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Marine Turtle Newsletter 58:10-12, © 2001

The Etymological Riddle of the Ridley Sea Turtle

Harold A. Dundee
Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118 USA

Ridley is a strange name for a turtle; it evokes query as to its etymology, and, as I shall show, it is an enigma, yea, a riddle! Carr (1942) admitted that the term "bastard turtle", used by Lacepède (1788), was venerable and that Kemp used that term when he passed his discovery of the turtle on to Garman. Carr proposed that the vernacular name be "relegated to synonymy" and that in this case "priority should bow to prevalence, that a common name which is not common is a mockery and henceforth I shall use ridley". Carr (1942) further indicated that the local name for the turtle on Lower Matecumbe Key, Florida was "ridley", attributing that name to a friend, Stewart Springer (deceased 1991), who ran a shark fishery, and said that Springer had told him of it some time ago. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 1942 as the origin of the name, apparently crediting Carr. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Carr as the source of the name, but says etymology unknown. Moseley (1926), speaking of the Bahamas Islands, mentioned the "ridley or bastard" turtle. The Florida Keys are (or were) home to a number of fishermen from the Bahamas; whether they or the native Floridians first used the name "ridley" is not certain.

The etymology of "ridley" once seemed to have been solved by Gotch (1986), who said it had been named after H. N. Ridley FRS, but Gotch gave no primary source of information. I queried Stuart Booth (consultant editor of the Blandford Press, publisher's of Gotch's book) and E. N. Arnold (British Museum of Natural History, one of Gotch's advisers) to see if they knew of Gotch's source. I found that Gotch's book had been published posthumously and that Gotch was quite elderly and largely bedridden when he wrote it. He lived in a rural area, was a long way from primary sources, and tended to rely on the help of others (one of his advisors was the late Angus Bellairs, an active herpetologist). Arnold said that he had checked many Greek derivations for Gotch, but was never asked about the derivation of ridley.

Henry Nicholas Ridley (1855-1956) was a botanist who worked primarily in southeastern Asia. His earliest paper in 1879 dealt with copepods. He also published several short titles on Asian herpetofauna, the first being on Malaysian reptiles (Ridley, 1899). Gotch said that H. N. Ridley had been in Brazil and also on the island of Fernando de Noronha off the northern coast of Brazil in 1887. He authored a single paper on the botany of Fernando de Noronha (Ridley, 1890a), as well as a paper (Ridley, 1888) and a book (Ridley, 1890b) on the natural history of this island. Scarcely any mention is made of turtles, and no mention of Ridley's name being used for them. Branner (1888) visited Fernando de Noronha in l886 but reported no sea turtles. Pritchard and Trebbau (1984) indicate no records of Lepidochelys (which would be L. olivacea) for Fernando de Noronha, but the species does nest in at least two places farther south in Brazil, as well as from the Guianas westward (Pritchard and Trebbau, 1984).

In his book about the Caribbean, Carr (1955) told of a ridley being caught 18 years earlier when he was out with Jonah Thompson in the Florida Keys. Thus, if we assume that Carr's book was being written in perhaps 1953, did he mean 1935? In any case he was saying l937 or earlier. Thompson's age was 65 and he said he'd started early. This suggests that the term ridley antedates perhaps 1900, and that gets close to Ridley's 1888-90 writings. Carr (1955) also indicated that an "old pod" at St. Lucie Inlet (peninsular Florida) said, "This yer ridley don't raise. He's a bastard, a crossbreed you get when a loggerhead mounts a green..." An old fisherman would not likely change his vernacular usage. Considering that both herpetologists and turtle fishermen were so puzzled by the identity of Lepidochelys kempii, I made a fanciful guess that the fishermen considered the identity to be a riddle, which was corrupted to ridley! Note that someone not familiar with pronunciation of a written word could have interpreted riddle as "ridd le".

Carr stated that he had visited all around the Caribbean and found no sign of ridleys or anyone who knew them. Thus the name ridley appears to be of limited geographic use. But in my conversations with Marjorie Carr, Archie Carr's widow, came a revelation. She could not remember the exact source, but she said that "ridley" came from "riddle", which was transmogrified in the Florida Keys to "riddler" and finally "ridley". The riddle being, she said, "Who were its parents?" No one knew from whence the "bastard turtle", as local turtlers sometimes called it, came or where it bred. Mrs. Carr said that many of the variant names were long in use in the Keys. We could guess, then, that the name could well go back into the early 19th century, perhaps even earlier. If the name was to honor H. N. Ridley, we must wonder how it ever got to be seemingly only a Florida-Bahamas vernacular.

At the University of Florida's P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, I perused a number of books dealing with Florida and the Florida Keys and I read old Key West newspapers dating from l831 onward into the early 1900's. Nowhere did I find the name "ridley", but the other sea turtles - green, hawksbill, loggerhead, and trunk (=leatherback) - were mentioned on occasion. Likewise, a search of literature on the Bahamas Islands turned up nothing. The most complete early listing on Florida sea turtles appeared in excerpts from John J. Audubon's early writings in 1831-32 (Herrick, 1926), in which he said of the sea turtles that four kinds occurred in the Florida Keys-the green, loggerhead, hawksbill, and trunk.

I have queried several herpetologists who work with turtles and especially sea turtles. None has any idea of the etymology of "ridley". The evidence is strong that "ridley" is a vernacular of local usage in Florida. Dr. Peter Pritchard (pers. comm.) says that he has never encountered the name "olive ridley" or "Pacific ridley" among native peoples in the range of Lepidochelys olivacea, but that local herpetologists may use it. Likewise Dr. Jack Frazier (pers. comm.) has not encountered the name ridley as a vernacular in the Pacific Ocean where virtually all literature used olive loggerhead for L. olivaceaas opposed to red-brown loggerhead applied to Caretta caretta. Perhaps one day the name "ridley" will surface in some obscure writing such as a whaling account or other early publication and provide a chronological clue to this mystery.

Branner, J. C. 1888. Notes on the fauna of the islands of Fernando de Noronha. Amer. Nat. 22:861-871

Carr, A. F., Jr. 1942. Notes on sea turtles. Proc. New England Zool. Club 21:1-16.

Carr, A. F., Jr. 1955(1956). The Windward Road. Alfred Knopf, New York.

Gotch, A. F. 1986. Reptiles. Their Latin Names Explained. Blandford Press, Ltd. London.

Grant, C. 1940. The herpetology of the Cayman Islands, with an appendix on the Cayman Islands and marine turtle. Bull. Inst. Jamaica Sci. Ser. 2: 1-65 + illust.

Herrick, F. H. 1926. Delineations of American Scenery and Character by John Audubon. G. A. Baker and Co., New York.

Lacepède, B. G. E. L., comte de. 1788. Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes Ovipare et des Serpens. Tome Premier. Hotel de Thou, Paris.

Moseley, M. 1926. The Bahamas Handbook. Nassau Guardian, Nassau.

Pritchard, P. C. H. and P. Trebbau. 1984. The Turtles of Venezuela. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles.

Ridley, H. N. 1888. Visit to Fernando de Noronha. Zoologist 12:41-49.

Ridley, H. N. 1890a. Notes on the botany of Fernando de Noronha. Bot. J. Linn. Soc. London 27(181):1-195.

Ridley, H. N. 1890b. The Natural History of the Island of Fernando de Noronha Based on the Collections Made by the British Museum Expedition in l887. J. Linn. Soc. London.

Ridley, H. N. 1899. The habits of Malay reptiles. Royal Asiatic Soc. J. 32:185-210.