258 DAMPIER'S SOJOURN IN GREAT NICOBAR 



of coconut trees which grow round it in every small ba}'. The 

 bays are half a mile or a mile long, more or less, and these 

 bays are intercepted or divided from each other with as many 

 little rocky points of woodland. 



" As the coconut trees do thus grow in groves, fronting to 

 the sea, in the bays, so there is another sort of fruit-tree in the 

 bays, bordering on the back side of the coco trees, farther from 

 the sea. It is called by the natives a melory tree.* This tree 

 is as big as our large apple trees, and as high. It hath a blackish-f* 

 rind and a pretty broad leaf. The fruit is as big as the bread- 

 fruit:}: at Guam, or a large penny loaf It is shaped like a pear, 

 and hath a pretty tough smooth rind of a light-green colour. 

 The inside of the fruit is in substance much like an apple, but 

 full of small strings as big as brown thread. I did never see 

 of these trees anywhere but here. 



" The natives of this island are tall, well-limbed men ; pretty 

 long visaged, with black eyes ; their noses middle-proportioned, 

 and the whole symmetry of their faces agreeing very well. Their 

 hair is black and lank, and their skins of a dark copper colour. 

 The women have no hair on their eyebrows. I do believe it 

 is plucked up by the roots, for the men had hair growing on 

 their eyebrows as other people. 



" The men go all naked ; only a long, narrow piece of cloth 

 or sash, which , going round their waists, and thence down between 

 their thighs, is brought up behind and tucked-in at that part 

 which goes about the waist. The women have a kind of a short 

 petticoat, reaching from their waists to their knees. 



" Their language was different from any that I ever heard 

 before ; yet they had some few Malayan words, and some of 

 them had a word or two of Portuguese, which, probably, they 



* " Larum." If they called it so, the name was probably acquired from 

 Portuguese visitors. 



t Always greyish-white. 



I This is the true bread-fruit {Artocarpus incisa), which does not grow in the 

 Nicobars, and with which the fruit of the pandanus is nominally confounded 

 by the English-speaking natives and by several of those Europeans who have 

 visited the Archipelago. 



