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42 chapter three The Turtle Islands of Sarawak While the epicures of the European capitals were acquiring a taste for green turtle soup and thousands of live turtles were exported from the New World, people in the colonial hinterlands prized the green turtle’s eggs as a delicacy. To feed this taste, eggs were systematically harvested from the major turtle rookeries and marketed. To ensure maximum revenue from this resource, colonial governments in places such as Malaya, Ceylon, and Borneo sold exclusive concessions to egg collectors for specific sections of the nesting beaches. The nesting population that was most affected by these egg harvests was on the Turtle Islands of Sarawak, off the northwestern coast of Borneo . These three tiny coral islands—Talang Talang Besar, Talang Talang Kechil, and Satang Besar—lie off the mouth of the Simitar River and not far from Sarawak’s capital city of Kuching. Eggs were systematically collected from these islands from as early as 1839, just before the establishment of the Brookes dynasty, the rulers known as the “White Rajahs.” The Brookes dynasty began in 1841 when the British baronet James Brooke helped quell a rebellion against the sultanate of Brunei and was rewarded by being made rajah of Sarawak. Brooke’s nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, became the second rajah. He built a natural history museum in Kuching, on the recommendation of the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection independently of Darwin, who had spent two fruitful years of research in Borneo and environs. In 1946, Vyner Brooke, the son of Sir Charles and the last White Rajah, celebrated 100 years of Brooke rule in an enlightened manner. He approved a new constitution for Sarawak, abrogating his absolute powers in favor of a governance structure that would allow the British colony to move toward democratic self-government. Vyner Brooke also adopted a new turtle law. The Turtle Islands of Sarawak were the nesting grounds for one of the largest populations of Chelonia mydas in all of Southeast Asia. The eggs The Turtle Islands of Sarawak 43 from the Turtle Islands were the center of a small industry that began after James Brooke’s suppression of piracy, with the help of the British Navy. Malay businessmen hired the men who did the actual egg collecting and then sold the eggs to merchants in Kuching and the coastal towns of southwestern Borneo. The nesting turtles had fascinated Rajah James Brooke. He wrote detailed observations in his diary of the scene in 1839 when he revisited the islands: “Morning calm. In the afternoon got under way and anchored again near the islands of Talang Talang. . . . The Bandar of the place came off in his canoe to make us welcome. He is a young man sent by the Rajah Muda Hassim to collect turtles’ eggs, which abound in this vicinity, especially on the larger island. The turtles are never molested, for fear of their deserting the spot; and their eggs, to the amount of five or six thousand, are collected every morning, and forwarded at intervals to Sarawak as articles of food.”1 When he visited the islands again three years later while pursuing pirates , James Brooke saw as many as 100 turtles come ashore each night in June and July, perhaps laying as many as 20,000 eggs on a good night. Twenty to forty men lived on the islands. In their watching hut, they waited for nesting females to come ashore. When a turtle had finished covering her nest, the watchers marked the spot with a flag. Brooke noted that the next morning, they “purposely spared some nests” when the eggs were dug up, dried in the sun, crated, and sold to wholesale dealers in Sarawak’s market towns. When Brooke became rajah, he sought to preserve this practice. His penal code made it illegal to kill any sea turtle, meeting such destruction with a heavy fine.2 The second rajah, Sir Charles Brooke, also had ideas about what was best for the Turtle Islands. In 1875, Sir Charles broke the monopoly that Rajah Muda Hassim held over egg collecting and awarded the right to the leading Malay datus, or chiefs, of Sarawak. The datus agreed to rotate control over the egg collecting on an annual basis, each keeping the proceeds from their year of control. Nesting took place all year, but with a definite peak at the end of the northeast monsoon season. This season was met with celebrations, called the...

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