Book Talk: The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean with Sharika D. Crawford

The Story of the Turtlemen: Navigating the Waters of Caribbean History

Who are the turtlemen of the Cayman Islands? In this episode of The Moreish Podcast, Sharika Crawford, historian and author of The Last Turtleman of the Caribbean delves into the history and cultural significance of sea turtle hunting in the Caribbean, particularly focusing on the turtlemen of the Cayman Islands. She discusses the rich maritime culture that has often been overshadowed by plantation histories in the Caribbean, how turtle hunting evolved from a subsistence activity to a commercial enterprise, driven by demand for turtle meat and tortoiseshell products in global markets, the socio-economic dynamics of turtle hunting, including the class structures that emerged and the environmental implications.

Connect with Sharika Crawford

www.sharikacrawford.com

https://x.com/SharikaCrawfo17 

The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making 

Episodes referenced

Caribbean Foodways with Dr. Candice Goucher 

Resources and Articles

Lions in Africa: Lincoln University Alumni in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1951–1966

Dr. Archie Carr 

The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson 

Peter Matthiessen 

World History Connected review of The Last Turtlemen

Transcript

Sharika

The centre of this story about the turtlemen is deeply rooted to Caymanian history, and the Caymanians are at the forefront. There are other places within this Western Caribbean, islands like San Andrés and Providencia, they too have individuals who are partaking in this industry. The main distinction is that, for reasons that have to do with the Cayman Islands, this becomes the largely and only industry. And that’s not true for other locales in which we do see turtle hunters. They do have a lot more options in terms of their livelihood.

[music] This is The Moreish Podcast where Caribbean history meets culture and cuisine. 

Hema

Hello, Sharika. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Moreish Podcast.

Sharika Crawford 

I'm so excited to be on your show and thank you for the invitation, Hema.

Hema 

Thank you for the book that you wrote, which we're going to be focusing on today, all about the turtlemen, which is a topic that I didn't know anything about. Through my conversation with Dr. Candice Goucher, she mentioned your book and I immediately had to look it up and do some research. But before we get there, can you introduce yourself?

Sharika Crawford

Absolutely, so I'm Sharika Crawford. I am a Speedwell Professor of International Studies and a Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy, which is in Annapolis outside Washington DC in the United States.

Hema 

How does the U.S. Naval Academy and some of the work that you're doing go together?

Sharika Crawford

So, um, hopefully for your listeners and viewers, you will give me a little bit of time to kind of share this story. I did not originally set out to write a history of sea turtle hunters in the Caribbean. Originally when I was doing my graduate schoolwork at the University of Pittsburgh, I had written a dissertation that looked at a small set of islands, a set of islands that are highlighted in the book called San Andrés and Providencia. And they are islands that

belong to Colombia, but are located close to Central America near Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I had written this doctoral thesis, and then I went on to get my first job here at the US Naval Academy. And I quickly realized that I didn't have enough time on my tenure track, which is about six years of temporary or probational work, to turn it into a book project the way I thought it would be.

I was really interested in these islands and how they became incorporated into Colombia, so I had to pause that project and look for an alternative project. And as I returned to my sources, I noticed there was a number of sources referencing disputes between Great Britain and the government of Colombia over fishermen around turtles in the early 1900s.

And I just thought this was sort of an interesting story, a story that I probably would have ignored, to be frank, considering that I didn't write about it in my doctoral work. But because I was at the U.S. Naval Academy and I was hired here as a Latin Americanist and a Caribbean scholar, I became more attuned to thinking about the maritime world, which I know sounds silly. Maybe it'll be interesting to talk about this being a Caribbeanist. To what degree do we really think about the Caribbean Sea? Do we have an island-centric understanding of that history?

And I just became more attuned to thinking about maritime disputes, fishing, naval power, sea power. And I just pulled this thread in, I guess, 2012, 2013, and it eventually developed into my first book, The Last Turtleman of the Caribbean.

And so it was a long way of getting there for some of our listeners who might be in graduate school. Perhaps the project that you start out with may not be the end product to your research,  but I can't tell you how like enriching it was for me to basically take a project that was born out of the scraps, sort of like old files that I had in my doctoral boxes, and to pull them out and then start to ask new questions about what I was seeing. 

So thankfully for my job at the Naval Academy, it gave me pause to take the sources seriously. It helped me to recall personal interactions I had when I was conducting field research in San Andrés in Colombia in the early 2000s where I saw people talking about turtle meat and eating turtle dishes to try to understand the origins and where that might fit in a larger story about the Caribbean, particularly of small islands, islands that were not overarchingly developed because of sugar or for cotton, Sea Island cotton, for example, or cacao or bananas later in the early 20th century. So that's a long-winded answer, I guess, to your thoughtful question about the origins of this project.

Hema (04:46)

There's so much in there, and there's a couple of things you talked about, which is how do we normally think about the Caribbean and the maritime conversation. In all of my research that I've done for this podcast and everything that I've learned from others, the vast majority of the time we are talking about agriculture, plantations and that kind of work. So I feel like it's a part of the history and the knowledge and the Caribbean that is not often talked about. So I'm excited for you to talk about it today.

Sharika Crawford (05:24)

Well, it's first of all, I want to say a shout out to Candace. Thank you. She reviewed my book very early on in 2020 for the World History Connected publication, which is easily accessible online if people were curious about her review. And I thank her for it because she had a lens on thinking about the culinary kind of cultural history of the Caribbean when she was reading the work as well. 

But you're on to something, Hema, that for the most part, the history of the Caribbean, at least in academic history, maybe not entirely in terms of people who are from the region and people who have roots in the region, how they think about the Caribbean, but academic historians still very much centre the plantation, the development, and then the subsequent destruction of the institution of slavery to create the commodities that brought tremendous wealth out of the region.

Enslavement of Africans, but also of Indigenous peoples. And that is centre and it's foretold and there's an appropriate reason why that structures the history. But ironically, it doesn't leave space, with a few exceptions. I'll just mention really quickly outside of my work with thinking about ordinary turtle hunters, I would say that there's an interest in piracy, though not necessarily by historians of the Caribbean traditionally, I think they're historians of British Empire or European Empires who are very much interested in kind of imperial conquest and play. So they look at piracy and corsairs and privateers. And then I would say that there is some small interest, maybe kind of antiquarian a little bit, from scholars of Imperial Spain who thought about the way that Spain created this sort of maritime highway through their Spanish treasure fleet system that triggered piracy later on the way that they connected all these coastal and island locations of the wealth that they had extracted from their Asian as well as their Central American, Mexican and South American territories. But other than that, very few hints or glimmers of the maritime world and mariners living in the Caribbean.

So I was hoping to, I think, try to encourage or press or push my colleagues to kind of consider these other people who are very much a part of the Caribbean fabric, the Caribbean story.

Hema (07:51)

In your book, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, you are talking about the time after the abolition of slavery. But I think in order to really dive into this conversation, I'd love to do a really brief history of the time geography before that to set the stage for this conversation.

Sharika Crawford (08:13)

So I'll start with the geography and then I'll start with the time, the chronology. That's really important. So of course as a historian of the Caribbean, it's very difficult. You can't do all the Caribbean. So my history more or less centres in the western or the southwestern portion of the Caribbean. 

And for our viewers and listeners, what I'm talking about is the island of Jamaica, south of Jamaica that would include the Cayman Islands they're centred in my history. It would also cover Cuba and more importantly the offshore tiny islands and keys from Cuba. And then we would move towards Central America, particularly looking at the territory south of Honduras from the Caribbean coast alongside Nicaragua, also Costa Rica. And though I don't highlight it extensively in this actual book, it would include Panama.

Offshore of Central America are the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, but also a number of keys and islets that are kind of the foreground Caribbean spaces of these turtle hunters. 

And then I would also sort of argue that north of Jamaica, we might want to also think about how in the time period, particularly of the latter 1800s into the early to mid 1900s, how we might think of Key West, the Bahamas, which I do reference as sort of part of the northern tips of this space that I'm looking at. 

So I'm tending to look at places that are often ignored in larger histories and surveys of the Caribbean. These are really tiny, small islands. Sometimes they're islands that have not been part of the traditional colonial story, particularly like the British colonial or the French colonial story.

And then chronologically, um, the story that I tell begins in the post-emancipation period, though I should point out that really turtle hunting had been there with the pre-Columbian Indigenous populations. It's always been a part of the space of the people who live there. Columbus on his first, second, third voyages commented on, observed, so did the crewman on his expeditions. They recognized that this was a part of the landscape, the ecological landscape. 

But I tell the story, despite having that longer history, I tell the story from the post emancipation period around 1830s and growing in the 1840s and 50s for a few reasons. This is a marked change in Caribbean mobility. I think one way we can talk about Caribbean history is, and we were commenting on it at the start of the show prior to taping that the Caribbean story is a story of mobility. People are moving. They're maybe moving, you know, on the islands or the coastal landscapes. They're moving across islands, so intra-island movement, and then they're moving to mainlands, coastal mainlands, whether they're Central America, South America, or the United States, and then they're moving beyond, obviously. 

And in the period, we know that people are moving for obvious reasons. Slavery came to an end after 1833, the Abolition Act of 1833 by 34, and they're moving in a lot of different ways. Some of them are moving to cities. Some are finding work where they can in Jamaica and some other islands. We're seeing the creation of a peasantry. People are able to create free towns.

But I also wanted to point out that in the small islands like Grand Cayman or the tinier islands of Cayman Brac, what we're also seeing is that where land is not available, where you are not able to realize your post-emancipation dream, having a little stake of land that you can feed yourself and your family, people also looked outward. They also travelled by sea.

And they didn't just travel by sea as some of my wonderful colleagues have documented in the latter period of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, drawn to the attraction of new employment opportunities, whether the United Fruit Company who needs workers on their banana plantations, or eventually the French and then the American Canal projects in Panama, or elsewhere in Central America or Cuba. 

They're also moving because they are people who have traditionally moved because they've been participating in this very artisanal maritime trade of turtle hunting. And so I start to see a parallel movement occur at the very same time that many of us who are familiar with 19th century Caribbean history are also seeing movements occur because of the emancipation process.

Hema (13:04)

We could probably talk for a very long time about the history because there are so many nuances depending on which islands, which countries you're talking about. But we're here to talk about the turtlemen. So before we move any further, who were the turtlemen?

Sharika Crawford (13:26)

The way I would describe turtlemen, they began prior to the 1850s as occasional collectors of sea turtles. What do I mean by occasionally? We have to imagine a world that doesn't quite exist today. But we need to imagine a world, let's say in the 1500s or maybe early 1600s where you could be on a beach, a three mile beach in Grand Cayman, maybe you're in Turtle Bogue or Tortuguero for those of you who have been to Costa Rica, where the beach is literally littered, littered with sea turtles. Sea turtles that, as part of their biology, have to lay their eggs and kind of hatch them and find a home for them for their survival by coming onto the beaches and therefore early on in the Caribbean, you could say a turtle hunter was someone who, for, yuo  know, means of food, right, subsistence, would happen upon hundreds of them and would easily acquire them. They're huge. They're three, four, 500 pounds. They're sizable. They're slow, particularly if you're finding impregnated female turtles. They're more vulnerable. And therefore, people habitually didn't have to travel very far. They could snatch them on the shore. Maybe they can go a little bit offshore, very short distances, and during certain seasonal periods could acquire these animals. 

But as time moved on, particularly by the 1800s, we are increasingly seeing sea turtle hunting as a profession, particularly because these sea turtles have become increasingly difficult to find. They've been extirpated. They've literally been hunted to the point where they're no longer returning to the beaches where populations live relatively close now. We now know that there is a more integrated Caribbean commercial system that, depends on the meat that is being provided by these sea turtles and there's a growing commodity for the types of products that can be drawn out of them. 

And so by the 1800s, we're increasingly finding men who may be of enslaved and then later freed men, people of African descent, and also their counterparts of racially mixed background or European background, who are organizing these expeditions with sloops and schooners to travel farther and farther distances from home in order to acquire hundreds and hundreds of these sea turtles for an international market, a market that might end them in New York or Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, or Paris. 

So when I'm talking about sea turtle hunters or the turtlemen, I'm talking particularly about the shift that happens at the start of the 1800s. But by the middle of the 19th century, what we're seeing are people who have made this their trade. This is the fundamental thing that they do. They don't have a plantation. They're not a peasant farmer. They spend weeks and months out of their year pretty much hunting sea turtles.

Hema (16:35)

So at the beginning when you said they would happen upon a turtle, was that a time when turtle meat was being used as food and sustenance just locally?

Sharika Crawford (16:50)

Yes, so you have both the experience of Indigenous populations who had been familiar with sea turtles and we can see all kinds of remnants, both archaeologically speaking, but also in the culture like the Maya. If you go to the Yucatan in Mexico, they have temples with beautiful descriptions of the, of the sea turtles, which really sort of symbolized longevity.

But you also see that beyond kind of decorative or perhaps supernatural sort of belief systems around sea turtles that maybe Indigenous populations of the Americas had, we increasingly see that Europeans, after the arrival of Columbus, as we start to have individuals inhabiting the space, both Europeans and people of African origin, they recognize that this is a food source. It's a very good animal protein for a few different reasons.

Because of their size, there could be plentiful amounts of meat that you can prepare in a variety of ways, similarly to how you might prepare, I guess, lamb or cattle. You can dry it, you can stew it, what have you. Therefore, the accessibility of this particular animal, the fact that it was easily caught, you didn't have to work so hard to capture it, made it just an additional sort of element of part of the cuisine and the substinence. 

But then over time, particularly Europeans who are travelling by sea, they're returning back and forth to Europe, they find that this particular animal, this reptile, this marine reptile essentially, is really, really good for their provisions because they're so large, they don't need water, you can keep them alive for a very long time, storing them on the top of your decks.

There's a belief that their meat is healthier because of the vegetarian diet that they consume, that they can kind of save off all kinds of malnutrition that often happens for mariners eating rotten food and very tasteless, you know, hard biscuits and tackies, that it becomes a preferable sort of cuisine, both for these mariners increasingly travelling around the globe and particularly in the Caribbean, who then introduce it later to some European populations. Not all enjoyed it, but the British in particular and the Anglophone world really take up the consumption of turtle meat.

Hema (19:17)

Were there specific turtles that are from that region or that were more prized than others?

Sharika Crawford (19:26)

Yeah, that's an excellent question. And it's one of the things that I often, my science-oriented readers, they're very fascinated with. 

dSo the sea turtle hunting industry that I focus on in the 19th and 20th centuries was focused around two particular species. And there's about six or seven varieties, both in that time period, at the very least, but ongoing today.

The two species are one that is known for its meat, which is the green turtle. These very large turtles, or they could be very large, typically about 500 pound turtles. And they are known to be vegetarian eating. They just don't consume any type of meat for their prey. And so the meat tastes like a veal, from how it's described. It's considered very nutritious. It's very highly palatable. And you get all these fancy restaurants in big cities around the Atlantic world, consuming them, you see them on plantations. We have accounts of both enslaved people, but also free people consuming it. 

But the other, and perhaps maybe even more prize-worthy commodity, just in terms of sheer, not the production in terms of numbers, but in terms of its value, is the hawksbill sea turtle. And the hawksbill turtle, some of our listeners may not know it by that name. They probably know it by its more common and poorly misnamed tortoiseshell. So tortoiseshell like glasses, decorative items, the sort of scales, on top of the, or the carapace is what fancy word for what they're describing on top of the sea turtle. They're lifted up. They have about eight different kind of colours of yellows and browns and blacks, if anyone's seen a tortoiseshell, I don't know, plate or glasses. And they would literally remove these from hawksbill sea turtles, oftentimes alive. They don't necessarily kill them first before they remove these. And they were pliable. 

We know of stories where the pirates who were based out of Jamaica were able to create these artisan crafts. They had all this money to spend, right? That there's a boom in all kinds of decorative arts. And this is something that actually pre-exists just the Caribbean as a region. This was something known since the Roman Republic and beyond in Mesopotamia. It's always been seen as a beautiful form of material that can make jewellery. And it actually, in terms of value, in terms of the price of the pounds of it, is way more profitable than green turtle, but green turtle and the turtle meat that people consume from it is perhaps more widely consumed by a variety of individuals.

Hema (22:16)

In your book, you talk about the turtle meat and consumption, but also, as you just alluded to, the shell being turned into luxury goods and something that was quite prized by the Europeans. So turtles as a whole, one of the things you talk about is it goes from the Caribbean to the banquets in London, and also the luxury goods. So I'd love to talk about that and how or if that became a part of why turtles were being depleted.

Sharika Crawford (22:56)

Yeah, mean, so let me step back for a moment and I will use the example of the hawksbill and the tortoise shell material that we commonly call from its shells. I would think that part of, um,  way of explaining its growth in popularity, which mirrors its growth in demand, is that it had a global, what's the word, a kind of global popularity.

While I might be focusing just on the Caribbean in my particular book, it should be known that there are other avenues by which European markets and people in the Western world in particular became very much familiar with it. This was popular in places as far as Japan where they call it Beko. It's popular in the Indian Ocean and oftentimes it gets fed into these large cities, particularly I highlight in London.

And one of the things to keep in mind is that, while turtles like the hawksbill, may have been at that time period in the 1850s and 60s, even earlier, more common than they are today, they increasingly were becoming less accessible for the hunters, in part because of the disruptions that are happening on shore captures, and then subsequently basically finding these beautiful animals only to take them when they are at a stage where they should be reproducing. So that actually kind of reduces the numbers. 

Because the tortoise shell, like a true tortoise shell essentially, is somewhat unique. mean, it can be replicated in the 1900s with plastic. But before we have the emergence of plastic in the 1900s, you only can get this from a hawksbill turtle, right? And so you have to wait for the material to emerge in these markets where you have cabinet makers who are making these like beautiful intricate designs on this woodworking that might be in the house of a Parisian royal.  

Increasingly because of the sailors and their movements across the maritime world they are talking about the benefits of turtle meat and because it's an imported food item, right, it's not accessible in the waters around the United Kingdom or necessarily on the Iberian Peninsula, when you bring it into the ports, they literally have to announce it. Today, we're going to have by the end of the week, we're going to have, turtle soup, line up. So it creates both a demand, a demand where which the Caribbean is just one of multiple spaces where you can acquire these commodities or, or or the turtles can be transferred into commodities once they've been killed for turtle meat or once you've taken their shells from their backs to make this pliable, beautiful material. And at the same time, that feeds into turtlemen, men who are going to hunt for more of these animals in order to make a livelihood for themselves.

And as that process continues, it feeds into a supply and demand and increasingly they're unable to maintain, if you will, across multiple national waters and competitions, an ability to control and sort of protect the abundance of those of this marine reptile at that time.

Hema (26:26)

As a result of all of this, the supply and demand, the depletion, so no longer having the turtles that you could just capture ashore, this led to more the turtlemen having to go longer distances for their hunting.

Sharika Crawford (26:42)

Yeah, so, I mean, it makes sense when I share the story kind of how this works. So you live on a small tiny island in which, for example, let's talk about Grand Cayman. It's a very low lying island. The soil has not been as successful in transforming it into agricultural commodities on the scale of maybe its neighbours and other more mountainous and green and hilly

environments, I'm thinking of small islands like don't know like Antigua for example, which produce a lot of sugar, coconuts and some ground provisions which was pretty much what people lived off on their land, which meant that these men in particular, it could have been women, these men in particular became more astute at turning their attention to the sea and the sea as an economic factor.

And so when they had to go further out, they're no longer on the shore to capture these sea turtles. They have to travel, you know, 20, 30, 50 nautical miles, maybe in the waters of nearby Cuba or the island of Jamaica, for example. And they're able to find more because they become more astute in understanding sea turtle navigation and where they're travelling to to find their feed. 

Where might they be turning towards in order to lay down their large eggs and bury them in the sand. And so they start developing techniques. They start building larger shipping or turtle fishing fleets, if you will. Sloops become larger and tonnage and schooners. The Caymanians in particular, who become the most prodigious and the most well-known in this particular industry, start to develop what we might think of as someone from myself from the Midwest of the United States as just a canoe, but they become called cat boats, these very pliable smaller boats that are attached to a sloop or a schooner. And their purpose is, of course, to bring them on the fleet so that in the moment where they're in the hunting grounds of these sea turtles, that you often have to go in the deep ocean, in the deep sea to capture, that they will be able to facilitate physically bringing them on these small boats that you then would maneuver to the larger sloop or schooner. 

The Caymanians became really, really adept at doing this. They became very good at figuring out netting systems and kind of the geographical landscape of where best to settle their vessels and to wait and set their nets.

And all of that is a function of actually their success, right, in figuring out where these sea turtles are located and then continuing to move farther and farther away from their home base, often near other imperial spaces or other national spaces that they're going to kind of become increasingly in conflict with.

Hema (29:42)

It seems that around this time is that big shift that you were just talking about. They had to go further from home. They had to figure out how to hunt in these deep waters and how to bring these animals aboard in these deep waters. They had to build new ships and new ways of bringing these animals or taking them to wherever they were being taken. You talk about some of the more advanced and experienced turtlemen sharing their knowledge as they got further and further out. And all of this has some implications and repercussions because there's some economy and finances and who benefits. It feels like this is a big turning point in the lives of the turtlemen.

Sharika Crawford (30:38)

Absolutely. while this is becoming increasingly, let's say, an organized industry, and I'm not sure to what degree some of your listeners are familiar with the industry of whaling, for example, whaling in the 19th century, though whaling predates just the 19th century and it was in other parts of the world. These types of turtle fishing expeditions that usually had two seasons, so there would be kind of an early summer and a late summer season. 

So men, typically older men, and they might bring along their younger children or younger men from the island who can serve as sort of apprentices. Well, you know, it may sound as simple as I described it. Well, they get a boat and they go out and they start fishing. It required quite a bit of capital, right? So who has the capital to what they say outfit one of these turtle fishing expeditions, which would may have you away from six weeks upwards to 12 weeks increasingly as we get into the middle of the 1900s. Well, obviously the merchant class, and I use that term loosely, merchant class, I would say the shopkeepers and owners, some of whom may own a lot more land, they are usually tied to some of the earlier free European families. 

What they do is they essentially partner with a captain. The sea captain may own their own vessel. They may own their own sloop or schooner, but not necessarily. It may be owned by one or more of the shopkeepers who pool their money together to buy the rope that you need, the thatch rope that you need to build the netting. They are going to ensure that the crew has sufficient food supplies for what they need during the course of this six to, I don’t know, twelve week expedition. 

And the result of that means that the captain who will share, so this is a sharing system, the owners of the vessel or the individuals who are going to pay for the supplies needed to do the sea turtle hunting are going to share the largest amount with the captain who's the head of the crew, and then the captain is going to bring on additional crew members who have particular functions, whether they're the cook, whether they are an individual called a ranger, which is someone who may join a sloop or schooner, they will travel far out into the deep sea, and then they may be left for periods of time in a nearby key, a very small, small piece of land above the water to then hunt around for sea turtles and then get picked back up. 

Those individuals, depending on your rank on the actual expedition, received a share, not a wage, a share. They get a share of what will be brought back at the end of the voyage. So if you, I don't know, bring back 100 green turtle, and after you've subtracted the upfront cost, right, depending on if you're the owner, if you're the captain, or you're a sub-member of the crew, you're gonna get a share of the profits. 

So in reality, oftentimes if you were a crew member, you might be away for multiple weeks at the very minimum, multiple months, and actually come home with very little money at the end of such an arduous expedition. And it becomes particularly challenging when your family, your wife, your mother, your sister, your children, if they need things during the duration of your time away hunting, what do they do? They go to the local shop. The local shop owner is perhaps the owner of one of these turtle fishing expeditions. They allow you to put on credit what you need for a pound of flour or sugar. And then when you arrive home after your multiple weeks at sea, they defray those costs that your family may have borrowed against your incoming profit. And therefore, it may have been in many ways a system that created a lot of autonomy and you could see moments of fraternity in the experience that was had at sea, but it was one that didn't necessarily bring wealth or close the income gap, or offer opportunities for people to take that capital for the most part and do something else. And so it had this very  unusual mechanism by which people are able to make a living out of it, though I use the word make a living sort of loosely oftentimes depending on the success of that particular fishing voyage.

Hema (35:33)

At this time and under these circumstances, the people that had the ability to provide the supplies and really fund these expeditions is a little bit of a carryover of pre-emancipation of the people who had and the people who didn't have. And so it feels like that, for lack of a better term, class system still existed.

Sharika Crawford (36:04)

Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that oftentimes get questions about more about kind of the social and the class structure, particularly the racialized system in the Cayman Islands. And I point out that because of the scale, the size of the Cayman Islands is much, much, it's a smaller place. And it's important to point out that because they did not have a robust commodity in the way that maybe sugar did that brought in quite a bit of wealth, which then created a very distinct planter class of sugar producers and those who were their enslaved and then subsequently their free workers, the Cayman Islands didn't function that way. So I should remind everyone that the Cayman Islands was a set of islands that had been informally settled. It wasn't a desirable place for the British or the French or any European power to seize and grab. And so people sort of found their way to these islands and then eventually it became constituted as part of a new British territory, and therefore I wouldn't say that we have a plantocracy because it initially began with felling of timber and mahogany was kind of the first industry. There was a short cotton, you know, Sea Island cotton boom industry that came thereafter and then there's emancipation. 

And so you don't have a very noticeable multi-generation sort of plantocracy that occupies spaces in the way that you might see in larger islands, whether in the Spanish or the French or the, um, English speaking Caribbean, because of the scale of the numbers of people. Of course, those who were free, those who were the landowners were in a position better than those who had been their enslaved workers. 

But the distance is not great. What happens is that that small number of the shopkeepers who are there can work together and they have connections with relatives outside the island so they have access to capital in ways, or they've developed commercial relationships in ways that those who are descended from the non-land-owning class prior to abolition don't necessarily have access to. 

They may have great knowledge about the geography, the landscape. They might be really savvy in all these other ways, but they don't have kind of the necessary familial and commercial connections. And so you're right, there's still a hierarchy and there's still one you can see in the Cayman Islands today.

Some of those families still exist and there is a distinction. But there's also an odd dependency and intimacy between the groups because initially they weren't so far apart. And there were fewer in those in number who had sort of great wealth compared to the majority of the Caymanians let's say between 1850 and 1940 more or less.

Hema (39:07)

In the book, you refer to the Cayman Islands as being quite insignificant to the British at the time for all of the reasons that you just mentioned. And I'm taking from everything that you just said that the reason the people from the Cayman Islands became so prolific at turtle hunting is because of the lack of other resources available to them on the islands.

Sharika Crawford (39:40)

Absolutely, and I guess what I would clarify is it's not so much that I think that they're insignificant, but I think that traditionally scholars of the British Caribbean have sort of dismissed the Cayman Islands as being insignificant because it wasn't a place that generated on its own the same level of pursuit to acquire it as a territory. But we have scholars like Mary Draper who has shown us how, in the 1700s in particular, we might want to think of a place like the Cayman Islands as this sort of integrated into this developing commercial and important food space because it becomes, um, like a storehouse or it feeds into the growing population in Jamaica. So one of the spaces early on in the 1700s where turtle meat is being consumed or the use of the mahogany is being felled and sent to is Jamaica, right? 

For these increasing number of settlers, colonial population that is growing and thriving in that population. So it becomes sort of an interdependent space, a subsidiary subjugated under, but necessary to kind of facilitate the growth as a hinterland. That's the word she uses, a hinterland to a greater Jamaica. And therefore, while it may not be as prominent as Barbados or Antigua, right? I think that she and other scholars are suggesting and showing that the Cayman Islands did play a role in facilitating at least the expansion and the growth and the stability of populations like the ones that I reference in the case of Jamaica.

Hema (41:18)

As a result of the turtlemen having to go out further distances and expand their hunting grounds there came, you alluded to them entering the waters of different nationalities. And this time caused a bit of conflict.

Sharika Crawford (41:41)

That actually is the origins of this project. I have a chapter in the book called Limits at Sea, and it's more about these disputes. That's how I entered into this project. 

Yeah, so imagine you were growing up in a space in which first you hang out at your beach, maybe you're in the nearby waters, and if you did have access to some type of sailing vessel, of course you can go out further.

But this idea increasingly, particularly in the sort of closing of imperial spaces, particularly as the British are retreating from their presence closer to Central America. We've already had the Spanish-American Wars of Independence in the 18 teens and in 1820s, you're starting to create nationalist states, and by the 1860s and 70s and 80s, they want to project their control over their own populations, their territories both terrestrially and maritime. These fishermen who just thought the sea is the sea and we follow the sea turtles wherever they may go and we capture them and take them wherever we want to becomes a hot-button issue as these governments of Nicaragua, of Costa Rica, of Colombia, of Cuba essentially push back that no you can't enter into territorial waters, which traditionally is about three miles.  So traditionally this idea of that a nation has the right to protect three miles from its land base of its shores, and the people and the waters and the things around it. 

But you also have the British government who increasingly has taken as part of its fundamental sea power or maritime sort of power base, the right to do commerce and move across the seas, so freedom of the seas, which is a little bit more expansive, and these fishermen become entangled in larger disputes over maritime territorial control of vying states. The British will actively intervene on behalf of a few hundred or less turtle men who often found themselves having to defend, having to seek freedom if they're arrested and their vessels were seized because they refuse to recognize national governments regulation and control over waters that they deemed national. 

For example, in the case of Nicaragua, which becomes kind of the centre of a lot of territorial disputes, you have the main primary hunting space for sea turtles for these turtlemen. So they travel closer to the Nicaraguan waters, which ironically then have these we might think of them as like offshore islets, they're referred to as keys. They're really small pieces of land above the water that can disappear with the tide. So sometimes they're seasonal. You might see them sometimes you don't, and they would be anchored. This is where the Caymanians would anchor and over the course of the latter part of the 1800s as the Nicaraguan authorities in Managua want to have more effective control over the Caribbean coast, an area that had traditionally had a lot of autonomy, had very strong connections with the British government, with even the kings of that particular autonomous state sometimes sent to Jamaica to be educated, had travelled even to England, were under a protectorate. As the British withdraw from that space and the Nicaraguan authorities enter, these turtlemen who are just about 50 miles, 60 miles off the shore become a part of these larger debates over who controls the waters, who controls this territory. And they can be very contentious. 

There are cases where individuals were arrested, some were beaten. They refuse to follow the regulatory steps which require them to come to the coast, come to one of the larger cities, purchase a permit that allows them to go fish and then go back out to the fishing grounds in the 1880s through early 19 teens. This starts to kind of become more regularized in the 1920s and onward. But for many decades, there was quite a bit of contention and then questioning of who actually owns these spaces. 

And the Caymanians start to claim, well, we own it. We were the ones who were here for decades. My grandfather was out here and they never mentioned seeing anybody from Nicaragua here. And so I found that this particular struggle over maritime spaces and trying to kind of delineate what part of the maritime world is a particular nation's realm, sort of maps with these turtle hunters who are at the foreground of this nationalizing of water as they follow sea turtles who have no regard, they have no understanding about a nation state or empire or regulatory control. And I think being at the Naval Academy for least giving me kind of an awareness that that's something they even have paid attention to.

Hema (46:47)

Would you say that this territorial, these disputes, these struggles was the beginning of the, I don't want to say downfall, but, the end of turtle hunting from these turtlemen.

Sharika Crawford (47:05)

That's a great question. I have never been asked that Hema, that's a great question. I think that, I think it made it more challenging. Absolutely, it made it more challenging from having no one put a check on your activity and your hunting to now having to lease to various degrees, right? Follow the appropriate steps to legally hunt sea turtles in nearby national waters. 

Based on seeing the continuation of this particular industry into the latter part of the 1900s, when the governments became more savvy or became more attentive to this industry and thus had the capacity often by creating coast guards who would be out patrolling the waters and as the state became more institutionalized, it didn't really deter to the degree that you would think sea turtle hunting from the Caymanians who were the leading sea turtle hunters. When I mean leading, I mean people are writing them from Australia, like in Tasmania, hey, we have sea turtles, we hear that you guys are really good at that. Can you share some tips, right? When I mean it, mean they're known internationally. 

I don't think that that's really is kind of the end point. I think the end is that it's kind of the start of our story because they became more innovative and they became more effective at both acquiring sort of an understanding of the biology and the behaviour of the animals in which they are hunting, and as they've developed a fairly good use of tools with the types of vessels and the size and the adaptions they made to the small vessels they needed to acquire the animals, I think that the nature of that, their more effectiveness and the demand, the accessibility, for example, we didn't talk about how in the interwar years and particularly as Americans in particular become a little bit more wealthier, at least until the Great Depression, canning and canned foods become more popular and so that also feeds in a lot of these animals are no longer just being a fresh, like we're announcing in the newspaper come to the restaurant, you now can have middle-class consumers who can have their own little version of you know the famous turtle soup in a can by Campbell's or Heinz or Philip Moore's Company. So I think that it's it's actually kind of in some ways a sort of simplistic but accurate logical story, they became better at it, they hunted more, and that led to fewer of them becoming available for them to actually continue with this industry.

Hema (49:48)

When you think about the Cayman Islands in relation to the entire world and how widespread it is, as you just talked about, that these turtlemen were known for this expertise, it's quite fascinating in an age where information didn't spread as widely as it does now that they were so well known for this.

Sharika Crawford (50:22)

Yes and no, because one of this is also the period between the latter part of the 1800s and the early 1900s is the history of print and newspapers, this is a time period, at least in parts of the Western world where literacy rates have improved, more people are having a basic education, can read, the growth of newspapers. Um, I think we underestimate how much people want to know about the world and people were eager to read what was coming on the pages of the newspapers. And I think in my reference in that wonderful example of a letter I found at the Cayman Island National Archive of a set of aspirant turtle hunters in Tasmania, it also is, I guess, mindful of least the interconnectedness of the British imperial world. 

I mean, it's not necessarily it was, I don't know, Indonesian set of writers. It was part of a larger English speaking world that may be more connected in ways that may not have been the same in multiple or other linguistic spaces. 

But newsprint, they were regularly featured in national newspapers. So people would hear this odd story like, there's this thing called turtle fishing. Like, who are these people?

And then they would have reporters do these large exposés. So I talk about an early one that happened well, they happened in places like the Jamaican Gleaner or the Daily Gleaner, depending on the time period. I think it's the Gleaner and the time period that it was featured, which is a large, important newspaper out of Kingston that had a pretty good reach.

But also you saw it in a larger New York papers. We also see it in the United States in a very important series of Time and Life, these large important magazines that featured a variety of individuals who found themselves in the Cayman Islands In the 1970s. It's written about by a very famous novelist, Peter Matthiessen, who's known for these novels that depict and think about the environment and protecting the environment. He does a very large feature for the New Yorker magazine in the 1970s where he actually boards one of these sea turtle vessels, one of the last ones actually, to do so in the 1970s. And then he later actually does this very famous experimental novel. It wasn't popularly received. It's called Far Tortuga and he

takes the same language. I mean, it's very much a good kind of almost ethnographic look into this particular voyage. But before he died a couple years ago, when asked about all the novels that he's written, which one was his favourite, he said it was Far Tortuga, which was actually based on his time on the vessel. 

So you're right, on the one hand, it's sort of surprising that this very small set of islands in the Caribbean, maybe not even known as well to other parts of the Caribbean  has gotten this attention, but I think it's the distinctiveness of a group of people who pretty much have dedicated their economy to sourcing sea turtles for the global market and around the world.

Hema (53:33)

When you put it in the context of the British Empire at that time, then it does make sense. 

Sharika Crawford (53:57)

Absolutely. And I should tell the listeners the centre of this story about the turtlemen is deeply rooted to Caymanian history and the Caymanians are at the forefront. But I also point out that there are other places within this Western Caribbean, not just places that they travel to in order to capture sea turtles, but the populations who live in the Caribbean lowlands of Central America or in the offshore islands of like San Andrés and Providencia, they too have individuals who are partaking in this industry. The main distinction is that for reasons that have to do with the Cayman Islands, this becomes the largely and only industry. I guess you could say to a secondary degree, there's coconut production as the next industry, but that's it. It's turtles or coconuts. And that's not true for other locales in which we do see turtle hunters. They do have a lot more options in terms of their livelihood.

Hema (55:01)

Something else happens in the history that leads to where we are now and that is conservation.

Sharika Crawford (55:16)

So I, in telling this history, it becomes quite clear that the sea turtle industry, which it's in decline. The sea turtle hunters themselves, the turtlemen, they know, they start talking about it in the 19 teens and 20s. They know it's taking them longer and longer for them to meet the same units, the same number of turtles captured as they had in previous decades. 

But it sort of ironically comes to a head in the middle of the 20th century in the 1950s where we're actually seeing a convergence of a number of things. We're seeing the rise of environmentalism in the post-World War II period. In my book, I sort of chart out particularly the maritime aspects of environmentalism. I remind people of Rachel Carson, who many of us may know about her work about toxins and agriculture, she becomes the voice in many ways of the modern US environmental movement. But she initially wrote about the sea. The sea was still seen as like a space that we didn't know enough about. It was really, really important. She writes a book called The Sea Around Us. And she, along with a number of other figures, but most importantly to my story, a man by the name of Archie Carr.

Archie Carr was an herpetologist. He was a specialist of reptiles. He was a professor at the University of Florida. He had spent time working in Central America, he was working in Honduras actually, and he meets a student from Costa Rica who invites him to come because he knows he's a reptile specialist and he tells them about this community in the northern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica that is known for both turtle fishing but also a site by which turtles regularly come there to nest, right? This is a place where they nest their eggs. 

And from that particular introduction Archie Carr is going to set out to do a number of early experimental but subsequently larger scientific observational studies in the 1960s. And the thing about Archie Carr as a herpetologist, he wasn't just an experimental sort of scientist where he sets up experiments and then you conduct them and then you see the results. He believed in and he relied on the knowledge of the people whom he encountered, who he thought would tell him a lot about the animals that he was trying to understand. And for Dr. Carr, he was really interested in understanding their migratory patterns. Why did they come to the places that they came to? Where did they go for all these years until they emerge on shore and what can be done to perhaps to save them. 

And so Archie Carr meets a lot of these captains of these turtle fishing vessels where he's able to learn more about sea turtle hunting. He travels widely throughout the Caribbean beyond just the Western Caribbean. And he ultimately starts to build a conservationist movement on sea turtles. Essentially, how can we save them? And he has to work with scientists from around the world, both in the North Atlantic, but he also works with Caribbean governments and Central American governments to partner with them. And you can even say his work with the turtle hunters, by incentivizing them, by giving them just a small amount of money to share information in these little envelopes and cards about the sightings of sea turtles and how many catches that they have all feed into this growing knowledge base. 

That research base is still in Costa Rica today. It's still led by a team that's affiliated with the University of Florida. And today we can talk about some successes, both in Central America and Costa Rica, which had one of the largest, largest nesting grounds of green sea turtles that had been in the pre-modern era. We know that this is a place where they had traditionally came to nest. And we've seen a positive direction of them returning there. They've created a very robust volunteering and state action to minimize activity and poaching of these animals. And there's been quite a bit of success actually in Florida. I should say, though, that that success should be tempered. We're not seeing nearly a return of the size of sea turtles that would have existed in the world of Columbus, and the populations of people who lived before Columbus and the other European and African and Asian populations who came to live in the Caribbean. 

But we are seeing a trend forward with the exception of climate change. As seas warm, those are not the most palatable spaces to create the environment for the animals to find the food that they need for nourishment. And so it's going to be our scientists will have to tell us more about whether they're going to be able to adapt, um, or will we start to see a backsliding in terms of their populations? 

So in 2020, when I ended this book, I could say I was much more hopeful. Like, I think things were on an upswing, but changes with the environment and the warming of the earth has a tangible and unfortunately negative consequence alongside the fact that we have tourism and more population on beaches, more lights. We have large scale fishing vessels that's kind of the swoop across the sea, the seabeds, right? And they take everything with them, including sea turtles, which they don't really want to hunt for any reason. So we still have to have a cautious sort of optimism when thinking about the survival of this maritime reptile species moving forward.

Hema (1:01:10)

When we started this conversation, we talked about the turtlemen and the fact that these turtles were a form of sustenance. It was food. And we've talked about the entire cycle. But I want to go back to that because what, if anything, replaced turtles as food, as nourishment for the people of the Cayman Islands, for example.

Sharika Crawford (1:01:37)

It hasn't. That's the thing. That's a great question. So I'll go back to an anecdote I said very early on. I was doing my doctoral research that this was 2005, 2006. I was living in San Andrés Island and I was staying with a lovely and gracious woman who was preparing to visit her son in Dallas, Texas. She is an islander from multiple generations from the Island.  And as I entered the kitchen a day before she was leaving and she had prepared a meal, she offered to give me turtle meat. 

At the time I was a graduate student, had no concept that this would ever be a topic of interest, and I politely declined. I had never encountered turtle meat. That wasn't something I knew. That was her son's favourite dish. So she was preparing this for her son who lives in Dallas, Texas with his family. That's 2005 and six. That's something that people are still eating, you know, people who have access to it.

And I wouldn't say that in San Andrés, which I know very very, well, and I know the Cayman Islands from my research, spending time in Grand Cayman, it's available, but it's now available through farming. So essentially they have these turtle farms that produce it locally. People are not going out and getting wild caught sea turtle for the most part. You know, I'm sure there's always some level of illicit sea turtle hunting.

But for the most part it's farmed, it's very expensive, so it cannot be a common dish. And in places like Costa Rica where I'm also familiar, it's permissible to eat as in Nicaragua, it's permissible, but people are not eating it at the same quantities. It has a traditional value to it, it has a traditional sentimental value. It also in some parts of the Caribbean, like, the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, there are beliefs around it being an aphrodisiac, you know, so having some aspects of the blood. So nothing's replaced it. It's just become a little bit more challenging for the people whose ancestors had fed off of this, had grown off of this particular animal protein. 

And I should say that Archie Carr, he was really, really concerned about that. It took him a very long time to advocate for a full-on, no consumption of any type of part of the sea turtle moving forward because he was a big believer, he understood that the populations in the Caribbean, whether from Panama or in parts of the Eastern Caribbean where he also observed sea turtle consumption, he understood that it was a fundamental component of their culinary and necessary for their subsistence. 

And it doesn't seem to me that they've replaced it. It's just simply became less available. And I gather when opportunities permit to enjoy in the partaking of those dishes, people do so and do so heartily.

Hema (1:04:32)

You open the book a captain, was a Captain Cadie, who from the Cayman Islands, and seemingly resisted a little bit of the changing of his ship or boat and somehow became famous enough that his was it his boat that was on a postage stamp?

Sharika Crawford (1:04:58)

Yeah, yeah. So he inherited a very famous vessel from the turtle fishing fleet of its heyday in the early 1900s. He was he's going to be the final captain essentially of that vessel. And as we saw in the 1800s, I talked about adaptions that needed to be made for Caymanians to hunt sea turtle further and further away as we get into the middle of the 1900s into the late 1960s and 70s, of course there's further adaptation radio technology to have engines, you know, as opposed to using traditional sail because they're still from the age of sail. And he really was very slow to make those adaptations and others had already done so, but he was one of those kind of traditional vessels. 

And the Cayman Islands, for those of you who, if you ever get a chance to visit there, one of the things that you will learn if you didn't know before arrival or maybe now you do, is that they're very proud of their maritime heritage. They're proud of their sea turtle hunting heritage because so many of their, grandfathers and great grandfathers and uncles and brothers and husbands participated in some way, shape and form. And so they have these commemorative stamps. And so the Lydia that particular vessel is on a commemorative set of stamps, but you can see posters and they have a Caymian in Island turtle farm that you can visit to learn about sea turtles. 

There's some controversy because part of the farm allows obviously the consumption of meat that can be sold and purchased in restaurants. But that particular opening, I wanted to show it as sort of reflective of the changes that were, there were some things that had changed and yet there were some things that were staying the same. That he was barring on a very old tradition, one that I only cover about a hundred years of, but really predates that hundred years. And yet we could already see the changes, that there were less crew members, right? Because the crew members weren't no longer participating in the sharing system. They can make more money doing merchant Marines, for example, or finding a job in the oil rig or tourism that was budding at the time. 

And yet you have Captain Cadie, right? Who is still going out there hunting his sea turtles, and sort of resisting the changes that were very much apparent to him, even if he didn't have the capacity to fully recognize and accept those changes.

Hema (1:07:28)

The this book is so fascinating because of that cultural aspect of the turtlemen that is not, in my experience, widely talked about. And the maritime culture and experience that is not widely talked about. Tell us again the name of the book.

Sharika Crawford (1:07:54)

This is The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean. So this is waterscapes of labor, conservation, and boundary making. And it was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. I believe if you navigate their new website, there is a link for the ebook, which I believe should be open access. It had been originally open access. I don't want you to feel like you have to buy the book, but you can still access the book and read it online. And of course, there are easy ways to get copies of it elsewhere.

Hema (1:08:30)

I will leave a link in the show notes to that book. You have other projects that you're working on and this is not the only thing that you've written.

Sharika Crawford (1:08:40)

No, I've been very fortunate to be able to do a lot of cool and different things. I will mention two, one that sort of is kind of wrapped up and then one that is ongoing and it's still very cursory. And I'll start with the second project. 

I'm working on another book project, and I'm returning back to that doctoral thesis. So it never left me. These spaces never left me. I'm returning to the mid 20th century. It's not the time period that I studied in my doctoral thesis, but I'm looking at the same set of islands. So I'm looking at these two tiny islands, San Andrés and Providencia. In fact, I'm wearing a little necklace that's of the shape of San Andres, which is a tiny seahorse. It’s about seven and a half miles long. So these are, it's a very, very tiny space. But I'm interested in tracing the rise of mass tourism. So we've been hearing a lot about tourism as various countries are trying to kind of get a handle on this desire for so many people around the world to see the world but are coming into spaces and crowds and they're trying to manage its impact on the local population. 

You can't tell a story about mass tourism in the modern era in the 20th century without thinking about the Caribbean, its plantations and its tourism. Ironically, tourism has not gotten the same level of attention as the plantation history in the Caribbean. It's gotten attention from scholars who are sociologists or anthropologists who are sort of interested in studying maybe the people who go there and the aspects of the tourism but I want to study it historically, and the reason I want to study these islands is because it's one of the most densely populated islands in the whole entire Caribbean. 

It went very very rapidly from being an island that produced coconuts with some of their members of their society hunting sea turtles, but a very small population of that. And then quickly aviation technology allowed greater contact with Colombia and it became a free port. And then when the free port sort of dissolved or transformed, it became a site of tourism and not tourism to bring wealthy people from the United States or Great Britain. It became a mechanism to strengthen the relationship between the islands and its distant political and national population on the mainland. 

And I think that in telling this story, we might be able to detect clearly and more palpably the impact that that makes on a society in a way that I don't think previously has existed in the scholarship. 

So I'm not just talking about the workers who work in the hotels that we have that, but even the environment, have the dredging up of swamps, the bringing in of sand, the levelling of deforestation to create the modern infrastructure, right? Like what's the environmental implications? And then for this island, as an aside, it's so densely populated because the population had around four or 5,000 people at the start of this process in the early 50s. But by the end of the 19, let's say the early 1970s, it had 60 to 70,000 people. 

Where did all those people come from? Well, many of those were workers coming from mainland Colombia who stayed, living on the islands. Some of those people are, a small number of them, are merchants from the Middle East or people of the Levant who lived in other parts of Latin America and Far East, who came to start up shops. And that created cultural tensions, not tensions that resulted in, you know, violence per se, but who belongs in this island, who doesn't. Which is kind of the nature of the Caribbean story, mobility, cultural diffusion. I wanna wrap that up in one story looking at this tiny space from the mid 1950s until the early 1970s. So that's the first project. 

And then the second is a question of mobility, but beyond the Caribbean and Latin America. My husband's originally from West Africa, he's from Ghana. And for decades, I've thought about the relationship between Black Americans and West Africa.

So I've been really interested in looking at expats who went there during the Kwame Nkrumah years. And I recently published this past summer in the Journal of African American History, an article that looked at a set of classmates who attended school with Kwame Nkrumah who came to the United States for his college education, who moved there in the 1950s and 1960s and looked at the very concrete ways they helped to participate in sort of his state building project, but in ways that are not about their shared common vision for Pan-Africanism necessarily, or socialism, but for a variety of reasons, their ability to help contribute in concrete ways to the economy, right, in the kind of structure of the nation state. So that finished up in the summer and it's kind of back burning because I want to keep hold of my Caribbean project.

Hema (1:13:59)

Can people find information on all of your projects on your website?

Sharika Crawford (1:14:03)

Yes! That website is an excellent place. It's the most thorough place. I try to keep it relatively updated I've been fortunate to do a number of projects. So you might see me on YouTube in a variety of capacities, but the website I'm trying to make that a great portal for various projects that have to do with pedagogy teaching materials. I think it's really important to teach in a variety of capacities and I welcome if anyone's interested in how my work or work that I've done with other partners could be useful for them in educational purposes.

Hema (1:14:38)

I learned so much from our conversation today. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge with us. This is a part of the history of the Caribbean that we don't talk about often, and I'm glad to have you come on and share it.

Sharika Crawford (1:14:54)

Oh, it's been a pleasure for me and thank you so much, Hema, for having me.

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