DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND. 9 



3ietiicatc5 



To THE Honourable IOHN BOND, 



Governour of the Island, whose proceeding is Authorized for 

 this Expedition, both by the King and Parliament. 



By WALTER HAMOND. 



London : 

 Prmtedfor Nicholas Bourne, and are to bee sold at his 

 Shop, at the South Entrance of the Roy all Exchange, 

 1643. [4to.] 



The promise of the title-page (as in the case of the Ger- 

 man hook already described) is hardly borne out by the book 

 itself, which does not contain much of value, except some 

 information about the author's experiences with the people, 

 chiefly those about St. Augustine's Bay on the south-west 

 coast. He seems to have been greatly impressed by the 

 honesty and good faith of the inhabitants ; again and again 

 is this mentioned in such words as " in all our trayding with 

 them we never sustained so much as the losse of one bead." 

 He even says, " they retaine the first incorrupt innocence of 

 man," and are " a people approaching in some degree neere 

 Adam, naked without guilt, and innocent, not by a forc't 

 vertue, but by ignorance of evill, and the creatures as inno- 

 cent and serviceable to man as they were before his trans- 

 gression." (How wofully, according to all accounts, must they 

 have depreciated since then !) We find, however, in the book, 

 that among these innocent people wars were going on be- 

 tween them and the neighbouring tribes, as there still are, and 

 probably always have been. There is a notice of some of the 

 valuable trees of the country, ebony, tamarind, and others, 

 and of a remarkable tree he calls the " flesh-tree," probably a 

 dragon-tree, yielding a sanguine-coloured sap. The book 

 contains an urgent appeal to the writer's countrymen to " go 

 in and possess the land," which " doth here by me friendly 

 and lovingly invite our nation to take some compassion of 

 her nakednesse, her poverty, and her simplicity, both corporall 

 and spirituall, and doth earnestly and affectionately even beg 

 of us to redeeme her out of her miserable thraldome under 

 the tyranny of Satan [curiously inconsistent this with the pre- 



