Due to its relatively flat surface, supply of fresh water as well as plants and animals, Floreana was a favorite stop for whalers and other visitors to the Galápagos.

Since the 19th century, whalers kept a wooden barrel at Post Office Bay, so that mail could be picked up and delivered to their destination by ships on their way home, mainly to Europe and the United States.

[6] Many years later Thomas Nickerson, who had been a cabin boy on the Essex, returned to Charles Island and found a black wasteland: "neither trees, shrubbery, nor grass have since appeared.

[10] In 1929, Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch arrived in Guayaquil from Berlin to settle on Floreana and sent letters back that were widely reported in the press, encouraging others to follow.

Later in 1932, the Austrian "Baroness" von Wagner Bosquet arrived with two German companions, Robert Philippson and Rudolph Lorenz, as well as the Ecuadorian guide Manuel Valdivieso Borja.

A series of strange disappearances and deaths (including possible murders) and the departure of Strauch then left the Wittmers as the sole remaining inhabitants of the group who had settled there.

[12][13][14] While residing in Tahiti in 1935, Georges Simenon wrote the novel Ceux de la Soif, which recounts these events in fictionalized form.

It supports one of the main colonies of critically endangered Galápagos petrels in the archipelago, with about 350 nests scattered beneath a dense vegetation among the rocks.

Other significant species include lava gulls, Galapagos penguins, and at one point in time the locally extinct Floreana mockingbird.

[24] When Charles Darwin visited the island in 1835, he found no sign of its native tortoise and assumed that whalers, pirates, and human settlers had wiped them out.