300 



cook's first voyage 



DEC, 



account of it about the year 1726, says, that in his 

 time there were, within the walls, 1242 Dutch houses, 

 and 1200 Chinese; and without the walls 1066 Dutch, 

 and 1240 Chinese, besides 12 arrack houses, making 

 in all 476O : but this account appeared to us to be 

 greatly exaggerated, especially with respect to the 

 number of houses within the walls. 



The streets are spacious and handsome, and the 

 banks of the canals are planted with rows of trees, 

 that make a very pleasing appearance; but the trees 

 concur with the canals to make the situation un- 

 wholesome. The stagnant canals in the dry season 

 exhale an intolerable stench, and the trees impede 

 the course of the air, by which, in some degree, the 

 putrid effluvia would be dissipated. In the wet 

 season the inconvenience is equal, for then these re- 

 servoirs of corrupted water overflow their banks in 

 the lower part of the town, especially in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the hotel, and fill the lower stories of the 

 houses, where they leave behind them an inconceiv- 

 able quantity of slime and filth: yet these canals are 

 sometimes cleaned; but the cleaning them is so 

 managed as to become as great a nuisance as the foul- 

 ness of the water: for the black mud that is taken 

 from the bottom is suffered to lie upon the banks, 

 that is, in the middle of the street, till it has acquired 

 a sufficient degree of hardness to be made the lading 

 of a boat and carried away. As this mud consists 

 chiefly of human ordure, which is regularly thrown 

 into the canals every morning, there not being a 

 necessary-house in the whole town, it poisons the 

 air while it is drying to a considerable extent. Even 

 the running streams become nuisances in their turn, 

 by the nastiness or negligence of the people : for every 

 now and then a dead hog, or a dead horse, is stranded 

 upon the shallow parts, and it being the business of 

 no particular person to remove the nuisance, it is 

 negligently left to time and accident. While we were 

 here, a dead buffalo lay upon the shoal of a river that 



