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} 
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, Laat, Seba, Regeeua, Timo, and 
Massara, each governed by its respective radja or king. It 
has three harbours, all good; the best is 7imo, situate some- 
where round the S8.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 on 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. 
