Their shell is still soft, their flesh extremely tender, and after they have cooked them they eat them just like oysters.

In this form large quantities are consumed.
However, this is not the most general use to which the chelonian eggs are put in the provinces of Amazones and Para.

The manufacture of _"manteigna de tartaruga,"_ or turtle butter, which will bear comparison with the best products of Normandy or Brittany, does not take less every year that from two hundred and fifty to three hundred millions of eggs.
But the turtles are innumerable all along the river, and they deposit their eggs on the sands of the beach in incalculable quantities.
However, on account of the destruction caused not only by the natives, but by the water-fowl from the side, the urubus in the air, and the alligators in the river, their number has been so diminished that for every little turtle a Brazilian pataque, or about a franc, has to be paid.
On the morrow, at daybreak, Benito, Fragoso, and a few Indians took a pirogue and landed on the beach of one of the large islands which they had passed during the night.

It was not necessary for the jangada to halt.

They knew they could catch her up.
On the shore they saw the little hillocks which indicated the places where, that very night, each packet of eggs had been deposited in the trench in groups of from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and ninety.