- The narrator (or Melville) tells you that no other part of the world has as many hermits living there as the Galapagos.
- Captains can be tyrannical and awful, and escaping into the Galapagos is one of the few ways sailors have to get away.
- Turtle-hunting makes hermits sometimes too; people go into the interiors, get lost, and their ships leave without them.
- Or sometimes people are exiled by their captains.
- He tells a story of a guy marooned on an island who was dying of thirst, till he came upon a seal, stabbed it, and sucked its blood.
- Ick.
- Vampire travel writing.
- And another story about a guy who escaped an island by killing seals and making a float of their corpses.
- He says people sometimes post bottles with messages in them on sticks; a kind of hermits' post office.
- And as a cheery end, he talks about gravestones on the islands.
- And that's it. Farewell, Galapagos novella. You were long, and your popularity is hard to figure, but at least Shmoop is done with you.