The tragedy of loveless George the tortoise

He's over 100, in his sexual prime and the rarest creature on Earth. Yet despite every enticement, George the tortoise just won't perform.

When I first met the girl who was to become my wife, she had just been to the Galapagos Islands and there was a lot of mention about someone called "George".

As she offered to show me pictures of her with him, I recall showing dismaying signs of jealousy, knowing how holiday romances can pop up in the most unlikely places and with the most unlikely people.

Out the photographs came nevertheless. And it was much to my relief that, when George emerged into shot, he turned out, in fact, to be a giant Galapagos tortoise.

Not just any old tortoise, though. George was the very last of his kind - officially, the rarest creature on Earth according to The Guinness Book Of Records.

Although scientists had spent long decades scouring the island of the Galapagos archipelago on which he had been found for another of his saddle-backed species, they had unearthed only tortoise shells and skeletons.

Ten years on, and Kirsty and I are happily married with a child.

George, however, remains in his enclosure in Galapagos, a celibate pensioner and the loneliest tortoise in the world.

A new book on his life, Lonesome George: The Life And Loves Of The World's Most Famous Tortoise by the young Cambridge graduate evolutionary biologist Dr Henry Nicholls, is proving something of a bizarre best-seller.

It has even been short-listed for The Royal Society's General Book Prize - the Booker of the animal kingdom.

It tells the extraordinary story of George's lumbering ancestors, his importance in the science of evolution, his discovery and the impassioned and often comical attempts by scientists to snap him out of celibacy. Above all, it describes how, through his long life and back beyond that, mankind has wrought such devastation on his kind.

Let me here declare my hand immodestly as a tortoise expert - and not just because I have had them in our garden since childhood.

I am also the author of Timothy The Tortoise: The Remarkable Story Of The Nation's Oldest Pet, which recounts the life and times of the tortoise who lived at Powderham Castle, the family seat of the

Earls of Devon, until his death in 2004 at the grand old age of 164.

Timothy lived at the castle for more than a century on a luxurious diet of elderflower and strawberry leaves. He was a national institution who witnessed great moments in Britain's history.

Born in the reign of Victoria, he was an enduring image of the Empire, the size of a medium-range Le Creuset cooking pot - in comparison to giant George, he was a dwarf.

Before arriving at the castle, Timothy was at sea, a ship's mascot serving on HMS Queen during the bombardment of Sebastopol in the Crimean War in 1854.

He was an old man by the time the Wright Brothers pioneered the first motorised flight in 1903 and well into his hundreds when he survived the bombing of Exeter during World War II.

A concert by the group Status Quo at Powderham Castle in the 1980s was mild by comparison.

That is the thing about tortoises. They are so often very, very old and have experienced so much more than any of us ever will.

"Tortoises are such intriguing beings," says Dr Nicholls, "because they have seen things only our grandparents saw, and only our grandchildren will see after us."

There is no birth certificate for George so the estimates of his age vary wildly - from 80 to 200 - but we do at least know he is a 5ft-long giant, weighing 200lb.

It was in 1972 that he was discovered on the remote island of Pinta, one of the dozen islands which comprise the Galapagos - made famous as a result of Charles Darwin in 1835.

Darwin's visit enabled him to study the wildlife and develop his theories on the Origin of Species, sparking the whole debate about man's evolution.

In those days, the islands were crawling with giant tortoises and, though a naturalist, Darwin was apparently a bit of a brute to the ones he saw.

"I frequently got on their backs," he wrote,

"and then giving a few raps on the hinder parts of their shells, they would rise up and walk away."

He gave the Galapagos marine iguanas a hard time, too: "They will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump in the water...I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by a retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood."

Tortoises, in those days, were seen as a plentiful source of food. The American writer Herman Melville passed through here, gathering material which would end up in his book Moby Dick, and the logbooks of 19th-century whaling vessels suggest that the main reason to stop off at the island of Pinta was to capture tortoises for supper.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the emphasis shifted from eating giant tortoises to taking them for scientific collections.

Most specimens taken live eventually died on the journey and were destined, to be stuffed for museum collections; others perished in the cold winters in Britain.

Back in Galapagos, many of those that survived the sailors' onslaught were decimated by the creatures they brought with them to the islands: donkeys trampled their nests, goats ate their food, dogs, pigs and rats devoured their eggs.

Goats on Galapagos became so brazen that they would stand on the backs of tortoises to reach the most succulent leaves of bushes.

So it was that George became the last of his species of Pinta tortoises - noted for their distinctive saddleback shells and long necks and wrinkled skin like old parchment.

He was spotted ambling on Pinta's black lava shoreline by researchers who thought his breed had died but who had heard a tortoise was on the island.

"When the animal raised its head 3ft in the air," said one of them, "I recognised the primeval stare of the British Museum specimens."

George was taken to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Galapagos, arriving in good physical condition.

This hasn't always been the case. Indeed, soon afterwards, he became worryingly fat due to an over-indulgent warden.

Then George suffered a fall, and word spread that he had died - he was certainly ill, but he pulled through.

On a couple of occasions, a cactus toppled into his enclosure and he ate the whole plant, suffering a nasty bout of constipation.

But in the main, George's health is mostly tip-top. For a tortoise in his hundreds, he should be in his sexual prime. Yet George has steadfastly refused to mate. This has not been for the want of trying.

First, females from a different giant tortoise species were put into his enclosure.

He showed no interest, even when the number of females were increased to orgiastic proportions.

The lack of activity in his corral led to all sorts of speculation.

"Visit Lonesome George, the world's oldest gay living turtle", touted one American travel agent.

Then, for four months in 1994, Swiss zoology graduate Sveva Grigioni made it her task to encourage his libido.

She spent days with him in the enclosure, trying to gain his trust.

"He was very shy at the beginning," she explains.

"He is such a big animal and he was so afraid."

To encourage him to loosen up, she smeared herself with female tortoise hormones, or pheromones, a sort of "come-and-get-me" signal.

And she succeeded where nobody has before or since. First she confirmed his sexual anatomy was normal.

Then she got him to show signs of sexual activity.

"Day by day, he became more interested in the females," she wrote. "He started to try copulation but it was like he didn't really know how."

Just as Grigioni and George were getting somewhere, her time at the research centre came to an end.

And George returned to sexual torpor, the state he remains in today as the biggest tourist attraction of the Galapagos.

It would, of course, be wrong if George was simply being used as a commercial ploy to get more funding for the Charles Darwin Research Station on the Galapagos or as a mere bait to attract more visitors who did not fully comprehend his uniqueness and rarity.

But Dr Nicholls believes the research centre is the only chance for George to perpetuate his species.

"Getting George to reproduce is, frankly, a long shot," he admits. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try."

"One day, George will give up the tortoise ghost.

"His remains must stay at the research station. Even in death it is here that he will have his greatest audience."

I feel the same about Timothy, and still visit his grave under the purple wisteria at Powderham Castle.

Curiously, like George, he did not mate - unless you accept his attempts to mount the late Lord Devon's wartime helmet.

Lonesome George: The Life And Loves Of The World's Most Famous Tortoise by Henry Nicholls is published by Pan Paperback at £7.99.