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Updated: September 22, 2025
The year 1816 was the Augustan age of outrageous negrophilism and equally extreme anti- Napoleonism. We are glad to be rid of the Jagas, a subject which has a small literature of its own; the savage race appeared everywhere like a "deus ex machina," and it became to Intertropical Africa what the "Lost Tribes" were and even now are in some cases, to Asia and not rarely to Europe.
It does not appear to be the disposition of the English settlers to try experiments on the growth of intertropical productions.
In the middle belt of the earth the Trade Winds reign supreme, undisputed, like monarchs of long-settled kingdoms, whose traditional power, checking all undue ambitions, is not so much an exercise of personal might as the working of long-established institutions. The intertropical kingdoms of the Trade Winds are favourable to the ordinary life of a merchantman.
This intertropical region may, and generally does, cover a number of years; and, therefore, it is hard to say, even for an assigned case, by any tolerable approximation, at what precise era it would be reasonable to describe the individual as having ceased to be a boy, and as having attained his inauguration as a man.
On the mountains of Abyssinia, several European forms and some few representatives of the peculiar flora of the Cape of Good Hope occur. At the Cape of Good Hope a very few European species, believed not to have been introduced by man, and on the mountains, some few representative European forms are found, which have not been discovered in the intertropical parts of Africa.
Something of the same kind must have occurred on the intertropical mountains: no doubt before the Glacial period they were stocked with endemic Alpine forms; but these have almost everywhere largely yielded to the more dominant forms, generated in the larger areas and more efficient workshops of the north.
Epithet after epithet was found too weak to convey to those who have not visited the intertropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences. I have said that the plants in a hothouse fail to communicate a just idea of the vegetation, yet I must recur to it.
Excepting near the lagoon, where there is some sand, the land is entirely composed of rounded fragments of coral. In such a loose, dry, stony soil, the climate of the intertropical regions alone could produce a vigorous vegetation.
The change of soil and of vegetation are equally remarkable at this place; the one being a rich, greasy, chocolate-coloured earth, the other partaking greatly of the intertropical character. In wandering over them, I noticed the wild fig and the cherry-tree, growing to a much larger size than I had seen them in any other part of the colony.
M'Leay and myself had made some short excursions, but without any result worthy of notice. A group of sand-hills rose in the midst of the alluvial deposits, about a quarter of a mile from the tents, that were covered with coarse grasses and banksias. We shot several intertropical birds feeding in the latter, and sucking the honey from their flowers.
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