The discovery was accidental and is linked to Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire. The Bishop of Panama, Tomas de Berlanga, was sailing to Peru to settle a dispute between the conquistador and his officers. A sudden change in the weather caused the ship to take to the high seas and after many days of drifting it landed on shallow waters. The peaks of the Galapagos Islands appeared before the sailors' eyes.
The bishop named the islands he saw Las Encantadas, and in his letters to King Charles V of Spain, he described the large turtles, iguanas, and thousands of different birds he observed on the islands. He also gave an approximate geographic location of the islands. Based on this information, the islands were placed on a map published in 1574 and named Isolas de Galapagos.
The conquistadors were not interested in the islands, instead they became a base for pirates. In the 17th and 18th centuries, English pirates captured several merchant ships in the Pacific. The most famous pirates were John Cooke and William Dampier (the first man to circumnavigate the globe three times and the first Englishman to discover Australia), who mapped the Galapagos Islands. In the 19th century, more people came to the islands, especially when whalers found them to be a good base for fishing.
They hunted not only whales, but also turtles, birds, and even iguanas. In the 19th century, up to 200,000 turtles were killed in the Galapagos Islands; some islands in the archipelago, such as Floreana, Rabida, and Santa Fe, became completely devoid of those reptiles.
