THE TURTLERS. 375 



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 Benjamin Strobel, 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 logger- 

 head 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 an- 

 swer 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 extraordinai'y 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 re- 

 sembling 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 



