370 BAT AVI A CHAP, xvi 



worse and worse every day. Then Tayeto, his boy, was 

 attacked by a cold and inflammation in his lungs ; then my 

 servants, Peter and James, and I myself had intermittent 

 fevers, and Dr. Solander a constant nervous one. In short, 

 every one on shore, and many on board, were ill, chiefly of 

 intermittents, occasioned no doubt by the lowness of the 

 country, and the numberless dirty canals, which intersect 

 the town in all directions. 



Some days before this, as I was walking the streets with 

 Tupia, a man totally unknown to me ran out of his house, 

 and eagerly accosting me, asked if the Indian whom he saw 

 with me had not been at Batavia before. On my declaring 

 that he had not, and asking the reason of so odd a question, 

 he told me that a year and a half before, Mr. De Bougain- 

 ville had been at Batavia with two French ships, and that 

 with him was an Indian so like this that he had imagined 

 him to be the identical same person, until I informed 

 him of the contrary. On this I inquired, and found that 

 Mr. De Bougainville was sent out by the French to the 

 Malouine or Falkland Isles (in order, as they said here, to 

 sell them to the Spaniards), had gone from thence to the 

 River Plate, and afterwards having passed into the South Seas, 

 maybe to other Spanish parts, where he and all his people 

 had got an immense deal of money in new Spanish dollars, 

 came here across the South Seas, in which passage he dis- 

 covered divers lands unknown before, and from one of them 

 he brought the Indian in question. 



This at once cleared up the account given us by the 

 Otahite Indians of the two ships which had been there 

 ten months before us (p. 9 6 of this journal) ; these were un- 

 doubtedly the ships of Mr. De Bougainville, and the Indian 

 was Otourrou, the brother of Eette, chief of Hidea. Even 

 the story of the woman was known here ; she, it seems, was 

 a Frenchwoman, who followed a young man sent out in the 

 character of botanist, in men's clothes. 1 As for the article 

 of the colours, the Indians might easily be mistaken, or Mr. 

 De Bougainville, if he had traded in the South Seas under 



1 See note on Bougainville, p. xliii. 



