The island is a pleasant intermixture of hill and valley; the hills spread with palms, coconuts, and cotton trees, with numbers of monkeys and parrots among them; the valleys with fruitful plantations of yams, kulalu, papas, variety of salading, ananas, or pineapples, guavas, plantains, banana, maniocs, and Indian Corn; with fowls, Guinea hens, Muscovy ducks, goats, hogs, turkeys, and wild beefs, with each a little village of Negroes, who, under the direction of their several masters, manage the cultivation, and exchange or sell them for money, much after the same rates with the people of São Tomé.
I shall run a description of the vegetables, with their properties, not only because they are the produce of this island, but most of them of Africa in general.
The palm-trees are numerous on the shores of Africa, and may be reckoned the first of their natural curiosities, in that they afford them meat, drink and clothing; they grow very straight to 40 and 50 foot high, and at the top (only) have 3 or 4 circles of branches, that spread and make a capacious umbrella. The trunk is very rough with knobs, either excrescencies, or the healings of those branches that were lopped off to forward the growth of the tree, and make it answer better in its fruit. The branches are strongly tied together with a cortex, which may be unravelled to a considerable length and breadth; the inward lamella of this cortex, I know are wove like a cloth at Benin, and afterwards dyed and worn: under the branches, and close to the body of the tree, hang the nuts, thirty bunches perhaps on a tree, and each of thirty pound weight, with prickly films from between them, not unresembling hedgehogs; of these nuts comes a liquid and pleasant scented oil, used as food and sauce all over the coast, but chiefly in the windward parts of Africa, where they stamp, boil and skim it off in great quantities; underneath, where the branches fasten, they tap for wine, called copra, in this manner; the Negroes who are mostly limber active fellows, encompass themselves and the trees with a hoop of strong with, and run up with a great deal of agility; at the bottom of a branch of nuts, he makes an excavation of an inch and a half over, and tying fast his calabash, leaves it to distill, which it does to two or three quarts in a night’s time, when done he plugs it up, and chooses another; for if suffered to run too much, or in the day time, the sap is unwarily exhausted, and the tree spoiled: the liquor thus drawn, is of a wheyish colour, intoxicating and sours in 24 hours, but when new drawn, is pleasantest to thirst and hunger both: it is from these wines they draw their arack in India. On the very top of the palm, grows a cabbage, called so, I believe, from some resemblance its taste is thought to have with ours, and is used like it; the covering has a down that makes the best of tinder, and the weavings of other parts are drawn out into strong threads.
Coconut trees are branch’d like, but not so tall as, palm trees, the nut like them, growing under the branches, and close to the trunk; the milky liquor they contain, (to half a pint or more,) is often drank to quench thirst, but surfeiting, and this may be observed in their way of nourishment, that when the quantity of milk is large, the shell and meat are very thin, and harden and thicken in proportion, as that loses.
Cotton trees also are the growth of all parts of Africa, as well as the islands, of vast bigness, yet not so incremental as the shrubs or bushes of five or six foot high; these bear a fruit (if it may be so called) about the bigness of pigeons’ eggs, which as the sun swells and ripens, bursts forth and discovers three cells loaded with cotton, and seeds in the middle of them: this in most parts the Negroes know how to spin, and here at Nicongo and the Island St. Jago, how to weave into cloths.
Yams are a common root, sweeter but not unlike potatos: kulalu, a herb-like spinnage: papa, a fruit less than the smallest pumkins; they are all three for boiling, and to be eat with meat; the latter are improved by the English into a turnip or an apple taste, with a due mixture of butter or limes.
Guavas, a fruit as large as a pippin, with seeds and stones in it, of an uncouth astringing taste, though never so much be said in commendation of it, at the West Indies, it is common for Creolians, (who has tasted both,) to give it a preference to peach or nectarine, no amazing thing when men whose tastes are so degenerated, as to prefer a toad in a shell, (as Ward calls turtle,) to venison, and Negroes
