On October 11, 1830, under the headline “Points of Honour”, The Times reported that “Colonel Montgomery was shot in a duel about a dog, Captain Ramsay in one about a servant, Mr Fetherson in one about a recruit, Sterne’s father in one about a goose, and another gentleman in one about an ‘acre of anchovies’.”

Whatever the purpose or true nature of the anchovies, the world into which Harriet the giant tortoise was born on or about that date was unquestionably different from the one in which she now lives out her twilight years in the affectionate embrace of Australia Zoo on the Gold Coast of Queensland. Indeed, she might imagine that the only constant, apart from this newspaper’s wry concision, was humanity’s preoccupation with honour. It was honour that made Col. Montgomery take a bullet for a dog, and it has become a point of honour for Harriet’s keepers that she really was plucked from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin himself.

Perhaps she was. But he would have conceived of evolution even if she wasn’t, for it was a mere human, boasting that he could tell which island a tortoise came from just by looking at it, who planted the idea in the great naturalist’s mind. What is remarkable about Harriet is the brute bulk of her eight score years and 15, during which we have graduated from steam to interplanetary rocketry, dreamed up and rejected communism, allowed live breakfast broadcasts to New York from Buckingham Palace — and hunted giant tortoises to the brink of extinction. What Harriet was doing for the years before the rest of us were born only she knows, and she ain’t saying.