Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/398

370 The palm-tree, named nipa, grew in those salt marshes. Its leaves are of great use in covering the cottages.

The hunters had already arrived at the place of rendezvous. We were all extremely thirsty; and we expected to procure cocoa-nuts, with as much facility as when we came to the same place in the morning. But the owner of the garden was absent, and there was no one in the cottage but his wife. It was in vain that we endeavoured to prevail upon her to sell us some cocoa-nuts, for which we would have made one of our guides climb the trees. She gave us to understand that she had not liberty to sell them to us. Besides, not one of our guides would have dared to climb the trees in the absence of the owner, and, if he had not come home, we should have had no cocoa-nuts; for he had placed among the trees a maté, for which our guides showed as much respect as for the one I have already mentioned. This one was also in the form of a little shed, the roof of which might be about twenty-six inches in height, covered with the leaves of the nipa palm, and supported by four posts, about eighteen inches distant from each other.

From the middle of the roof was suspended by a rope a piece of bamboo, about eight inches in length, and covered with half a cocoa-nut. In this