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To the northward, as I have observed, there are plantations of yams, sweet potatoes, and coccos, but we saw no such to the southward; the inhabitants therefore of that part of the country must subsist wholly upon fern root and fish, except the scanty and accidental resource which they may find in sea fowl and dogs; and that fern and fish are not to be procured at all seasons of the year, even at the sea side, and upon the neighbouring hills, is manifest from the stores of both that we saw laid up dry, and the reluctance which some of them expressed at selling any part of them to us when we offered to purchase them, at least the fish, for sea stores: and this particular seems to confirm my opinion that this country scarcely sustains the present number of its inhabitants, who are urged to perpetual hostilities by hunger, which naturally prompted them to eat the dead bodies of those who were slain in the contest.
Water is their universal and only liquor, as far as we could discover, and if they have really no means of intoxication, they are, in this particular, happy beyond any other people that we have yet seen or heard of.
As there is perhaps no source of disease either critical or chronic, but intemperance and inactivity, it cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health: in all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowded about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers that we have seen naked, did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had left behind: at first, indeed, observing that some of them when they came off to us were marked in patches with a white flowery appearance upon different parts of their bodies, we thought that they were leperous, or highly scorbutic; but upon examination we found that these marks were owing to their having been wetted by the sprey of the sea in their passage, which, when it was dried away, left the salts behind it in a fine white powder.
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© Derived from Vols. II-III of the London 1773 edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, pages 460 - 461, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv23/458.html