A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 794 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13.

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 794 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13.
the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature, and often also containing particles of iron.  Some basaltic appearances in one of the districts into which the island is divided, and several precipices among the mountains, evidently produced by sudden violence, indicate the volcanic origin of this highly favoured country.  There is plenty of good water to be had over all the island.  The weather from March till August is usually mild and pleasant.  During the rough season, which lasts from December till March, the wind often blows very hard from the west, and is attended with rain.—­E.]

The produce of this island is bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas of thirteen sorts, the best we had ever eaten; plantains; a fruit not unlike an apple, which, when ripe, is very pleasant; sweet potatoes, yams, cocoas, a kind of Arum fruit known here by the name of Jambu, and reckoned most delicious; sugar-cane, which the inhabitants eat raw; a root of the salop kind, called by the inhabitants Pea; a plant called Ethee, of which the root only is eaten; a fruit that grows in a pod, like that of a large kidney-bean, which, when it is roasted, eats very much like a chesnut, by the natives called Ahee; a tree called Wharra, called in the East Indies Pandanes, which produces fruit, something like the pine-apple; a shrub called Nono; the Morinda, which also produces fruit; a species of fern, of which the root is eaten, and sometimes the leaves; and a plant called Theve, of which the root also is eaten:  But the fruits of the Nono, the fern, and the Theve, are eaten only by the inferior people, and in times of scarcity.  All these, which serve the inhabitants for food, the earth produces spontaneously, or with so little culture, that they seem to be exempted from the first general curse, that “man should eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”  They have also the Chinese paper mulberry, morus papyrifera, which they call Aouto; a tree resembling the wild fig-tree of the West Indies; another species of fig, which they call Matte; the cordia sebestina orientalis, which they call Etou; a kind of Cyprus grass, which they call Moo; a species of tournefortia, which they call Taheinoo; another of the convolvulus poluce, which they call Eurhe; the solanum centifolium, which they call Ebooa; the calophyllum mophylum, which they call Tamannu; the hibiscus tiliaceus, called Poerou, a frutescent nettle; the urtica argentea, called Erowa; with many other plants which cannot here be particularly mentioned:  Those that have been named already will be referred to in the subsequent part of this work.

They have no European fruit, garden stuff, pulse, or legumes, nor grain of any kind.

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A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.