worse and worse every day. Then Tayeto, his boy, was attacked by a cold and inflammation in his lungs; then my servants, Peter and James, and I myself had intermittent fevers, and Dr. Solander a constant nervous one. In short, every one on shore, and many on board, were ill, chiefly of intermittents, occasioned no doubt by the lowness of the country, and the numberless dirty canals, which intersect the town in all directions.
Some days before this, as I was walking the streets with Tupia, a man totally unknown to me ran out of his house, and eagerly accosting me, asked if the Indian whom he saw with me had not been at Batavia before. On my declaring that he had not, and asking the reason of so odd a question, he told me that a year and a half before, Mr. De Bougainville had been at Batavia with two French ships, and that with him was an Indian so like this that he had imagined him to be the identical same person, until I informed him of the contrary. On this I inquired, and found that Mr. De Bougainville was sent out by the French to the Malouine or Falkland Isles (in order, as they said here, to sell them to the Spaniards), had gone from thence to the River Plate, and afterwards having passed into the South Seas,—maybe to other Spanish parts, where he and all his people had got an immense deal of money in new Spanish dollars—came here across the South Seas, in which passage he discovered divers lands unknown before, and from one of them he brought the Indian in question.
This at once cleared up the account given us by the Otahite Indians of the two ships which had been there ten months before us (p. 96 of this journal); these were undoubtedly the ships of Mr. De Bougainville, and the Indian was Otourrou, the brother of Rette, chief of Hidea. Even the story of the woman was known here; she, it seems, was a Frenchwoman, who followed a young man sent out in the character of botanist, in men’s clothes.[1] As for the article of the colours, the Indians might easily be mistaken, or Mr. De Bougainville, if he had traded in the South Seas under
