While the negotiations between the United States and Ecuador in the period 1909 to 1913 came to no fruitful conclusion, they still remain a subject of interest because in microcosm they illustrate so well how the Department of State operated in the Taft administration. The negotiations embraced all the standard considerations: strategy, vested American interests, projected loans, power politics, and “ up-lift.” The Department's interest in Ecuador quickened in this period because Ecuador owned the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago which lay six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador and about one thousand miles southwest of the Isthmus of Panama, where the canal was under construction.