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Updated: May 17, 2025
Clumps of bamboo as big as a city lot and towering to the sky, with the yellow allamanda framing the bungalows, and a tangle of bananas, lantana, tafeie, cocoas, and a hundred other fruits, flowers and creepers, made the whole journey through a paradise. Around many cocoanut-palms were bands of tin or zinc ten or twenty feet from the earth. Every available piece of thin metal was used for this.
They here landing, burnt the town, the church, and the custom-house, in which latter they found six hundred bags of anil, to dye cloth, each bag being worth forty crowns, and four hundred bags of cocoas, each worth ten crowns. These cocoas served in the country both for food and money, one hundred and fifty of them being valued at one real of silver.
We skirted a coast of almost vertical cliffs crowned by cocoas, the faces of the rock black or covered above the waterline with vines and plants, green and luxuriant. Long stretches of white curtains and huge pictures in curious outlines were painted on the sable cliffs by encrusted salt.
The vessel in which I arrived sailed with the merchants, who loaded her with cocoas. I expected the arrival of another, which landed speedily for the like loading. I embarked on board the same all the cocoas that belonged to me, and when she was ready to sail, I went and took leave of the merchant who had been so kind to me; but he could not embark with me, because he had not finished his affairs.
They affected to be poor, and came to beg, not bringing any thing to the ship, yet the four islands whence they came appeared, to be well stored with cocoas. On the 1st June, the Dutch came to anchor between the coast of New Guinea and an island two miles long.
Those who were behind, being unable to get over the throng of canoes and men before them, leapt into the sea, and diving under the canoes, swam to the ship with bunches of cocoas in their mouths, and climbed up the side like so many rats, and in such swarms that the Dutch had to keep them off with cudgels.
The 15th, still pursuing the same course, they reached two low islands about half a league from the main, about the latitude of 2° 54' S. where they had good anchorage in 45 and 46 fathoms. Seeing the country well stored with cocoas, two boats well armed were sent with orders to land and procure some cocoa-nuts.
The island of Guam, Guaham, or Guaci, one of the group named by the Spaniards Islas de las Velas, Ladrones, or Mariane Islands, is in lat 13° 40' N. The soil is tolerably fertile producing vast quantities of cocoas, and the natives grow rice in several places. The Dutch procured here about 2000 fowls, but the natives would not part with their cattle for any price.
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.
In the foreground the cocoas, from the rocky headlands to the gate of Calvary, stood like an army bearing palms of victory. In rows and circles, plats and masses, the gray trunks followed one another from sea to mountain, yielding themselves to the storm, swaying gently, and by some trick of wind and rain seeming to march toward the cross-crowned summit.
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