- This is about Norfolk Isle, northeast of Charles's Island.
- This has a story too. A sad, sad, story of pathos, about turtles in love.
- Okay, not about turtles in love. But yes about pathos.
- Shmoop would rather have turtles in love. But Melville did not ask Shmoop.
- Anyway.
- So it's the narrator/Melville's first visit to the Galapagos, when a shipmate sees something fluttering in the distance.
- They figure out it's a handkerchief, and sail off towards it.
- Where they find a woman, stranded.
- Pathos!
- And some turtles, as there always are on the Galapagos.
- The woman is named Hunilla; three years ago she'd sailed with her new husband Felipe and brother Truxill on a French whaler.
- The whaler put them on the island where they were to collect turtles for the oil; the captain was supposed to come back and get them.
- But he didn't. And they're screwed.
- Even worse, Felipe and Truxill go on a fishing trip and are killed by a bad tide.
- Hunilla is not having the best of luck. She is very sad. The sailors hearing her stories are sad. Ah, the pathos.
- Felipe's body came ashore and she buried him.
- Hunilla doesn't know the ship isn't coming back, so she waits and waits. Scenes of great sadness etc. etc.
- Hunilla kept a marker of days for a while, and then stopped. The implication is that she was pregnant and had a baby who was stillborn.
- This is not said directly, though. (See Characters: Hunilla.)
- There's also some suggestion that a ship did come ashore and that a sailor or sailors raped Hunilla, though she won't talk about it.
- Hunilla says it was lucky fate that led her to see the narrator's ship which has finally come to rescue her, because usually she's on the opposite side of the island.
- They take her back to her hut, and she brings her oil and some turtles aboard the ship.
- She's got a lot of dogs too, but has to leave a bunch of them.
- So when they push off the island, the dogs left behind run along after her howling.
- They sell her oil to give her money, and she leaves the ship at Payta. That's the end of a sad story.
- On to one with more murder and action.