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Indian corn, or Maize, is also produced here; which the inhabitants gather when young, and toast in the ear. Here is also a great variety of kidney beans, and lentiles, which they call Cadjang, and which make a considerable part of the food of the common people; besides millet, yams both wet and dry, sweet potatoes, and European potatoes, which are very good, but not cultivated in great plenty. In the gardens, there are cabbages, lettuces, cucumbers, rhadishes, the white rhadishes of China, which boil almost as well as a turnep; carrots, parsley, celery, pigeon peas, the egg plant, which broiled, and eaten with pepper and salt, is very delicious; a kind of greens resembling spinage; onions, very small, but excellent; and asparagus: besides some European plants of a strong smell, particularly sage, hysop, and rue. Sugar is also produced here in immense quantities: very great crops of the finest and largest canes that can be imagined are produced, with very little care, and yield a much larger proportion of sugar than the canes of the West Indies. White sugar is sold here at two pence half-penny a pound; and the molasses makes the arrack, of which, as of rum, it is the chief ingredient; a small quantity of rice, and some cocoa-nut wine, being added, chiefly, I suppose, to give it flavour. A small quantity of indigo, is also produced here, not as an article of trade, but merely for home consumption.
But the most abundant article of vegetable luxury here, is the fruit; of which there is no less than six and thirty different kinds, and I shall give a very brief account of each.
I. The pine apple; Bromelia Ananas. This fruit, which is here called Nanas, grows very large, and in such plenty that they may sometimes be bought at the first hand for a farthing a piece; and at the common fruit shops we got three or them for two pence half-penny. They are very juicy and well flavoured; but we all agreed that we had eaten as good from a hot-house in England: they are however so luxuriant in their growth that most of them have two or three crowns, and a great number of suckers from the bottom of the fruit; of these Mr. Banks once counted nine, and they are so forward that very often while they still adhered to the parent plant they shot out their fruit, which, by the time the large one became ripe, were of no inconsiderable size. We several times saw three upon one apple, and were told that a plant once produced a cluster of nine, besides the principal: this indeed was considered as so great a curiosity, that it was preserved in sugar, and sent to the Prince of Orange.
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© Derived from Vols. II-III of the London 1773 edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, pages 733 - 734, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
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