Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.Major, Richard Henry
History
Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.
Major, Richard Henry
Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Discoveries in geography -- Portuguese; Voyages and travels
Next morning my men came aboard and brought a rundlet of brackish water,
which they got out of another well that they dug in a place a mile off,
and about half as far from the shore; but this water was not fit to
drink. However we all concluded that it would serve to boil our oatmeal
for burgoo, whereby we might save the remains of our other water for
drinking, till we should get more; and accordingly the next day we
brought aboard four hogsheads of it: but while we were at work about the
well we were sadly pester’d with the flies, which were more troublesome
to us than the sun, tho’ it shone clear and strong upon us all the
while, very hot. All this while we saw no more of the natives, but saw
some of the smoaks of some of their fires at two or three miles
distance.
The land hereabouts was much like the part of New Holland that I
formerly described (vol. i, p. 463); ’tis low, but seemingly barricado’d
with a long chain of sandhills to the sea, that lets nothing be seen of
what is farther within land. At high water, the tides rising so high as
they do, the coast shows very low; but when ’tis low water it seems to
be of an indifferent heighth. At low water-mark the shore is all rocky,
so that then there is no landing with a boat; but at high water a boat
may come in over those rocks to the Sandy Bay, which runs all along on
this coast. The land by the sea for about five or six hundred yards is a
dry sandy soil, bearing only shrubs and bushes of divers sorts. Some of
these had them at this time of the year, yellow flowers or blossoms,
some blue and some white, most of them of a very fragrant smell. Some
had fruit-like peascods, in each of which there were just ten small
peas: I opened many of them, and found no more nor less. There are also
here some of that sort of bean which I saw at Rosemary Island, and
another sort of small, red, hard pulse, growing in cods also, with
little black eyes like beans. I know not their names, but have seen them
used often in the East Indies for weighing gold; and they make the same
use of them at Guinea as I have heard, where the women also make
bracelets with them to wear about their arms. These grow on bushes; but
here are also a fruit like beans, growing on a creeping sort of
shrub-like vine. There was great plenty of all these sorts of cod fruit
growing on the sandhills by the sea side, some of them green, some ripe,
and some fallen on the ground; but I could not perceive that any of them
had been gathered by the natives, and might not probably be wholesome
food.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account