As but few places afford a sufficient supply of food to support a large assemblage of persons these Kwon-nat grounds are generally the spots at which their annual barter meetings are held, and during these fun, frolic, and quarrelling of every description prevail.
POISONOUS NUTS.
No article of food used by the natives is more deserving of notice than the by-yu.

This name is applied to the pulp of the nut of a species of palm which, in its natural state, acts as a most violent emetic and cathartic; the natives themselves consider it as a rank poison: they however are acquainted with a very artificial method of preparing it, by which it is completely deprived of its noxious qualities and then becomes an agreeable and nutritious article of food.

Europeans who are not acquainted with this mode of preparing the nut, the stones of which they find lying about the fireplaces of the natives, are frequently tempted to eat it in its natural state, but they invariably pay a severe penalty for the mistake.

The following extract, from Captain Cook's * first voyage, gives one instance of this: (*Footnote.

Volume 2 page 624.) The third sort, which, like the second, is found only in the Northern parts, seldom grows more than ten feet high, with small pinnated leaves, resembling those of some kind of fern; it bears no cabbage, but a plentiful crop of nuts, about the size of a large chestnut, but rounder.
As the hulls of these were found scattered round the places where the Indians had made their fires it was taken for granted that they were fit to eat; however those who made the experiment paid dear for their knowledge to the contrary, for they operated both as an emetic and cathartic, with great violence: still however it was not doubted but they were eaten by the Indians, and, in order to determine this more clearly, they were carried to the hogs, who might be supposed to have a constitution as strong as the Indians, although the ship's people had not.