HOME MOVIES: GALAPAGOS ISLANDS 1929

Genre: home movie

Year Published: 1928

Format: 16mm

Description: Possibly the first color footage ever shot in the Galapagos Islands, this exceptional home movie was shot by an unknown traveler in the earliest era of eco-tourism. Once part of a longer home movie, the rest of which has been lost, this is nevertheless a captivating view of what the experience of visiting these islands was like in this era. The Kodacolor process was an early lenticular (additive color) film system, first introduced in 1928 for 16mm film. Films of this type are rare, owing to the cost of the film stock and the short life of the Kodacolor product (which was made obsolete by Kodachrome). This wonderful film was transferred by DeBergerac Productions of Fairport, NY using a newly-developed, proprietary telecine system. The Galápagos Islands (official name: Archipiélago de Colón, other Spanish names: Islas Galápagos, Spanish pronunciation: [ɡaˈlapaɣos]) are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed on either side of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean, 926 km (575 mi) west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part. The Galápagos Islands and their surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a biological marine reserve. The principal language on the islands is Spanish. The islands have a population of slightly over 25,000. The islands are famed for their vast number of endemic species and were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The first recorded visit to the islands happened by chance in 1535, when the Bishop of Panamá Fray Tomás de Berlanga went to Peru to arbitrate in a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. De Berlanga was blown off course, though he eventually returned to the Spanish Empire and described the conditions of the islands and the animals that inhabited them. The group of islands was shown and named in Abraham Ortelius's atlas published in 1570. The first crude map of the islands was made in 1684 by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, who named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after British royalty and noblemen. These names were used in the authoritative navigation charts of the islands prepared during the Beagle survey under captain Robert Fitzroy, and in Darwin's popular book The Voyage of the Beagle. The then new Republic of Ecuador took the islands from Spanish ownership in 1832, and subsequently gave the islands official Spanish names. The older names remained in use in English language publications, including Herman Melville's The Encantadas of 1854.

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