produced abundance of cocoa-nuts, bananas, bread-fruit, yams, and plantains; they had also plenty of fowls, goats, and pigs; the woods abounded with a species of wild hog, and the coasts of the island with several kinds of good fish; these constituted the whole of their resources, except a little sugarcane, which Adams told Sir Thomas Staines, with a smile on his countenance, enabled him to make a small quantity of bad rum.
Their agricultural implements were made by themselves, from the iron supplied by the Bounty, which, with great labour, they beat out into spades, hatchets, &c. Adams kept a regular journal, in which was entered the nature and quantity of work performed by each family, what each had received, and what was due on account; there was, it seems, besides private property, a sort of general stock, out of which articles were issued on account of the several members of the community; and, for mutual accommodation, exchanges of one kind of provision for another were very frequent, as salt for fresh meat, vegetables and fruit for poultry, fish, &c.; also when the stores of one family were low, or wholly expended, a fresh supply was raised from another, or out of the general stock, to be repaid when circumstances were more favorable; all of which transactions were carefully noted down in the patriarch’s journal.
But what was most gratifying of all to the visitors, was the simple and unaffected manner in which the members of this little community returned thanks to the Almighty for the many blessings they enjoyed. They never failed to say grace before and after meals, to pray every morning at sunrise and again on retiring to rest. The day on which Sir Thomas Staines and Captain Pipon landed, was Saturday the 17th Sept., but by John Adams’s account it was Sunday the 18th; and they had already commenced their Sabbath devotions when the frigates were first discovered by them. This difference in the time was occasioned by the Bounty having proceeded thither by the eastern route, and the Briton and Tagus having gone to the westward; the master of the Topaze found Adams right, according to his own reck-
