So Excellent a Fishe!

Our book today is 1867′s So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles by the great Archie Carr, the one-time professor of Zoology at the University of Florida who also wrote the classic natural history memoir The Windward Road (recently re-issued in a lovely paperback by the University Press of Florida – hint, hint!). So Excellent a Fishe is Carr’s account of the magnificent animals who swam through his imagination for so many decades of his life, the five genera of sea turtles left in the modern world: loggerheads (Caretta), ridleys (Lepidochelys), hawksbills (Eretomochelys), green turtles (Chelonia), and leatherbacks (Dermochelys).

The great Carl Safina, in his own book on sea turtles, 2006′s Voyage of the Turtle, indulges in one of his predictably beautiful flights of enthusiasm (if we have a better living writer of natural history, I’ve never heard of that lucky person): “Through jewel-hued sultry blue lagoons, through waters wild and green and cold, stroke these angels of the deep – ancient, ageless, great-grandparents of the world.”

Crusty old Carr, with his watery eyes, his carapace of brusqueness, his odd, out-of-element grace, and his unfathomable kindness, is much less poetic in his book than Safina, and he’s in some ways concerned with much more practical things. In his day as in ours, sea turtles are routinely slaughtered by humans and served up as delicacies in restuarants, and Carr devoted the whole of his life as a teacher, a writer, and a conservationist to saving the world’s sea turtles before they were gone completely. The fact that there are any left in the world today is owed more to Archie Carr than to any other single person (“You’ve done a lot for turtles,” his absolutely wonderful wife Marjorie once grinningly summed up, with her typical matter-of-factness; “They’ve done a lot for me too,” he replied, in a rare, wild excess of excitement).

So Excellent a Fishe is one of his many studies of those turtles, and it’s his best. He was fascinated by every aspect of turtle life, including the abiding mysteries of their navigation abilities, which seem present right out of the egg:

The trip of the little turtles to the water begins when they break out of the nest. This may be located on unobstructed beach sloping evenly toward a sea that lies in full view. More likely, however, teh location of the nest gives the hatchlings a first view of nothing but sand and sky. In either case the little turleds have got to find the water, and unless they are eaten they nearly always do. After a few short false starts they begin to crawl, and almost at once swing into the general direction of the sea. They move around, through, or over obstacles, and go up or down slopes with unswerving “confidence” in whatever sign it is that marks the ocean for them. They can find it by daylight or at night, in all weather except heavy rain, with the sun or moon hidden, or shining brightly in any part of the sky. The main guiding cue is not yet wholly understood.

While plumbing these “senses beyond the sense of man,” Carr came in contact with a great many sea turtles and had the weird, thought-halting experience of encountering these enormous creatures when they’ve crawled up onto the alien world of their birth:

At breeding time, when survival is in the most delicate balance, all sea turtles leave the familiar safety of the sea, where they have grown to a size that makes them almost immune to predation, and lumber ashore and expose themselves and their offspring to the hazards of the land. A green turtle on shore is almost defenseless. She weighs an average of nearly three hundred pounds but seems almost wholly unable to use her bulk and strength in active self-defense. She is awkward of gait, myopic of vision, and single-track of mind.

So Excellent a Fishe is in many ways a battle report, and the original version is full of black-and-white photos of turtles clambering laboriously out of the surf and overcoming all obstacles in order to reach their breeding sands. For hundreds of years, the worst of those obstacles was, as Safina puts it, “a man with a machete,” and although there are occasional conservation success stories, it’s a grim likelihood that sea turtles, like all other megafauna on Earth, won’t survive the press of ten billion humans who’ll inhabit this planet before the present century is out. So Carr’s books may serve as unintended epitaphs as well to these creatures whose kind was old when the dinosaurs appeared and who placidly watched them disappear.

However that goes, Carr gave them a small extra lease on life – and this smart, informative book is the story of how he did it.