Shell Game

Robinson Crusoe certainly has a rough time of it, and that’s even after the seventeenth-century castaway has “found a large tortoise or turtle” while exploring the back side of the Island of Despair. But find one he does, and soon he is feasting on the “hundreds of them” that roam the opposite beach — their eggs and their flesh, “the most savoury and pleasant that I ever tasted in my life.”

The Robinsons, a Swiss family who wash up on a different island in a different sea, also do okay by exploiting their chelonian neighbours for “many a sumptuous meal.” And in one memorable scene — my childhood favourite from the 1960 film adaptation of the 1812 Johann David Wyss novel — a propitious marine turtle serves as something of a tugboat, helping Father and the gang drag their salvaged supplies from ship to shore.

Leviticus may lump the tortoise “among the creeping things that creep upon the earth,” but the placid guy is a very different beast than the weasel...