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which when roasted eats much like Chestnuts and is call[d] Ahee; besides a fruit of a tree which they call wharra in appearance like a pine apple, the fruit of a tree calld by them Nono, the roots and perhaps leaves of a fern and the roots of a plant calld Theve which 4 are eat only by the poorer sort of people in times of scarcity.
For tame animals they have Hogs, fowls and doggs, which latter we learn'd to eat from them and few were there of the nicest of us but allowd that a S-Sea dog was next to an English lamb; this indeed must be said in their favour that they live intirely upon vegetables, probably our dogs in England would not eat half as well. Their pork is certainly most excellent tho sometimes too fat, their fowls are not a bit better rather worse maybe than ours at home, often very tough.
Tho they seem to esteem flesh very highly yet in all the Islands I have seen the quantity they have of it is very unequal to the number of their people, it is therefore seldom usd among them. Even their most principal people have it not every day or even week, tho some of them had piggs that we saw quarterd upon different
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Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from State Library of NSW Transcription of Banks's Journal page (vol.1) 349, February 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-banks_remarks-104.html