The Ascent of Man

One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man. We tramped single file through the rice field for half an hour, then came to a rickety footbridge that led into a mangrove swamp. Treading carefully, I followed my companions over the uneven planks. The Turtle Man recalled how, in the days before the bridge existed, he used to wade hip-deep through the mangroves, which as we walked in the twilight stuck up from the swamp with a stricken, Pompeiian air. The footbridge brought us to the Atlantic Ocean and a sandy beach. We headed north along the beach for a mile or two, encountering only a flock of vultures. The beach was studded with the stumps of dead trees: every year the ocean pushed the beach deeper and deeper into the swamp, and it was inevitable that the forest would in time drown in the sand. Back in the Seventies, the Turtle Man said, the beach here might have been littered with the carcasses of up to thirty leatherback turtles killed by poachers. As the authorities did nothing about the slaughter, he took it upon himself to act. He would hide his trail bike, a Yamaha 100, among the coconut trees, and, armed with a fishing gun and dressed in a khaki outfit which he hoped made him look like a game warden, patrol the miles of beaches where the turtles came ashore to lay their eggs. If he saw poachers, he would challenge them to stop. ‘It was a crazy thing to do,’ the Turtle Man said. ‘It was the middle of the night and these men were armed with cutlasses.’