Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/399

Rh The little island of Savu, which, trifling as it is, appears to me to be of no small consequence to the Dutch East India Company, is situate in lat. 10° 35′ S. and long. 122° 30′ E. from the meridian of Greenwich: its length and breadth are nearly the same, viz. about 6 German or 24 English miles. The whole is divided into five principalities, nigries as they are called by the Indians, Laai, Seba, Regeeua, Timo, and Massara, each governed by its respective radja or king. It has three harbours, all good; the best is Timo, situate somewhere round the S.E. point of the isle; the next, Seba, where we anchored, situate round the N.W. point of the third we learnt neither the name nor situation, only guess it to be somewhere on the south side. Off the west end of the island is another called Pulo, with an additional name, which in the hurry of business was forgotten, and never again asked for.

The appearance of the island, especially on the windward side where we first made it, was allowed by us all to equal in beauty, if not excel, anything we had seen, even parched up as it was by a drought, which, Mr. Lange informed us, had continued for seven months without a drop of rain, the last rainy season having entirely failed them. Verdure, indeed, there was at this time no sign of, but the gentle sloping of the hills, which were cleared quite to the top, and planted in every part with thick groves of the fan-palm, besides woods almost of cocoanut trees, arecas which grew near the seaside, filled the eye so completely that it hardly looked for or missed the verdure of the earth, a circumstance seldom seen in any perfection so near the line. How beautiful it must appear when covered with its springing crops of maize, millet, indigo, etc., which cover almost every foot of ground in the cultivated parts of the island, imagination can hardly conceive. The verdure of Europe, set off by those stately pillars of India, palms—I mean especially the fan-palm, which for straightness and proportion, both of the stem itself and of the head to the stem, far excels all the