69. CHAPTER LXIX.
While the doctor and the natives were taking a digestive
nap after dinner, I strolled forth to have a peep at the country,
which could produce so generous a meal.
To my surprise, a fine strip of land in the vicinity of the hamlet,
and protected seaward by a grove of cocoa-nut and bread-fruit
trees, was under high cultivation. Sweet potatoes, Indian
turnips, and yams were growing; also melons, a few pine-apples,
and other fruits. Still more pleasing was the sight, of
young bread-fruit and cocoa-nut trees set out with great care,
as if, for once, the improvident Polynesian had thought of his
posterity. But this was the only instance of native thrift which
ever came under my observation. For, in all my rambles over
Tahiti and Imeeo, nothing so much struck me as the comparative
scarcity of these trees in many places where they ought to
abound. Entire valleys, like Martair, of inexhaustible fertility,
are abandoned to all the rankness of untamed vegetation. Alluvial
flats bordering the sea, and watered by streams from the
mountains, are overgrown with a wild, scrub guava-bush, introduced
by foreigners, and which spreads with such fatal rapidity,
that the natives, standing still while it grows, anticipate its
covering the entire island. Even tracts of clear land, which,
with so little pains, might be made to wave with orchards, lie
wholly neglected.
When I considered their unequaled soil and climate, thus
unaccountably slighted, I often turned in amazement upon the
natives about Papeetee; some of whom all but starve in their
gardens run to waste. Upon other islands which I have
visited, of similar fertility, and wholly unreclaimed from their
first discovered condition, no spectacle of this sort was presented.
The high estimation in which many of their fruit-trees are
held by the Tahitians and Imeeose—their beauty in the landscape—their
manifold uses, and the facility with which they are
propagated, are considerations which render the remissness
alluded to still more unaccountable. The cocoa-palm is as an
example; a tree by far the most important production of Nature
in the Tropics. To the Polynesian, it is emphatically the
Tree of Life; transcending even the bread-fruit in the multifarious
uses to which it is applied.
Its very aspect is imposing. Asserting its supremacy by an
erect and lofty bearing, it may be said to compare with other
trees, as man with inferior creatures.
The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year,
the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking
of its fruit; he thatches his hut with its boughs, and weaves
them into baskets to carry his food; he cools himself with a
fan platted from the young leaflets, and shields his head from
the sun by a bonnet of the leaves; sometimes he clothes himself
with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base
of the stalks, whose elastic rods, strung with filberts, are used
as a taper; the larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him
with a beautiful goblet: the smaller ones, with bowls for his
pipes; the dry husks kindle his fires; their fibres are twisted
into fishing-lines and cords for his canoes; he heals his wounds
with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut; and
with the oil extracted from its meat, embalms the bodies of the
dead.
The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless. Sawn into
posts, it upholds the islander's dwelling; converted into charcoal,
it cooks his food; and supported on blocks of stone, rails in his
lands. He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of
the wood, and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same
hard material.
In pagan Tahiti a cocoa-nut branch was the symbol of regal
authority. Laid upon the sacrifice in the temple, it made the
offering sacred; and with it, the priests chastised and put to
flight the evil spirits which assailed them. The supreme majesty
of Oro, the great god of their mythology, was declared in
the cocoa-nut log from which his image was rudely carved.
Upon one of the Tonga Islands, there stands a living tree, revered
itself as a deity. Even upon the Sandwich Islands, the
cocoa-palm retains all its ancient reputation; the people there
having thought of adopting it as the national emblem.
The cocoa-nut is planted as follows: Selecting a suitable
place, you drop into the ground a fully ripe nut, and leave it.
In a few days, a thin, lance-like shoot forces itself through a
minute hole in the shell, pierces the husk, and soon unfolds
three pale-green leaves in the air; while originating, in the
same soft white sponge which now completely fills the nut, a
pair of fibrous roots, pushing away the stoppers which close two
holes in an opposite direction, penetrate the shell, and strike
vertically into the ground. A day or two more, and the shell
and husk, which, in the last and germinating stage of the nut,
are so hard that a knife will scarcely make any impression,
spontaneously burst by some force within; and, henceforth, the
hardy young plant thrives apace; and needing no culture, pruning,
or attention of any sort, rapidly advances to maturity. In
four or five years it bears; in twice as many more, it begins
to lifts its head among the groves, where, waxing strong, it
flourishes for near a century.
Thus, as some voyager has said, the man who but drops one
of these nuts into the ground, may be said to confer a greater,
and more certain benefit upon himself and posterity, than many
a life's toil in less genial climes.
The fruitfulness of the tree is remarkable. As long as it
lives, it bears; and without intermission. Two hundred nuts,
besides innumerable white blossoms of others, may be seen
upon it at one time; and though a whole year is required to
bring any one of them to the germinating point, no two, perhaps,
are at one time in precisely the same stage of growth.
The tree delights in a maritime situation. In its greatest
perfection, it is perhaps found right on the sea-shore, where its
roots are actually washed. But such instances are only met
with upon islands where the swell of the sea is prevented from
breaking on the beach by an encircling reef. No saline flavor is
perceptible in the nut produced in such a place. Although it
bears in any soil, whether upland or bottom, it does not flourish
vigorously inland; and I have frequently observed, that
when met with far up the valleys, its tall stem inclines seaward,
as if pining after a more genial region.
It is a curious fact, that if you deprive the cocoa-nut tree of
the verdant tuft at its head, it dies at once; and if allowed to
stand thus, the trunk, which, when alive, is encased in so hard
a bark, as to be almost impervious to a bullet, molders away,
and, in an incredibly short period, becomes dust. This is,
perhaps, partly owing to the peculiar constitution of the trunk,
a mere cylinder of minute hollow reeds, closely packed, and
very hard; but when exposed at top, peculiarly fitted to convey
moisture and decay through the entire stem.
The finest orchard of cocoa-palms I know, and the only
plantation of them I ever saw at the islands, is one that stands
right upon the southern shore of Papeetee Bay. They were
set out by the first Pomaree, almost half-a-century ago; and
the soil being especially adapted to their growth, the noble
trees now form a magnificent grove, nearly a mile in extent.
No other plant, scarcely a bush, is to be seen within its precincts.
The Broom Road passes through its entire length.
At noonday, this grove is one of the most beautiful, serene,
witching places that ever was seen. High overhead, are ranges
of green rustling arches; through which the sun's rays come
down to you in sparkles. You seem to be wandering through
illimitable halls of pillars; everywhere you catch glimpses of
stately aisles, intersecting each other at all points. A strange
silence, too, reigns far and near; the air, flushed with the
mellow stillness of a sunset.
But after the long morning calms, the sea-breeze comes in;
and creeping over the tops of these thousand trees, they nod
their plumes. Soon the breeze freshens; and you hear the
branches brushing against each other; and the flexible trunks
begin to sway. Toward evening, the whole grove is rocking
to and fro; and the traveler on the Broom Road is startled by
the frequent falling of the nuts, snapped from their brittle
stems. They come flying through the air, ringing like jugglers'
balls; and often bound along the ground for many rods.
