home to thousands of sea-birds at its top and thousands of fish at its base. Again is the typical philosophizing on animals. Penguins are “without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man. …On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops.”
Other sketches deal in other human and animal inhabitants, including several involving runaways or castaways and dogs. The eighth sketch, “Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow,” is the most affecting. The widow’s story prompts the narrator to comment on his own technique, something that occurs here and there throughout Melville’s short fiction—as it does, indeed, throughout all his work, as though he can’t help here and there trying to vindicate himself in the eyes of potential critics. Here, we learn that “[u]nwittingly, I imp this cat-like thing,” that is, Fate, which “will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad.” In trying to capture this through writing, he “sport[s] with the heart of him who reads; for if he feel not, he reads in vain.”
It was not in vain that I read of the Chola widow, whose story, along with the fourth sketch, contributes much to the enchanted, dolorous, almost vaporous atmosphere of the islands. In that sketch, “A Pisgah View from the Rock,” we get the warning that that view is not available, that the Encantadas are not open, to just anyone:
[T]ake the following prescription. Go three voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest frigate that floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the guides who conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many more, respectively, to a rope-dancer, an Indian Juggler, and a chamois. This done, come and be rewarded by the view from our tower. How we get there, we alone know.
Fortunately, Melville went there for me instead, and I can sit and let him sport with my heart, enchanting me.
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