SEPT. 1770 FERTILITY OF THE ISLAND 341 



The little island of Savu, which, trifling as it is, appears 

 to me to be of no small consequence to the Dutch East India 

 Company, is situate in lat. 10 35' S. and long. 122 30' E. 1 

 from the meridian of Greenwich : its length and breadth are 

 nearly the same, viz. about 6 German or 24 English miles. 

 The whole is divided into five principalities, nigries as they 

 are called by the Indians, Zaai, Seba, Regeeua, Timo, and 

 Massara, each governed by its respective radja or king. It 

 has three harbours, all good ; the best is Timo, situate some- 

 where round the S.E. point of the isle ; the next, Seba, where 

 we anchored, situate round the N.W. point : of the third we 

 learnt neither the name nor situation, only guess it to be 

 somewhere 011 the south side. Off the west end of the 

 island is another called Pulo, with an additional name, which 

 in the hurry of business was forgotten, and never again 

 asked for. 



The appearance of the island, especially on the windward 

 side where we first made it, was allowed by us all to equal 

 in beauty, if not excel, anything we had seen, even parched 

 up as it was by a drought, which, Mr. Lange informed us, 

 had continued for seven months without a drop of rain, the 

 last rainy season having entirely failed them. Verdure, 

 indeed, there was at this time no sign of, but the gentle 

 sloping of the hills, which were cleared quite to the top, 

 and planted in every part with thick groves of the fan-palm, 

 besides woods almost of cocoanut trees, arecas which grew 

 near the seaside, filled the eye so completely that it hardly 

 looked for or missed the verdure of the earth, a circumstance 

 seldom seen in any perfection so near the line. How 

 beautiful it must appear when covered with its springing 

 crops of maize, millet, indigo, etc., which cover almost every 

 foot of ground in the cultivated parts of the island, imagina- 

 tion can hardly conceive. The verdure of Europe, set off 

 by those stately pillars of India, palms I mean especially 

 the fan-palm, which for straightness and proportion, both of 

 the stem itself and of the head to the stem, far excels all the 



1 The latitude and longitude were left blank : they ".have been filled in 

 from Cook's Journal. 



