Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/286

228 one delicious meal. These, with the fern roots and one vegetable (Pandanus) totally unknown in Europe, which, though eaten by the natives, no European will probably ever relish, are the whole of the vegetables which I know to be eatable, except those which they cultivate and have probably brought with them from the country from whence they themselves originally come.

Nor does their cultivated ground produce many species of esculent plants; three only have I seen, yams, sweet potatoes, and cocos, all three well known and much esteemed in both the East and West Indies. Of these, especially the two former, they cultivate often patches of many acres, and I believe that any ship that found itself to the northward in the autumn, about the time of digging them up, might purchase any quantity. They also cultivate gourds, the fruits of which serve to make bottles, jugs, etc., and a very small quantity of the Chinese paper mulberry tree.

Fruits they have none, except I should reckon a few kinds of insipid berries which had neither sweetness nor flavour to recommend them, and which none but the boys took the pains to gather.

The woods, however, abound in excellent timber, fit for any kind of building in size, grain, and apparent durability. One, which bears a very conspicuous scarlet flower made up of many threads, and which is as big as an oak in England, has a very heavy hard wood which seems well adapted for the cogs of mill-wheels, etc., or any purpose for which very hard wood is used. That which I have before mentioned to grow in the swamps, which has a leaf not unlike a yew and bears small bunches of berries, is tall, straight, and thick enough to make masts for vessels of any size, and seems likewise by the straight direction of the fibres to be tough, but it is too heavy. This, however, I have been told, is the case with the pitch-pine in North America, the timber of which this much resembles, and which the North Americans lighten by tapping, and actually use for masts.