Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/415

] we were obliged to imitate our host by taking up the victuals with our fingers; but we did not eat the less on that account, nor with a worse appetite.

All of us reconciled ourselves very well to bread made of sago; the fish was strongly seasoned with pimento, but some glasses of the water of the sago-tree diminished the violence of its effects.

While we sat at dinner, we were entertained with music. A kind of spinet was accompanied by a man's voice; a drum served as a base, and a tamtam as a counter-base.

After dinner our host carried us in his canoe about 500 toises towards the east.

There we saw a man employed in preparing a sago-tree. This tree, which was about eighteen inches in thickness, had been cut down a little time before. It was already opened for a part of its length, the whole of which did not exceed forty feet, and it had afforded a great deal of sago. This palm, like the other trees of this genus, preserving nearly the same diameter for its whole length, yields nearly as much sago towards the top of the trunk as towards the root. (Fig. A. Plate xlii, is an exact figure of a young sago tree.) The external part of its trunk is formed of a very hard ligneous shell or cruft, four lines and a half in