Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/164

106 having met with a much larger supply of hogs, fowls, etc., than we have done, I can most readily account for that, as we have found by constant experience that these people may be frightened into anything. They have often described to us the terror which the Dolphin's gun caused them, and when we ask how many people were killed, they number names upon their fingers, some ten, some twenty, some thirty, and then say worrow worrow, the same word as is used for a flock of birds or a shoal of fish. The Dolphin's journals often serve to confirm this opinion. "When," say they, "towards the latter end of our time provisions were scarce, a party of men were sent towards Eparre to get hogs, etc., an office which they had not the smallest difficulty in performing, for the people, as we went along the shore, drove out their hogs to meet us, and would not allow us to pay anything for them."

About a mile farther on we found houses fairly plentiful on each side of the river, the valley being all this way three or four hundred yards across. We were now shown a house which proved the last we saw; the master offered us cocoa-nuts, and we refreshed ourselves. Beyond this we went maybe six miles (it is difficult to guess distances when roads are bad as this was, for we were generally obliged to travel along the course of the river). We passed by several hollow places under stones where, we were told, that people who were benighted slept. At length we arrived at a place where the river was banked on each side with steep rocks; and a cascade which fell from them made a pool so deep, that the Indians said we could not go beyond it—they never did. Their business lay below the rocks, on each side of the plains, above which grew great plenty of vae. The avenues to these were truly dreadful, the rocks were nearly perpendicular, one being nearly a hundred feet in height, with its face constantly wet and slippery from the water of numberless springs. Directly up the face of even this was a road, or rather a succession of long pieces of bark of Hibiscus tiliaceus, which served as a rope to take hold of and scramble up from ledge to ledge, though upon these very ledges none