Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1892 — TURTLE-EGG BUTTER. [ARTICLE]

TURTLE-EGG BUTTER.

Ingenious Way in Which It Is Prepared Along the Amazon. Another thing which the Government now wisely regulates is the turtle-egg harvest,which otherwise would soon become extinct. Everybody has heard of the famous tartaruga, or Amazonian turtle, which abounds by millions all along the river and its affluents, and of the manteiga da tartaruga (turtle-egg butter) — a substance peculiar to this quarter of the globe. At certain seasons of the year they come ashore and deposit their eggs in the sand, says a correspondent of the Philadelphia Record. Then the stream will be fairly speckled with them, each paddling clumsily up to its native sandbar, for it is positively asserted by those W’ell up in turtle lore, that not one of them will lay an egg anywhere except on thevery spot where it was itself hatched out. It is said that the. noise of their shells striking against one another in the rush and scramble to Shore may be heard a great distance. Each lays from 80 to 120 eggs every other year. Their work commences at dusk and ends with the following dawn, when they again scramble back into the water. During the daytime the natives collect the eggs and pile them in great heaps, sometimes 20 feet in diameter and of corresponding height, as cannon balls are piled in a navy yard. While yet fresh the eggs are thrown into wooden troughs, broken with sticks and stamped fine with the feet. Water is then thrown on and th?, mass is exposed to the rays of the sun. The intense heat brings the oily matter of the eggs to the surface from which it is skimmed off. This, when clarified over a gentle fire, resembles melted butte’-, and is the manteiga of commerce. It is conveyed to market packed in earthen pots, and the Indians and lower classes generally prize it very highly for seasoning their food, though it retains a strong flavor of fish oil. It is estimated that in earlier times as many as 250,000,000 turtle eggs were destroyed every, year in the manufacture of mauteiga, and there are still extensivebeaches, notably in Marajo, .which have yielded every year as many as 2,000 pot* of oil, each pot containg five gallons, the product of about 2,500 eggs. The wonder is how any turtle can come to matinity, so many enemies lie in wait for it the moment it emerges from the she'll and makes its way to the water. Alligators are waiting to swallow it, jaguars to feed on it, buzzards, eagles and woodibises to pounce upon and devour it, and if it escapes all these and reaches tho water, ravenous fishes are awaiting to seize upon it in the stream. But so prodigiously prolific are they that only their most powerful enemy, man, has visibly diminished their numbers.