This favoured island boasted all the fruits of the Antilles: its tobacco was better than that of any other island; its sugar canes attained an enormous size, and their juice was sweeter than elsewhere; its numerous medicinal plants were exported to heal the diseases of the Old World. The only four-footed animal was the wild boar, originally transplanted from Hispaniola. As it soon grew scarce, the French governor made it illegal to hunt with dogs, and required the hunter to follow his prey single-handed and on foot. The wood-pigeons were almost the only birds in the island. They came in large flocks at certain periods of the year; Oexmelin says that, in two or three hours, without going eighty steps from the road, he killed ninety-five with his own hand. As soon as they eat a certain berry their flesh became bitter as our larks do when they move from the stubbles into the turnips. A Gascon visitor, once complaining of their sudden bitterness, was told by a Buccaneer as a joke that his servant had forgot to remove the gall. Fish abounded round the island, and crabs without nippers; the night fishermen carrying torches of the candle-wood tree. The shell fish was the food of servants and slaves, and was said to be so indigestible as to frequently produce giddiness and temporary blindness; the turtle and manitee, too, formed part of their daily diet. The planters were much tormented by the white and red land-crabs, or tourtourons, which lived in the earth, visited the sea to spawn, and at night gnawed the sugar-canes and the roots of plants. Their only venomous reptile was the viper, which they tamed to kill mice; in a wild state, it fed on poultry or pigeons. From the stomach of one Oexmelin drew seven pigeons and a large fowl, which had been swallowed about three hours before, and cooked them for his own dinner, verifying the old proverb of "robbing Peter to pay Paul." In times of scarcity these snakes were eaten for food. Besides chameleons and lizards, there were small insects with shells like a snail. These were considered good to eat and very nourishing. When held near the fire, they distilled a red oily liquid useful as a rheumatic liniment. Though the scorpions and scolopendrias were not venomous, nature, always just in her compensations, covered the island with poisonous shrubs. The most fatal of these was the noxious mançanilla. It grew as high as a pear tree, had leaves like a wild laurel, and bore fruit like an apple; this fruit was so deadly, that even fish that ate of it, if they did not die, became themselves poisonous, and were known by the blackness of their teeth. The only antidote was olive oil. The Indian fishermen used, as a test, to taste the heart of the fish they caught, and if it proved bitter they knew at once that it had been poisoned, and threw it away. The very rain-drops that fell from the leaves were deadly to man and beast, and it was as dangerous to sleep under its shadow as under the upas.