Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/297

1770 appear to a European, to draw nourishment from a class of plant which in Europe no animal, hardly even insects, will taste, I am much inclined to think that it affords a nourishing and wholesome diet. These people eat but little, and this is the foundation of their meals all summer, at least from the time that their roots are planted, till the season for digging them up. Among them I have seen several very healthy old men, and in general the whole of them are as vigorous a race as can be imagined.

To the southward, where little or nothing is planted, fern roots and fish must serve them all the year. Accordingly, we saw that they had made vast piles of both, especially the latter, which were dried in the sun very well, and I suppose meant for winter stock, when possibly fish is not so plentiful or the trouble of catching it is greater than in summer.

Water is their universal drink, nor did I see any signs of any other liquor being at all known to them, or any method of intoxication. If they really have not, happy they must be allowed to be above all other nations that I have heard of.

So simple a diet, accompanied with moderation, must be productive of sound health, which indeed these people are blessed with in a very high degree. Though we were in several of their towns, where young and old crowded to see us, actuated by the same curiosity as made us desirous of seeing them, I do not remember a single instance of a person distempered in any degree that came under my inspection, and among the numbers of them that I have seen naked, I have never seen an eruption on the skin or any signs of one, scars or otherwise. Their skins, when they came off to us in their canoes, were often marked in patches with a little floury appearance, which at first deceived us, but we afterwards found that it was owing to their having been in their passage wetted with the spray of the sea, which, when it was dry, left the salt behind it in a fine white powder.

Such health drawn from so sound principles must make