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Updated: May 14, 2025
My wife showed me a cask of ortolans she had preserved in butter, and a quantity of loaves of cassava bread, carefully prepared. She pointed out, that the pigeons had built in the tree, and were sitting on their eggs. We then looked over the young fruit-trees brought from Europe, and my sons and I immediately laid out a piece of ground, and planted them.
The cassava had not an acid taste, but some remains of European prejudices prevented our joining in the praises bestowed by the good missionary on what he called an excellent ant paste. The violence of the rain obliged us to sleep in this crowded hut.
Those mountains rose in terraces, from ten to fifteeen leagues in length and breadth; rough and rocky, interspersed with glens of a red soil, remarkably fertile, where they raised their cassava bread. The ascent from terrace to terrace was about fifty feet; steep and precipitous, formed of the living rock, and resembling a wall wrought with tools into rough diamond points.
At their accustomed time, from every 'dobe and palm hut and grass-thatched shack and dim patio glided women black women, brown women, lemon-colored women, women dun and yellow and tawny. They were the marketers starting to purchase the family supply of cassava, plantains, meat, fowls, and tortillas. Decollete they were and bare-armed and bare-footed, with a single skirt reaching below the knee.
Casembe's ground-nuts are the largest I have seen, and so is the cassava. I got over a pint of palm oil for a cubit of calico. A fine young man, whose father had been the Casembe before this one, came to see us; he is in the background now, otherwise he would have conducted us to the village: a son or heir does not succeed to the chieftainship here. 21st November, 1867.
Their hammocks, their reed mats, their pots for holding cassava and fermented maize, their bows and arrows, everything is arranged in the greatest order. Men and women bathe every day; and being almost constantly unclothed, they are exempted from that uncleanliness, of which the garments are the principal cause among the lower class of people in cold countries.
The rain fell as though it would make another flood and in much less than forty days. We must be silent, for wind and thunder allowed no other choice. Streams of rain came into the cavern, but we found ledges curtained by rock. We ate cassava cake and drank from a runlet of water. The storm made almost night, then actual night arrived.
The mandioca is called cassava in some countries. The press used by the Indians is a simple and most ingenious contrivance. It is made by the Indians wherever the plant is grown. It is a basket made of fine split cane loosely plaited; in shape, a tube five feet long and five inches in diameter at the mouth, and narrowing somewhat at the bottom. A strong loop is left at each end.
A collision between his two remaining ships rendered them still more unfit to cope with the squalls and breakers of the Archipelago; but at last, in the middle of June, with his crews in despair, nearly all his anchors lost, and his vessels worm-eaten so as to be "as full of holes as a honey-comb," he arrived off the southern coast of Cuba, where he obtained supplies of cassava bread from friendly natives.
But the next day put a new aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise, the Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and children, in preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice, yams, and cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for subsistence during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the hungry soldiers.
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