The Circumstances In The Text Are Absurd Additions, Either From Ignorance Or Imposition.

- E.]

The chief employments of the people here are fishing and agriculture. In fishing, they use several sorts of nets and lines as we do; but, as there are great banks of mud in some places, the fishermen have contrived a small frame, three or four feet long, not much larger than a hen-trough, and a little elevated at each end, to enable them to go more easily on these mud banks. Resting with one knee on the middle of one of these frames, and leaning his arms on a cross stick raised breast high, he uses the other foot on the mud to push the frame and himself forwards.

In their agricultural operations, all their fields on which any thing is to be cultivated, whether high or low, are formed into such plots or beds as may admit of retaining water over them when the cultivator thinks proper. The lands are tilled by ploughs drawn by one cow or buffalo; and when it is intended to sow rice, the soil is remarkably well prepared and cleared from all weeds, after which it is moistened into the state of a pulp, and smoothed by a frame drawn across, when the rice is sown very thick, and covered over with water, only to the height of two or three inches. When the seedling plants are six or eight inches long, they are all pulled up, and transplanted in straight lines into other fields, which are overflowed with water; and, when weeds grow up, they destroy them by covering them up in the interstices between the rows of rice, turning the mud over them with their hands. When they are to sow wheat, barley, pulse, or other grain, they grub up the surface of the ground superficially, earth, grass, and rook, and mixing this with some straw, burn all together. This earth, being sifted fine, they mix with the seed, which they sow in holes made in straight lines, so that it grows in tufts or rows like the rice. The field is divided into regular beds, well harrowed both before and after the seed is sown, which makes them resemble gardens. The rice grounds are meliorated merely by letting water into them; but for the other grains, where the soil requires it, they use dung, night-soil, ashes, and the like. For watering their fields, they use the machine mentioned by Martini in the preface to his Atlas, being entirely constructed of wood, and the same in principle with the chain-pump.

In order to procure salt, as all the shores are of mud instead of sand, they pare off in summer the superficial part of this mud, which has been overflowed by the sea-water, and lay it up in heaps, to be used in the following manner: Having first dried it in the sun, and rubbed it into a fine powder, they dig a pit, the bottom of which is covered with straw, and from the bottom a hollow cane leads through the side of the pit to a jar standing below the level of the bottom.

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