looking about them. It may therefore be, as my informer said, that the existence of such a bay has been but lately discovered; indeed, were it not for that policy, I could believe anything of their stupidity and ignorance. As an example of this, the governor of the town, Brigadier-General Don Pedro de Mendozay Furtado, asked the captain of our ship whether the transit of Venus, which we were going to observe, were not the passing of the North Star to the South Pole, as he said he had always understood it to be.
The river, and indeed the whole coast, abounds with greater variety of fish than I have ever seen; seldom a day passed in which we had not one or more new species brought to us. Indeed the bay is the most convenient place for fishing I have ever seen, for it abounds with islands between which there is shallow water and proper beaches for drawing the seine. The sea also without the bay is full of dolphins, and large mackerel of several sorts, who very readily bite at the hooks which the inhabitants tow after their boats for that purpose. In short, the country is capable, with very little industry, of producing infinite plenty, both of necessaries and luxuries: were it in the hands of Englishmen we should soon see its consequence, as things are tolerably plentiful even under the direction of the Portuguese, whom I take to be, without exception, the laziest as well as the most ignorant race in the whole world.
The climate here is, I fancy, very good. During our whole stay the thermometer was never above 83°, but we had a good deal of rain, and once it blew very hard. I am inclined to think that this country has rather more rain than those in the same northern latitude are observed to have, not only from what happened during our short stay, but from Marcgrav, who gives us meteorological observations on this climate for three years. It appears that it rained here in those years almost every other day throughout the year, but more especially in May and June, when it rained almost without ceasing.[1]
- ↑ Here follows, in the manuscript, a list of 316 plants collected by Banks near Rio de Janeiro.
