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624095IJH Page Proof Instructions and Queries Journal Title: The International Journal of Maritime History Article Number: 624095 Greetings, and thank you for publishing with SAGE. We have prepared this page proof for your review. Please respond to each of the below queries by digitally marking this PDF using Adobe Reader. Click “Comment” in the upper right corner of Adobe Reader to access the mark-up tools as follows: For textual edits, please use the “Annotations” tools. For formatting requests, questions, or other Please refrain from using the two tools crossed out complicated changes, please insert a comment below, as data loss can occur when using these tools. using “Drawing Markups.” Detailed annotation guidelines can be viewed at: http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdfs/AnnotationGuidelines.pdf Adobe Reader can be downloaded (free) at: http://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html. 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Please note that this proof represents your final opportunity to review your article prior to publication, so please do send all of your changes now. 0010.1177/0843871415624095The International Journal of Maritime HistoryCrawford and Marquez research-article2015 IJMH Article The International Journal of Maritime History A contact zone: The turtle 1 –17 © The Author(s) 2015 commons of the Western Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Caribbean DOI: 10.1177/0843871415624095 ijh.sagepub.com Sharika D Crawford and Ana Isabel Marquez Abstract Turtle fishing has a long history in the Caribbean. Early Caribbean accounts from New World sailors and adventurers noted an abundance of the marine reptile, which quickly became desired for its delicious meat and beautiful shell. Nowhere was the presence of sea turtle more pronounced than in the adjacent cays, banks, and reefs of the Western Caribbean, where Europeans also noted the abilities developed by the indigenous peoples of the region to capture them. By the mid-eighteenth century, English-speaking inhabitants from the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Nicaragua and the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Old Providence took to the sea in search of green and hawksbill turtles. In doing so, they created a robust maritime commerce and distinctive seafaring culture, which continues to exist in these communities. In this article, we argue that the turtle trade facilitated the creation and recreation of a dynamic contact zone of ongoing transnational and cross-cultural encounters among indigenous, European and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants. Keywords Caribbean, fishing, seafaring, turtle In his 1956 publication, The Windward road, Floridian herpetologist Archie Carr mes- merized English-speaking audiences with his whimsical tales of turtle fishing communi- ties along ‘remote Caribbean shores’.1 Traveling from the Caribbean coasts of Mexico 1. Archie Carr, The Windward road: Adventures of a naturalist on remote Caribbean shores (Gainesville, FL, 1979 [1956]). Corresponding author: Sharika D Crawford, Assistant Professor of History, United States Naval Academy – History, 107 Maryland Avenue, Mailstop 12C, Annapolis Maryland 21401, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 The International Journal of Maritime History and Central America to the Windward Islands of Martinique and Tobago to the Cayman Islands, Carr circumvented the Caribbean Sea seeking to learn about the migratory pat- terns of sea turtles. However, his adventures introduced readers to an eclectic maritime community where turtle made for hearty meals and an intrepid livelihood. Turtlers lived and worked along the coastal edges and the islands in between the Caribbean Sea, which had once served as buccaneer and pirate hideouts. By the mid-twentieth century, during the period of Carr’s visits, it was clear that these turtle fishing communities shared a distinctive seafaring tradition that crossed national boundaries as well as races and ethnicities. What was less visible on the agenda and radar of these scientific communities was the destruction of distinctive Caribbean seafaring cultures and maritime communities, which for centuries relied on turtle consumption and commerce. While scholarly atten- tion has focused on the rise of turtle conservationism, less attention has been given to the role of turtle in the development of these fishing communities.2 Academic studies too often portray the turtlers as fanciful or ignorant characters critical to the destruc- tion of these marine reptiles. With the exception of Archie Carr’s The Windward road, most fail to examine the cultures and maritime knowledge associated with the use of these marine reptiles, which led them to develop transnational, cross-cultural encoun- ters among Central American coastal communities and adjacent small islands in the Caribbean Sea.3 Anthropological and cultural geographical analyses of these communities provide a wealth of information on the evolution of the maritime practices of turtling communities. Drawing on studies conducted from the 1970s to the 2000s, it is clear that anthropolo- gists have taken an immense interest in the ethnohistories of turtling communities such as the Miskitu of Tasbapauni in Nicaragua; the Afro-Caribbean communities of Old Harbour, Cahuita, and Turtle Bogue (Tortuguero) in Costa Rica; and the Afro-Caribbean communities of San Andres and Old Providence in Colombia.4 Yet these studies often document and analyze turtling practices in isolation, within a wider context of indige- nous ethnic traditions, or vis-à-vis nationalist politics. Scholars have tended to perceive these maritime practices rather narrowly as an indigenous tradition and either ignore or downplay the vibrant existence of these traditions in non-indigenous communities, 2. Alison Rieser, The case of the green turtle: An uncensored history of a conservation icon (Baltimore, MD, 2012). 3. Carr, Windward road, 149–57 and 206–36. 4. Charles W. Hale, Resistance and contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan state, 1894–1987 (Palo Alto, CA, 1994); Bernard Nietchsmann, Between land and sea: The sub- sistence ecology of the Miskito Indians, eastern Nicaragua (New York, 1973); Paula Palmer, ‘What happen’: A folk-history of Costa Rica’s Talamanca Coast (Miami, FL, 2005 [1974]); Harry G. LeFever, Turtle Bogue: An Afro-Caribbean life and culture in a Costa Rican village (Susquehanna, PA, 1992); James J. Parsons, San Andres and Providencia: English-speaking islands in the Western Caribbean (Berkeley, CA, 1956); Ana Isabel Márquez Perez, ‘Catboats, lanchs, and canoes: Apuntes para una historia de las relaciones de las islas de Providencia y Santa Catalina con el Caribe Centroamericano y Insular a traves del construcccion y el uso de embarcaciones de madera’, Passagens: Revista Internacional de Historia Politica e Cultura Juridica 6, No. 3 (2014), 480–503. Crawford and Marquez 3 which actually guarantee the survival of many of them.5 Our approach is to showcase the ways turtle fishing techniques and tools became shared from indigenous to non-indige- nous fishermen as well as from coastal to island communities. In doing so, we urge read- ers to consider these mariners as part of a seafaring culture that transcends race, ethnicity and nationality. To deepen our understanding of the turtling culture and to understand how this fishing culture adapted and evolved, we focus on the cultural exchanges among Caymanians and the islanders of San Andres and Providencia (Colombia). We draw on both written and oral sources, which include early modern Caribbean travel accounts, newspaper articles, government correspondence and unpublished oral histories. We seek to move beyond scholarship that has merely alluded to, or glossed over, the longstanding maritime con- nections among these island communities.6 Turtle in the Atlantic world Turtle was an essential part of the making of the early modern Atlantic world.7 From the moment European adventurers crossed the Atlantic Ocean and ventured to the large and small islands as well as coastlands in and around the Caribbean Sea, they quickly learned that this marine reptile made for a crucial part of their subsistence and provisions. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, New World explorers and settlers found turtle at every corner of the circum-Caribbean. Impregnated turtles congregated at their nesting grounds near the Caribbean lowlands of Mexico and Costa Rica as well as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, while a variety of turtles grazed on sea grass off the coasts of Nicaragua, Suriname and around the Galapagos Islands (see Figure 1).8 As European sojourners came into contact with indigenous settlements, these newcomers adapted their fishing techniques and developed a taste for turtle. Due to the abundance and easy accessibility of turtle, some chroniclers described seas and beaches as being choked with turtles.9 In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León called a group of small islands west of the Florida peninsula Las Tortugas (later to be known as Dry Tortugas) because his crew once captured