government. You were not supposed to get in there, but we
did. Perry Macadial was our quarantine master. That was
right there at North Point. A little bit or right at that
there was rock on the bottom, cocquina rock. They are all
about gone now; there are only a few left there. Then going
south, on Cayo Costa Island, there are some mangroves. It
used to be they made a big cove in there. At one time--way
back there in 1910, at Useppa Island, before you got to
Pelican Pass, where we go in at--there was a separate pass
there that you could go right in Pelican Bay. Old Place
Hole is what they called it. Old Place Hole has about
twenty feet of water in it in places. You could go right in
through there. We always went in that way. Then finally it
filled in there, and it broke through there at Pelican Pass
and went around the other way, right where Deadman's Key
broke in, right up there. If I had a map, I could probably
show you. Old man Padilla, Tarvia Padilla, came to this
country, but how in the hell he ever came here I will never
know. He was from the Canary Islands. The old lady was
from Mexico.
E: She was not Spanish; she was Mexican. What was her name?
RC: I'll be damned if I know. Old Gribsteen could tell you,
because he went over there to Mexico, and he found traces of
her in that Catholic Church. But to find out when she left
there and all about it he would had to have stayed there
three months, and he did not have the time. Mexico would
not let him in the Catholic Church. But he went over there
to trace it.
E: Do you think the Padillas are the oldest family on Cayo
Costa?
RC: As far as I know they were the oldest.
E: There were supposedly some people over there working for the
Cuban fishermen, the Cuban rancheros, as early as the
seventeenth century.
RC: Well, there could have been.
E: Maybe they only come around here during mullet season; maybe
they were only there in the winter.
RC: No, that could have been. It is hard to know. Old man
Tarvia Padilla ran that big mullet business. He lived at
the north end of Cayo Costa on that bayou. Tarvia Bayou is
what they call it. None of the Padillas want to talk much
about it. Nell Adams's father, John Padilla, was the last
one to be buried there. He was buried there in the 1930s.
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