beds of the streams and rivers, which swell into torrents during the
rainy season, consist of stones and gravel, often of a flinty nature,
and often also containing particles of iron. Some basaltic appearances
in one of the districts into which the island is divided, and several
precipices among the mountains, evidently produced by sudden violence,
indicate the volcanic origin of this highly favoured country. There is
plenty of good water to be had over all the island. The weather from
March till August is usually mild and pleasant. During the rough season,
which lasts from December till March, the wind often blows very hard
from the west, and is attended with rain.--E.]

The produce of this island is bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas of
thirteen sorts, the best we had ever eaten; plantains; a fruit not
unlike an apple, which, when ripe, is very pleasant; sweet potatoes,
yams, cocoas, a kind of _Arum_ fruit known here by the name of
_Jambu_, and reckoned most delicious; sugar-cane, which the inhabitants
eat raw; a root of the salop kind, called by the inhabitants _Pea_; a
plant called _Ethee_, of which the root only is eaten; a fruit that
grows in a pod, like that of a large kidney-bean, which, when it is
roasted, eats very much like a chesnut, by the natives called _Ahee_; a
tree called _Wharra_, called in the East Indies _Pandanes_, which
produces fruit, something like the pine-apple; a shrub called _Nono_;
the _Morinda_, which also produces fruit; a species of fern, of which
the root is eaten, and sometimes the leaves; and a plant called _Theve_,
of which the root also is eaten: But the fruits of the _Nono_, the fern,
and the _Theve_, are eaten only by the inferior people, and in times of
scarcity. All these, which serve the inhabitants for food, the earth
produces spontaneously, or with so little culture, that they seem to be
exempted from the first general curse, that "man should eat his bread in
the sweat of his brow." They have also the Chinese paper mulberry,