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Sharika Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

Madison Albano

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Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, coastal Central American and Caribbean nations vied for control over maritime regions. In her book The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, author Sharika D. Crawford argues that although many historians have studied the commodity chains of land-based commodities such as sugar or silver, the history of aquatic-based commodities has received less critical attention. Although the terrain of islands like Santo Domingo and Cuba were well suited to plantation-based systems of agricultural production, other regions like the Cayman Islands were not. However, in the early colonial period, such islands were populated with a surplus of turtles which settlers eventually hunted and transformed into commodities. First used as sustenance for populations of sailors, the meat of green turtles gained popularity amongst London consumers, and throughout the Atlantic world, tortoiseshell products made from the shells of hawksbill turtles were used widely. Crawford’s book, however, focuses on a period in which overfishing had depleted the majority of the turtle population throughout the Cayman Island population. Although turtlemen had fished in such regions for centuries, by the end of the 1800s, they had to travel farther to access turtle populations - much to the chagrin of nearby nations who sought to assert their own maritime boundaries and profit off of the coasts they laid claim to.

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Image of different Sea Turtle species. Smithsonian Ocean , Smithsonian institution.

 

Throughout her book, Crawford narrates the relationship between sea turtles and the men who spent their lives hunting them. In her final chapter, she analyzes the development of the twenty-first century scientific study of turtle behavior and uses research from the herpetologist Archie Carr. While tagging and tracking turtles, Carr realized just how far throughout the Atlantic world turtles were willing to migrate to. Crawford argues that the men who hunted turtles shared a similar relationship to the migrating turtle populations of turtles. For many Caymanian turtlemen of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean was an economically precarious space; many sailors became “itinerant” and “pursued better opportunities” by venturing to other regions of the British Atlantic empire to either work as turtlemen traveling from port to port to trade their turtles or to search for other work opportunities (Crawford 62). Likewise, reoccurring natural disasters which threatened the homes of many turtlemen forced them to relocate from island to island. Crawford uses the small narratives of individual turtlemen to demonstrate how they became involved in a wider network of contact and trade – both the trade of turtles and the trade of knowledge. Many Caymanian turtlemen borrowed their hunting techniques from Miskito people indigenous to the Caribbean, who relied on turtles for food throughout the pre-Columbian era. Besides contact with Miskito people, sailors traded live turtles to consumers in London, New York, and eventually Florida, where workers transformed these turtles into food or tortoiseshell products. Overall, Crawford argues that many Caribbean turtlemen implicated themselves in a wider network of trade and migration.

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However, this wide network of mobility and trade was rife with tensions. By using correspondence from colonial and state officials, Crawford argues that newly independent nations like Nicaragua and Colombia as well as Spanish-controlled Cuba sought to fortify their maritime boundaries by limiting foreign turtemen’s ability to hunt along their coasts. Such governments enacted new laws that required turtlemen to either carry turtling licenses or pay a tax on all of their catch. This increase in policing and regulations at times resulted in the detainment of foreign turtlemen; oftentimes, British state officials intervened in defense of the detained turtlemen. When Colombian authorities detained two ships full of British Caribbean turtlers, British authorities argued that oceans should be free spaces, and that the Colombian government did not have sufficient control of their coasts but rather were jealous at the expertise of Caymanian turtlemen and the economic threat their skillfulness represented to Colombian authorities. Not only did the British empire implicate itself in struggles over coastal land claims, the US did as well. As Caymanian sailors contested Nicaragua’s claims to the Miskito Cays, US officials who occupied Nicaragua during the early twentieth century sought to defend the economic interests of Nicaragua; if foreign turtlers were hunting in territory that Nicaraguan governments claimed, the turtlers may have hunted goods that otherwise could have been profitable for the Nicaraguan state. Crawford argues that the expanding presence of Caymanian turtlemen throughout the Caribbean furthered local nations’ attempts to solidify and establish maritime borders.

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Archie Carr with a Turtle. Florida Museum, Department of National History.

Overall, Crawford presents several convincing arguments in her book The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean about the role that turtlemen played in the interconnected maritime sphere of the Caribbean. Her argument that the depletion of turtle populations motivated Caymanian sailors to expand their hunting networks, and such increased contact in turn lead to territorial disputes that forced nations to establish claims to their borders is particularly convincing. Such argument demonstrates that a commodity as simple as turtles could transform the ways in which states defined themselves and interacted with one another.

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Linocut titled "The Turtle Hunter" by Andrew Wanambi Margalulu, 1999. 

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