NOV. 1769 THAMES RIVER—TIMBER 201 
inviting us in; they had heard of us from our last friends. 
We landed, and while we stayed they were most perfectly 
civil, as indeed they have always been where we were 
known, but never where we were not. We proceeded up 
the river and soon met with another town with but few 
inhabitants. Above this the banks were completely clothed 
with the finest timber? my eyes ever beheld, of a tree we had 
before seen, but only at a distance, in Poverty Bay and 
Hawke’s Bay. Thick woods of it were everywhere upon the 
banks, every tree as straight as a pine, and of immense size, 
and the higher we went the more numerous they were. 
About two leagues from the mouth we stopped and went 
ashore. Our first business was to measure one of these trees. 
The woods were swampy, so we could not range far; we 
found one, however, by no means the largest we had seen, 
which was 19 feet 8 inches? in circumference, and 89 
feet in height without a branch. But what was most re- 
markable was that it, as well as many more that we saw, 
carried its thickness so truly up to the very top, that I dare 
venture to affirm that the top, where the lowest branch took 
its rise, was not a foot less in diameter than where we 
measured it, which was about 8 feet from the ground. We 
cut down a young one of these trees; the wood proved heavy 
and solid, too much so for masts, but it would make the 
finest plank in the world, and might possibly by some art 
be made light enough for masts, as the pitch-pine in America 
(to which our carpenter likened this timber) is said to be 
lightened by tapping. 
Up to this point the river has kept its depth and very 
little decreased in breadth ; the captain was so much pleased 
with it that he resolved to call it the Thames. It was now 
time for us to return; the tide turning downwards gave us 
warning, so away we went, and got out of the river into the 
bay before it was dark. We rowed for the ship as fast as we 
1 Podocarpus dacrydioides, A. Cunn. 
2 The dimensions were left blank in Banks’s Journal. In Wharton’s Cook, p. 
159, itis stated to be 19 feet 8 inches at 6 feet above the ground, and its 
length from the root to the first branch 89 feet; and it tapered so little that 
Cook judged it to contain 356 feet of solid timber, clear of the branches. 
