"I accompanied Cardozo in many wanderings on the Solimoes, during which we visited the 'praias' (sand islands), the turtle pools in the forests, and the by-streams and lakes of the great desert river. His object was mainly to superintend the business of digging up turtle eggs on the sandbanks, having been elected commandant for the year by the municipal council of Ega, of the 'praia real' of Shimuni, the one lying nearest to Ega. There are four of these royal praias within the Ega district, a distance of 150 miles from the town, all of which are visited annually by the Ega people for the purpose of collecting eggs and extracting oil from their yolks. Each has its commander, whose business is to make arrangements for securing to every inhabitant an equal chance in the egg harvest, by placing sentinels to protect the turtles whilst laying, and so forth. The pregnant turtles descend from the interior pools to the main river in July and August, before the outlets dry up, and there seek in countless swarms their favourite sand-islands; for it is only a few praias that are selected by them out of the great number existing. The young animals remain in the pools throughout the dry season. These breeding places of turtles then lie 20 to 30 or more feet above the level of the river, and are accessible only by cutting roads through the dense forest....
"We found the two sentinels lodged in a corner of the praia, where it commences at the foot of the towering forest-wall of the island, having built for themselves a little rancho with poles and palm-leaves. Great precautions are obliged to be taken to avoid disturbing the sensitive turtles, who, previous to crawling ashore to lay, assemble in great shoals off the sand-bank. The men, during this time, take care not to show themselves, and warn off any fisherman who wishes to pass near the place....
"I rose from my hammock by daylight, shivering with cold; a praia, on account of the great radiation of heat in the night from the sand, being towards the dawn the coldest place that can be found in this climate. Cardozo and the men were already up watching the turtles. The sentinels had erected for this purpose a stage about fifty feet high, on a tall tree near their station, the ascent to which was by a roughly made ladder of woody lianas. They are enabled, by observing the turtles from their watch-tower, to ascertain the date of successive deposits of eggs, and thus guide the commandant in fixing the time for the general invitation to the Ega people.
"The turtles lay their eggs by night, leaving the water, when nothing disturbs them, in vast crowds, and crawling to the central and highest part of the praia. These places are, of course, the last to go under water when, in unusually wet seasons, the river rises before the eggs are hatched by the heat of the sand.... The hours between midnight and dawn are the busiest. The turtles excavate with their broad webbed paws deep holes in the fine sand; the first-comer, in each case, making a pit about three feet deep, laying its eggs (about 120 in number), and covering them with sand; the next making its deposit at the top of that of its predecessor, and so on until every pit is full. The whole body of turtles frequenting a praia does not finish laying in less than fourteen or fifteen days, even when there is no interruption. When all have done, the area (called by the Brazilians 'taboleiro') over which they have excavated is distinguishable from the rest of the praia only by signs of the sand having been a little disturbed.
"I mounted the sentinel's stage just in time to see the turtles retreating to the water on the opposite side of the sand-bank, after having laid their eggs. The sight was well worth the trouble of ascending the shaky ladder. They were about a mile off, but the surface of the sands was blackened with the multitudes which were waddling towards the river; the margin of the praia was rather steep, and they all seemed to tumble head first down the declivity into the water.... Placards were posted up on the church doors at Ega, announcing that the excavation on Shimuni would commence on the 17th of October, and on Catuá, sixty miles below Shimuni, on the 25th. By the morning of the 17th some 400 persons were assembled on the borders of the sand-bank, each family having erected a rude temporary shed of poles and palm-leaves to protect themselves from the sun and rain. Large copper kettles to prepare the oil, and hundreds of red earthenware jars, were scattered about on the sand.
"The excavation of the taboleiro, collecting the eggs, and purifying the oil, occupied four days. All was done on a system established by the old Portuguese governors, probably more than a century ago. The commandant first took down the names of all the masters of households, with the number of persons each intended to employ in digging; he then exacted a payment of 140 reis (about 4d.) a head towards defraying the expense of sentinels. The whole were then allowed to go to the taboleiro. They ranged themselves round the circle, each person armed with a paddle, to be used as a spade, and then all began simultaneously to dig on a signal being given–the roll of drums–by order of the commandant. It was an animating sight to behold the wide circle of rival diggers throwing up clouds of sand in their energetic labours, and working gradually towards the centre of the ring. A little rest was taken during the great heat of mid-day, and in the evening the eggs were carried to the huts in baskets. By the end of the second day the taboleiro was exhausted; large mounds of eggs, some of them four to five feet in height, were then seen by the side of each hut, the produce of the labour of the family.
"In the hurry of digging, some of the deeper nests are passed over; to find these out, the people go about provided with a long steel or wooden probe, the presence of the eggs being discoverable by the ease with which the spit enters the sand. When no more eggs are to be found, the mashing process begins. The egg, it may be here mentioned, has a flexible or leathery shell; it is quite round, and somewhat larger than a hen's egg. The whole heap is thrown into an empty canoe and mashed with wooden prongs; but sometimes naked Indians and children jump into the mass and tread it down, besmearing themselves with yolk, and making about as filthy a scene as can well be imagined. This being finished, water is poured into the canoe, and the fatty mass is then left for a few hours to be heated by the sun, on which the oil separates and rises to the surface. The floating oil is afterwards skimmed off with long spoons, made by tying large mussel-shells to the end of rods, and purified over the fire in copper kettles.
"The destruction of turtle eggs every year by these proceedings is enormous. At least 6000 jars, holding each three gallons of the oil, are exported annually from the Upper Amazons and the Madeira to Para, where it is used for lighting, frying fish, and other purposes. It may be fairly estimated that 2000 more jarfuls are consumed by the inhabitants of the villages on the river. Now, it takes twelve basketfuls of eggs, or about 6000, by the wasteful process followed, to make one jar of oil. The total number of eggs annually destroyed amounts, therefore, to 48 millions. As each turtle lays about 120, it follows that the yearly offspring of 400,000 turtles is thus annihilated. A vast number, nevertheless, remain undetected; and these would probably be sufficient to keep the turtle population of these rivers up to the mark, if the people did not follow the wasteful practice of lying in wait for the newly-hatched young, and collecting them by thousands for eating; their tender flesh, and the remains of yolk in their entrails, being considered a great delicacy. The chief natural enemies of the turtle are vultures and alligators, which devour the newly-hatched young as they descend in shoals to the water. These must have destroyed an immensely greater number before the European settlers began to appropriate the eggs than they do now. It is almost doubtful if this natural persecution did not act as effectively in checking the increase of the turtle as the artificial destruction now does. If we are to believe the tradition of the Indians, however, it had not this result; for they say that formerly the waters teemed as thickly with turtles as the air does now with mosquitoes. The universal opinion of the settlers on the Upper Amazon is, that the turtle has very greatly decreased in numbers, and is still annually decreasing.
"The principal object of another expedition was to search certain pools in the forest for young turtle. We started from the praia at sunrise on the 7th of October in two canoes, containing twenty-three persons, nineteen of whom were Indians. The pool covered an area of about four or five acres, and was closely hemmed in by the forest, which, in picturesque variety and grouping of trees and foliage, exceeded almost everything I had yet witnessed. The margins for some distance were swampy, and covered with large tufts of fine grass. The pool was nowhere more than five feet deep, one foot of which was not water, but extremely fine and soft mud.
"Cardozo and I spent an hour paddling about. The Indians seemed to think that netting the animals, as Cardozo proposed doing, was not lawful sport, and wished first to have an hour or two's old-fashioned practice with their weapons. I was astonished at the skill which they displayed in shooting turtles from little stages made of poles and cross pieces of wood. They did not wait for their coming to the surface to breathe, but watched for the slight movements in the water which revealed their presence underneath. These little tracts on the water are called the siriré; the instant one was perceived an arrow flew from the bow of the nearest man, and never failed to pierce the shell of the submerged animal. When the turtle was very distant, of course the aim had to be taken at a considerable elevation, but the marksmen preferred a longish range, because the arrow then fell more perpendicularly on the shell, and entered it more deeply.