to rival your jazziest tropical fish. Even today, fishermen in England, Australia, and other English-speaking countries call sp iny lobsters "crawfish" or "crayfish," or sometimes "rock lobsters." All across the Pacific, mariners and explorers have regularly praised both the abundance of spiny lobsters and their taste. Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, claimed "sea crawfish" as one of the greatest luxuries of New Zealand, and he wrote about how the Maori fo und them Juan Fernandez fishermen show offtheir crawfish catch. on the bottom by using their feet. When adventurer Thor Heyerdahl was sailing across the Pacific during the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, he also saw people catching spiny lobsters with their feet-the women of Easter Island were catching them at night using their toes.
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British mariners often wrote specifically of the spiny lobsters of the Juan Fernandez Islands. Visiting in the 17 40s, the Royal Navy commander Lord George Anson
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proclaimed these lobsters the best in the world, with individuals regularly weighing eight or nine pounds (a lobster at a restaurant today is normally berween one and one-and-a-half pounds.) He wrote that so many lobsters lined the sea floor that when the sailors were maneuvering their boats on and off the beach, they couldn't help but stick the animals with their boat hooks. A century later, Lieutenant Frederick Walpole of HMS Collingwood wrote about five-pound lobsters off the islands and of h ow much fun the crew had catching them while at anchor. Walpole wrote: "We had crawfish for breakfast, crawfish for dinner, crawfish for supper, and crawfish for any accidental meal we could cram in berween." For some reason Daniel Defoe didn't have his character Crusoe eating sea crawfish, but
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\JN i>l;:\2. ABD OM \::..r.J Andrew Selkirk surely would have as part of his -fo~ 1"'\0\IEl"'lt:iJ\, C\..fN.J ttJl>, regular diet. Acco rding to one of his biogp..~ t:> ) Lr- f' ~Mt-.\-€", raphers, when he returned home to Scotland, . HOL-DINb 6 66 S "Day after day he spent in fishing .. .catching lobsters, his favourite amusement, as they reLl\J~S \iJ vJj\"\~P-.. Jp minded him of the crawfish ofJuan Fernandez." / To .6 'SO t>E. tf-' Next issue: the passenger pigeon of Cape Horn. For past "Animals in Sea History, " visit www. seahistory.org.