So Excellent a Fishe, A Natural History of Sea Turtles.

Garden City, NY: The American Museum of Natural History, The Natural History Press, 1967. Octavo, cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, x, 248 pp. Fine in a Near Fine dust jacket with sunned spine. From dust jacket: In 1620, the Bermuda Assembly passed a law to inhibit fishermen who “snatch & catch up indifferentlye all kinds of Tortoyses both yonge and old little and great and soe carrye awaye and devoure them to the much decay of so excellent a fishe...” To the seamen of the Spanish Main, the green turtle was as important as the buffalo farther north. There were countless numbers of sea turtles on the Caribbean beaches when the sailors first arrived, but as they were slaughtered for food they soon all but disappeared. Today the marine turtle is still revered by the gourmet. There is, however, another reason for halting its extinction: the sea turtle performs some of the most complex navigational manoeuvres known in the animal world, as it travels from its feeding grounds to its place of birth to nest -- a trip over 1400 miles of ocean with absolutely no “landmarks” to guide it. For over a decade Archie Carr has been living in the Caribbean -- studying the green turtle and its remarkable migration; the result of his research in this volume -- a natural history of this “so excellent a fishe” as only a great naturalist writer can tell it.