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86 By 1962, Tom Harrisson was convinced that the green turtle population of Sarawak was crashing. It was true that his Turtle Board staff had collected over a million eggs and sold them at one pound sterling per one hundred. But his predecessor, Edward Banks, had recorded an annual harvest upwards of four million eggs. Harrisson’s annual egg numbers were declining steadily and at an accelerating rate. To stem the loss, he decided to expand the conservation program on the Turtle Islands. Although the Turtle Board expected him to get the maximum revenue from the eggs, Harrisson nevertheless told his staff to replant a full 10 percent of the eggs collected from the nests into the hatchery, and to do so with even more care. He was delighted later when the hatch rate reached 70 percent. This was far better than what Hendrickson had gotten in 1954. And Harrisson had the staff protect the hand-reared hatchlings for longer than Hendrickson had and take them farther beyond the reef before they released them.1 The data resulting from Hendrickson’s tagging studies were beginning to alarm Harrisson. They showed that the females nested multiple times within a given nesting season. The nesting population’s size was therefore much smaller than Harrisson initially assumed. They showed too that once the nesting season was over, the turtles moved away great distances. Harrisson believed their migrations might be comparable to that of the great whales. If this were so, the turtles could be swimming as far as the treacherous waters of the Pacific around Christmas and Johnston islands, where atomic bombs were being tested. If his sea turtles were to be saved from extinction, they would require protection in the distant waters where they spent the bulk of their time. He wrote, “Alas, there is plenty of reason to think that outside our waters their modern troubles really begin.”2 It took Harrisson quite a bit longer to realize that the Turtle Board’s egg harvesting itself might be reducing the numbers. He had agreed with chapter six A Turtle Flap in London A Turtle Flap in London 87 Hendrickson’s conclusion that egg collection was a potentially sustainable use of the turtles, whereas killing them for their flesh was decidedly not. Harrisson attributed the beginning of the egg decline to the mistreatment of the rookery during the Japanese occupation before he became curator. After that, the turtles’ habitat was degraded by the rapid economic development following Rajah Brooke’s transfer of sovereignty and the concurrent decline in the authority of the Turtle Board. Harrisson no longer controlled the waters around the islands; they were now teeming with peril for turtles, from motor boats and fishing fleets, to pollution and the bright lights that shone from shore at water level. To Harrisson’s mind, the value of green turtle flesh as food was the main reason for the decline. To combat this peril, he decided to publicize the green turtle’s plight to a larger audience than was likely to be reading his beloved Sarawak Museum Journal. An active member of Britain ’s Fauna Preservation Society, Harrisson sent an article to his friends on the editorial board of the society’s quarterly, Oryx, entitled “The Present and Future of the Green Turtle.” He quoted Carr as having called Chelonia mydas the “most valuable reptile in the world,” but wrote: “Unfortunately , this value is reflected again in the great reptile’s alternative common name ‘the Edible turtle’. Under the richly ironic scientific name of mydas, this ponderous marine has poured its rich juices into centuries of banquets proffered by the Lord Mayor of London or President of the United States. Genuine turtle soup is still a top status symbol in upperclass diet through most of the civilized world—except South-east Asia.”3 Harrisson believed the taboo against eating turtle flesh had saved the green turtle in that region but was, sadly, now beginning to break down because of population pressure and the disturbance of traditional conservation laws and patterns. Despite his numerous projects as museum curator and government ethnologist, Harrisson’s particular passion was wildlife conservation, something he shared with the woman he had married. Barbara Harrisson ’s specific concern was for the orangutan. She established a sanctuary for orphaned orangutans in the Harrissons’ home in Kuching and another in the mountains of Borneo to protect them from the depredations of the pet and zoo trade. Commercial collectors often killed the mothers...

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