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The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders by Ernest Scott
page 61 of 532 (11%)
and plenty reigned and care and toil were not. George Forster, the German
naturalist who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, wrote of the men as
"models of masculine beauty," whose perfect proportions would have
satisfied the eye of Phidias or Praxiteles; of the women as beings whose
"unaffected smiles and a wish to please ensure them mutual esteem and
love;" and of the life they led as being diversified between bathing in
cool streams, reposing under tufted trees, feeding on luscious fruits,
telling tales, and playing the flute. In fact, Forster declared, they
"resembled the happy, indolent people whom Ulysses found in Phaeacia, and
could apply the poet's lines to themselves with peculiar propriety:

'To dress, to dance, to sing our sole delight,
The feast or bath by day, and love by night.'"

In Tahiti grew an abundance of breadfruit. It was in connection with this
nutritious food, one of nature's richest gifts to the Pacific, that Bligh
undertook a mission which involved him in a mutiny, launched him upon one
of the most dangerous and difficult voyages in the annals of British
seamanship, and provided a theme for a long poem by one of the greatest
of English authors. Byron it was who, writing as though the trees
sprouted quartern loaves ready baked, said of it (The Island 2 11):

"The bread-tree, which without the ploughshare yields
The unreaped harvest of unfurrowed fields,
And bakes its unadulterated loaves
Without a furnace in unpurchased groves,
And flings off famine from its fertile breast,
A priceless market for the gathering guest."

Breadfruit had been tasted and described by Dampier in the seventeenth
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