A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13Kerr, Robert
History
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13
Kerr, Robert
Voyages and travels
The produce of this island is bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas of
thirteen sorts, the best we had ever eaten; plantains; a fruit not
unlike an apple, which, when ripe, is very pleasant; sweet potatoes,
yams, cocoas, a kind of _Arum_ fruit known here by the name of
_Jambu_, and reckoned most delicious; sugar-cane, which the inhabitants
eat raw; a root of the salop kind, called by the inhabitants _Pea_; a
plant called _Ethee_, of which the root only is eaten; a fruit that
grows in a pod, like that of a large kidney-bean, which, when it is
roasted, eats very much like a chesnut, by the natives called _Ahee_; a
tree called _Wharra_, called in the East Indies _Pandanes_, which
produces fruit, something like the pine-apple; a shrub called _Nono_;
the _Morinda_, which also produces fruit; a species of fern, of which
the root is eaten, and sometimes the leaves; and a plant called _Theve_,
of which the root also is eaten: But the fruits of the _Nono_, the fern,
and the _Theve_, are eaten only by the inferior people, and in times of
scarcity. All these, which serve the inhabitants for food, the earth
produces spontaneously, or with so little culture, that they seem to be
exempted from the first general curse, that "man should eat his bread in
the sweat of his brow." They have also the Chinese paper mulberry,
_morus papyrifera_, which they call _Aouto_; a tree resembling the wild
fig-tree of the West Indies; another species of fig, which they call
_Mattè_; the _cordia sebestina orientalis_, which they call _Etou_; a
kind of Cyprus grass, which they call _Moo_; a species of
_tournefortia_, which they call _Taheinoo_; another of the _convolvulus
poluce_, which they call _Eurhe_; the _solanum centifolium_, which they
call _Ebooa_; the _calophyllum mophylum_, which they call _Tamannu_; the
_hibiscus tiliaceus_, called _Poerou_, a frutescent nettle; the _urtica
argentea_, called _Erowa_; with many other plants which cannot here be
particularly mentioned: Those that have been named already will be
referred to in the subsequent part of this work.
They have no European fruit, garden stuff, pulse, or legumes, nor grain
of any kind.
Of tame animals they have only hogs, dogs, and poultry; neither is there
a wild animal in the island, except ducks, pigeons, paroquets, with a
few other birds, and rats, there being no other quadruped, nor any
serpent. But the sea supplies them with great variety of most excellent
fish, to eat which is their chief luxury, and to catch it their
principal labour.[2]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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