Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/450

392 which were by any means so good as those of Brazil. Europeans commonly compare this fruit to a melting peach, to which in softness and sweetness it certainly approaches, but in flavour as certainly falls much short of any that can be called good. The climate, as I have been told, is here too hot and damp for them; and on the coast of India they are much better. Here are almost as many sorts of them as of apples in England; some much inferior to others; some of the worst sorts are so bad that the natives themselves can hardly eat them when ripe, but use them as an acid when just full grown. One sort, called by them mangha cowani, has so strong a smell that a European can scarce bear one in the room; these, however, the natives are fond of. The best kinds for eating are first mangha doodool, incomparably better than any other, then mangha santock and mangha gure; and besides these three I know no other which a European would be at all pleased with.

(7) Of bananas (Musa) here are likewise innumerable kinds: three only of which are good to eat as fruit, viz. pisang mas, pisang radja, and pisang ambou; all of which have a tolerably vinous taste; the rest, however, are useful in their way. Some are fried with butter, others boiled in place of bread (which is here a dearer article than meat), etc. One of the sorts, however, deserves to be taken notice of by botanists, as it is, contrary to the nature of the rest of its tribe, full of seeds, from whence it is called pisang batu or pisang bidjis. It has, however, no excellence to recommend it to the taste or any other way, unless it be, as the Malays think, good for the flux.

(8) Grapes (Vitis vinifera) are here to be had, but in no great perfection: they are, however, sufficiently dear, a bunch about the size of a fist costing about a shilling or eighteen-pence. (9) Tamarinds (Tamarindus indica) are prodigiously common and as cheap; the people, however, either do not know how to put them up, as the West Indians do, or do not practise it, but cure them with salt, by which means they become a black mass so disagreeable to the sight and taste that few Europeans choose to meddle with them. (10)