This picuda, full-grown specimens of which weigh their fifteen or twenty pounds, makes exciting fishing. There is no science about it, for he is a regular sea glutton, and with a fresh fish (the picuda insists on this: he is no refuse-eater) as bait on a string quite ropelike in its thickness you are almost certain to hook one just about here. The monster comes on board with a regular hullabaloo, flapping and leaping like a veritable tarpon and inflicting ugly bites if you give him the chance. The sailors kill him by hitting him over the head with a wooden mallet; but this weapon proved ineffective in the hands of the lad Dolores, who, apparently in the hope of hastening the fish's escape from his sufferings, pressed his two brown fingers into the creature's eye-sockets. We were ashamed of the cruelty of the action, and motioned to him to stop. But Yucatecans have no humanity, and the boy, his handsome face lit up with a bewitching smile, went on gouging out the fish's eyes. We had a shot or two at an alligator and bagged a few birds as we sailed out of this creek into a wide stretch of water, its thickly wooded shores making it look like an English lake. Towards evening we ran into another channel, and there at an inlet, tree-shrouded, we ran the boat into the boggy bank. The only inhabitant of the island is an old Indian, a regular Mayan Robinson Crusoe, nearly blind through a splinter of wood flying up into his face while he was chopping. We were greeted by the barking of some half a dozen dogs which came bounding down from the hut, followed by their master who could only just distinguish night from day, and yet made his way to the water edge with extraordinary confidence. He welcomed us with true Mayan hospitality, and in a little time we were dining like princes off roasted picuda, biscuit and rice, washed down with Cadbury's cocoa. There was one drawback to our new quarters: the mosquitoes were in possession.