dressed for our dinner, and proved excellent meat. In the evening the boat returned from the reef, bringing four turtles; so we may now be said to swim in plenty. Our turtles are certainly far preferable to any I have eaten in England, which must be due to their being eaten fresh from the sea before they have either wasted away their fat, or, by the unnatural food which they receive in the tubs where they are kept, acquired a fat of not so delicious a flavour as it is in their wild state. Most of those we have caught have been green turtle from two to three hundred pounds in weight; these, when killed, were always found to be full of turtle-grass (a kind of Conferva I believe). Two only were loggerheads, which made but indifferent meat; in their stomachs were nothing but shells.
16th. As the ship was now ready for her departure, Dr. Solander and I employed ourselves in winding up our botanical bottoms,[1] examining what we wanted and making up our complement of specimens of as many species as possible. The boat brought three turtles again to-day, one of which was a male, who was easily to be distinguished from the female by the vast size of his tail, which was four times longer and thicker than hers; in every other respect they were exactly alike. One of our people on board the ship, who had been a turtler in the West Indies, told me that they never sent male turtles home to England from thence, because they wasted in keeping much more than the females, which we found to be true.
17th. Tupia, who was over the water by himself, saw three Indians, who gave him a kind of longish root about as thick as a man's finger and of a very good taste.
18th. The Indians were over with us to-day and seemed to have lost all fear of us, becoming quite familiar. One of them, at our desire, threw his lance, which was about eight feet in length; it flew with a degree of swiftness and steadiness that really surprised me, never being above four feet from the ground, and stuck deep in at a distance of fifty paces. After this they ventured on board the ship and
- ↑ i.e. affairs.
