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Like young turtles just from the shell, the baby alligators make for the water, but unlike the young of the sea-turtles, the saurians have the assistance of their parent, who not unfrequently takes a load of them upon her back.
Its members are extinct and primitive forms of the thick-shelled reptiles, but true turtles, both of marine and fresh water, abound before the close of the Mesozoic. The sea-turtles attain an enormous size. Archelon, one of the primitive types, measured about twelve feet across the shell. Another was thirteen feet long and fifteen feet from one outstretched flipper to the other.
The latitude reduced by the reckoning on the rhumbs of wind at the meridian observation, appeared to me to be 19 degrees 40 minutes 50 seconds. As long as we were within sight of the rock of Cayman-brack sea-turtles of extraordinary dimensions swam round our vessel.
At the expiration of four hours the storm had worn itself out, and was succeeded by a perfect calm. On the 10th of January we caught sight of several sea-turtles and a whale. The latter was only a young one, about forty feet long. 11th January. We were now off the Rio Plata, and found the temperature very perceptibly cooler.
In the daytime large sea-turtles came to the surface of the water to sun themselves, stretching their awkward necks to get sight of our hull. Big schools of dolphins played their gambols about the ship, darting bodily out of the water, and pitching in again head foremost, no doubt holding their breath when submerged in atmospheric air, as a diver does when he plunges into the sea.
Though it is ordinarily believed that there are only three sorts of sea-turtles, yet we have seen six or seven sorts at different times, and our people have eaten of them all, except the very large whooping or loggerhead kind, which are found in great plenty in Brazil, some of them above 500 pounds weight. We did not eat of these, because at that time our provisions were plentiful.
Large sea-turtles come to the surface to sun themselves, stretching their awkward necks to get a sight of our hull; dolphins and flying-fish are too abundant to be a curiosity; big water-snakes raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish.
The remora being thus set just as one would set a baited hook was left free to follow its own inclinations, which usually were to fasten its sucking-plates against the shell of one of the great sea-turtles, so famed at aldermanic feasts and prized by modern gourmets, and equally relished by the ancient Cuban caciques.
"A German journalist had to translate an item on sea-turtles from an English paper. He did not exactly understand what a turtle was; but he know of turtle-doves, which are in German called Turtel-tauben, and, as he did not want to trouble himself to look for the expression in a dictionary, turtle-doves it remained.
The place was filled, after the Hamburg fashion, with edibles of all sorts; things early and things out of season, dainties not yet in existence or having long ceased to exist, for the common crowd. In the kitchen they showed us, in great tanks, huge sea-turtles which lifted their scaly heads above the water, resembling snakes caught between two platters.
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