Word: tortugas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...explored and written about the Amazon, North America and Africa. The Caribbean was the stage for his 1975 poetic narrative of turtle fishermen, Far Tortuga. His latest work, The Snow Leopard, springs from a 250-mile hike that he and Field Biologist George Schaller made five years ago in the Himalayas. Schaller (The Mountain Gorilla, The Serengeti Lion) pushed tirelessly through icy passes and over the Tibetan plateau to observe the rutting habits of the bharal, a wild goatlike animal better known as the blue sheep. He also hoped for a glimpse of the snow leopard, a creature so rare...
...that a battery of sakers on the gun deck of a galleass is bombarding a galliot with langrel that has collapsed its topgallants and smashed a few slush lamps. He is just as sure-footed ashore. When Sabatini finishes describing Captain Blood's hangout, the pirate fortress at Tortuga, any attentive reader could build a scale model in his basement, right down to the little green lizards on the breadfruit trees...
...TORTUGA by Peter Matthiessen. With much dialogue and a minimum of description, nine flawed and simple men hunt turtles in the southwest Caribbean and become actors in an elemental drama...
...Tortuga therefore sets sail with a babel of unattributed dialogue swimming in blinding expanses of white space. Pages go by bearing single words: "Polaris," "horizon." Taken singly, these pages seem too easy, too close to the work of lazy poets who write a word like "loneliness" in the middle of a blank piece of paper and call it an insight...
...noted explorer and naturalist as well as a novelist. Back in 1967, he sailed on a turtle boat out of Grand Cayman. As thoroughly as possible with words on paper, he has duplicated that experience, creating along the way an uncommonly successful mixture of fact and fiction. Far Tortuga is a treatise on turtling, an account of the dying days of sailing ships on unspoiled waters, and a history of a locale that winter tourists tripping through the Caribbean rarely see. Most memorably, it is a spare adventure tale about simple men driven to the extremities of pain and death...