370 BATAVIA 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, 
—nmaybe 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. 96 of this journal); these were un- 
doubtedly the ships of Mr. De Bougainville, and the Indian 
was Otourrou, the brother of Rette, 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 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. 
