Sometimes you pick up a book because it is sent to you for a review, and sometimes you end up wanting to write a review because you picked up a book that you really enjoyed reading from cover to cover. The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean by Sharika D. Crawford falls into the latter category. The Last Turtlemen sketches the demise of the turtle industry in the Caribbean, looking specifically at the lives of the turtlemen of the Caymans from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century. In five beautifully written chapters, The Last Turtlemen foregrounds the maritime space of the Caribbean and the people who worked there to argue the importance of the turtlemen and their lives at sea in shaping, contesting and claiming the circum-Caribbean. The book illuminates the working realities of turtlemen and the way their labour was affected by and affected in itself wider local, imperial and global socio-economic changes. The history of the turtlemen appeals to historians of all sorts; whether one is interested in transnational governance, labour and empire, or environmental change and conservation, there is a chapter for you in this book. The wide scope may for some be also considered a potential risk of the book: for someone interested in one of these specific themes, you are left wanting more only to find the next chapter does not delve into it deeper.

In five chapters we are taken through the ebb and flow of turtlemen’s working lives and labouring landscapes. Chapter one sets out the basic biology and behaviour of sea turtles and gives a brief overview of the early modern history of the maritime space in which turtling took place, relating turtling as a form of labour, food and income to other imperial socio-economic endeavors and existing indigenous turtle-hunting practices. In chapter two Crawford argues that new technologies and capital investment changed the character of turtle hunting and the working lives of turtlemen as they were incorporated into a wider industry with global reach. The labouring landscape of the turtles comes to the fore in chapter three, where the connections between the Cayman Islands and the wider Caribbean are explored and it is argued that the increasingly long-distance migrations of turtlemen led to a transnational family and community of sorts as well as a shared maritime culture and exchange of knowledge. A chapter that will be of great interest to those interested in transnational governance and the use of imperial power dynamics by labourers is chapter four. In this chapter, disputes over turtling grounds are highlighted in relation to the development of sovereign states and tensions over maritime territorial sovereignty. Finally, chapter five caters to those interested in the rise of environmental activism. It draws from Archie Carr’s archives and highlights how turtlemen’s knowledge ended up contributing to the rise of an environmental movement calling for the end of turtling as turtle populations faced extinction.

As is apparent, the book touches upon many themes and histories, and this is both the strength and on occasion the weakness of the book. It is written with great care and does justice to the dynamic lives of the turtlemen, their lives at sea and their knowledge of turtles. Crawford highlights that their knowledge of turtles was immense and circulated throughout the Caribbean, but that it also contributed to the effectiveness of a trade that was in the end unsustainable.

It pains me to critique a book that I wish everyone would read. Even so, the book left me scratching my head as someone interested in the gendered dynamics of labour history. That is to say, the sources referenced many interviews with women, yet the importance of their stories was left implicit and the question ‘but why turtlemen’ was not explicitly addressed. For example, the book does draw on interviews with women and references anecdotes where the social networks of these women is implicitly demonstrated to be important to the wage labour opportunities of men (e.g., p.76, p. 129-130). However, these stories are not explicitly referred to nor explained as such, with women instead often being referred to under the headings of ‘wives, mothers, and sisters’. Similar issues might be found for those interested in transnational governance (why is there no comparison to the legal developments in maritime sovereignty and the later development of environmental personhood, for example?) or for anyone interested in one of the many themes the book addresses, such as the rise of an environmental conservation movement (i.e., how does this relate to the history of global activist movements?). It is therefore important to emphasize not to lose sight of the beauty of the book in its entirety and the way it relates the specific history of the turtlemen to many wider historic developments. The Last Turtlemen is therefore a great resource for teaching, as it raises a plethora of questions and refers to a great variety of archival sources, from colonial sources, to oral history and personal archives. For someone who really enjoyed the book, I can only state that the book is worthy of many sequels.