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Tourism in the Galapagos Islands has come a long way since Patrick Watkins, an Irishman who found himself washed up on Isla Floreana in 1807. A hardened alcoholic, Watkins lived in a hut for two years, surviving on vegetables and iguana meat, his appearance, as one witness wrote, “the most dreadful thing that can be imagined… in ragged clothes and covered with vermin… and with no desire beyond that of getting drunk."

Trading vegetables for rum from passing ships, Watkins captured men who came ashore by getting them drunk and hiding them till their ships departed, thereby acquiring them as slaves. Finally managing to steal a boat, he set out for the mainland with five captives, killing and/or eating all of them before he arrived on the mainland.

Tasty as they looked, I didn’t have to eat any of my fellow travellers, since my passage through the Galapagos was aboard Sulidae, one of the most comfortable boats in the archipelago. A 63-foot gaff-rigged ketch with berths for 12, Sulidae began life in 1901 as a Baltic trader, but now ferries human cargo around the islands on eight-day tours.

First port of call was the island of South Plaza, a 13-hectare chunk of rock punctated by cactus and piles of mustard-coloured iguanas. A narrow trail wound up to and along a cliff top, providing intimate encounters with basking sea lions, blue-footed boobies and swallow-tailed gulls. A boiling surf chewed away at the base of the cliff groomed by a stiff, salt-laden up-draft in which clouds of birds — red-billed tropics, frigates, Audubon's shearwaters — banked crazily, shrieking like bleached bats.

Because of their isolation (1000km off the coast of Ecuador), and the fact that they were never attached to any land mass, many of Galápagos' animals — 95 percent of the reptiles, 50 percent of the birds, 80 percent of the insects and 20 percent of the fish — exist nowhere else in the world. The more time you spend here, the more you come to suspect that someone — the Ecuadorian Tourism Bureau? — is paying all of them to be nice to the tourists. Our second day, off Isla San Salvador, we went snorkeling with sea lions, who spent the whole time blowing bubbles in our faces.

My favourite animal, however, was the East Pacific green sea turtle. Weighing 150kg each, the turtle’s grace underwater is only exceeded by their prodigious libido. On the little visited Isla Pinta, in the north of the archipelago, we found the main beach covered with them, horny turtles in the shallows and crawling on the sand, couples locked in laborious love, hour upon hour of near motionless copulation. It was hard not be envious.

Until, that is, we came across Lonesome George, the last of Pinta's so-called “giant” tortoises. (Many of the Galapagos’ turtle species were wiped out years ago by traders, whalers and pirates, who would stow the animals, alive, as sources of fresh meat on long journeys.) An ancient quarter tonne male now living out his last days in a research station on Santa Cruz Island, George steadfastly resists all entreaties to mate with similar sub-species, thereby condemning his line to extinction.

Sobered by this thought, I determined to mate vigorously and frequently, lest I end up alone and wrinkly in a research station. I also decided to eat as much as possible, because, well… because I could. Naturally enough, food in the Galapagos is seafood based, and though the kitchen was cosy, this had no negative impact on its output.

Fittingly, the last night’s meal was probably the best. Moored under moonlight at Bartolome’s Island Sullivan Bay, we feasted on barracuda (caught by the skipper on a handline that day), plus a bevy of lobsters harvested by the crew from directly beneath our boat. And the wine: a light Spanish red called Faustino Quinto. We even broke out the rum, in honour of Patrick Watkins. The guy was a pioneer, after all.

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