The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [455]
Sea turtles played a significant role in another of Roosevelt’s federal bird reservations. The president liked the fact that sea turtles came from “a different world.” Long before the biologist Marston Bates published The Forest and the Sea in 1960, Roosevelt understood that the “sea margin”—where marine and terrestrial environments mixed—meant everywhere in Florida. Whether it was on tidal flats, sandy beaches, or flyspeck islets, marine species often used land and sea interchangeably.40 Certainly this was true of sea turtles. The Atlantic coast of Florida, especially from Melbourne Beach to Palm Beach was the world’s most crucial habitat for sea turtles—loggerheads, greens, and leatherbacks.41 Keeping up on sea turtle biology Roosevelt wanted to protect egg clutches from predators ranging in menace from raccoons to Miami restaurateurs. Roosevelt didn’t mind if fishermen caught these turtles to eat (he personally thought turtle fritters were dee-licious) but ravaging their breeding grounds indiscriminately needed correction.
On April 6, 1908, Roosevelt declared the Tortugas Keys (now Dry Tortugas National Park) a federal bird reservation. (The Tortugas group, located ninety miles west of Key West, Florida, and 470 miles southeast of New Orleans, consisted of eight little islands: Loggerhead Key, Bird Key, Garden Key, Long Key, Bush Key, Sand Key, Middle Key, and East Key.) Roosevelt boldly protected both sea turtles’ egg-laying and the boobies that congregated by the thousands in the buttonwood trees. When the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first visited these coral reefs in 1513, he marveled at the colonies of sea turtles he encountered. His crew recorded catching 160 of them. Ponce de Leon considered them a good omen, and they were also perfect for soup and stew; he was the one who named the remote island group Tortugas (“turtles”). John James Audubon had spent days in Tortugas Key mainly to observe the sooty terns that annually nested here, raised chicks, and then migrated back to the Yucatán peninsula.42 In Caribbean pirate lore, the chain had a bad reputation as a site of shipwrecks; Caribbean captains, in fact, called the reefs an “underwater graveyard.”43 Before long, the word “Dry” was added to nautical charts to warn mariners that there was no fresh water on the island chain.
Although one can’t be certain, Roosevelt probably first seriously encountered the Dry Tortugas when writing his two-volume history The Naval War of 1812, published in 1882. Fort Jefferson—America’s largest coastal fort in the mid-1800s, built with more than 16 million bricks—was constructed on Garden Key in that chain (following the battle of New Orleans) to provide a future defense line for Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. At times the Dry Tortugas were used to quarantine people with yellow fever. After being convicted as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Dr. Samuel Mudd was incarcerated at this remote prison fortress in the Gulf of Mexico, helping to care for these patients. By the time Roosevelt became president in 1901, lighthouses were operating in Tortugas Key warning sloops and schooners of the low-lying staghorn coral, patch reefs, sand flats, and sea grass beds. In Florida and the Game Water-Birds, Uncle Rob had declared the Tortugas Keys the center of the greatest fish population in the entire United States. He was indubitably right. Although the Tortugas were difficult to get to, sports fishermen, including the novelist Zane Grey, used to hunt in the warm waters for 300-pound blue marlins and 100-pound wahoos.
The biologist Rachel Carson of the U.S. Fish and Service Wildlife wrote in The Edge of the Sea about the fascinating creatures Roosevelt had saved with his federal bird reservations—particularly the Tortugas group. Describing how loggerhead, green, and hawksbill turtles must return to land