Cultural attitudes toward foods, particularly the consumption of animal flesh, may be decisively influenced by religion. Avoidance of sea turtle meat, as with that of the freshwater or land tortoises with which they are often confused, is widespread in South and Southeast Asia (Simoons 1994; Charles Tam-biah, personal communication). The eggs are at the same time, much sought after, prized for their presumed health-giving and aphrodisiac properties. Hinduism holds turtles in veneration. Lord Vishnu is said to have taken the form of a sea turtle during one of his reincarnations, raising the world from chaos and conflict. Turtles are thus depicted as bearers of the world and, as such, command respect. Among the devout the meat is not consumed.
In theory, the Islamic faith prohibits eating the meat of reptiles. However, although this is a restriction affecting vast numbers of shore people around the Indian Ocean, it is apparently not operative in North Africa. But, although the Muslim Malay may not eat turtle, the many Chinese living in Singapore and elsewhere in the area have no aversion to it. Turtles offered in urban markets may be taken in nets or harpooned, but turning them over on the beaches is prohibited.
Buddhists, too, avoid turtle flesh, and to gain favor with the deity, they set free turtles that become entangled in their fishing nets. The Burmese are said to consider turtles divine and keep them in tanks on pagoda grounds where they are fed special foods, but this practice may more often involve river turtles. Early Chinese sources refer to freshwater or land tortoises as symbolic of the good and the long life. Only with the conquest of the south in the Han period (206 B. C. to A. D. 220) did sea turtles become generally available. In T ang times (A. D. 618-907) the green sea turtle and its calipee are recorded as having been a tribute to the royal court paid by the city of Canton (Simoons 1991). In contemporary China, turtles apparently continue to occupy a special niche in folk belief and the apothecary trade. The recent world-record-shattering performances of several female Chinese track-and-field athletes have been attributed to their drinking of turtle blood (Sports Illustrated, October 24,1994).
If there are many cases of abstinence, there are exceptions that test the rule. On Hindu Bali, as among Polynesian and Micronesian groups and converted Christians generally, turtle flesh is especially consumed at festivals and on ceremonial occasions. Pliny long ago wrote of a cave-dwelling people at the entrance to the Red Sea who worshiped the turtle as sacred yet ate its flesh. Among subsistence shoredwelling communities of the Indian subcontinent and those throughout Southeast Asia on whom religions often rest easily, turtle is still likely to provide a significant and palatable dietary supplement as well as a source of occasional cash income. Pagan coastal peoples in Southeast Asia have generally held sea turtle eggs and flesh in high esteem. Among Australian Aborigines who live close to the sea, the green turtle remains a principal totem.
At the same time, many, and perhaps most, of the turtle beaches of these southern seas support intensive egg-collecting operations under licensing systems controlled by local authorities. These systems are often designed to assure that sufficient quantities of eggs are left to support reproduction of the turtle populations. There were, for example, more than 30 such licensed areas for egg collecting not long ago on the east coast of Malaya. The three Turtle Islands off Sarawak until 1950 consistently yielded harvests of from 1 to 2 million eggs a year, the product of a population of perhaps 10,000 females (Hendrickson 1958).Watchers on each island marked new nests each night with flags, returning in the morning to dig and box the eggs for shipment to Kuching, the Sarawak capital. The proceeds went to charities or the mosques. The killing of sea turtles is prohibited in Sarawak, as in most Southeast Asian countries, but poaching is widespread.
The American Experience
Among Native Americans encountered by the first Europeans in the turtle-rich Caribbean, attention appears to have been focused on the giant reptiles as a source of meat, whereas their eggs were of secondary interest. The green turtle was and still is at the base of the diet of such coastal people as the Miskito of Nicaragua and Honduras, the Baja California tribes, and the Seri of Sonora, all living close to major turtle pasturing grounds. In the West Indies, unfortunately, the large populations of nesting and grazing turtles described by the early chroniclers at Grand Cayman, the Dry Tortugas, and Bermuda were quickly exterminated (Carr 1954). Only at Tortuguero in Costa Rica and on tiny Aves Island off Venezuela do the greens continue to congregate in numbers in the Caribbean.
At least one Carib group in the Lesser Antilles was said not to have eaten sea turtle “for being fearful of taking on the characteristics of that reptile” (Rochefort 1606,2: 202).Yet eggs were relished. A similar preoccupation with turtle eggs, rather than turtle flesh, was evident for early Indian peoples on the west coast of Mexico and in Brazil. Turtle eggs are smaller than those of poultry but have more fatty yolk. They are often consumed raw. One might speculate, in terms of conservation, whether it is better to take the turtles or their eggs. Had both been subject to unrestrained exploitation, the prospects for the survival of the species would have been bleak much earlier.
The Europeans who first came into contact with the green and hawksbill populations of the Caribbean were not of one accord in their judgment of this fortuitously accessible new resource. The Spanish and Portuguese seemed for the most part uninterested in turtle. Alvise da Cadamosto, the first Portuguese to mention what must have been the green turtle, fed it to his crew in the Cape Verde Islands in 1456 and found it “a good and healthy” food. Fernandez de
Oviedo y Valdez, in his Historia Natural of 1526, agreed. But most Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers of the early period ignored the animal or suspected it of being poisonous; it was the later-arriving English who were most outspoken in their praise of the green turtle’s virtues (Parsons 1962). Its health-giving qualities were much commented upon by observers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To John Fryer (1909: 306), writing of East India and Persia in the late seventeenth century, it was “neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, restoring vigor to the body and giving it a grace and luster as elegant as viper wine does to consumptive persons and worn out prostitutes.”
Many an ill-disposed Englishman on Jamaica went to the Cayman Islands during the turtling season to recover his health by feasting on turtle. As a cure for scurvy and relief from the monotony of a hardtack and salt-beef diet, the meat was much prized by explorers, merchantmen, and buccaneers. The great clumsy creatures were abundant, easy to catch, and most important in the tropical heat, able to be kept alive on the decks of ships for weeks. The late. Archie Carr (1973) suggested that the green turtle more than any other dietary factor supported the opening up of the Caribbean. It seems to have played a similar role in the Indian Ocean. William Dampier, that rough seaman who, Oliver Goldsmith observed, added more to natural history than half the philosophers who went before him, made repeated and extensive references to sea turtles as a shipboard meat reserve in his Voyages, written between 1681 and 1688 (Dampier 1906). In his eyes, the eggs were for natives.
Learning from the Miskito
The coastal Miskito are the world’s foremost sea turtle people (Carr 1973; Nietschmann 1973, 1979). The coral cays and shelf off their Nicaraguan home coast are the principal feeding ground for green turtles from the renowned Tortuguero rookery, some 200 miles to the south in Costa Rica. Under subsistence exploitation regulated by local Miskito communities with strong cultural, religious, and economic ties to the species, the population remained stable. But with commercialization, first by Cayman Islanders who had seen the turtles of their own island decimated, and then by other foreign interests, extraction rates became excessive. Yet this coast, between Cape Gracias a Dios and Bluefields, still supports the largest remaining population of greens, and also hawksbills, in the Caribbean. With the recent establishment of the Miskito Coast Protected Area, there is prospect for a return to culturally regulated exploitation after a long period of overuse (Nietschmann 1991).
The Miskito may have taught the English to appreciate turtle. As early as 1633, a trading station had been established among the Miskitos at Cape Gracias a Dios by English adventurers from the Puritan colony at Old Providence Island. From the beginning, relations between natives and traders were amicable, encouraging a sort of symbiotic relationship that was nurtured in part by mutual antagonism toward the Spaniard. The Indians, superb boatmen, had an “eye” for turtles that never ceased to amaze the Europeans. Many an English and Dutch pirate vessel carried at least one Miskito man as a “striker” to harpoon turtle for the mess table. “Their chief employment in their own country,” wrote Dampier,
Is to strike fish, turtle, and manatee. . . . for this they are esteemed by all privateers, for one or two of them in a ship will maintain 100 men, so that when we careen our ships we choose commonly places where there is plenty of turtle or manatee for these Miskito men to strike; it is very rare to find privateers without one or more of them. (Dampier 1906,1:39)
Caymanian turtlers were working the Miskito shore by at least 1837. From Grand Cayman, turtle boats could reach the cays in three or four days. The turtlers assembled their catch at temporary camps in the cays, carrying them north at the end of the season to be kept in “crawls” until marketed. From 2,000 to 4,000 turtles were taken annually. (A turtle-soup cannery was established in Grand Cayman in 1952 by the Colonial Development Corporation, but it closed after one year.) When, in 1967, this traditional arrangement with the Caymanian turtlers was terminated by the Somoza government and turtling rights were granted to higher bidders, the extraction rate soared to an insupportable
10,000 a year. By 1979, international conservation pressure had forced the Nicaraguan government to shut down the turtle companies and to ban further commercial exploitation (Nietschmann 1993).
Turtle was in as great demand as a slave food in the West Indian colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as was salt cod from Newfoundland. But the reptile was also enjoyed by the West Indian white aristocracy. It was considered a special delicacy when eaten fresh. “To eat this animal is the highest perfection,” wrote Goldsmith (1825: 164), “instead of bringing the turtle to the epicure, he ought to be transported to the turtle.” Janet Schaw, describing her visit to. Antigua in the 1770s, wrote:
I have now seen turtle almost every day, and though I never could eat it at home, am vastly fond of it here, where it is indeed a very different thing. You get nothing but old ones there [London], the “chickens” being unable to stand the voyage; and even these are starved, or at best fed on coarse and improper food. Here they are young, tender, fresh from the water, where they feed as delicately and are as great epicures as those who feed on them. (Schaw 1939:95)
The special quality of turtle soup was said to be that it did not “cloy” In other words, one could eat almost any quantity without ill effects. Its easily assimilated proteins, without carbohydrate or fat, were proclaimed to prepare the stomach in superb fashion for what was to come. When banquets started with this soup, the diner was considered best able to enjoy the numerous rich dishes to follow. Goldsmith wrote that turtle “has become a favorite food of those who are desirous of eating a great deal without surfeiting. . . . by the importation of it alone among us, gluttony is freed from one of its greatest restraints” (1825: 674). The soup, flavored with sherry, capsicums, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg, and served piping hot, was considered at its fiery best “when, after having eaten, one is obliged to rest with his mouth wide open, and cool the fevered palate with Madeira or Port” (Simmonds 1883: 366). In 20 years in the West Indies, one doctor professed, he had never heard of an “accident” arising from eating it! It was also held to be an ideal food for convalescents, especially when served in jellied form.
The Dutch, although they partook of it, seem to have been rather indifferent to turtle in the East, perhaps because of their close association with the Malays, who avoided the meat. In the West, the French, while interested, found but a limited supply of green turtle available to them, most of the best turtling grounds being under English control. From the seventeenth-century account of Pere Labat, a Dominican monk, it is evident that the animal’s merits were not unrecognized. Yet it did not rate so much as a mention in Brillat-Savarin’s exhaustive Physiologie du gout, written in 1825. For the French, turtle was clearly an English dish.
World History
