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76 Another scholar who was drawn to the green turtle was James J. Parsons. Neither a zoologist nor a curator but a geographer from the University of California at Berkeley, Parsons believed a geographer’s place was in the field. He was, in fact, an economic geographer with a regional focus on Latin America. By the mid-1950s, Parsons had studied a range of topics in American agriculture and natural resource–based industries. Plants were his particular passion; his detailed assessment of the introduction of African grasses to the Americas became a classic in the field. While Parsons was studying the geography of the Miskito pine savanna, the southernmost stand of pine on the American continent, he came across Archie Carr’s 1953 book, High Jungles and Low, and its vivid description of forests along the part of the eastern Nicaraguan coast known as the Miskito Shore.1 Carr had written the book after returning to Florida from his four-year stint teaching at the Pan-American School of Agriculture in Honduras.2 Parsons visited and wrote about the English-speaking settlements of the Miskito Shore and the offshore islands of San Andrés and Providencia .3 The trade that connected these islands with the Miskito coast introduced Parsons to a different species of the American tropics, whose interesting geography had not yet been told. Switching from flora to fauna, he decided to document the geography of exploitation of the green turtle. The Green Turtle and Man When he began to explore what was known about the green turtle, Parsons soon realized that Archie Carr had also begun to focus on the green turtle, finding in the literature accounts of Carr’s research in Florida and Costa Rica, alongside the studies reported by Tom Harrisson and John Hendrickson from Borneo and Malaya. Between these three scientists, chapter five The Geography of Turtle Soup The Geography of Turtle Soup 77 the green turtle’s nesting and migration habits were well on the way to being understood. But the history of exploitation of the green turtle had never been pulled together in one account. Parsons decided he would enlarge upon the growing biological knowledge with an account of man’s use of the green turtle, illustrating the impact of this use with a map of all the nesting and feeding areas where turtles and their eggs had been hunted, the turtle places that no longer existed and the few that remained. He would explore the different cultural attitudes toward eating turtle flesh and eggs and the history of international trade in green turtles. He would also document where governments had tried to manage the exploitation with licenses and prohibitions, following the unsuccessful 1620 Bermuda ordinance , which Carr had quoted in his Handbook of Turtles. To get all this information, Parsons corresponded with the turtle scientists , with the many geography colleagues he had around the world, and with trade officials in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, peppering his correspondents with questions about turtle localities and markets and the practices of local peoples. He asked John Hendrickson about marine turtle localities and cultural practices in Southeast Asia, noting Hendrickson ’s account of the origins of the Muslim attitudes toward eating turtles that appeared in his 1958 paper in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. To fill a gap in information on the turtles of Siam, Hendrickson told Parsons to try to obtain a paper that a Thai naval officer had presented at the November 1957 Pacific Science Congress in Bangkok.4 Parsons began his 1962 book The Green Turtle and Man with an essay on the “the world’s most valuable reptile.” After a brief review of what was then known of the green turtle’s biology, he described the cultural attitudes toward the meat and eggs. The European view of the turtle’s value had evolved over time. When first discovered, the green turtle was valued only as an antidote to scurvy but soon became a staple of the West Indian plantation and colonial diet. By the Victorian era green turtle soup was a prestige food enjoyed only by the wealthy, “a symbol of Victorian opulence” occupying the same class of fare as the oyster. In other cultures, eating turtle flesh was a cultural taboo, although the eggs were collected and consumed in vast amounts. Parsons compiled dozens of historical and modern accounts of human uses of green turtles, documenting how the green became the focus of a [18.226.222...

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