KINDNESS OF MARHEYO AND THE REST OF THE ISLANDERS--A FULL DESCRIPTION OF
THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE--DIFFERENT MODES OF PREPARING THE FRUIT
All the inhabitants of the valley treated me with great kindness; but as
to the household of Marheyo, with whom I was now permanently domiciled,
nothing could surpass their efforts to minister to my comfort. To the
gratification of my palate they paid the most unwearied attention.
They continually invited me to partake of food, and when after eating
heartily I declined the viands they continued to offer me, they seemed
to think that my appetite stood in need of some piquant stimulant to
excite its activity.
In pursuance of this idea, old Marheyo himself would hie him away to
the sea-shore by the break of day, for the purpose of collecting
various species of rare sea-weed; some of which among these people are
considered a great luxury. After a whole day spent in this employment,
he would return about nightfall with several cocoanut shells filled with
different descriptions of kelp. In preparing these for use he manifested
all the ostentation of a professed cook, although the chief mystery of
the affair appeared to consist in pouring water in judicious quantities
upon the slimy contents of his cocoanut shells.
The first time he submitted one of these saline salads to my critical
attention I naturally thought that anything collected at such pains must
possess peculiar merits; but one mouthful was a complete dose; and great
was the consternation of the old warrior at the rapidity with which I
ejected his Epicurean treat.
How true it is, that the rarity of any particular article enhances
its value amazingly. In some part of the valley--I know not where, but
probably in the neighbourhood of the sea--the girls were sometimes in
the habit of procuring small quantities of salt, a thimble-full or
so being the result of the united labours of a party of five or six
employed for the greater part of the day. This precious commodity they
brought to the house, enveloped in multitudinous folds of leaves; and
as a special mark of the esteem in which they held me, would spread
an immense leaf on the ground, and dropping one by one a few minute
particles of the salt upon it, invite me to taste them.
From the extravagant value placed upon the article, I verily believe,
that with a bushel of common Liverpool salt all the real estate in Typee
might have been purchased. With a small pinch of it in one hand, and a
quarter section of a bread-fruit in the other, the greatest chief in the
valley would have laughed at all luxuries of a Parisian table.
The celebrity of the bread-fruit tree, and the conspicuous place it
occupies in a Typee bill of fare, induces me to give at some length
a general description of the tree, and the various modes in which the
fruit is prepared.
The bread-fruit tree, in its glorious prime, is a grand and towering
object, forming the same feature in a Marquesan landscape that the
patriarchal elm does in New England scenery. The latter tree it not a
little resembles in height, in the wide spread of its stalwart branches,
and in its venerable and imposing aspect.
The leaves of the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut
and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady’s lace collar. As they
annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety
of their gradually changing hues the fleeting shades of the expiring
dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they
are, sink into nothing in comparison with this tree.
The leaf, in one particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours
are blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into
a superb and striking head-dress. The principal fibre traversing its
length being split open a convenient distance, and the elastic sides of
the aperture pressed apart, the head is inserted between them, the leaf
drooping on one side, with its forward half turned jauntily up on the
brows, and the remaining part spreading laterally behind the ears.
The fruit somewhat resembles in magnitude and general appearance one of
our citron melons of ordinary size; but, unlike the citron, it has no
sectional lines drawn along the outside. Its surface is dotted all over
with little conical prominences, looking not unlike the knobs, on an
antiquated church door. The rind is perhaps an eighth of an inch in
thickness; and denuded of this at the time when it is in the greatest
perfection, the fruit presents a beautiful globe of white pulp, the
whole of which may be eaten, with the exception of a slender core, which
is easily removed.
The bread-fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit
to be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.
The most simple manner in which this operation is performed, and I
think, the best, consists in placing any number of the freshly plucked
fruit, when in a particular state of greenness, among the embers of a
fire, in the same way that you would roast a potato. After the lapse
of ten or fifteen minutes, the green rind embrowns and cracks, showing
through the fissures in its sides the milk-white interior. As soon as it
cools the rind drops off, and you then have the soft round pulp in its
purest and most delicious state. Thus eaten, it has a mild and pleasing
flavour.
Sometimes after having been roasted in the fire, the natives snatch it
briskly from the embers, and permitting it to slip out of the yielding
rind into a vessel of cold water, stir up the mixture, which they
call ‘bo-a-sho’. I never could endure this compound, and indeed the
preparation is not greatly in vogue among the more polite Typees.
There is one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served,
that renders it a dish fit for a king. As soon as it is taken from the
fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part
is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with
a pestle of the same substance. While one person is performing this
operation, another takes a ripe cocoanut, and breaking it in halves,
which they also do very cleverly, proceeds to grate the juicy meat into
fine particles. This is done by means of a piece of mother-of-pearl
shell, lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its
straight side accurately notched like a saw. The stick is sometimes a
grotesquely-formed limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting
from its body like so many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or
three feet from the ground.
The native, first placing a calabash beneath the nose, as it were, of
his curious-looking log-steed, for the purpose of receiving the
grated fragments as they fall, mounts astride of it as if it were a
hobby-horse, and twirling the inside of his hemispheres of cocoanut
around the sharp teeth of the mother-of-pearl shell, the pure white meat
falls in snowy showers into the receptacle provided. Having obtained a
quantity sufficient for his purpose, he places it in a bag made of
the net-like fibrous substance attached to all cocoanut trees, and
compressing it over the bread-fruit, which being now sufficiently
pounded, is put into a wooden bowl--extracts a thick creamy milk. The
delicious liquid soon bubbles round the fruit, and leaves it at last
just peeping above its surface.
This preparation is called ‘kokoo’, and a most luscious preparation it
is. The hobby-horse and the pestle and mortar were in great requisition
during the time I remained in the house of Marheyo, and Kory-Kory had
frequent occasion to show his skill in their use.
But the great staple articles of food into which the bread-fruit is
converted by these natives are known respectively by the names of Amar
and Poee-Poee.
At a certain season of the year, when the fruit of the hundred groves
of the valley has reached its maturity, and hangs in golden spheres from
every branch, the islanders assemble in harvest groups, and garner in
the abundance which surrounds them.
The trees are stripped of their nodding burdens, which, easily freed
from the rind and core, are gathered together in capacious wooden
vessels, where the pulpy fruit is soon worked by a stone pestle,
vigorously applied, into a blended mass of a doughy consistency, called
by the natives ‘Tutao’. This is then divided into separate parcels,
which, after being made up into stout packages, enveloped in successive
folds of leaves, and bound round with thongs of bark, are stored away in
large receptacles hollowed in the earth, from whence they are drawn as
occasion may require. In this condition the Tutao sometimes remains for
years, and even is thought to improve by age. Before it is fit to be
eaten, however, it has to undergo an additional process. A primitive
oven is scooped in the ground, and its bottom being loosely covered
with stones, a large fire is kindled within it. As soon as the requisite
degree of heat is attained, the embers are removed, and the surface of
the stones being covered with thick layers of leaves, one of the large
packages of Tutao is deposited upon them and overspread with another
layer of leaves. The whole is then quickly heaped up with earth, and
forms a sloping mound.
The Tutao thus baked is called ‘Amar’; the action of the oven having
converted it into an amber-coloured caky substance, a little tart, but
not at all disagreeable to the taste.
By another and final process the ‘Amar’ is changed into ‘Poee-Poee’.
This transition is rapidly effected. The Amar is placed in a vessel, and
mixed with water until it gains a proper pudding-like consistency, when,
without further preparation, it is in readiness for use. This is the
form in which the ‘Tutao’ is generally consumed. The singular mode of
eating it I have already described.
Were it not that the bread-fruit is thus capable of being preserved for
a length of time, the natives might be reduced to a state of starvation;
for owing to some unknown cause the trees sometimes fail to bear fruit;
and on such occasions the islanders chiefly depend upon the supplies
they have been enabled to store away.
This stately tree, which is rarely met with upon the Sandwich Islands,
and then only of a very inferior quality, and at Tahiti does not abound
to a degree that renders its fruit the principal article of food,
attains its greatest excellence in the genial climate of the Marquesan
group, where it grows to an enormous magnitude, and flourishes in the
utmost abundance.