Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise, believed to be the oldest reptile living on earth, in Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean.GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/Getty Images
Kendra Coulter is the author of The Tortoise’s Tale and a professor who leads the animal ethics and sustainability leadership program at Huron University College, Western University.
This was a world of tortoises. For 200 million years, tortoises’ hardy legs propelled their elegant and often enormous, shelled bodies slowly but surely across the lands now given names like Ecuador, Madagascar and the Philippines.
As people moved, tortoises were moved too, away from their ancestral lands and communities. Into personal menageries where they were ridden and kept alongside other captive animals by people like Walter Rothschild, a man born into a famed banking family but more interested in amassing animals than financial capital. Into university laboratories and museums where their remains were studied and displayed. Most commonly, onto ships to be eaten by sailors, so widely and often that this is no longer a world of tortoises. On the Galapagos Islands, entire species of tortoises who survived millions of years of planetary evolution disappeared in a historical blink of an eye because of one particular species and its economic and colonial decisions: our own. Charles Darwin himself both ate and rode on giant tortoises, the unsettling results of intellectual labour disconnected from reverence or even respect for animals laid bare.
An Aldabra giant tortoise named Jonathan was taken from the Seychelles off the eastern coast of Africa to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean in 1882. Photos reveal that Jonathan was fully grown at the time, likely weighed close to 500 pounds, and was at least 50 years of age. Then he was moved no more, and Jonathan still roams the grounds of the Saint Helena governor’s mansion. He is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living land animal and this year, will turn 193. Jonathan enjoys fruits, vegetables, flowers, long naps and mating with fellow tortoise residents David, Emma and Fred. As one does, at 193.
To get out of the turtle hospital, slow and steady wins the race
Jonathan has remained steadfast through more than 30 governors. He has outlived Walter Rothschild and Charles Darwin. Queens and kings, hunters, chefs and sailors. Their children and grandchildren. In a world that can feel overrun by gross inequality and greedy little men with grossly inflated egos, there is something particularly powerful about the peacefulness of tortoises.
Imagine how much Jonathan has witnessed. I have. His remarkable story inspired me to write a tortoise’s memoir. My novel is dedicated to him and to another tortoise with an equally revealing and even more humbling journey.
In 2019, conservationists in the Galapagos found a female tortoise tucked in amidst the rocky, volcanic terrain of Fernandina Island. They soon established that she is a Fernandina tortoise, a species deemed extinct more than a century ago. Yet there she has been, all along. Surviving.
Extensive searches have been undertaken to determine if any other Fernandina tortoises secretly endured, but so far, she remains the lone survivor. Scientifically, she is Chelonoidis phantasticus, a title both poetic and bittersweet. As an individual, she has been named Fernanda, the embodiment of her island, of both vulnerability and strength. If she could write her own story, it would be a clarion call. She might say, please, be careful, you who wield such power over endings and beginnings, and the possibilities in between.
Her extraordinary tale shares chapters with Lonesome George, the last known Pinta tortoise. He captivated the world’s attention, a reminder of the intertwined fragility and resilience of animals whose stories have been made all too tragic. George died in 2012, and with him, his entire species. Their memories and knowledge. Their aspirations.
Lonesome George, the last known Pinta tortoise, at Galapagos National Park in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador, in 2009.The Associated Press
Many kinds of turtles are native to Canada, but not tortoises. Any tortoises on what many Indigenous nations call Turtle Island were moved to these lands, their origins and journeys less known and surely varied; some legal, others illegal, all worthy of ethical concern. This country has a striking tortoise story too, one that seems lifted from the pages of lore, but is true, and real.
The Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History is home to Gopher Gus, the Lettuce King, Gus for short, a 103-year-old gopher tortoise bought in Florida for $5. He used to roam the hallways and exhibits of the museum freely and reportedly went missing for a year in the 1950s. Was he stuck somewhere, or did he simply need quiet time away from our kind to rest? To reflect. To ponder.
Gus cannot be safely returned to the wild but gopher tortoises long to dig burrows, and in warm weather he enjoys (supervised) walks and digging outside. Maybe he looks at the faces of the children marvelling at his presence and thinks of the future. Perhaps he enjoys the feel of the sun on his body. Tortoises teach us the importance of humility, especially when it comes to animals.
The tortoise whose story I created is given many names. As people come and go, she endures, always seeking joy and connection, wondering if our species will evolve from human to humane. “I am a tortoise,” she says. “I am proud to be a tortoise. I am also a prism.” Vibrant colours of co-existence, shimmers of compassion and solidarity, stubbornly hopeful, they endure too.
Conservation work continues across the Galapagos and beyond. Today, Aldabra tortoises are being returned to Madagascar and Seychelles, Jonathan’s homeland. They are being rewilded and recognized for both their inherent worth and benefits to local ecosystems and economies. As sentient beings deserving of both respect and reverence. Truths rooted in eons with vital new branches.
Jonathan and Fernanda could outlive me, and you; maybe Gus will too. Equally as important are the tortoises who have not been given names, at least not by us. Those who roam wild and free, where they belong.
This could be a world of tortoises again, this delicate, formidable and precious planet, our only home. Our shared home. Imagine.