"from future comparison to what district or 'centre of creation' the organized beings of this archipelago must be attached." On 8 April 1888 , a Navy-manned research vessel assigned to the United States Fish Commission, visited Floreana Island during a 2-week survey of the islands. In 1929, Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch arrived in Guayaquil from Berlin to settle on Floreana, and sent letters back that were widely reported in the press, encouraging others to follow. In 1932 Heinz and Margret Wittmer arrived with their son Harry from Germany, and shortly afterwards their son Rolf was born there, the first citizen of the island known to have been born in the Galápagos. Later in 1932, the Austrian self-described "Baroness" von Wagner Bosquet arrived with two German companions, Robert Philippson and Rudolph Lorenz, as well Ecuadorian guide Manuel Valdivieso Borja, but a series of strange disappearances and deaths (including possible murders) and the departure of Strauch left the Wittmers as the sole remaining inhabitants of the group who had settled there. They set up a hotel which is still managed by their descendants, and Mrs. Wittmer wrote an account of her experiences in her book Floreana: A Woman's Pilgrimage to the Galápagos. While residing in Tahiti in 1935, Georges Simenon wrote a novel, Ceux de la soif, which recounts these events in fictionalized form. The story was first published as a feuilleton in the newspaper Le Soir between 12 December 1936 and 1 January 1937, and as a novel by Gallimard in 1938. Simenon´s novel was adapted for television in 1989, by Laurent Heynemann. A documentary film recounting these events, The Galapagos Affair, was released in 2013. The demands of these visitors, early settlers, and introduced species devastated much of the local wildlife with the endemic Floreana tortoise being declared extinct and the endemic Floreana mockingbird becoming extirpated on the island (the few remaining are found on the nearby islands of Gardiner and Champion). When Charles Darwin visited the island in 1835, he found no sign of its native tortoise and assumed that whalers, pirates, and human settlers had wiped them out. Since about 1850, no tortoises have been found on the island (except for one or two introduced animals kept as pets by the locals), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified the Floreana tortoise (Chelonoidis elephantopus sometimes called Chelonoidis nigra) as extinct. However, it may be that