Wide forests, deep beneath Maldivia's tide,
From withering air the wondrous fruitage hide;
There green-haired nereids tend the bowery dells,
Whose healing produce poison's rage expels.
_The Lusiad._
If Japan be still a sealed book, the interior of China almost unknown,
the palatial temple of the Grand Lama unvisited by scientific or
diplomatic European--to say nothing of Madagascar, the steppes of
Central Asia, and some of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago--how
great an amount of marvel and mystery must have enveloped the
countries of the East during the period that we now term the middle
ages! By a long and toilsome overland journey, the rich gold and
sparkling gems, the fine muslins and rustling silks, the pungent
spices and healing drugs of the Morning Land, found their way to the
merchant princes of the Mediterranean. These were not all. The
enterprising traversers of the Desert brought with them, also, those
tales of extravagant fiction which seem to have ever had their
birthplace in the prolific East. Long after the time that doubt--in
not a few instances the parent of knowledge--had, by throwing cold
water on it, extinguished the last funeral pyre of the ultimate
Phoenix, and laughed to scorn the gigantic, gold-grubbing pismires of
Pliny; the Roc, the Valley of Diamonds, the mountain island of
Loadstone, the potentiality of the Talisman, the miraculous virtues of
certain drugs, and countless other fables, were accepted and believed
by all the nations of the West. One of those drugs, seldom brought to
Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East,
and its extreme rarity, was a nut of alleged extraordinary curative
properties--of such great value, that the Hindoo traders named it
_Trevanchere_, or the Treasure--of such potent virtue, that Christians
united with Mussulmen in terming it the Nut of Solomon. Considered a
certain remedy for all kinds of poison, it was eagerly purchased by
those of high station at a period when that treacherous destroyer so
frequently mocked the steel-clad guards of royalty itself--when
poisoning was the crime of the great, before it had descended from the
corrupt and crafty court to the less ceremonious cottage. Nor was it
only as an antidote that its virtues were famed. A small portion of
its hard and corneous kernel, triturated with water in a vessel of
porphyry, and mixed, according to the nature of the disease and skill
of the physician, with the powder of red or white coral, ebony, or
stag's horns, was supposed to be able to put to flight all the
maladies that are the common lot of suffering humanity. Even the
simple act of drinking pure water out of a part of its polished shell
was esteemed a salutary remedial process, and was paid for at a
correspondently extravagant price. Doubtless, in many instances it did
effect cures; not, however, by any peculiar inherent sanative
property, but merely through the unbounded confidence of the patient:
similar cases are well known to medical science; and at the present
day, when the manufacture and sale of an alleged universal heal-all is
said to be one of the shortest and surest paths that lead to
fortune--when in our own country 'the powers that be' encourage rather
than check such wholesale empiricism--we cannot consistently condemn
the more ancient quack, who having, in all faith, given an immense sum
for a piece of nut-shell, remunerated himself by selling draughts of
water out of it to his believing dupes. The extraordinary history of
the nut, as it was then told, assisted to keep up the delusion. The
Indian merchants said, that there was only one tree in the world that
produced it; that the roots of that tree were fixed, 'where never
fathom-line did touch the ground,' in the bed of the Indian Ocean,
near to Java, among the Ten Thousand Islands of the far East; but its
branches, rising high above the waters, flourished in the bright
sunshine and free air. On the topmost bough dwelt a griffin, that
sallied forth every evening to the adjacent islands, to procure an
elephant or rhinoceros for its nightly repast; but when a ship chanced
to pass that way, his griffinship had no occasion to fly so far for a
supper. Attracted by the tree, the doomed vessel remained motionless
on the waters, until the wretched sailors were, one by one, devoured
by the monster. When the nuts ripened, they dropped off into the
water, and, carried by winds and currents to less dangerous
localities, were picked up by mariners, or cast on some lucky shore.
What is this but an Eastern version--who dare say it is not the
original?--of the more classical fable of the dragon and the golden
fruit of the Hesperides?
Time went on. Vasco de Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, and a
new route was opened to Eastern commerce. The Portuguese, who
encountered the terrors of the Cape of Storms, were not likely to be
daunted by a griffin; yet, with all their endeavours, they never
succeeded in discovering the precious tree. By their exertions,
however, rather more of the drug was brought to Europe than had
previously been; still there was no reduction in its estimated value.
In the East, an Indian potentate demanded a ship and her cargo as the
price of a perfect nut, and it was actually purchased on the terms; in
the West, the Emperor Rodolph offered 4000 florins for one, and his
offer was contemptuously refused; while invalids from all parts of
Europe performed painful pilgrimages to Venice, Lisbon, or Antwerp, to
enjoy the inestimable benefit of drinking water out of pieces of
nut-shell! Who may say what adulterations and tricks were practised by
dishonest dealers, to maintain a supply of this costly medicine? but,
as similar impositions are not unknown at the present day, we may as
well pass lightly over that part of our subject.
The English and Dutch next made their way to the Indian Ocean; yet,
though they sought for the invaluable Tree of Solomon, with all the
energy supplied by a burning thirst for gain, their efforts were as
fruitless and unsuccessful as those of the Portuguese. Strange tales,
too, some of these ancient mariners related on their return to Europe:
how, in the clear waters of deep bays, they had observed groves of
those marvellous trees, growing fathoms down beneath the surface of
the placid sea. Out of a mass of equally ridiculous reports, the only
facts then attainable were at length sifted: these were, that the tree
had not been discovered growing in any locality whatever; that the nut
was sometimes found floating on the Indian Ocean, or thrown on the
coast of Malabar, but more frequently picked up on the shores of a
group of islands known as the Maldives; from the latter circumstance,
the naturalists of the day termed it _Cocus Maldivicus_--the Maldivian
cocoa-nut. Garcius, surnamed Ab Horto (of the garden), on account of
his botanical knowledge, a celebrated authority on drugs and spices,
who wrote in 1563, very sensibly concluded that the tree grew on some
undiscovered land, from whence the nuts were carried by the waves to
the places where they were found; other writers considered it to be a
genuine marine production; while a few shrewdly suspected that it
really grew on the Maldives. Unfortunately for the Maldivians, this
last opinion prevailed in India. In 1607, the king of Bengal, with a
powerful fleet and army, invaded the Maldives, conquered and killed
their king, ransacked and plundered the islands, and, having crammed
his ships with an immense booty, sailed back to Bengal--without,
however, discovering the Tree of Solomon, the grand object of the
expedition. Curiously enough, we are indebted to this horrible
invasion for an interesting book of early Eastern travel--the
Bengalese king having released from captivity one Pyrard de Laval, a
French adventurer, who, six years previously, had suffered shipwreck
on those inhospitable islands. Laval's work dispelled the idea that
the nut grew upon the Maldives. He tells us, that it was found
floating in the surf, or thrown up on the sea-shore only; that it was
royal property; and whenever discovered, carried with great ceremony
to the king, a dreadful death being the penalty of any subject
possessing the smallest portion of it.
The leading naturalists of the seventeenth century having the Maldives
thus, in a manner, taken away from beneath their feet, took great
pains to invent a local habitation for this wonderful tree; and at
last they, pretty generally, came to the conclusion, that the vast
peninsula of Southern Hindostan had at one time extended as far as the
Maldives, but by some great convulsion of nature, the intermediate
part between those islands and Cape Comorin had sunk beneath the
waters of the ocean; that the tree or trees had grown thereon, and
still continued to grow on the submerged soil; and the nuts when ripe,
being lighter than water, rose to the surface, instead--as is the
habit of supermarine arboreal produce--of falling to the ground.
Scarcely could a more splendid illustration of the fallacies of
hypothetical reasoning be found, than the pages that contain this
specious and far-fetched argument. Even the celebrated Rumphius, who
wrote so late as the eighteenth century, assures his readers that 'the
_Calappa laut_,' the Malay term for the nut, 'is not a terrestrial
production, which may have fallen by accident into the sea, and there
become hardened, as Garcias ab Horto relates, but a fruit, growing
itself in the sea, whose tree has hitherto been concealed from the eye
of man.' He also denominates it 'the wonderful miracle of nature, the
prince of all the many rare things that are found in the sea.'
In the fulness of time, knowledge is obtained and mysteries are
revealed. Chemistry and medicine, released from the tedious but not
useless apprenticeship they had served to alchemy and empiricism, set
up on their own account, and as a consequence, the 'nut of the sea'
soon lost its European reputation as a curative, though it was still
considered a very great curiosity, and the unsettled problem of its
origin formed a famous stock of building materials for the erecters of
theoretical edifices. In India and China, it retained its medicinal
fame, and commanded a high price. Like everything else that is brought
to market, the nuts varied in value. A small one would not realise
more than L.50, while a large one would be worth L.120; those,
however, that measured as much in breadth as in length were most
esteemed, and one measuring a foot in diameter was worth L.150
sterling money. Such continued to be the prices of these nuts for two
centuries after the ships of Europe had first found their way to the
seas and lands of Asia. But a change was at hand. In the year 1770, a
French merchant-ship entered the port of Calcutta. The motley
assemblage of native merchants and tradesmen, Baboos and Banians,
Dobashes, Dobies, and Dingy-wallahs, that crowd a European vessel's
deck on her first arrival in an Eastern port, were astounded when, to
their eager inquiries, the captain replied that his cargo consisted of
_cocos de mer_.[3] Scarcely could the incredulous and astonished
natives believe the evidence of their own eyesight, when, on the
hatches being opened, they saw that the ship was actually filled with
this rare and precious commodity. Rare and precious, to be so no
longer. Its price instantaneously fell; persons who had been the
fortunate possessors of a nut or two, were ruined; and so little did
the French captain gain by his cargo, that he disclosed the secret of
its origin to an English mercantile house, which completed the utter
downfall of the nut of Solomon, by landing another cargo of it at
Bombay during the same year.
A singular circumstance in connection with the discovery of the tree,
a complete exemplification of the good old tale, _Eyes and no Eyes_,
is worthy of record, as a lesson to all, that they should ever make
proper use of the organs which God has bestowed upon them for the
acquisition of useful knowledge. Mahé de la Bourdonnais, one of the
best and wisest of French colonial governors, whose name, almost
unknown to history, is embalmed for ever in St Pierre's beautiful
romance of _Paul and Virginia_, sent from the Isle of France, in 1743,
a naval officer named Picault, to explore the cluster of islands now
known as the Seychelles. Picault made a pretty correct survey, and in
the course of it discovered some islands previously unknown; one of
these he named Palmiers, on account of the abundance and beauty of the
palm-trees that grew upon it; that was all he knew about them. In
1768, a subsequent governor of the Isle of France sent out another
expedition, under Captain Duchemin, for a similar purpose. Barré, the
hydrographer of this last expedition, landing on Palmiers, at once
discovered that the palms, from which the island had, a quarter of a
century previously, received its name, produced the famous and
long-sought-for _cocos de mer_. Barré informed Duchemin, and the twain
kept the secret to themselves. Immediately after their return to the
Isle of France, they fitted out a vessel, sailed to Palmiers, and
having loaded with nuts, proceeded to Calcutta. How their speculation
turned out, we have already related. We should add that Duchemin, in
his vain expectation of making an immense fortune by the discovery,
considering that the name of the island might afford future
adventurers a clue to his secret, artfully changed it to Praslin, the
name of the then intendant of marine, which it still retains.
We shall speak no more of the Tree of Solomon; it is the _Lodoicea
Seychellarum_--the double cocoa-nut of the Seychelles--as modern
botanists term it, that we have now to deal with. As its name implies,
it is a palm, and one of the most nobly-graceful of that family, which
have been so aptly styled by Linnæus the princes of the vegetable
kingdom. Its straight and rather slender-looking stem, not more than a
foot in diameter, rises, without a leaf, to the height of from 90 to
100 feet, and at the summit is superbly crowned with a drooping plume,
consisting of about a score of magnificent leaves, of a broadly-oval
form. These leaves, the larger of which are twenty feet in length and
ten in width, are beautifully marked with regular folds, diverging
from a central supporting chine; their margins are more or less deeply
serrated towards the extremities; and they are supported by footstalks
nearly as long as themselves. Every year there forms, in the central
top of the tree, a new leaf, which, closed like a fan, and defended by
a downy, fawn-coloured covering, shoots up vertically to a height of
ten feet, before it, expanding, droops gracefully, and assumes its
place among its elder brethren; and as the imperative rule pervades
all nature, that, in course of time, the eldest must give place unto
their juniors, the senior lowest leaf annually falls withered to the
ground, yet leaving a memento of its existence in a distinct ring or
scar upon the parent trunk. It is clear, then, that by the number of
these rings the age of the tree can be accurately determined; some
veterans shew as many as 400, without any visible signs of decay; and
it seems that about the age of 130 years, the tree attains its full
development.
As in several other members of the palm family, the male and female
flowers are found on different individuals. The female tree, after
attaining the age of about thirty years, annually produces a large
drupe or fruit-bunch, consisting of five or six nuts, each enveloped
in an external husk, not dissimilar in form and colour to the coat of
the common walnut, but of course much larger, and proportionably
thicker. The nut itself is about a foot in length; of an elliptic
form; at one end obtuse, at the other and narrower end, cleft into two
or three, sometimes even four lobes, of a rounded form on their
outsides, but flattened on the inner. It is exceedingly difficult to
give a popular description when encumbered by the technicalities of
science; we must try another method. Let the reader imagine two pretty
thick vegetable marrows, each a foot long, joined together, side by
side, and partly flattened by a vertical compression, he will then
have an idea of the curious form of the double cocoa-nut. Sometimes,
as we have mentioned, a nut exhibits three lobes; let the reader
imagine the end of one of the marrows cleft in two, and he will have
an idea of the three-lobed nut; and if he imagines two more marrows
placed side by side, and compressed with and on the top of the former
two, he will then have an idea of the four-lobed nut. In fact, almost
invariably, the four-lobed nut parts in the middle, forming two of the
more common two-lobed nuts, only distinguishable by the flatness of
their inner sides from those that grew separately. When green, they
contain a refreshing, sweetish, jelly-like substance, but when old,
the kernel is so hard that it cannot be cut with a knife.
The enormous fruit-bunches, weighing upwards of fifty pounds, hang
three or four years on the tree before they are sufficiently ripened
to fall down; thus, though only one drupe is put forth each season,
yet the produce of three or four years, the aggregate weight of which
must be considerable, burdens the stem at one time. This great weight,
suspended at the top of the lofty and almost disproportionately
slender stem, causes the tree to rock gracefully with the slightest
breeze; the agitated leaves creating a pleasing noise, somewhat
similar to that of a distant waterfall. Some French writers have
enthusiastically alluded to this rustling sound as a delightful
adjunct of the interesting scene; nor have our English travellers
spoken in less glowing language. 'Growing in thousands,' says Mr
Harrison, 'close to each other, the sexes intermingled, a numerous
offspring starting up on all sides, sheltered by the parent plants,
the old ones fallen into the sear and yellow leaf, and going fast to
decay to make room for the young trees, presents to the eye a picture
so mild and pleasing, that it is difficult not to look upon them as
animated objects, capable of enjoyment, and sensible of their
condition.'
Though no longer producing a drug of great value for the exclusive use
of the wealthy, the double cocoa-nut of the Seychelles affords many
humbler benefits to the inhabitants of those islands. The trunk, when
split and cleared of its soft, fibrous interior, serves to make
water-troughs and palisades. The immense leaves are used, in that fine
climate, as materials for building: not only do they make an excellent
thatch, but they are also employed for walls. With one hundred leaves,
a commodious dwelling, including doors, windows, and partitions, may
be constructed. Baskets and brooms are made from the ribs of the
leaves and the fibres of their footstalks. The young leaf, previous to
its expanding, is soft, and of a pale-yellow colour; in this state it
is cut into longitudinal stripes, and plaited into hats; while the
downy substance by which it is covered, is found valuable for stuffing
beds and pillows. Vessels, of various forms and uses, are made out of
the light, strong, and durable nut-shells. When preserved whole, with
merely a perforation at the top, they are used to carry water, some
holding nearly three gallons. When divided, the parts serve, according
to their size and shape, for platters, dishes, or drinking-cups. Being
jet-black, and susceptible of a high polish, they are often curiously
carved, and mounted with the precious metals, to form sugar-basins,
toilet-dishes, and other useful and ornamental articles for the
dwellings of the tasteful and refined.
The group of islands termed the Seychelles lie to the northward and
eastward of Madagascar, in the latitude of 6 degrees south of the
equinoctial. The tree, in its natural state, is found on three small,
rocky, and mountainous islands only--Praslin, containing about 8000
acres; Curieuse, containing but 1000; and Round Island, smaller still;
all three lying within a few hundred yards of each other. These
islands are about 900 miles distant from the Maldives; and as Garcias
ab Horto, in the sixteenth century, supposed, the nuts, many of which
grow on rocky precipices overhanging the sea, drop into the waves, and
are transported by the prevailing currents to other shores. It is a
remarkable fact, that the trees will not flourish on any other of the
adjacent islands of the Seychelles group. Many have been planted, but
they merely vegetate, and are wretchedly inferior to the splendid
natural trees of Praslin and Curieuse. From the time that the nut
falls from the tree, a year elapses before it germinates; it only
requires to lie on the ground without being covered, for the germ
shoots downwards, forming a root, from which ascends the plumule of
the future plant.
Several attempts have been made to grow this tree in some of the
larger horticultural establishments in Great Britain, but hitherto
without success. Hopes, however, are now entertained; for the
interesting spectacle of a double cocoa-nut in the act of germination
may be witnessed at this moment in the national gardens at Kew.