Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/285

1770 when taken out of the water. Of them we bought great quantities everywhere to the northward from the natives, who catch them by diving near the shore, feeling first with their feet till they find out where they lie. We had also that fish described by Frézier in his voyage to Spanish South America by the name of elefant, pejegallo, or poisson coq, which, though coarse, we made shift to eat, and several species of skate or sting-rays, which were abominably coarse. But to make amends for that, we had among several sorts of dogfish one that was spotted with a few white spots, whose flavour was similar to, but much more delicate than, our skate. We had flat fish also like soles and flounders, eels and congers of several sorts, and many others, which any European who may come here after us will not fail to find the advantage of, besides excellent oysters, cockles, clams, and many other sorts of shell-fish, etc.

Though the country generally is covered with an abundant verdure of grass and trees, yet I cannot say that it is productive of such great variety as many countries I have seen: the entire novelty, however, of the greater part of what we found recompensed us as natural historians for the want of variety. Sow-thistle, garden-nightshade, and perhaps one or two kinds of grasses, were exactly the same as in England, three or four kinds of fern were the same as those of the West Indies: these with a plant or two common to all the world, were all that had been described by any botanist out of about four hundred species, except five or six which we ourselves had before seen in Terra del Fuego.

Of eatable vegetables there are very few; we, indeed, as people who had been long at sea, found great benefit in the article of health by eating plentifully of wild celery and a kind of cress which grows everywhere abundantly near the sea-side. We also once or twice met with a herb like that which the country people in England call "lamb's-quarters" or "fat-hen," which we boiled instead of greens; and once only a cabbage-tree, the cabbage of which made us