A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 10: Arranged in systematic order: Forming a complete history of the origin and progress of navigation, discovery, and commerce, by sea and land, from the earliest ages to the present time.Kerr, Robert
History
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 10: Arranged in systematic order: Forming a complete history of the origin and progress of navigation, discovery, and commerce, by sea and land, from the earliest ages to the present time.
Kerr, Robert
Voyages and travels
The island of St Antonio is inhabited by about 500 negroes, including
men, women, and children, who subsist chiefly on goats, and also
cultivate a small quantity of cotton. On the sea-side they have
extensive plantations of lemons and oranges, whence they gather great
quantities every year. These were very readily supplied to the Dutch by
the negroes in exchange for mercery goods, but they saw neither hogs,
sheep, nor poultry in the island.
Sailing from St Vincent's on the 25th July, they anchored in the road of
Sierra Leona on the 11th August. Here on the 15th some of the crew being
on shore, eat freely of certain nuts resembling nutmegs, which had a
fine taste, but had scarcely got on board when one of them dropt down
dead, and before he was thoroughly cold he was all over purple spots.
The rest recovered by taking proper medicines. Sierra Leona is a
mountain on the continent of Africa, standing on the south side of the
mouth of the river Mitomba, which discharges itself into a great bay of
the sea. The road in which ships usually anchor is in the lat. of 8° 20'
N. This mountain is very high, and thickly covered with trees, by which
it may be easily known, as there is no mountain of such height any where
upon the coast. There grow here a prodigious number of trees, producing
a small kind of lemons called _limasses_, (limes?) resembling those of
Spain in shape and taste, and which are very agreeable and wholesome, if
not eaten to excess. The Dutch fleet arrived here at the season when
this fruit was in perfection, and having full leave from the natives,
the people eat them intemperately; by which, and the bad air, the bloody
flux increased much among them, so that they lost forty men between the
11th of August and the 5th September. Sierra Leona abounds in
palm-trees, and has some ananas, or pine-apples, with plenty of wood of
all sorts, besides having an exceedingly convenient watering-place
opposite to the anchorage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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