there are cabbages, lettuces, cucumbers, radishes, the white radishes of China, which boil almost as well as a turnip; carrots, parsley, celery, pigeon peas, the egg plant, which, broiled and eaten with pepper and salt, is very delicious; a kind of greens resembling spinnage; onions, very small, but excellent; and asparagus:  Besides some European plants of a strong smell, particularly sage, hysop, and rue.  Sugar is also produced here in immense quantities; very great crops of the finest and largest canes that can be imagined are produced with very little care, and yield a much larger proportion of sugar than the canes in the West Indies.  White sugar is sold here at two-pence half-penny a pound; and the molasses makes the arrack, of which, as of rum, it is the chief ingredient; a small quantity of rice, and some cocoa-nut wine, being added, chiefly, I suppose, to give it flavour.  A small quantity of indigo is also produced here, not as an article of trade, but merely for home consumption.[147]

[Footnote 147:  Pepper, sugar, and coffee, are produced in very considerable quantities, especially the first, which has been reckoned one of the chief commodities of the place.  As to sugar, one may have some notion of the quantity yielded, by a circumstance noticed by Stavorinus in his account.  He says that thirteen millions of pounds were manufactured, in 1765, in the province of Jaccatra alone.  Much of it used to be sent to the west of India, and a considerable part found its way to Europe before the derangement, or rather annihilation of the Dutch trade, by the effects of the revolutionary wars.—­E.]

But the most abundant article of vegetable luxury here, is the fruit; of which there is no less than six-and-thirty different kinds, and I shall give a very brief account of each.

1.  The pine-apple; Bromelia Ananas.  This fruit, which is here called Nanas, grows very large, and in such plenty that they may sometimes be bought at the first hand for a farthing a-piece; and at the common fruit-shops we got three of them for two-pence half-penny.  They are very juicy and well flavoured; but we all agreed that we had eaten as good from a hot-house in England:  They are however so luxuriant in their growth that most of them have two or three crowns, and a great number of suckers from the bottom of the fruit; of these Mr Banks once counted nine, and they are so forward that very often while they still adhered to the parent plant they shot out their fruit, which, by the time the large one became ripe, were of no inconsiderable size.  We several times saw three upon one apple, and were told that a plant once produced a cluster of nine, besides the principal:  This indeed was considered as so great a curiosity, that it was preserved in sugar, and sent to the Prince of Orange.

2.  Sweet oranges.  These are very good, but while we were here, sold for six-pence a piece.

3.  Pumplemoeses, which in the West Indies are called Shaddocks.  These were well flavoured, but not juicy; their want of juice, however, was an accidental effect of the season.