King George's Island
Index
Search
Contact us
figure they somewhat resembled the square tombs, with a flat top, which are always to be found in our country churchyards. Near these buildings we found many neat boxes full of human bones, and upon the branches of the trees which shaded them, hung a great number of the heads and bones of turtle, and a variety of fish, inclosed in a kind of basketwork of reeds: some of the fish we took down, and found that nothing remained but the skin and the teeth; the bones and entrails seemed to have been extracted, and the muscular flesh dried away.
We sent off several boat-loads of cocoa-nuts, and a great quantity of scurvy-grass, with which the island is covered; refreshments which were of infinite service to us, as by this time I believe there was not a man among us wholly untouched by the scurvy.
The fresh water here is very good, but it is scarce; the wells which supply the natives are so small, that when two or three cocoa-nut shells have been filled from them, they are dry for a few minutes; but as they presently fill again, if a little pains were taken to enlarge them, they would abundantly supply any ship with water.
We saw no venomous creature here; but the flies were an intolerable torment, they covered us from head to foot, and filled not only the boat, but the ships. We saw great numbers of parrots and parroquets, and several other birds which were altogether unknown to us; we saw also a beautiful kind of dove, so tame that some of them frequently came close to us, and even followed us into the Indian huts.
All this day the natives kept themselves closely concealed, and did not even make a smoke upon any part of the islands as far as we could see; probably fearing that a smoke might
 |
Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from Volume I of the London 1773 Edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, page 103, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv01/139.html