In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

62 When Archie Carr rose to give the keynote address to the meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, he had a different group of turtle islands on his mind. Christopher Columbus called them Las Tortugas. The islands were teeming with sea turtles that looked “like little rocks,” Columbus wrote in his journal in May 1503, during his fourth voyage to the New World. The islands he described would later come to be known as the Cayman Islands, and their vast herds, or “fleets,” of breeding green turtles would supply European voyagers, vessels, and colonies for the next 300 years.1 It was September 6, 1954, and Carr had been thinking about the turtles of the Caribbean for more than a decade. On that day in Gainesville , he talked of Chelonia, how its size and abundance reflected its straightforward ecology, and how its taste and ease of capture supported the opening up of the Caribbean and probably the entire New World. “All early activity in the New World tropics—exploration, colonization, buccaneering and the maneuvering of naval squadrons—was in some way dependent on the turtle,” Carr said. Grazing all day in vast herds on submarine grasses, “they grew fat and numerous and succulent, and in every way a blessing.” But it was a blessing that was short-lived. The last fleets of Chelonia were passing; he believed fervently that unless the turtle was “effectively protected it may soon be extirpated as a breeding resident of American waters.” The green turtle would go the way of the buffalo, but without the notice and drama that accompanied that extermination. The green turtle was simply “too good to last.”2 Six Big Questions Carr had come to believe that the Atlantic green turtle was destined for premature extinction two years earlier while writing his taxonomic chapter four The Gifted Navigators The Gifted Navigators 63 treatise on turtles, Handbook of Turtles. In writing the notes on the Atlantic green turtle, he had found historical sources on Bermuda and Jamaica describing the extirpation of one rookery after another as the New World’s turtles fed the new colonies and the visiting navies. He cited Samuel Garman, whose 1884 report on the reptiles of Bermuda described how the Bermuda Assembly in 1620 was so concerned about overexploitation that it passed “An Act Agaynst the Killinge of ouer Young Tortoyses,” prohibiting the killing of turtle less than eighteen inches in diameter from the waters around Bermuda to a distance of five leagues.3 In the 1950s, green turtles were still being exported in large numbers from the Caribbean to the United States. Carr had seen the impact of this trade with his own eyes as he scouted the Caribbean for sea turtle nesting beaches. Turtle soup canneries still operated in the United States and Europe, and Queensland was still exporting turtles caught by Aboriginal fishing companies.4 But the Cayman Islands no longer had the magnificent breeding fleet that Columbus had seen. To stay in the turtle trade once their own herd was gone, the Cayman Islanders had built a fleet of turtle fishing schooners to find seagrass pastures where the green turtle could still be hunted. For the last hundred years or so, the Cayman schooners specialized in catching the green turtles residing on the Miskito Banks, some 350 miles away, off the coast of Nicaragua in the western Caribbean. Since long before the war, Carr told his audience of biologists, a green turtle cannery in Key West, Florida, has done a brisk trade with the schooners of Grand Cayman.5 Carr hastened to say that the Miskito Bank turtle fishery was not the most serious drain on the greens of the Caribbean. That was happening where the turtles gathered and came ashore for breeding in Costa Rica. The capture for export from a place called the Turtle Bogue was a relatively new fishery. Because it took adult breeding turtles, it was likely to be the last straw for Chelonia.6 Carr told his audience that the extirpation of the Atlantic green turtle could be prevented, but the knowledge needed to do so was lacking. The will was there, but the science was not. He noted that “at this point our procedure is blocked by an astonishing ignorance of the biology of the animal. Most of the countries and peoples with a stake in the Caribbean littoral would be in sympathy with the idea of saving the green turtle. [3.139.82.23] Project...

Share