Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/194

136 yams; cocos, a kind of arum, known in the East Indies by the name of Habava; a fruit known there by the name of eng. mallow, and considered most delicious; sugar-cane, which the inhabitants eat raw; a root of the salop kind, called by the inhabitants pea; the root also of a plant called ethee; and a fruit in a pod like a large hull of a kidney bean, which, when roasted, eats much like a chestnut, and is called ahee. Besides these there is the fruit of a tree called wharra, in appearance like a pine-apple; the fruit of a tree called nono; the roots, and perhaps leaves of a fern; and the roots of a plant called theve: which four are eaten only by the poorer sort of people in times of scarcity.

Of tame animals they have hogs, fowls, and dogs, which latter we learned to eat from them; and few were there of the nicest of us but allowed that a South Sea dog was next to an English lamb. This indeed must be said in their favour, that they live entirely upon vegetables; probably our dogs in England would not eat half as well. Their pork certainly is most excellent, though sometimes too fat; their fowls are not a bit better, rather worse maybe, than ours at home, and often very tough. Though they seem to esteem flesh very highly, yet in all the islands I have seen, the quantity they have of it is very unequal to the number of their people; it is therefore seldom used among them, even the principal chiefs do not have it every day or even every week, though some of them had pigs that we saw quartered upon different estates, as we send cocks to walk in England. When any of these chiefs kills a hog, it seems to be divided almost equally among all his dependents, he himself taking little more than the rest. Vegetables are their chief food, and of these they eat a large quantity.

Cookery seems to have been but little studied here; they have only two methods of applying fire. Broiling