It is a commonplace story when reduced to a bare description, but really the fishing is full of romance. The sailing amidst the golden islands of the west, the anchorage off the sandy coast of Nicaragua; the casting of the wide-meshed nets and the catching of heavy two or three hundred pound turtles, desperately savage. The turning of a half-exhausted turtle on to his shell-armoured back; the noise of the heavy flapping of over two hundred fins stronger than a strong man’s arm; the pathos of continual sighing, uncanny, half human, wholly unnerving. The journey to the Jamaica jetty. The flopping of the catch into a deep-sea pool, boarded off from the open bay; the feeding of the brutes with curious grass which, seemingly ignored, somehow disappears gradually, when no one is by to witness. Then the romantic drudgery of turtle fishing ends, and the dangerous part begins. The danger lies in the fishing from the pool, the turning on the hot wooden slab, the shipment, in a steamer homeward bound, and--the dinner table. Of late there has been some excitement over Jamaica turtle fishing. The British fishers claim the right of fishing in places Nicaragua called her very own. Schooners were detained and a British ship of war journeyed to the fishing grounds to see that the game was played with fairness. The affair has blown over now, at least so the black Jamaican turtle fisherman told me. Not that he would care anyway; for his work is only that of fishing up the turtle from the pool. He does not bother about the troubles of schooners. His is pretty work, filled to overflowing with dangerous possibilities. Still there are compensations. The feeding of the turtle is employment entailing the expenditure of very little bodily exertion; the thrusting of a few heaps of weed through a loose board; and the fishing comes but seldom, once a week perhaps, or once in two weeks. And, after all, a little danger is a good thing for a man who must swagger before his women folk as one in authority over more than a hundred turtle. He will invite you to the fishing with all the joy of a young child conscious of an audience before whom he knows he can carry himself with distinction. First he strips in the full glare of noonday, and glories in the exhibition of his nudity. “I go among all those savage fishes with no knife, no, not even a gun,” he will tell you. Though why a gun should be mentioned I cannot imagine, since his work is under water. He strides to the loose board with the air of an African chieftain in his village among his women and little children. And after all some weakness, if weakness it be, is permissible in a man who has to play a man’s part in the fullest meaning of the phrase.