SELF-EXILES PERISH

Taranaki Daily News, 1 December 1934, Page 17 (Supplement)

SELF-EXILES PERISH

STARVATION AND THIRST. BARREN VOLCANIC ISLAND. San Francisco, *ov. 19. Starvation and thirst on a barren volcanic island off the coast of. Ecuador have ended the Adam and Eve existence of Arthur Wittmer and his German, wife and possibly four others.

The victims were members of a more or .less nudist colony of self-exiled Germans and French, who settled on desolate islands in the Galapagos group. The two Wittmers and their child evidently attempted to pay a visit from their island to Marchena, where a Frenchman named Lorenz had settled. The crew of an American fishing-boat noticed a canoe beached, and went ashore, where they found the bodies of the three Wittmers, and other, evidence indicated that Lorenz and several others perished in a recent storm. Among the victims probably were

Baroness Wehrborn, who kept a famous curio shop in Paris, and Robert Phillippsohn, a German business man. Investigation showed . that Wittmer died first, and that his wife expired after writing a pathetic letter to Captain Allan Hancock, of Los Angeles,, the millionaire explorer, who backed Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in his first flight across the Pacific.