Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Midge Raymond writes about Floreana from Little A.

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I wasn’t planning to write another penguin novel. In the spring before My Last Continent was published, I’d traveled to the Galápagos Islands to see penguins and other wildlife—it wasn’t meant to be a research trip. Yet it turned into one after I learned about the bizarre human history of Floreana Island.

I became fascinated by the story known as “the Galápagos affair,” and especially by its unsolved mysteries. In the early 1930s, three small groups of Europeans settled on the uninhabited Galápagos island of Floreana, each with their own hopes and dreams. First came two German lovers, Dore Strauch and Friedrich Ritter, who had left their spouses in Berlin to start a new life together. They were joined on the island three years later by another German family, the Wittmers—Heinz; his pregnant wife, Margret; and his teenage son, Harry. The two families lived independently and fairly harmoniously—until the arrival of a mercenary, gun-wielding Austrian woman known as the Baroness, along with her two German lovers, Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Philippson, all of whom proceeded to wreak havoc on the other settlers’ relatively quiet lives. 

By 1934 the Baroness and Robert Philippson had disappeared, and Rudolf Lorenz and Friedrich Ritter were dead. To this day, the Baroness and Philippson have never been seen again—and the other two deaths remain shrouded in mystery. 

Though I still didn’t know this story would become my next novel, out of curiosity I began reading everything I could about the settlers, which turned out to be not very much: three books, a documentary, and a handful of articles. I read Dore Strauch’s memoir, Satan Came to Eden; Margret Wittmer’s memoir, Floreana; and the book The Galápagos Affair by John Treherne. I also watched the documentary The Galápagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, and read a couple of the articles Friedrich Ritter had published in The Atlantic. Yet rather than answer my questions, everything I researched only piqued my curiosity even more. This was when I realized that I was, in fact, researching my next book.

It was when I’d finished both memoirs that I knew I had to write about this story. For me, it wasn’t just that the mysteries weren’t solved—it was that Dore and Margret had such different versions of what had happened on Floreana. This, I knew, was where the story was.

The two memoirs not only differ significantly in terms of the events that occurred; I sensed, reading between the lines, that Dore and Margret weren’t being honest with themselves, let alone with whomever they envisioned their readers to be. It made me wonder: What do we as women tell ourselves in order to make peace with ourselves and the world? Is it ever the whole truth, or just our versions of it?

Dore and Margret did not agree on the details of the disappearance of the Baroness and Robert Philippson. Margret reported that the two left on a private yacht for Tahiti on March 27. Dore, on the other hand, claims to have heard a scream midday on March 19, and she later noticed that many of the Baroness’s things appeared in the Wittmer home. Dore became suspicious of Rudolf Lorenz and Margret Wittmer, and Margret’s memoir cast suspicion upon Rudolf Lorenz and Friedrich Ritter.

Likewise, Dore’s and Margret’s versions of Friedrich’s death are completely different. Margret wrote that, after eating the meat of chickens who themselves had died from sickness, Friedrich became gravely ill, and Dore showed up at Wittmers for help, too late—when Margret arrived at their homestead, Friedrich was beyond saving. According to Margaret, Friedrich scrawled a note to Dore before he died, writing, “I curse you with my dying breath.” According to Dore, Friedrich reached his arms out to her, his gaze “joyously tranquil,” and told her, “I go; but promise you will not forget what we have lived for,” just before he died. 

Despite these vastly different versions, this wasn’t the most fascinating part of the story. Reading both memoirs, I felt the women’s competitiveness with each other, resulting in an uneasy friendship strengthened somewhat by the arrival of the Baroness, who soon became their common enemy. And Dore’s account of her relationship with Friedrich was decidedly complex; she wrote how he was the love of her life while also expressing being bitterly unhappy.

My writer self was all in; I wanted to unravel all of these mysteries in a novel that not only resolved the deaths and disappearances but examined the nature of truth and secrecy, what we hide from ourselves and from one another, and what we put out into the world as truth when it is anything but.

I decided to include a contemporary point of view to examine the ways in which life has changed for women (and the ways it hasn’t) over the past century, and how the islands have changed as well. In Dore Strauch’s time on Floreana, for example, she didn’t see tortoises; most had been taken by sailors, and those remaining hadn’t survived the invasive species that ravaged the island. Yet a century later, the tortoises are back on Floreana, and scientists and the Galápagos National Park are working to save species that Dore never got to see.

While my research began as a passing curiosity, it ended up consuming my next few years, and I dove in to not only historical research but current penguin conservation work. In the dual narratives of Floreana, Dore tells her unvarnished truth (as I imagined it), and Mallory’s story, a century later, parallels Dore’s with her own twenty-first century struggles. The Galápagos Islands proved to be just the right setting for portraying the ways in which humans do harm to nature and animals and one another, how we try to make it right, and how we are all still evolving.

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Midge Raymond is the author of My Last Continent, the short-story collection Forgetting English, and, with coauthor John Yunker, the mystery novel Devils Island. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times magazine, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Midge has taught at Boston University, Boston’s GrubStreet Writers, Seattle’s Hugo House, and San Diego Writers, Ink. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she is cofounder of the boutique environmental publisher Ashland Creek Press. For more information, visit http://midgeraymond.com.