should not have wanted so many natives, had it not been for the great weight of their food, which consists almost entirely of potatoes: one, in fact, went solely to carry food for the first day's journey, and left us next morning.
I left Tawranga about one o'clock on the 17th of February, 1839. This day's journey was not above fifteen miles, and was almost entirely over a plain covered with fern: the walk was however quite enough for me for that day, and I was very glad when the tent was pitched, and I enjoyed my pot of tea and piece of bread and pork with an appetite an alderman might have envied. There is something inexpressibly delightful in living in a tent: snail-like, you carry your house wherever you go; and for my own part, I always sleep much better in a tent than in an inn, and enjoy my meals infinitely more in the open air, sitting at the mouth of my tent like the shepherds of old, than I should if I had the best dinner that ever was cooked in a smoky hotel in London. I recollect while in England that a very little thing would put me out of conceit with my tea, and I could no more think of relishing it without white sugar than of eating a piece of dry crust covered with mould; but here I always used to think the tea excellent, although boiled in a common tin pot, or pannikin as the sailors call it, and drunk out of the same, and sweetened with coarse brown sugar; and I used to dole out the remnants of bread when they were quite blue, as if it was the greatest luxury in the world:—so much are our tastes as well as ourselves liable to be altered by circumstances. It was not till long after this, however, that I was short of bread; as by the kindness of my friends at Tawranga, I was loaded with bread, roast-meat, &c., and was not yet reduced to the necessity of eating potatoes with my tea, or cold potatoes without salt for lunch. I have often seen the natives eat raw potatoes, and once living craw-fish; two things I never was so hard-pushed as to try.
