1771. ROUND THE WORLD. 367 



partly by ill usage, of which they frequently com- 

 plained; and I am sorry to say, that instances of 

 wanton cruelty are much more frequent among my 

 countrymen here, than among the Dutch, who are, 

 and perhaps not without reason, generally reproached 

 with want of humanity at Batavia and the Cape. 



Among the native products of this island, which 

 are not numerous, must be reckoned ebony, though 

 the trees are now nearly extinct, and are not re- 

 membered to have been plenty: pieces of the wood 

 are frequently fouu in the valleys, of a fine black 

 colour, and a hardn s almost equal to iron: these 

 pieces, however, are always so short and crooked, 

 that no use can be made of them. Whether the tree 

 is the same with that which produces ebony upon the 

 isle of Bourbon, or the islands adjacent, is not known, 

 as the French have not yet published any account 

 of it. 



There are but few insects in this place, but there 

 is a species of snail found upon the tops of the high- 

 est ridges, which probably has been there since the 

 original creation of their kind, at the beginning of 

 the world. It is indeed very difficult to conceive 

 how any thing which was not deposited here at its 

 creation, or brought hither by the diligence of man, 

 could find its way to a place so severed from the rest 

 of the world, by seas of immense extent, except the 

 hypothesis that has been mentioned on another oc- 

 casion be adopted, and this rock be supposed to have 

 been left behind, when a large tract of country, of 

 which it was part, subsided by some convulsion of 

 nature, and was swallowed up in the ocean. 



At one o'clock in the afternoon of the 4th of May, 

 we weighed and stood out of the road, in company 

 with the Portland man-of-war, and twelve sail of 

 Indiamen. 



We continued to sail in company with the fleet, 

 till the 10th in the morning, when, perceiving that 

 we sailed much heavier than any other ship, and 



