natural productions, shall be described in another place.  Before I returned to my ship, I ascended the first ridge of rocks, which rise in a kind of amphitheatre above one another.  I was in hopes, by this means, of obtaining a view of the country; but before I reached the top, there came on so thick a fog, that I could hardly find my way down again.  In the evening, we hauled the seine at the head of the harbour, but caught only half a dozen small fish.  We had no better success next day, when we tried with hook and line.  So that our only resource here, for fresh provisions, were birds, of which there was an inexhaustible store.

The morning of the 26th proved foggy, with rain.  However, we went to work to fill water, and to cut grass for our cattle, which we found in small spots near the head of the harbour.  The rain which fell swelled all the rivulets to such a degree, that the sides of the hills, bounding the harbour, seemed to be covered with a sheet of water.  For the rain, as it fell, run into the fissures and crags of the rocks that composed the interior parts of the hills, and was precipitated down their sides in prodigious torrents.

The people having wrought hard the two preceding days, and nearly completed our water, which we filled from a brook at the left corner of the beach, I allowed them the 27th as a day of rest, to celebrate Christmas.  Upon this indulgence, many of them went on shore, and made excursions, in different directions, into the country, which they found barren and desolate in the highest degree.  In the evening, one of them brought to me a quart bottle which he had found, fastened with some wire to a projecting rock on the north side of the harbour.  This bottle contained a piece of parchment, on which was written the following inscription: 

Ludovico XV.  Galliarum rege, et d.[109] de Boynes regi a Secretis ad res maritimas annis 1772 et 1773.

[Footnote 109:  The (d.), no doubt, is a contraction of the word Domino_.  The French secretary of the marine was then Monsieur de Boynes.—­D.]

From this inscription, it is clear, that we were not the first Europeans who had been in this harbour.  I supposed it to be left by Monsieur de Boisguehenneu, who went on shore in a boat on the 13th of February, 1772, the same day that Monsieur de Kerguelen discovered this land, as appears by a note in the French chart of the southern hemisphere, published the following year.[110]

[Footnote 110:  On perusing this paragraph of the journal, it will be natural to ask, How could Monsieur de Boisguehenneu, in the beginning of 1772, leave an inscription, which, upon the very face of it, commemorates a transaction of the following year?  Captain Cook’s manner of expressing himself here, strongly marks, that he made this supposition, only for want of information to enable him to make any other.  He had no idea that the French had visited this land a second time; and, reduced to the necessity of trying to accommodate what he saw himself, to what little he had heard of their proceedings, he confounds a transaction which we, who have been better instructed, know, for a certainty, belongs to the second voyage, with a similar one, which his chart of the southern hemisphere has recorded, and which happened in a different year, and at a different place.