But with the afternoon, sure enough, there came a gentle gusty breeze, rising from nowhere. The brown sails for a moment belly out like well-filled corn-sacks. The boom swings over with a creaking, jerky, grating noise. The dark, clear, oily blue water breaks up into little gentle ripples at our bow, and we are once more moving. As darkness falls and the clear azure of the sea turns to a leaden grey, we run past Cancun, this time to seaward, at five or six knots. But it is dawn before we see the coast of Cozumel, which is what sailors call "raw" and is not one to be approached at night time if it can be avoided. So we stand off until the morning; for if one cannot describe the island's shore as one "whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tide," it is true enough that that "foot" is fearsomely shod with coral. As you make your way into the little natural bay and peer down through fathoms of water clear as crystal, you see those ghastly spikes, those evil-looking spires and towers, rising from the bottom, their blackness in the clear water suggestive of their murderous meaning for mariners. As we anchor some five hundred yards from the shore the little island town of San Miguel rings the bay. A few palm-thatched huts, a wooden store, an open space, a custom house with a flagstaff, a few small boat-shelters of palm-leaves to save boats from cracking in the sun, and a jetty, three feet wide, running out into water waist-deep. Northward a grove of palm trees; southward stretches, as far as the eye can see, the rocky coral beach. At the end of the eighteenth century Cozumel, desolate, uninhabited, was the headquarters of the pirate Molas, terror of the Carib Sea; and its rock-and reef-bound coast, broken here and there by tiny land-locked inlets, the water at the entrances discoloured by the sunken corals, looked the ideal shelter for a pirate horde. We were not long in starting for the rocky bay of San Miguel in the crazy dug-out which served as longboat for our schooner. A quarter of a mile lay between us and the shore: and it looked certain we should be swamped, for, with two Indians, our packing-cases and guns made a top-heavy cargo. But these islanders are born sailors, and the way they manœuvred us over the swell towards the small landing-stage was extraordinary. As we neared the beach the swell broke up into rollers, and once or twice it was nearly all up with us. A shark, grasping the situation, swam in after us, showing his ugly eyes above the green water; but he lost his breakfast.