Given a certain degree of infamy thanks to Charles Darwin, the Galapagos Islands are far less famous for their role in playing host to a tiny, isolated German expat community in the 1930s, living quietly, surrounded by the unending blue of the Pacific Ocean.

The motley crew of settlers included a doctor with philosophical aspirations, a pregnant housewife and an eccentric baroness bent on creating a hotel for millionaires, complete with their doting entourage of love interests.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ideological disparate factions often failed to see eye to eye whilst they precariously shared the island's few natural springs.

A situation that rose more than a few suspicions to those that watched on from the outside, after a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances tore the quiet island life apart from the inside, leaving the survivors to shrink off into quite obscurity.

This is Dark History's, where the facts are worse than fiction.

Hello and welcome to Dark History's Season 6 episode 4. I'm Ben as always, I hope this episode finds you well.

This week we've got another murder mystery coming up, or well I suppose it's murder mystery, it's a little bit more than that.

It's a bit of an oft odd one, because normally I wouldn't do two episodes in a row that are kind of similar to genres.

This one is kind of similar to last week's episode, but somehow, as per usual, my episode planning has gone completely out of the window, and I've started doing whatever episodes I please in whatever order on.

Somehow I've ended up with these two next to each other, but it is what it is. But with that said, let's crack straight on into it, because it is quite a long one.

As always these days, I think that's becoming the norm. But yeah, so let's just get straight into it. This is called the Floreana Affair Murder in Paradise.

The Galapagos Archipelago, formed from a small cluster of volcanic islands, lies in the Pacific Ocean, 500 miles from Ecuador, off the western coast of South America,

laying with islands on either side of the equator, it has a surprisingly diverse climate, due to the humble current that flows north along the western coast of South America, bringing a cold water stream to the region.

The warm season lasts for just over six months of the year, and brings long hours of sunlight with periodic tropical rain showers.

On the flip side, the rest of the year is dominated by the cool season, which sees the islands covered in shrubland, grassland and forests shrouded in persistent, complete fog.

Although they cover an area of 17,000 square miles of ocean, and make up over 3,000 square miles of land, the Archipelago is dominated by its 18 main islands, including Darwin Island, famously named after the naturalist, who visited the islands for five weeks as a geologist,

and his observations of the wildlife at the time went some way to developing his theory on evolution, which he later published in on the origin species in 1859.

The most popular island, Santa Cruz, lies in the center of the island chain, and hosts a population of around 16,000.

Directly south of Santa Cruz, at the bottom of the Archipelago, sits Floriana, circular in shape. In the 1920s, it was completely uninhabited, with only relics of those who had come before, a series of caves carved out of the volcanic rock by pirates, and a small tin shack sat deserted in the rather aptly named post office bay, which was named after its curious mailbox, constructed from a barrel that had been painted white and hoisted upon a pole,

used by seafarers, predominantly wailers, for hundreds of years, as outgoing ships would drop off their mail to be collected by inbound ships at a later date.

By the 1920s, the island's caves have been long since deserted, and the only humans that sat foot on the island were passes by, dropping off for collecting mail, and the occasional hunters from neighbouring islands, who would visit temporarily in order to hunt the prodigious stocks of wild cattle and boars that made the islands their home,

along with the flocks of Framingos. It was, for an adventurous, wannabe cast away, the perfect desert island paradise, at least on paper, which is exactly what a German doctor, tired of society, felt when he read about it in William Bebes Galapagos, World's End, published in 1924, that detailed the naturalist 20-day expedition to the Archipelago in a somewhat romantic style.

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