452 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



who remember the events of Christmas days, and of other 

 days. But in Batavia trust in " invariable temperance " 

 was misplaced. Everyone fell sick. The only exception 

 was the sailmaker, an old man of seventy or eighty ages 

 were vague in those days who had been invariably 

 intemperate ; " generally more or less drunk every day." 

 Surgeon Monkhouse died. Tupia died ; ' ' a shrewd, sensible, 

 ingenious man," says Cook, " but proud and obstinate, 

 which often made his situation on board both disagreeable 

 to himself and to those about him." Banks was " seized 

 with a tertian, the fits of which," he says, " were so violent 

 as to deprive me entirely of my senses, and leave me 

 so weak as scarcely to be able to crawl downstairs." His 

 servants were as bad as himself, and Solander became 

 ill for the first time in his life. The two sick botanists 

 bought a Malay woman apiece, " hoping that the tender- 

 ness of the sex would prevail even here, which, indeed, 

 we found it to do." In charge of their nurses they went 

 to a country-house, and gradually recovered strength. 

 But, when the ship sailed, seven had died, forty or more 

 were sick, and the rest were weakly. Cook said that 

 Batavia was the unhealthiest place upon the globe. 1 

 " We came in here with as healthy a ship's crew as need 

 go to sea, and, after a stay of not quite three months, 

 left it in the condition of a hospital ship ; and yet all the 

 Dutch captains said we have been very lucky." 

 Britain Banks had not been too ill to use his eyes, and to take 



notes - The country reminded him of the flatness of his 

 native Lincolnshire. The canals made carriage incon- 

 ceivably cheap, but also made the air inconceivably 

 unwholesome. He writes enthusiastic praise of the fertility 

 and wealth of Java. He describes the elaborate organiza- 

 tion of the spice business. Nutmegs, for example, have 

 been extirpated in all the islands except Banda, "which 

 easily supplies the world, and would easily supply another, 

 if the Dutch had another to supply." He understood, 

 however, that there were spices in islands away to the East, 



1 " The unwholesome air of Batavia is the death of more Europeans 

 than any other place upon the globe of the same extent." 



