Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/95

Rh with it taste as if they were made of sawdust. Yet it is the only bread which is eaten here, for European bread is sold at nearly the rate of a shilling a pound, and is exceedingly bad on account of the flour, which is generally heated in its passage from Europe.

The country produces many more articles, but as I did not see them or hear them mentioned, I shall not set them down, though doubtless it is capable of producing anything that our West Indian islands do; notwithstanding this they have neither coffee nor chocolate, but import both from Lisbon.

Their fruits, however, I must not pass over in silence. Those that were in season during our stay were pine-apples, melons, water-melons, oranges, limes, lemons, sweet lemons, citrons, plantains, bananas, mangos, mamme-apples, acajou-apples and nuts, Jambosa, another sort which bears a small black fruit, cocoanuts, palm nuts of two kinds, palm berries. Of these I must separately give my opinion, as no doubt it will seem strange to some that I should assert that I have eaten many of them, and especially pine-apples, better in England than any I have met with here. I begin, then, with the pines, as the fruit from which I expected the most, they being, I believe, natives of this country, though I cannot say I have seen or even heard of their being at this time wild anywhere in this neighbourhood. They are cultivated much as we do cabbages in Europe, or rather with less care, the plants being set between beds of any kind of garden stuff, and suffered to take their chance: the price of them in the market is seldom above, and generally under a vintain, which is three halfpence.

All that Dr. Solander and myself tasted we agreed were much inferior to those we had eaten in England, though in general they were more juicy and sweet, yet they had no flavour, but were like sugar melted in water. Their melons are still worse, to judge from the single specimen we had, which was perfectly mealy and insipid; their water-melons, however, are very good, for they have some little flavour or at least a degree of acid, which ours have not. Oranges are