Page:Ornithological biography, or an account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America, vol 2.djvu/411

Rh crew, for all of them had already been satiated with turtle soup, but my friends the Herons, of which I had a goodly number alive in coops, in- tending to carry them to John Bachman of Charleston, and other persons for whom I ever feel a sincere regard. So I went to a " crawl," accom- panied by Dr, to inquire about prices, when, to my surprise, I found that the smaller the turtles, above ten pounds weight, the dearer they were, and that I could have purchased one of the loggerhead kind that weighed more than seven hundred pounds, for little more money than another of only thirty pounds. While I gazed on the large one, I thought of the soups the contents of its shell would have furnished for a "Lord Mayor s dinner," of the numerous eggs which its swollen body contained, and of the curious carriage which might be made of its shell, — a car in which Venus herself might sail over the Carribbean sea, provided her tender doves lent their aid in drawing the divinity, and pro- vided no shark or hurricane came to upset it. The turtler assured me that although the "great monster" was in fact better meat than any other of a less size, there was no disposing of it, unless indeed it had been in his power to have sent it to some very distant market. I would wilUng- ly have purchased it, but I knew that if killed, its flesh could not keep much longer than a day, and on that account I bought eight or ten small ones, which " my friends" really relished exceedingly, and which served to support them for a long time.

Turtles such as I have spoken of, are caught in various ways on the coasts of the Floridas, or in estuaries and rivers. Some turtlers are in the habit of setting great nets across the entrance of streams, so as to answer the purpose either at the flow or at the ebb of the waters. These nets are formed of very large meshes, into which the turtles partially enter, when, the more they attempt to extricate themselves, the more they get entangled. Others harpoon them in the usual manner; but in my estimation no method is equal to that employed by Mr Egan, the Pilot of Indian Isle.

That extraordinary turtler had an iron instrument, which he called a peg, and which at each end had a point not unlike what nail-makers call a brad, it being four-cornered but flattish, and of a shape somewhat resembling the beak of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, together with a neck and shoulder. Between the two shoulders of this instrument a fine tough line, fifty or more fathoms in length, was fastened by one end being passed through a hole in the centre of the peg, and the hue itsself