The Marquesas were reached on 7th April, and after a narrow escape from running on the rocks, satisfactory anchorage was obtained, and they were visited by some of the natives, from whom breadfruit and fish were purchased.

It was set in the center of a great garden in which mango and cocoa and breadfruit abounded.

We were struck by the superb breadth and immense height of a breadfruit-tree the shadows of which fell over a small brick pagoda.

Then every foot of ground from the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro, the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves and asked no cultivation.

It is not so in the Marquesas, eight hundred miles north, where breadfruit is the staff, nor in Hawaii, where fermented taro (poi) is the chief reliance of the kanaka.

The breadfruit are as big as Dutch cheese, weighing four or five pounds, their green rinds tuberculated like a golf-ball.

The fei, the breadfruit, the cocoanut, the mango, and the taro are all about.

Natives were seen cooking their simple meal of fish and breadfruit, or only the latter.

They looked at him, sighingly, the young women of the village, even at this hour busied cooking breadfruit or fish and coffee; and Landers flirted with each one and in Tahitian called out words which made them laugh, and sometimes hide their heads coquettishly.

Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all Polynesia, the girls have their fling at promiscuity from puberty to the late teens or early twenties, when an immense and increasing population compelled the thinking men to devise a remedy for the starvation which in times of drought or comparative failure of the feis or breadfruit or a scarcity of fish menaced the nation!

From different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ.

A pile of breadfruit-leaves were laid before each feaster's space in lieu of plates, and four half-cocoanut-shells, containing drinking water, cocoanut-milk, grated ripe cocoanut, and sea-water.

We transferred each to his own breadfruit-leaves what he desired from the stores in the center, meat and vegetables and fruit, and seasoned it as we pleased.

The poi was in calabashes, and was made of ripe breadfruit pounded until dough with a stone pestle in a wooden trough, then baked in leaves in the ground, and, when cooked, mixed with water and beaten and stirred until a mass of the consistency of a glutinous custard.

We went through Tetuanui's breadfruit-grove, and there, as wherever were choice growths, I stopped to examine and admire.

The cocoa will grow almost in the sea and in any soil, but the breadfruit demands humus and a slight attention.

The timber of the breadfruit is excellent for canoes and for lumber, and its leaves, thick and glossy, and eighteen inches long by a foot broad, are of account for many purposes, including thatch and plates.

The blue duranta and the white oleander, the cool gray-green hibiscus with lemon-colored blossoms, the yellow allamanda, the trumpet lily, acacias, lilac ipomaea, tree ferns, and huge bird's-nest ferns mingled with white convolvulus, and over all lifted groves of cocoas and the symmetrical breadfruit.

" I drew from him that he had bought eighteen acres of land for twelve hundred dollars, and had spent most of a year in preparing it for vanilla, cocoanuts, a few breadfruit, a small area of coffee and taro, and a vegetable patch.

BALL, ALFRED L. Ripe breadfruit.

Ripe breadfruit, by Armine von Tempski.

BALL, ALFRED L. Ripe breadfruit.

Ripe breadfruit, by Armine von Tempski.

Is it very hot there, and do you live on bananas and breadfruit?

In the following year, Captains Bligh and Portlock, in the Providence and Assistance, conveying breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies, saw a portion of the south-east coast of New Guinea, when on their way to pass through Torres Strait.