the surgeon of the Tamar surrounded a piece of ground near the watering-place with a fence of turf, and planted it with many esculent vegetables as a garden, for the benefit of those who might hereafter come to this place.[26] Of this harbour, and all the neighbouring islands, I took possession for his majesty King George the Third of Great Britain, by the name of Falkland’s Islands; and there is, I think, little reason to doubt that they are the same land to which Cowley gave the name of Pepys’s Island.

[Footnote 26:  “Many of them began to spring up very fast, and we have since heard, that some persons who arrived there after our departure, eat of those roots and sallad.”]

In the printed account of Cowley’s voyage, he says, “we held our course S.W. till we came into the latitude of forty-seven degrees, where we saw land, the same being an island, not before known, lying to the westward of us:  It was not inhabited, and I gave it the name of Pepys’s Island.  We found it a very commodious place for ships to water at, and take in wood, and it has a very good harbour, where a thousand sail of ships may safely ride.  Here is great plenty of fowls; and, we judge, abundance of fish, by reason of the ground’s being nothing but rocks and sands.”

To this account there is annexed a representation of Pepys’s Island, in which names are given to several points and head-lands, and the harbour is called Admiralty Bay; yet it appears that Cowley had only a distant view of it, for he immediately adds, “the wind being so extraordinary high that we could not get into it to water, we stood to the southward, shaping our course S.S.W. till we came into the latitude of 53 deg.;” and though he says that “it was commodious to take in wood,” and it is known that there is no wood on Falkland’s Islands, Pepys’s Island and Falkland’s Islands may notwithstanding be the same; for upon Falkland’s Islands there are immense quantities of flags with narrow leaves, reeds and rushes which grow in clusters, so as to form bushes about three feet high, and then shoot about six or seven feet higher:  These at a distance have greatly the appearance of wood, and were taken for wood by the French, who landed there in the year 1764, as appears by Pernetty’s account of their voyage.[27] It has been suggested that the latitude of Pepys’s Island might, in the MS. from which the account of Cowley’s voyage was printed, be expressed in figures, which, if ill made, might equally resemble forty-seven, and fifty-one; and therefore as there is no island in these seas in latitude forty-seven, and as Falkland’s Islands lie nearly in fifty-one, that fifty-one might reasonably be concluded to be the number for which the figures were intended to stand:  Recourse therefore was had to the British Museum, and a manuscript journal of Cowley’s was there found.  In this manuscript no mention is made of an island not before known, to which he gave the name of Pepys’s Island,