In the final chapters of Galapagos, Leon Trout ponders how Mary and Captain von Kleist's relationship might have been rekindled, reveals that that is to become of the story's remaining protagonists and recounts the manner in which he came to Sweden following his service in the Vietnam War.
In the story's twelfth chapter, Trout discloses the names of the six Kanka-bono women: Sinka, Lor, Lira, Dirno, Nanno and Keel. It is later in this chapter that an aged Mary Hepburn, eighty years old for the sake of minutiae, visits the Captain, who is now afflicted by Alzheimer's disease and whom Akiko has nursed for the last several years.
Upon Akiko's departure to see to her four year old son, the derailed Captain seizes Mandarax from Mary's old hands and proceeds to chuck it onto the slope of the island's shoal. In Mary's effort to retrieve her prized possession, she and Mandarax are eaten by a great white shark.
In his months subsequent the Vietnam War, Trout was sent to Bangkok, Thailand for "Rest and Recreation", where he came upon a private physician, a fan of his father's science-fiction, much to Leon's dismay, who urged him to seek treatment for his syphilis in Sweden.
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