The Flamingo, And Its Remarkable Nest

The Flamingo, And Its Remarkable Nest

I know not whether there are any other beasts on the island: there are some wildfowl, but I judge not many.

I saw a few flamingos, which is a sort of large fowl, much like a heron in shape, but bigger, and of a reddish colour.

They delight to keep together in great companies, and feed in mud or ponds, or in such places where there is not much water: they are very shy, therefore it is hard to shoot them.

Yet I have lain obscured in the evening near a place where they resort, and with two more in my company have killed 14 of them at once; the first shot being made while they were standing on the ground, the other two as they rose.

They build their nests in shallow ponds where there is much mud, which they scrape together, making little hillocks like small islands appearing out of the water a foot and a half high from the bottom.

They make the foundation of these hillocks broad, bringing them up tapering to the top, where they leave a small hollow pit to lay their eggs in.

When they either lay their eggs or hatch them they stand all the while, not on the hillock but close by it with their legs on the ground and in the water, resting themselves against the hillock and covering the hollow nest upon it with their rumps.

Their legs are very long; and building thus, as they do, upon the ground, they could neither draw their legs conveniently into their nests, nor sit down upon them otherwise than by resting their whole bodies there, to the prejudice of their eggs or their young, were it not for this admirable contrivance which they have by natural instinct.

They never lay more than two eggs and seldom fewer. The young ones cannot fly till they are almost full-grown; but will run prodigiously fast; yet we have taken many of them.

The flesh of both young and old is lean and black, yet very good meat, tasting neither fishy nor any way unsavoury.

Their tongues are large, having a large knob of fat at the root, which is an excellent bit: a dish of flamingo’s tongues being fit for a prince’s table.

When many of them are standing together by a pond’s side, being half a mile distant from a man, they appear to him like a brick wall; their feathers being of the colour of new red brick: and they commonly stand upright and single, one by one, exactly in a row (except when feeding) and close by each other.

The young ones at first are of a light grey; and as their wing-feathers spring out they grow darker; and never come to their right colour, or any beautiful shape, under ten or eleven months old.

I have seen flamingoes at Rio la Hacha, and at an island lying near the Main of America, right against Curacao, called by privateers Flamingo Key, from the multitude of these fowls that breed there: and I never saw of their nests and young but here.

There are not above 5 or 6 men on this island of Sal, and a poor governor, as they called him, who came aboard in our boat, and about 3 or 4 poor lean goats for a present to our captain, telling him they were the best that the island did afford.

The captain, minding more the poverty of the giver than the value of the present, gave him in requital a coat to clothe him; for he had nothing but a few rags on his back and an old hat not worth three farthings; which yet I believe he wore but seldom, for fear he should want before he might get another; for he told us there had not been a ship in 3 years before.

We bought of him about 20 bushels of salt for a few old clothes: and he begged a little powder and shot.

We stayed here 3 days; in which time one of these Portuguese offered to some of our men a lump of ambergris in exchange for some clothes, desiring them to keep it secret, for he said if the governor should know it he should be hanged.

At length one Mr. Coppinger bought for a small matter; yet I believe he gave more than it was worth.

WHERE AMBERGRIS IS FOUND

No one in the ship that knew ambergris. But I have since seen it in other places, and therefore am certain it was not right.

It was of a dark colour, like sheep dung, and very soft, but of no smell, and possibly it was some of their goat’s dung.

I afterwards saw some sold at the Nicobars in the East Indies which was of a lighter colour, but very hard, neither had it any smell. This also I suppose was a cheat.

Yet in both these places there is ambergris found.

John Read, a Bristol man, told me that he was apprentice to a master who traded to these islands of Cape Verde.

Once as he was riding at an anchor at Fogo, another of these islands, there was a lump of it swam by the ship.

The boat being ashore he missed it, but knew it to be ambergris because:

• he had taken up a lump swimming in the like manner the voyage before
• his master had several times bought pieces of it of the natives of the isle of Fogo so as to enrich himself.

And so at the Nicobars, Englishmen have bought, as I have been credibly informed, great quantities of very good ambergris.

Yet the inhabitants are so subtle that they will counterfeit it, both there and here.

I have heard that in the Gulf of Florida, whence much of it comes, the native Indians there use the same fraud.

Mr. Hill the surgeon upon his showing me once a piece of ambergris, which was thus.

I knew a Benjamin Barker for a long time. He was very diligent, observing, sober and credible. He told this Hill that he was in the Bay of Honduras to procure log-wood, which grows there in great abundance.

He passed in a canoe over to one of the islands in that bay where he found on a samdy shore a lump of ambergris so large that, when carried to Jamaica, he found it to weigh over 100 pounds.

When he first found it it lay dry above the mark which the sea then came to at high-water; and he observed in it a great multitude of beetles:

It was of a dusky colour, towards black, and about the hardness of mellow cheese, and of a very fragrant smell.

Mr. Hill showed some to me that Mr. Barker gave him.

Besides those already mentioned, all the places where I have heard that ambergris has been found, at Bermuda and the Bahama Islands in the West Indies, and that part of the coast of Africa with its adjacent islands which reaches from Mozambique to the Red Sea.