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 seaweed; 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 cocoa-nut 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 cocoa-nut 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 the 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 the 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 a 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 cocoa-nut, and breaking it in
half, 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 one of his hemispheres of
cocoa-nut 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 cocoa-nut 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 lucious 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.