KEEGUELEN'S LAND 77 
destruction of its former forests has produced abundance 
of good coal.^ Cook mentions the remarkable cabbage, 
which, to a crew long on salt meat, is an invaluable 
anti-scorbutic, and to many, a most agreeable dish ; 
unlike other pot-herbs, it possesses after boiling so much 
of its essential oil, as entirely to neutralise or destroy 
any symptoms of heart-burn or flatulence ; nothing can 
be more wholesome than it is. The root eats like horse- 
radish and the young hearts like coarse mustard and 
cress ; the seeds are the food of the numerous ducks 
on the island ; growing as it does near the sea, on a 
spot upwards of 1000 miles from any land where fresh 
vegetables can be obtained, it seems planted by Nature's 
hand for the poor mariner, when suffering under his own 
peculiar malady. 
This curious plant was one of Cook's discoveries ; Hooker 
had been specially urged by his father and Eobert Brown to 
investigate it on the spot, and it recurs again and again in 
the letters on either side. From seed he brought back with 
him, young plants were raised in Tasmania, though it seems 
without success in establishing the plant as a staple of 
food. Sir WilHam at first failed to raise it at Kew ; his son 
writes : 
I do not understand your not getting the Kerguelen's 
Land Cabbage to grow. I have had fifty plants of it from 
seed. I had it growing in a bottle ! (hanging to the after 
rigging), on a tuft of Leptostomum during all our second 
cruise in the Ice, and brought it alive to Falklands. It was 
sprouting before the Cape Horn plants went home, from 
seeds I scattered under the little trees. We used to amuse 
ourselves planting it here and there where we go. I shall 
fill a Ward's case with Lyall ^ (it is the Terror's second case) 
at St. Helena, with native plants, and sow the seeds among 
it. Try it again in a cool place very wet and shaded, in a 
black vegetable mould like peat. Do not bury it but lay 
^ ' If I could get a piece,' responds Sir William enthusiastically, ' I would 
have it framed and glazed.' 
2 David Lyall (1817-95) was assistant -surgeon on the Terror and a useful 
botanist. 
