Not P but Moby-Dick (23)

[Mike Jing]

Even more from Chapter 40:

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed
clay.

Four of the five previous translations I have at hand interpreted this as
"pine can live in any sort of soil", which doesn't seem right to me. It
seems that they have confused "hardest" with the word "hardy", or am I
missing something here?