and deep, and
amazingly fertile; it produces spontaneously, and almost without
cultivation, all the necessaries of life, grain, fruit, herbs, and
roots. Every thing matures to perfection, and is excellent in its
kind."[B] One thing, which always surprized him, was the prodigious
rapidity with which the sap of trees repairs any loss they may happen to
sustain in that country: "And I was never," says he, "more astonished,
than when landing four days after the locusts had devoured all the
fruits and leaves, and even the buds of the trees, to find the trees
covered with new leaves, and they did not seem to me to have suffered
much."[C] "It was then," says the same author; "the fish season; you
might see them in shoals approaching towards land. Some of those shoals
were fifty fathom square, and the fish crowded together in such a
manner, as to roll upon one another, without being able to swim. As soon
as the Negroes perceive them coming towards land, they jump into the
water with a basket in one hand, and swim with the other. They need only
to plunge and to lift up their basket, and they are sure to return
loaded with fish." Speaking of the appearance of the country, and of the
disposition of the people, he says,[D] "Which way soever I turned mine
eyes on this pleasant spot, I beheld a perfect image of pure nature; an
agreeable solitude, bounded on every side by charming landscapes; the
rural situation of cottages in the midst of trees; the ease and
indolence of the Negroes, reclined under the shade of their spreading
foliage; the simplicity of their dress and manners; the whole revived in
my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate the
world in its primitive state. They are, generally speaking, very
good-natured, sociable, and obliging. I was not a little pleased with
this my first reception; it convinced me, that there ought to be a
considerable abatement made in the accounts I had read and heard every
where of the savage character of the Africans. I observed both in
Negroes and Moors, great humanity and sociableness, which gave me strong
hopes that I should be very safe amongst them, and meet with the success
I desired in my enquiries after the curiosities of the country."[E] He
was agreeably amused with the conversation of the Negroes, their
_fables, dialogues_, and _witty stories_ with which they entertain each
other alternately, according to their custom. Speaking of the remarks
which the natives