Fourteen years ago, while researching an old murder case, I came across a 1941 tabloid passage so absurd that I committed it entirely to memory: “Was Dr. Ritter, With His Steel Teeth, Poisoned in Paradise? Was ‘Baroness Eloise,’ Known as ‘Crazy Panties,’ Who Ruled the Island With a Gun and Love, Murdered by One of Her Love Slaves After She Had Driven the Other to His Death? And Why is Frau Ritter Going Back to What She Once Called ‘Hell’s Volcano?’—the Mystery of the Galapagos Island Which Germany Covets, to Be Solved At Last?”
After a feverish few days in the archives, I confirmed that “Crazy Panties” more than satisfactorily embodied her nickname. One visitor to the Galápagos island of Floreana called the baroness’s local hotel “a festering sex complex” where she seduced tourists and hosted orgies. I pivoted from my original project about the old murder case. This was the book I should write. Aside from these eccentric European exiles, I was intrigued by Floreana itself. Why did a small, uninhabited island—mostly barren and covered in volcanic rock—attract them?
However, two publishers disagreed. They wanted a book about American history, set in America. With that directive, I expanded my cast to include an intriguing group of Americans: the wealthy explorers who “discovered” the European exiles and became enmeshed in their ultimately fatal Utopian experiment.
First, in January 1930, came Eugene F. McDonald, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who founded Zenith Radio and had long been fascinated by oceanic exploration. Inspired by the book Galapagos: World’s End, by the American naturalist William Beebe, McDonald invited a group of scientists to join him on a two-month expedition. Arriving on Floreana, in the southern part of the Galápagos archipelago, the entourage was shocked to find a man and a woman living a few miles from the bay, near the island’s lone spring.
One of McDonald’s colleagues spoke German, and he translated for the couple. Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch had come from Berlin in 1929. Not only were they starving, but Ritter had also badly slashed his arm with an axe As Ritter spoke, his lips parted to reveal a set of steel dentures. Every tooth, from the incisors to the molars, gleamed in the sun. He and Strauch had abandoned civilization in order to “live a life of contemplation, of mutual love and simple work with natural things,” Ritter explained.
As a devotee of Nietzsche, he was drawn to Floreana’s dark history (it had served as the archipelago’s first penal colony) and challenging landscape. Where previous European settlers had failed, fleeing the island after a short period of time, Ritter believed he could succeed. Upon McDonald’s return to the United States, he encouraged other explorers to visit “modern-day Adam and Eve.”
Two months later Vincent Astor, son of robber baron John Jacob Astor IV, set sail on the U.S.S. Nourmahal, a 263-foot “floating brothel,” as one guest put it, owing to Astor’s habit of inviting a woman to accompany each male guest on his yacht. After studying the work of Charles Darwin, Astor hoped to retrace the scientist’s steps in the Galápagos. He, along with McDonald and 400 other wealthy Americans, even considered buying the islands and donating them to the United States government. Such a deal would foster friendliness between North and South America, the men argued, and be a boon for both continents, preserving the islands’ wildlife and increasing opportunities in trade and investment. (Ecuadorean officials universally opposed the idea, calling the United States the “Yankee Menace.”)
While in the Galápagos, Astor collected various live specimens, including flightless cormorants, four-foot long lizards, a 300-pound turtle, a fish with two backbones, several piscatorial specimens so rare that they had no names, and a rookery of penguins half the size of their Arctic counterparts. Astor named one of the penguins “Paddlewing” and gave him a tour of Broadway before dropping him off at the New York Aquarium.
As a devotee of Nietzsche, Friedrich Ritter was drawn to Floreana’s dark history (it had served as the archipelago’s first penal colony) and challenging landscape.
In addition to bringing home an exotic menagerie, Astor brought reports of Ritter and Strauch’s unconventional life, which proved a welcome distraction from the compounding ills of the Great Depression. The exiles represented an escape, a bold blueprint for an existence far removed from the madness, an experiment in extreme self-isolation that suggested a madness of its own. “They may have lost a lot of the attractions that civilization has to offer,” read an article in The Austin Statesman, “but likewise they have gained a lot—for civilization, after all, has its price. Far from the world’s beaten path, they have escaped many things.”
By the time Los Angeles industrialist George Allan Hancock—whose family owned the oil-rich La Brea Tar Pits—visited Floreana in 1932, two new groups of exiles had moved to the island. Heinz Wittmer, a former high-ranking official in the Weimar Republic, had fled Germany with his pregnant girlfriend, Margret, and young son, Harry. The boy had been frail and sickly since birth, and Heinz hoped the tropical climate might be therapeutic. They were followed shortly thereafter by Baroness Antonia Wagner von Wehrborn Bosquet (otherwise known as “Crazy Panties”), and two of her lovers, Robert Philippson and Rudolph Lorenz. Upon her arrival, the baroness announced her intention to build a hotel on Floreana and transform the island into a destination for American tourists. The plan didn’t go down well with her more privacy-minded neighbors.
Hancock’s scientific research and conservation efforts became secondary to his interest in the European exiles. They, in turn, depended upon him for their very survival. He served as a confidant who assuaged their fears, a mediator who defused increasingly violent tensions, and a provider whose material generosity—frequent gifts of food, tools, and building supplies—only stirred competition and hatred.
In December 1934, when two bodies washed up on a different Galápagos island, their identities surprised everyone. Hancock launched an investigation and interrogated the Floreana settlers. His efforts, ultimately, were in vain. To this day Floreana’s murder mystery endures and fascinates. So, too, does the grim lesson of the exiles’ experiment. “For things will never be perfect, until human beings are perfect,” wrote Thomas More, who coined the word “Utopia” in his 1516 book. Or, in the later words of John-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.”
Abbott Kahler is the author of several books, including Where You End, Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and more
