At the extreme southern end of Cancun, whither we now sailed, we discovered another small ruin of no great interest, but further suggesting the once dense population of the island. Here, too, was a fisher-hut, four poles stuck in the sand with two cross-poles covered with palm-leaf for roof. Round this Cancun point, known as Nisuc, are turtle in plenty: both the green turtle (_Chelonia midas_), beloved of aldermen, and the hawk-billed turtle, the caret (_Eretmochelys imbricata_), which provides the commercial tortoise-shell. It is this latter which the Yucatecan fishermen chiefly hunt, for they can get as much as eight dollars a pound for the shell. For the flesh of the turtle they have no taste; an example of the truth of the saying that what we have we never value. The beaches of these Caribbean isles, around the fisher settlements, are often littered with the rotting carcases of turtle, spectacles of wilful waste sufficient to break the stoutest aldermanic heart. The preparation of turtle soup demands a culinary artist, and no Yucatecan is this. Their kitchen methods are ever those of the sloven cook who throws meat into a pot anyhow. But they begin to learn that there are people who prize the flesh of turtle, and a certain trade is done in the green reptilian with the captains of American trading schooners which come across the Gulf from Florida and the Eastern States. Thus a feature of the villages are the turtle "crawls," enclosures built some few yards out from the water edge, made of stakes driven in in the form of a small square bound together by lianas. Here the turtles swim about until they are wanted. At the "crawl" in Isla de Mujeres there were some two dozen, many of them monsters weighing four hundred pounds or more. At this hut on Nisuc Point we met two young Yucatecan fishermen, handsome fellows in spotless cottons, their feet sandalled. They, too, were from Mujeres and they joined us in our evening meal, which we ate in picnic fashion at the water edge. But the mosquitoes were also feeding, so at sunset we put out into mid-stream to avoid their pressing attentions, and fished for picuda till dark. These Yucatecans are quite Arab-like in the simplicity of their sleeping habits, and it was quaint to watch at sundown the five men wrap themselves, head and all, in their coloured blankets, as if they were going to send themselves by parcels post, and fall asleep in little packets all over the fore deck. All night they sleep in the same attitude in which they lie down, a dreamless sleep like that of a cat on a sunny window-ledge. And it is a good thing they do, for the few inches of gunwale would not save them from a ducking if they twisted a hand's breadth.