It is interesting to note that on these truly remarkable voyages, which few living seamen would be heroic enough to undertake, their chief means of sustenance were flour (probably from maize) and chocolate mixed with sugar, besides the fish obtained for them by their Indian companions. The buccaneers afterwards recrossed Central America, and rested for a time in the English colony of Virginia. From this region Dampier accompanied a captain, John Cook, in the _Revenge_ (a privateer or buccaneering ship), on a voyage to the Pacific. They sailed first to the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic. On one of the easternmost of this still-little-known archipelago Dampier made some most interesting and truthful observations regarding the nesting of flamingoes, though he jumped to a wrong conclusion as to the attitude in which the female flamingo hatches her eggs; but he observes that a dish of flamingoes' tongues is fit for a prince's table, the tongue of this bird being very large and fat. From the Cape Verde Islands they passed on to the Sherboro River (near Sierra Leone), even in those days an English trading settlement. Then, boldly leaving the West African coast, they steered right across the Atlantic to the extremity of South America, helped by a succession of tornadoes to cross the region of equatorial calms till the trade winds blew them over to the Falkland Islands and round Cape Horn. Soon after entering the Pacific Ocean they fell in with other English ships, quite a number of which were now being dispatched round the extremity of South America to the Pacific Ocean, not so much to make discoveries in that direction as to trade with or to plunder the west coast of South America. To all such the Islands of Juan Fernandez[51] were a favourite and safe rendevous for repairs and for obtaining supplies of fresh water. But that the Spaniards became during the seventeenth century perfectly inept in the matter of defending their monopolist pretensions in seas which they attempted to forbid to the rest of the world, they would have occupied and garrisoned at an early date the principal island of the Juan Fernandez group.[52] On this island--Mas-a-tierra--goats and pigs had been landed by the Spanish pilot, Juan Fernandez himself, in the sixteenth century. They had increased and multiplied, and furnished excellent mutton and pork for ships that called there. There were only two bays in Mas-a-tierra Island (which was about 36 miles in circumference and of very broad, diversified surface, "high hills and small pleasant valleys") wherein ships might anchor. In the vicinity of each harbour there were rivulets of good fresh water. In course of time the goats multiplied to such an extent that they began to destroy the forests, which still in Dampier's time were a prominent feature in the landscapes, and which included not only good timber trees but an Areca cabbage-palm, the head of which formed an excellent