spruce, though the wood is more ponderous, and bears a greater
resemblance to the pitch-pine. Many of these trees are from six to eight
and ten feet in girt, and from sixty to eighty or one hundred feet in
length, large enough to make a main-mast for a fifty-gun ship.

Here are, as well as in all other parts of New Zealand, a great number of
aromatic trees and shrubs, most of the myrtle kind; but amidst all this
variety, we met with none which bore fruit fit to eat.

In many parts the woods are so over-run with supplejacks, that it is
scarcely possible to force one's way amongst them. I have seen several
which were fifty or sixty fathoms long.

The soil is a deep black mould, evidently composed of decayed vegetables,
and so loose that it sinks under you at every step; and this may be the
reason why we meet with so many large trees as we do, blown down by the
wind, even in the thickest part of the woods. All the ground amongst the
trees is covered with moss and fern, of both which there is a great
variety; but except the flax or hemp plant, and a few other plants, there
is very little herbage of any sort, and none that was eatable, that we
found, except about a handful of water-cresses, and about the same quantity
of cellery. What Dusky Bay most abounds with is fish: A boat with six or
eight men, with hooks and lines, caught daily sufficient to serve the whole
ship's company. Of this article the variety is almost equal to the plenty,
and of such kinds as are common to the more northern coast; but some are
superior, and in particular the cole fish, as we called it, which is both
larger and finer flavoured than any I had seen before, and was, in the
opinion of most on board, the highest luxury the sea afforded us. The
shell-fish are, muscles, cockles, scallops, cray-fish, and many other
sorts, all such as are to be found in every other part of the coast. The
only amphibious animals are seals: These are to be found in great numbers
about this bay on the small rocks and isles near the sea coast.

We found here five different kinds of ducks, some of which I do not
recollect to have any where seen before. The largest are as big as a
Muscovy duck, with a very beautiful variegated plumage, on which account we
called it the Painted Duck; both male and female have a large white spot on
each wing; the head and neck of the latter is white, but all the other
feathers as well as those on the head and neck of the drake are of a dark