Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
accompanied our boats and seemed exceedingly ravenous. The craw
fish was likewise found in the greatest plenty conceivable and beyond
any like I ever saw in largeness or goodness. We generally caught close
to the sea side, often striking them with our boat hooks. Nor were the
sea lion and seals excluded from our table. Through satiety or wanton-
ness or depraved appetites we found them excellent food. The former
bearing some affinity with beef and the latter not to be distinguished
from mutton . . .
12
Sometimes the travellers enjoyed the rare luxury of goat meat,
which to their deprived palates tasted like venison. The remnants
of the little herd introduced by the first Spanish colonists had bred
freely and would by 1742 have covered much of the island had an-
other species of animal not been introduced by some passing ship:
The place is covered with dogs of an enormous size resembling .
. . grey hounds. These with the advantage of level surface have effec-
tually destroyed the goats on this side, whose refuge consists of steep
rocks and precipices, and probably in time will destroy them on the
other, the dogs likewise having contracted an agility and swiftness al-
most equal to the goats.
13
Foraging parties found it difficult to track down and shoot the
nimble goats and Saumarez calculated that there were only about a
hundred and fifty left.
The most important element in the diet, however, was not fish
or flesh, but vegetables. As we have seen, mariners had long since
observed that fresh-grown produce was one remedy for scurvy. In
1734 the Dutch writer, John Backstrom, went so far as to suggest that
vegetable deficiency was the
only
cause of this appalling disease.
Anyone who had made a long sea voyage could not have failed to no-
tice the near-miraculous recovery sick men made as soon as their
