In St. Bartholomew’s or Turtle bay, as the whalers call it, where for five months we lay, taking and curing abalones, our food was chiefly turtle. This little harbor swarmed with them. After a few hours’ hunt one of our whaleboats would return with five or six of these unwieldy creatures in the bottom, some so large and heavy as to require hoisting over the side. Often the green fat under the callipee, or under shell, lay three inches in thickness. I served up turtle fried, turtle stewed, quarters of turtle roasted and stuffed like loins of veal, turtle plain boiled and turtles’ flippers, boiled to a jelly and pickled. A turtle is a variously flavored being. Almost every portion has a distinct and individual taste. After all, old Jake, our black boat-steerer, showed us the most delicate part of the turtle, and one previously thrown away. This was the tripe, cleansed of a thin inner skin. When the cabin table had once feasted on stewed turtle tripe they called for it continuously. After many trials and much advice and suggestion, I learned to cook acceptably the abalone. The eatable part of this shellfish when fresh is as large as a small tea saucer. There are two varieties, the white and black. The white is the best. Cut up in pieces and stewed, as I attempted at first, the abalone turned out stewed bits of gutta percha; fried, it was fried gutta percha. Then a man from another vessel came on board, who taught me to inclose a single abalone in a small canvas bag and then pound it to a jelly with a wooden mallet. This process got the honey out of the abalone. The remains of four or five abalones thus pounded to a pulp, and then allowed to simmer for a couple of hours, would make a big tureen of the most delicious soup man ever tasted, every drop of which, on cooling, hardened to the consistency of calves’-foot jelly. When my cabin boarders had once become infected with abalone soup they wanted me to keep bringing it along. The Americans do not know or use all the food in the sea which is good.