1802.
January.
Sunday 10.
zamia (Zamia spiralis of Brown's Prodr. flor. Nov. Holl. I, 348); a class of plants nearly allied to the third kind of palm found by captain Cook on the East Coast, the fruit of which produced the same deleterious effects on board the Endeavour.[1]
The weather, unfortunately for my bearings, was so hazy, that unless objects were eminently conspicuous, they could not be distinguished beyond four or five leagues. My list, however, contained forty-five islands and clusters of rocks, independently of many patches of breakers where nothing above water appeared; yet most of those in the western part of the archipelago were invisible, either from their distance, or from being hidden by other lands.
In turning from the view of these complicated dangers to that of the interior country, the prospect was but little improved. Sand and stone, with the slightest covering of vegetation, every where presented themselves on the lower lands; and the many shining parts on the sides of the hills, showed them to be still more bare. The vegetation, indeed, consisted of an abundant variety of shrubs and small plants, and yielded a delightful harvest to the botanists; but to the herdsman and cultivator it promised nothing: not a blade of grass, nor a square yard of soil from which the seed delivered to it could be expected back, was perceivable by the eye in its course over these arid plains.
Upon a rock on the side of the hill I found a large nest, very similar to those seen in King George's Sound. There were in it several masses resembling those which contain the hair and bones of mice, and are disgorged by the owls in England after the flesh is digested. These masses were larger, and consisted of the hair of seals and of land animals, of the scaly feathers of pinguins, and the bones of birds and small quadrupeds. Possibly the constructor of the nest might be an enormous owl; and if so, the cause of the bird being never seen, whilst the nests were not scarce, would be from- ↑ Hawkesworth, Vol. III. p. 220, 221.
