At five o’clock the next morning, I sent away the Master with two boats to sound the entrance of an inlet which bore from us west, at about the distance of a league, into which I intended to go with the ship, that I might wait a few days till the moon should encrease, and in the mean time examine the country. As soon as the ship could be got under sail, the boats made the signal for anchorage; upon which we stood in, and anchored in five fathom water, about a league within the entrance of the inlet; which, as I observed a tide to flow and ebb considerably, I judged to be a river that ran up the country to a considerable distance. In this place I had thoughts of laying the ship ashore, and cleaning her bottom; I therefore landed with the Master in search of a convenient place for that purpose, and was accompanied by Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander. We found walking here exceedingly troublesome, for the ground was covered with a kind of grass, the seeds of which were very sharp and bearded backwards; so that whenever they stuck into our clothes, which indeed was at every step, they worked forwards by means of the beard, till they got at the flesh; and at the same time we were surrounded by a cloud of musquitos, which incessantly tormented us with their stings. We soon met with several places where the ship might conveniently be laid ashore; but to our great disappointment we could find no fresh water. We proceeded however up the country, where we found gum trees like those that we had seen before, and observed that here also the gum was in very small quantities. Upon the branches of these trees, and some others, we found ants nests, made of clay, as big as a bushel, something like those described in Sir Hans Sloan’s Natural History of Jamaica, vol. ii. p. 221, tab. 258, but not so smooth: the ants which inhabited these nests were small, and their bodies white. But upon another species of the tree we found a small black ant, which perforated all the twigs, and having worked out the pith, occupied the pipe which had contained it; yet the parts in which these insects had thus formed a lodgment, and in which they swarmed in amazing numbers, bore leaves and flowers, and appeared to be in as flourishing a state as those that were sound. We found also an incredible number of butterflies, so that for the space of three or four acres the air was so crowded with them that millions were to be seen in every direction, at the same time that every branch and twig was covered with others that were not upon the wing. We found here also a small fish of a singular kind; it was about the size of a minnow, and had two very strong breast fins: we found it in places that were quite dry, where we supposed it might have been left by the tide; but it did not seem to have become languid by the want of water; for upon our approach it leaped away, by the help of the breast fins, as nimbly as a frog: neither indeed did it seem to prefer water to land; for when we found it in the water, it frequently leaped out, and pursued its way upon dry ground: we also observed that when it was in places where small stones were standing above the surface of the water at a little distance from each other, it chose rather to leap from stone to stone, than to pass through the water; and we saw several of them pass entirely over puddles in this manner, till they came to dry ground, and then leap away.

Voyaging Accounts