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The town in general is supplied from a considerable distance, where great quantities of land are cultivated merely for the production of fruit. The country people, to whom, these lands belong, meet the people of the town at two great markets; one on Monday, called Passar Sineen; and the other on Saturday, called Passar Tanabank. These fairs are held at places considerably distant from each other, for the convenience of different districts neither of them however are more than five miles distant from Batavia. At these fairs, the best fruit may be bought at the cheapest rate; and the sight of them to a European is very entertaining. The quantity of fruit is astonishing; forty or fifty cart loads of the finest pine apples, packed as carelessly as turneps in England, are common, and other fruit in the same profusion. The days however on which these markets are held, are ill contrived; the time between Saturday and Monday is too short, and that between Monday and Saturday too long: great part of what is bought on Monday, is always much the worse for keeping before a new stock can be bought, either by the retailer or consumer; so that for several days in every week there is no good fruit in the hands of any people but the Chinese in Passar Pissang.
The inhabitants of this part of India, practice a luxury which seems to be but little attended to in other countries; they are continually burning aromatic woods, and resins, and scatter odours round them in a profusion of flowers, possibly as an antidote to the noisome essluvia of their ditches and canals. Of sweet smelling flowers they have a great variety, altogether unknown in Europe, the chief or which I shall briefly describe.
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© Derived from Vols. II-III of the London 1773 edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, pages 741 - 742, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv23/741.html