- The story starts off with a quote from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene about dangerous islands that are dark, doleful, dreary, and other things beginning with "d".
- The story proper begins with a discussion of the Enchanted Isles, or Encantadas, known in English as the Galapagos.
- The islands were made by volcanos, and they are…well, dark, doleful and dreary, Shmoop supposes.
- Melville says the islands are even more awful and desolate than other isolated places, because they're at the equator, where nothing changes.
- There aren't even jackals on the Galapagos; that's how forlorn it is. There are just reptiles.
- It's all volcanic rock and wasteland.
- Not a vacation spot (though of course these days people love to vacation on the Galapagos. Shows what giant leaps forward in transporation technology can do over a century and a half.)
- The ocean currents are nasty too, which makes it hard to get from island to island.
- There's a superstition that reptiles are transformed wicked sea-officers.
- Would being a turtle really be so bad? Turtles seem pretty content, really….
- That is Shmoop's opinion there. Melville thinks turtles look sad.
- Melville says sometimes now at home he imagines himself back in those brutal islands.
- This is sort of like "The Piazza," but with turtles instead of Marianna.
- The turtles work better.