The produce of this island is bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas of thirteen sorts, the best we had ever eaten; plantains; a fruit not unlike an apple, which, when ripe, is very pleasant; sweet potatoes, yams, cocoas, a kind of _Arum_ fruit known here by the name of _Jambu_, and reckoned most delicious; sugar-cane, which the inhabitants eat raw; a root of the salop kind, called by the inhabitants _Pea_; a plant called _Ethee_, of which the root only is eaten; a fruit that grows in a pod, like that of a large kidney-bean, which, when it is roasted, eats very much like a chesnut, by the natives called _Ahee_; a tree called _Wharra_, called in the East Indies _Pandanes_, which produces fruit, something like the pine-apple; a shrub called _Nono_; the _Morinda_, which also produces fruit; a species of fern, of which the root is eaten, and sometimes the leaves; and a plant called _Theve_, of which the root also is eaten: But the fruits of the _Nono_, the fern, and the _Theve_, are eaten only by the inferior people, and in times of scarcity. All these, which serve the inhabitants for food, the earth produces spontaneously, or with so little culture, that they seem to be exempted from the first general curse, that "man should eat his bread in the sweat of his brow." They have also the Chinese paper mulberry, _morus papyrifera_, which they call _Aouto_; a tree resembling the wild fig-tree of the West Indies; another species of fig, which they call _Mattè_; the _cordia sebestina orientalis_, which they call _Etou_; a kind of Cyprus grass, which they call _Moo_; a species of _tournefortia_, which they call _Taheinoo_; another of the _convolvulus poluce_, which they call _Eurhe_; the _solanum centifolium_, which they call _Ebooa_; the _calophyllum mophylum_, which they call _Tamannu_; the _hibiscus tiliaceus_, called _Poerou_, a frutescent nettle; the _urtica argentea_, called _Erowa_; with many other plants which cannot here be particularly mentioned: Those that have been named already will be referred to in the subsequent part of this work.
They have no European fruit, garden stuff, pulse, or legumes, nor grain of any kind.
Of tame animals they have only hogs, dogs, and poultry; neither is there a wild animal in the island, except ducks, pigeons, paroquets, with a few other birds, and rats, there being no other quadruped, nor any serpent. But the sea supplies them with great variety of most excellent fish, to eat which is their chief luxury, and to catch it their principal labour.[2]