“The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, “Herman Melville’s novella, is a set of literary miscellanies comprising ten descriptive sketches of the Galapagos Islands that are located on the equator in the Pacific Ocean. The narrator calls these islands “a group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles.” In this thesis, I address the power of the metaphoric world of “Gallipagos” (Melville’s selection of the Spanish name of the islands) as “relics” that rebel against the imperialistic current toward expansion in the Western Hemisphere, a current that was prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century America and was driven by the Monroe Doctrine. “Gallipagos” places a counterproductive value on the relics left on the islands and resists the notions of expansion and advancement.

The relics on these abandoned islands include “hermitages and stone basins,” post offices consisting of “stake and bottle” and “grave-stones” left by buccaneers and hermits who once inhabited the islands. These relics exemplify the “signs of vanishing humanity” on this barren territory. Similar to the concept of “souvenir” as discussed by Yunte Huang, relics “turn the human gaze back to the past, not the future.” Souvenir and relics jeopardize both the “development of human productive force and the progress of teleological history” that commodities represent. In the sketches of this novella, the relics in the islands resist the future-oriented current of mid-nineteenth-century America.

The term “Gallipagos” may refer to the islands themselves or to the species of tortoise that inhabits these islands. These two implications reveal the realities beyond the description of the sketches. The Gallipagos islands are described as the “Apple of Sodom, ruddiness and ashes, life and death.” The tortoises have a similar duality; the narrator depicts tortoises as “one inky blot” and points out at their possibility of turning “both black and bright.” Both of “Gallipagos” are traces of the past, and they have the duality in them. I will examine the two Gallipagos referents in the context of this duality, as relics in the distant sea.

The narrator invites his readers to visualize the equator. He asks, “Did you ever lay eye on the real genuine Equator? Have you ever, in the largest sense, toed the Line? ” Then he depicts the headland of the islands, which is divided by the equator as if one is cutting “through the centre of a pumpkin pie.” Here, the reader becomes a holder of a knife, and the equator, an imaginary line, is visualized and realized in a metaphorical way within the text. The reader and the narrator, who suffer an “optical delusion” of the Enchanted Isles, see a “burning in live letters” such as “Memento***” on the back of a tortoise. As Marvin Fisher points out, this is not a memento mori but a memento vitae (memory of life). The relics reverse the duality contained in the two meanings of Gallipagos, taking on its past-oriented force. The islands that stand both as a “burial in the ocean” and a sentry “in a pure necessity of seafaring life,” enhance the “distant beauty” floating in the Pacific.