Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/208

150 cannot avoid being taken notice of by the most superficial observer. This colour is made by the admixture of the juices of two vegetables, neither of which in their separate state have the least tendency to the colour of red, nor, so far at least as I have been able to observe, are there any circumstances relating to them from whence any one would be led to conclude that the red colour was at all latent in them. The plants are Ficus tinctoria, called by them matte (the same name as the colour), and Cordia Sebestena, called etou: of these, the fruits of the first, and the leaves of the second, are used in the following manner.

The fruit, which is about as large as a rounceval pea, or very small gooseberry, produces, by breaking off the stalk close to it, one drop of a milky liquor resembling the juice of a fig-tree in Europe. Indeed, the tree itself is a kind of wild fig. This liquor the women collect, breaking off the foot-stalk, and shaking the drop which hangs to the little fig into a small quantity of cocoanut water. To sufficiently prepare a gill of cocoanut water will require three or four quarts of the little figs, though I never could observe that they had any rule in deciding the proportion, except by observing the cocoanut water, which should be of the colour of whey, when a sufficient quantity of the juice of the little figs was mixed with it. When this liquor is ready, the leaves of the etou are brought and well wetted in it; they are then laid upon a plantain leaf, and the women begin, at first gently, to turn and shake them about; afterwards, as they grow more and more flaccid by this operation, to squeeze them a little, increasing the pressure gradually. All this is done merely to prevent the leaves from breaking. As they become more flaccid and spongy, they supply them with more of the juice, and in about five minutes the colour begins to appear on the veins of the etou leaves, and in ten, or a little more, all is finished and ready for straining, when they press and squeeze the leaves as hard as they possibly can. For straining they have a large quantity of the fibres of a kind of Cyperus grass (Cyperus stupeus) called by them mooo, which the boys prepare very nimbly by drawing the