Sea Control - Sea Control 227 - The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean with Dr. Sharika Crawford

Episode Date: February 14, 2021

The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation and Boundary Making, by Sharika Crawford, University of North Carolina Press (2020). Sea Control 206: The Cod Wars with Will Reynolds and Walker Mills, CIMSEC (October 11, 2020) “The Cod Wars Today: Lessons from an Almost War,” by Walker Mills, CIMSEC (July 28, 2020). Sea Control 219: USCG Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz, CIMSEC (December 27, 2020). A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South During Prohibition, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, University of North Carolina Press (2021). To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire, by Jason Smith, University of North Carolina Press (2018). Home Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the North Atlantic, by James Rentfrow, Naval Institute Press (2014). Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean, by Vanessa Mongey, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela, by Cristina Soriano, University of New Mexico Press (2019). The Smuggler’s World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth Century Venezuela, by Jesse Cromwell, University of North Carolina Press (2018).

Hey folks, Jared here. This week we have Walker Mills hosting and he's joined by author Dr. Sharika Crawford to discuss her book, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making. Listen to the conversation, then have your pencils ready around the 34 minute mark when Sharika rattles off a whole list of great reading recommendations on the Caribbean, or you can check the show notes. They're all listed there as well. Aside from that, I'm recording this intro on Wednesday, February 10th, and we are in the midst of our site migration, meaning that we at SimSec can't update any posts or put up any new material. Hopefully we're through that by the time this

airs on Saturday evening, but if not, rest assured that we are working to get this done as quickly as possible and that we are all grateful for your patience. The reason we're able to make these structural changes and upgrade our support agreement right now, though, is you. Our Right Fight Win holiday campaign was successful enough to allow us to make a few infrastructural improvements, so thanks to those who donated. And if you haven't yet, you can still donate on the website or add us as your preferred nonprofit on Amazon Smile so you can support us while you shop. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron

brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. This week, we are talking with Dr. Sharika Crawford, who is a professor at the United States Naval Academy. Sharika, we're excited to have you here. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about your new book, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making in the Intersection of Fisheries and Maritime Boundary Disputes. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Yes, thank you for having me on, Walker. I am a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean.

I received my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2009. And before that, I did a master's in Latin American studies at UCLA. And then my undergraduate work was in anthropology. So I've been kind of an interdisciplinary scholar, if you will, but history is at the forefront. My interests have primarily focused on Colombia and the Colombian islands of San Andres and Providencia in the Western Caribbean, and that's how I kind of became what many historians think of as kind of a circum-Caribbean scholar. And then again, before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of the institutions that we are associated with. Sharika, now that you've

introduced yourself, I'd like you to introduce your book. Who are turtle men and why are they the last turtle men and what do they have to do with boundary making and maritime disputes? Okay, so let's see. The last turtle men are or were primarily men and sometimes even boys who grew up on the small islands in western and southwestern Caribbean communities such as the Cayman Islands. I just briefly referenced the Colombian Islands of San Andres and Providencia, but also coastal communities in Central America that face the Caribbean, whether we're talking about Turtle Bogue in Costa Rica, or we're looking at Nicaragua. And these are communities that hunted primarily two forms or two types of turtles commercially, and I can talk a little

about them later. And the reason why they're the last is because turtle fishing is no longer really legal, nor is it viable sustainably, pretty much since the 1970s. So you might find communities that still partake in the consumption of eating turtle meat or turtle eggs, but you don't have a viable, legal turtle fishing industry any longer in the Caribbean. And how they're related to maritime boundaries, I was fascinated to discover that multiple Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations really started to harden and assert their sense of territorial rights at sea in order to kind of control or limit access to these marine resources, such as turtles to outsiders, those who were not part of the national bodies. And therefore,

turtle fishing, which is sort of an odd maritime activity, became really important in kind of shaping understandings of national maritime boundaries. I think that that intersection that you just mentioned, Sharika, of the boundaries and the kind of obscure fishing of turtles is really what was the most interesting to me, certainly got me interested in your book, and I think it's probably one of the most interesting pieces to our listeners. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you conducted your research? Because reading through the book, you've got stuff that's definitely historical research and almost all the way up into the present. Yeah. So, you know, I'm a historian. So I started out really finding these snippets

of incidences surrounding turtle fishing disputes first in Columbia. And that kind of led me to do some archival research in the United States, but also in Costa Rica and eventually in the British Cayman Islands. But then when I was at the Cayman Islands National Archive, I was fortunate to find this treasure trove of documents, which were essentially oral histories, kind of life histories of the Caymanian community. And for our listeners who think of the Cayman Islands as a beautiful beach resort place, beautiful, you know, sandy beaches to swim in, it has that. But prior to tourism, pretty much being popular in mid 20th century, the economy was surrounded by one economic activity, and that was turtle fishing. And so you have 50, 80 transcribed, long, thick

life histories of former turtle fishermen explaining how they hunted turtle, their travels, the disputes they had, problems with their families. And I relied a lot on what we might think of as ethnographic kind of material. And then I supplemented that, of course, with newspaper reports, scientific publications, photographs, maps, and of course, traveling to a lot of these locations. It also helps to set the scene in terms of understanding the people in some of their customs, travel accounts from the 19th century.

So it was a variety of material that I fortunately had available to me. Were you able to conduct some of your own interviews that made it into the book? No, none that proved as viable as the ones that I was able to find at the Cayman Island National Archive. There's a wonderful scholar in Columbia who's an anthropologist who works on maritime activities from Providencia. And she and I worked together on a previous article. So she had done some wonderful interviews that I had access to, but it didn't prove necessary for me. And could you give us a sense of how large these communities are? And like you mentioned, Shurika, some of our listeners may have visited the Cayman Islands or these coastal regions.

But I remember being kind of surprised by what I felt like was how few turtle fishermen there actually were at any given time in these communities. Absolutely. So when we think of the Cayman Islands, and I should tell the listeners, essentially, that we're talking about the period from, let's say, 1870s, 80s, until about the 1970s. And these communities were very small in total numbers. We're talking about 2,000 to 5,000 people total, for example, on the islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Little Cayman Islands, the three inhabited islands that make up the Cayman Islands. We had about 7,000 by 1930 on San Andres and Providencia Islands. So these are already small communities. And so we're talking at a given time, maybe 70 men, give or take 70 to 100 men. There would have been slightly more mid-19th century, but as I talk about in the book, over the course of the late 19th to the 20th century, as turtle fishing techniques mature, become more sophisticated, hunting becomes more lengthy, we also see a decline in turtles because of overfishing, and therefore you can't have as many hunters out at sea. I know you have a previous body of work that touches on San Andres and Providencia. Were you able to build on that? Or was this kind of a new theme for you, the turtle fishing? Absolutely. That's how I came to the project. I had studied the islands of San Andres and Provencia. And for our listeners, it's kind of akin to maybe, I don't know, America, Samoa or Puerto Rico to the United States. It's a part of Colombia, but the population is very distinct.

And so I was interested in very different questions. But when I went back to kind of the sources that I had collected, I had noticed a lot of discussion about turtle fishing and there was conflicts with government officials over turtle fishing. And when I've spent time on the islands, and I've spent many, many years living there, people actually consume turtle to this day. They cook it and make it in their stews. And it made me start to question a little bit more about kind of the economic viability of a marine resource like turtles. And then as I did a little bit more reading, I learned that it was very widely a part of this Western Caribbean culture. And I sort of just followed the breadcrumbs. So all of my research started in Colombia and it pushed me outward to other places in the Caribbean region. It would be fair to say that turtle hunting in the Western Caribbean, at least in the first half of the 20th century, had kind of a disproportionate cultural impact on the region. Yes. And I would actually even argue that those who probably in the 17th century, the best examples of kind of the turtle men were actually not those on the Caribbean islands themselves. There were the Mesquitu indigenous populations on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.

These were very skilled fishermen and turtle hunters to the point that we have like famous pirates and buccaneers who would actually have them on their voyages in order so that they could always keep a fresh supply of turtle meat, which was actually a desirable maritime victual for a lot of ship captains to have as part of their provisions. And so we've seen changes over the course of the last several hundred years about which populations hunted turtle, how they've hunted turtle, and then the larger impact in terms of geopolitical consequences. To me, that was one of the, another one of the interesting parts of the book was to see these little snippets where you pulled out famous explorers or pirates or other famous or infamous Caribbean figures that listeners might have heard of. And you're like, oh, they were eating, basically they were eating turtles the whole time, or the deck of their ship

would have been covered with turtles that they were waiting to eat. And also, I think you talk about how the turtle products are going much farther afield than the Caribbean, at least by the 20th century. And I'm podcasting right now from Philadelphia, home on leave, and Philadelphia kept coming up as a place where, I'm forgetting the term, but the turtle backs were going to make glasses and snuff tins. For the tortoise shell, yeah. The tortoise shell, exactly. That was it. Even though they're not tortoises, they're turtles. Yeah, so I guess I should mention to the listeners the two types of turtle that are being hunted primarily in this Western Caribbean trade. So the first is the green turtle. It's a large turtle, one of the largest types, up to 600, 700 pounds. And it's an adult life. It's a vegetarian. So the meat is very desirable to eat. There's all these descriptions of it being veal-like, lean and gelatinous in their soup.

And so it becomes very popular for turtle soup, which becomes kind of a British kind of Atlantic phenomenon that you find up along the Eastern Seabourn in Philadelphia with men's and gentlemen's clubs in New York City. And that's a very viable and an important part of the trade. A more profitable trade, however, was that of the hawksbill turtle, which was not desired at all, mostly for its meat, for reasons that I'll get into a moment. But it was desired for its scales, the scutes on its back, which, you know, have this multicolor, you know, which I'm wearing a kind of a cheaper version of a tortoiseshell frames right now. But in the 19th and early 20th century, before the introduction of plastics, you know, most of the kind of glass frames would have made out of tortoiseshell. And so it was very, very profitable, but a very kind of niche luxury market sort of trade coming out of the Atlantic. And I want to shift back now to the maritime disputes around specifically San Andres and Providencia. And as you know, and our listeners may or may not remember, I actually work in Colombia. So I have a little bit of familiarity with those, even though I haven't actually been to the islands myself. At what point did the turtle fishing come into maritime disputes? And we're kind of talking between Nicaragua and Colombia. Yes. So to kind of orient our listeners visually to the geography of the Caribbean,

Colombia, which is at the northern, what we would think of as the northern portion of South America facing the Caribbean Sea, about a little over like around 200 miles away, they have an archipelago of islands that are a part of the nation for reasons that I don't have time to get into. The population is ethnically and linguistically and culturally distinct, but they're a part of Colombia. They speak English, they're Protestant, and they're very much involved in trade with other places in the Caribbean, like Jamaica, for example, to kind of orient your listeners. But Jamaica, again, is very far away from these islands. They're sort of isolated. Their most close neighbors are those in Nicaragua. Because of their isolation, in terms of its closeness to

Colombia, they are in a state of vulnerability, particularly in the aftermath of Panama's independence in 1903. There's vying competition from Nicaragua, but even before that from Costa Rica, as to whether or not this is really Colombian territory. And what I started to notice very early on in the 19-teens was that there was islanders who were making claims that were really upset that the Colombian government is not doing more to protect our access to fishing in the waters near our islands. And we're seeing these foreigners coming with their foreign flags on these ships, and they're picking up these marine resources, these turtles, right? And they see the British flag. And the Colombian government, it's a little bit slow, but eventually kind of takes up

this call to action because they're also in a growing dispute with Nicaragua over who should have access to these islands. And to add that onto the mix, you also have the United States, which is sort of rising an advent of interest in the region. And they too are not quite clear who has possession of the islands. And therefore, there's these growing competitive claims as to who can access the water, who controls the islands, who has the ability to most provide security in terms of these islands. And turtles become front and center, which is what I became really fascinated with when I started the project. So I'm always looking for linkages and allegories. And one of the ones that immediately sprung to my mind is this series of interstate conflicts

between Iceland and the United Kingdom with a couple of other nations called the Cod Wars. And it was in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. And SimSec has done a podcast and some writing on this previously, which we'll link to. But I think it's the same kind of deal where when the fish start getting or the turtles start getting scarce, nations start having to figure out who can fish where. And so I wondered, as you were kind of writing this book or as you're watching other maritime disputes unfold, do you see there there are parallels to current events or other things going on or other other maritime conflicts? Oh, absolutely. As you were giving that example, I thought about the United States and Canada and then, you know, in the North Pacific with the Salish Sea or the salmon fisheries. We think about China and, you know, the South Seas. This was, it actually has been going on for quite some time in the Asia Pacific context. I think you hit it on the nail, right? You have a mobile, like an ecologically mobile commodity that you don't have the control over where it's going to go.

And then you have questions of, is it sustainable? Like there's a decline and there's competition to access it. And we also have to keep in mind, this is starting to be the period of the 19th century is when, at least in Latin America, and I think we see it later in the 20th century for maybe other countries in the global south and east, the countries are in a position of having navies. navies. You know, they're starting to develop their own navies. They're starting to talk about maritime security. And fisheries has always been an ongoing problem. It doesn't get the same attention in the news, right? It's not like flashy and exciting. But I think that on a day-to-day basis, I think that the people who do the work of doing kind of naval and maritime security probably were not unfamiliar with incidences as the ones that I describe in my book. For sure. And I think that we're starting to see, you know, I had the opportunity to talk with the colonel of the Coast Guard, Admiral Carl Schultz, a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things we

talked about is how they just released a strategy on illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing and how this is becoming a bigger issue. And one of the things that he said, and I've heard before from Admiral Fowler, who's the commander of U.S. Southern Command, is that especially in Latin America, these nations, I don't want to say they're waking up to it, but they're at least raising their voices together and saying that this is a big issue. And, you know, it's reminding me of the large Chinese fishing fleet that was kind of off the Galapagos and maybe up to no good. And even more recently in the last couple of weeks, it seemed like there were some at least back and forth with the Brexit, the Brexit deal and France over who's going to have rights to

some of these fishing grounds. And, you know, if you had fished here for a hundred years or several hundred years, does that mean you can keep fishing there even if it's in some other country's exclusive economic zone, et cetera? I think what you're describing, Walker, that they're ongoing and they're not really resolved. I don't think we've really resolved these issues, right? I mean, they're competing claims. So on the one hand, you have the claim that you just laid out, kind of artisanal or native fishermen, right, who are making a claim that we've done this multi-generate, my family, my people have hunted or fished in this particular region for a very long time, and therefore I have the right to continue to do it. And those were the

kinds of claims that I saw many of the turtle men in my study make. And then you have nations who are using these kind of modern political systems of trying to control what is essentially very hard to control the sea. It's fluid by its nature, right? The wildlife that lives in the sea, it doesn't stay put. It moves, which is why the people in my study were having problems. They had to follow where the turtles went and they went to other areas. And so these are really, I think, competing claims. Whose claim is going to win out? Is it going to be the state's version or which state's version of having claims over a territorial water? And for our listeners, traditionally it had been three miles. So three miles from a coastline is what you could claim

as being a part of your nation. And anything further is open sea, which is commons. It's for everyone. And what we started to see, Elise, in my study, and I think Walker knows there's other cases of this, is that different countries are going to make claims that that's not really true. And so that becomes the conflict, right? Who's right? Is it the generational argument for long-term communities of fishing who have had access to fishing spots? Or is it these new modern political claims as to security and control of economic privileges? Absolutely. And I would say kind of tongue-in-cheek, I think in this study and in some of the other studies, what comes to mind is the only way that the disputes are resolved is when

the fish or the turtles are all gone. And then unfortunately, there's nothing left to fight over. How does turtle fishing compare, at least the history of it, to whaling? I think some of our listeners probably have never really thought about turtle hunting before, but they may be more familiar with the history of whaling, which I think looms a little larger in the imagination. Absolutely. So there were two kinds of whaling, remember? So we had originally shore whaling, which is kind of traditional. You see it in Japan originally and in the Inuit communities, Even in New England, prior to the arrival of Europeans. But what we're mostly thinking of is kind of the 18th and 19th century whaling industry, capitalists organized. You have wealthy individuals who basically fund a large whaling ship. They staff a crew, usually internationally over time, and they take upwards to a year-long voyage, in part because they've overfished whales in nearby fishing grounds.

And essentially the workers, they make money off of shares, the profits that come after a very long voyage, and it's very little. Turtle fishing has similar processes as whaling in the sense that, one, initially it was coastal. They only went to long-distance turtle fishing after they've overfished turtle in nearby waters. By the 19th century, you do have investors who are sponsoring turtle fishing trips that will extend turtle men further out. But where it really differs is that whaling in the process on the ship was like a machine. It was like a factory on a ship. You know, they either harpoon the whale or they capture the whale, bring it back on the ship, and then they have to process it there on the ship. I mean, it's the smell of the blood.

It's just it can't be imagined. That's not what's happening on a turtle voyage. Turtles are kept alive for the for at least for the green turtles. They're kept alive. You can keep them alive for a very long time. So usually they would either be brought to Cayman Islands. Sometimes in prior to the 1850s to Jamaica, you keep them in a water pen until you have a ship that's going to New York, Florida, London, you know, somewhere else to market. Eventually, they'll just ship them directly to the United States. And then for tortoise shell, you do find that there is a need to slaughter them on site. So they don't slaughter them on the ship, they slaughter them usually on a key or a coastline somewhere on site, and then they process them by the shell, they send them overboard. So whaling, both in terms of its size and scale, it's just much more, it's just larger than what the turtle industry is doing. It doesn't make as much money. It's nowhere comparable in terms of the scale.

And it's not as highly mechanized in terms of the factory-like processing of the actual animal in the course of the voyage. shurika can you can you tell us kind of how the the turtling ended obviously that's kind of included in your in your book we keep kind of bookmarking ourselves in the you know in the 1970s give or take so what what happened to the turtling industry in the western caribbean well twofold one we see a slow decline of the availability of of turtles overfishing becomes part of the story. And so as we have fewer turtles to hunt, you have fewer men who will seek turtle fishing as an occupation. So there's a very small concentration of turtle hunters. But you also find that as this is taking place, we're seeing the rise of marine environmentalism or environmentalism

at large mid 20th century. And that leads particularly to a concern about sea and sea animals with the rise of a herpetologist, actually, basically a guy who studies reptiles named Archie Carr. He was a University of Florida professor. He became a massive traveler in Central America, became very interested in understanding like turtle migration and became the first advocate to save turtles. And he's known as a sea turtle conservationist. And his efforts helped to create international laws that identified sea turtles as endangered or critically endangered animals. And then he worked very conscientiously with countries in the Caribbean, the United States and Europe to impart laws that made it unlawful, therefore collapsing

essentially wild turtle fishing. In one of your chapters, you mentioned that during prohibition at a time when the turtles were getting more scarce, some of the turtle men were using the boats and the maritime knowledge that they had to basically be rum runners and smuggle illegal liquor into the United States. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, that was just kind of fascinating. Because of these life histories, people just talked. I mean, they talked a lot. And so I kept annotating and noting down anywhere I saw this. So between 1920 to 1933, our listeners probably remember alcohol consumption and sale was banned in the US. However, it was still being brought in primarily through routes in the Caribbean.

So you had Caymanian men who were unable to find work, really good work any longer in turtle fishing, but they had these boats. And so they became part of a circuit, both Caymanians and those who are from the Bay Islands off the coast of Central America in Honduras. They became these rum runners, essentially, and it was fleeting, but they would mention that they were picking up rum, they would have to go to Havana, they often went to Florida was the primary marketplace, or at least entry point. There was a couple of cases where they talked about skirmishes with the law, because oftentimes, they didn't come all the way up to the coastline, they would often be met by an American ship that would meet them in deep waters, and then transfer, I guess, the liquor there. There's been some really interesting studies. Most recently, in 2018, there's a book by Lisa Lindquist-Doer has a book, and she's looking at smuggling in the Prohibition era from the Caribbean, and I think probably largely from Cuba. But again, I would say that this is another backdrop story of the Caribbean. And I'm sure, Walker, you've seen some of this. The Caribbean is a place that is known for smuggling. It always has been a place for smuggling, particularly little tiny islands that are hard to get to and no one knows about. They make the perfect spot to hide all kinds of items that were deemed unlawful to trade. Definitely. I mean, I was immediately reminded of some of the research that I've been doing about illicit networks in the Caribbean. And I think there's also a link, and this is something that I believe Admiral Schultz told our listeners a couple weeks ago, that illegal and unregulated and reporting phishing can be kind of a gateway into these other illicit networks. And I'm not necessarily accusing these, these turtle men of, of doing that because the regulatory structures, you know, didn't, didn't, didn't always exist then. But certainly the idea that, yeah, if you have a small boat and you're very knowledgeable about your region and you're kind of crossing in these, in these gray areas and these ungoverned spaces, you know, you can pick up turtles and, or you can also move illegal goods and maybe you're moving turtles illegally. And the boundary there, I think is quite fluid. Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, it's hard for us, because I think in the US anyway, we have a national debate, you know, particularly because we think about drugs and illicit trade, and therefore there's a moral component. But that discussion, that debate doesn't exist in all places in all times. So it's just as you described, it's sort of just kind of a livelihood choice. Like, you know, what can I do to make a living? The larger kind of moral implications or the lawfulness component doesn't have a high component in the thinking of the decision makers at that time.

And something you might may or may not know, Sharika, is that of these people call them narco subs or semi submersible vessels that are that are used to carry about a third, give or take is the best estimate of the cocaine coming out of Columbia. The first one that was ever discovered by law enforcement was discovered in 1993 in San Andreas Island. And not that necessarily is connected to turtle fishing, but at least the idea that these are spaces somewhat less governed or I don't know. You know, I think you could say either on one hand, that's just a coincidence, or on another hand, maybe there is something going on there. So I thought that was interesting. No, no, I appreciate you sharing that with me. One, I didn't know that even after spending many, like over 20 years of my life back and

forth going to San Andres, I didn't know that that was the history. But two, I do think there is a link. I don't think we've studied it enough. And I saw it in the Cayman Islands as well. They had a high number of their population that had been incarcerated, you know, in the United States in part because of this drug trafficking, you know, back and forth. So to your point, there are histories of illicit trades, histories of smuggling of all kinds of commodities, and there probably is linkages that we haven't paid as close attention to that parallel to this

present day. And I think one might also argue that there's a history of innovation there. Certainly these narco submarines were innovative, but I think you also, I'm briefly forgetting the name, But there was a special type of boat that they developed to use for turtling, was there not? Yes, the cat boat. So there's been a lot of archaeological, like anthropological studies, maritime anthropological studies about Caribbean maritime culture. And one of them was the use of their boats, what kind of boat were they using. And basically because of the overfishing that disallowed coastal capturing of turtles, you have by the 19th century Caymanians particularly traveling very lengthy distances, which resulted in them having these innovative changes in terms of their physical cat boats. So essentially, you would get on a schooner or sloop. You have, you know, several of these cat boats that would drop members of your crew further into the deep ocean, usually to set nets.

Right. And then they had to have these cat boats basically designed in a way that they could hold, you know, large numbers of turtles to carry back onto the sloop or the schooner. And so, yes, I mean, it's quite innovative. And they're also teaching other communities as they're interacting over long periods of time. So the Mesquitu, as I mentioned, in the 18th century, who were going on those pirate ships who were known as the harpooners, eventually we see them in the 20th century using nets. How did they learn those nets? They're learning it from the Caymanians who they keep seeing coming into their waters and they're bartering and trading with them. And so there's a shared kind of system of kind of indigenous or local maritime knowledge, whether in boat making or in terms of sharing of nets or techniques. Obviously, we've made pretty clear that these communities aren't still relying on turtling. What kind of industry has replaced it in the Western Caribbean? So in the Cayman Islands, what you see is that the island went from turtle fishing into tourism to banking. So we also know that it's a center for financial institutions to place their income there. But in places like San Andres and Providencia, turtling was never the primary economic activity.

It was a kind of an ancillary one. Coconut economy actually was its primary. And it started to collapse in the 1930s. And it wasn't until the 1950s when tourism emerges in Colombia. Tourism from Colombia to the islands essentially is where that starts to replace it. And they've never quite had any other kind of industry. That being said, fishing in the local fisheries is always happening. They're fishing lobster, right? In part, some of the disputes that Colombia has had with Nicaragua recently over that kind of maritime space has to do with fishing, but not fishing of turtle, fishing of lobster and other kinds of sea life. And then in these coastal communities, they really are kind of living subsistence.

These are, you know, they're having a little plot of land that they're able to grow a little food. They go out to do some fishing. There's no major industry, maybe like a lumber industry might have been there and it collapsed or might have been a banana plantation. It was formerly there, but it collapsed. So these are often communities that are still struggling, whether on the coastal portions of Central America and to a lesser degree on the islands who are relying on tourism as the primary form of economic activity. And I would just add to our listeners who may or may not know that the recent, I think it was like two months ago, Hurricane Iota came through. And really, I think as it upgraded from Category 4 to Category 5, it sat right on top of Providencia. And then it came in and did some pretty severe damage in coastal Central America as well, unfortunately. Working in the Caribbean myself, you know, sometimes I look for good histories of the region. And I feel like I'm coming up a little short, you know, so I feel like at least from my kind of inch deep view that the region might be lacking some of the scrutiny that we get in maritime spaces elsewhere.

Are there good authors or really good books, histories of the region or especially from the security perspective that you could recommend to our listeners if they're interested in the Western Caribbean or the Greater Caribbean? Yes, so I'm going to have two types of recommendations. So ones that deal more directly with maybe maritime security or kind of naval, U.S. naval presence, for example. I love recently Jason Smith's work. It's called Masterless Sea. It's out of the University of North Carolina Press. Jason Smith teaches at Southern Connecticut History. And some of your listeners may have encountered him at a McMullen Naval History Symposium. And his work looks at the U.S. Navy cartography, the environment. So this kind of idea of how does the U.S. Navy control this vast Caribbean Sea in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And he does talk a lot about the Caribbean. So the Caribbean is one of the spaces that the U.S. Navy spends time in. I have a former colleague, Captain James Renfro, who wrote a book about the U.S. Navy in the 19th century as well. Home Squadron. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. it came out in 2015. And he looks at the rise of the U.S. Navy prior to the Civil War, prior to the Spanish-American War of 1898, that really kind of sheds light on. And I thought that those are two really good stories, very different. One is more kind of an operational history. The other is a more kind of environmental sort of history of the U.S. Navy. As a Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist, there is a lot of wonderful stories coming or histories coming out about the Caribbean,

particularly in the 19th century. There's this like a renaissance. I would show you the rogue revolutionaries, the fight for legitimacy in the greater Caribbean is a wonderful book looking at a lot of these unknown maritime spaces and how countries respond to revolutions and pseudo revolutionaries trying to, you know, kind of instigate rebellion. There is works from Christina Soriano, who is a historian at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. She has a wonderful book on colonial Venezuela, and she looks at a lot of the networks of information, how it's shared. And then finally, Jesse Cromwell, who teaches in Mississippi. He has a wonderful book about smuggling in the colonial period. So it kind of gives you that colonial Caribbean edge. So a lot

of the work, I think, is looking at the 1800s, early 1800s, the age of Atlantic revolutions, but in insightful and innovative and different ways than had been previously done. Awesome. And we'll make sure we put links to all those below the podcast so our listeners don't have to keep listening to think they got the author's name right. The last thing I want to ask is, what's the status of the turtle populations? And this was something that you used, I guess it's kind of a bookend. You kind of started your book with more of a biological description of the turtles, and then you kind of ended it with a, what's the status of those populations now? The status is disappointing, but slightly hopeful. So the work of Archie Carr,

particularly in Costa Rica, really did make a positive difference in trying to see the slow, but building up of a turtle population on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. So there has been positive gains there. So the conservation efforts there have worked. However, green and hawksbill turtles are still viewed as endangered species. And that has in part to do not just with like local consumption of turtles in a variety of ways. It has to do with a lot of, let's just be honest, the ships passing in the Caribbean,

And whether we're talking about big commercial fisheries who are scraping literally the ocean bed and they pick up turtles by accident. It has to do with passenger cruise ship. Right. And a lot of pollution that is happening in the waters. And so that that contaminates and there's plastics and there's there's all these other human made problems that are really kind of the problem for these turtle populations. But if we can use Archie Carr's model in Costa Rica of his conservation efforts to be replicated elsewhere, perhaps we can kind of stem the tide. There's an opportunity to see a slow repopulation of the Caribbean's original sea turtle population. Before we close out, Tarika, do you have any final thoughts or last comments that you want to leave us with? I just I thank you so much, Walker, for inviting me here. I should have told our listeners I teach at the U.S. Naval Academy and I'm a civilian. And I think in part my work about maritime disputes was definitely colored by working in a naval environment where, you know, midshipmen, you know, I'm thinking all the time, like, what do I teach to them? that's going to be useful when they're going to be an officer or they're going to be a Marine.

And I'm not sure if all of them would fully appreciate a story about my Turtle Men of the Caribbean, but I definitely felt that it was important to think about security. And I know that that was definitely started because of my work at the Academy in Annapolis. So I just wanted to share that with listeners that even having this conversation with you, I wouldn't have imagined that I would be here, but it's really because of that connection, it's helped me to think through these historical moments in very different ways. Awesome. No, I think there's definitely a strong connection there. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and get this kind of slight departure from our more security, security, security, war, combat focused podcast and content.

But as I mentioned before, and as I brought out with Admiral Schultz, and I had a recent conversation that hasn't been posted yet with Claude Baraby, also at the United States Naval Academy. And he has some really interesting work focused on NGOs and ocean conservation. And I think that's something we're going to be seeing a lot more of. So I appreciate what you're doing at the Naval Academy. So unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Professor Sharika Crawford of the United States Naval Academy for joining today. Again, her book is The Last Turtleman of the Caribbean, Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary making. And it's available from the University of North Carolina Press. Sharika, is there anything

that you're currently working on? And then where can our listeners find you online? I am very eager to return back to Colombia and to return back to my original topic, looking at these beautiful islands of San Andres and Providencia, which have had a complicated political and social history within the Republic of Colombia. So I'm looking at a a 20th century social and political history of those islands. And listeners can find me at the United States Naval Academy. I have a faculty webpage. If you type in my first and last name in Google, you will surely find the link. Thank you for joining me. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Sea Control is produced and edited by

Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Sal and William McQuiston. Again, the opinions presented in this podcast are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we are associated with. ¶¶