Cocoa nut grove

“ However, those planted in good soil give, as might be expected, an earlier and more productive yield than is afforded by trees grown in the poor land which usually adjoins the coral sea-beach. A cocoa-nut planted in average soil commences to bear fruit in about the fifth year of its existence, and from that time until it has attained the age of a hundred years,—when it is probably blown down,—it yields about twelve dozen nuts per annum. ”

“ The cocoa-nut tree belongs to the palm family: it requires to [250] grow seven years before it bears fruit; but after this period, and for a whole century, it yields continually the same product—that is, every month about twenty large nuts. This produce never fails, and on the same tree may be seen continually flowers and fruits of all sizes. The cocoa-nut affords, as everyone knows, nutritious food, and when pressed yields a quantity of oil. The shell of the nut serves to make vases, and the filamentary parts are spun into ropes and cables for ships, and even into coarse clothing. ”

“ The fruit consists of a thick external husk or rind of a fibrous structure, within which is the ordinary cocoa-nut of commerce. The nut has a very hard, woody shell, inclosing the kernel, within which again is a milky substance of a rather agreeable taste.
The cocoa-nut palm is so widely disseminated throughout tropical countries that it is impossible to distinguish its original habitat. It flourishes with equal vigor on the coast of the East Indies, throughout the tropical islands of the Pacific, and in the West Indies and tropical America. ”

“ During very hot weather, if the nuts are fresh gathered, or suffered to remain for a while in cold water, it is not very easy to withstand the temptation.
The shell of the cocoa-nut is always most valuable when suffered to ripen upon the tree; it then acquires great hardness, and a fine dark chocolate color, interveined by fine lines of a rich dun, or clay, or perhaps striated with those tints: they then take a good polish, and may, when tastefully mounted, be considered as ornamental to the sideboard. ”

“ Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving cocoa-nut will not bring its nuts to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of cocoa-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together ”

“ But, as whatever feeds a young plant will also feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm for the use of its own seedling, the cocoa-nut has been compelled to inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and defensive shell. ”

“ The trees, we learn, will flourish only within a certain distance of the sea-coast, and each full-grown tree produces annually sixty nuts. We presume that the estimated profits take into consideration the processes of oil-extraction and fibre-dressing, which necessarily follow in the wake of cocoa-nut cultivation. ”

“ Then the nuts gradually swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst thing about the cocoa-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. ”

“ The leaves are four fathoms, or four and a half long, at the very top of the tree, and serve excellently for thatching houses. At the bottom of the leaves the cocoa nuts grow in clusters of ten, fifteen, or twenty, hanging by a small string which is full of joints. Each nut, with its outer rind, is larger than a man's head, and within this outer rind is a hard woody shell which will hold near a quart of liquid. The nut or kernel lines the inside of this shell, and within this kernel is about a pint and half of pure clear water, very cool, sweet, and pleasant. ”

“ It flourishes best in the vicinity of the sea-shore. The tree grows frequently to the height of 50 to 100 feet. The trunk is straight and naked, and is about two feet in diameter, the feather-shaped leaves forming the top or crown, from which the nuts hang in clusters. The fruit itself, covered by a hard shell, is inclosed in a fibrous husk; within the nut is a clear sweet liquid. Few plants possess so many and useful properties as the cocoa-nut. From its wood the natives obtain the building material for their houses and canoes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cocoa-nut Tree, cocos nucifera, belongs to the order monœcia hexandria. Male calyx is trifid, the corolla three-petalled, with five stamens; the female calyx is quinquefid, the corolla divided into three segments, and furnished with three stamens. The cocoa-nut tree is supposed to have been brought from the Maldives to the West Indies. It loves a sandy soil, and sometimes attains the height of eighty feet. ”

“ Plant Cocoa-nuts when the stomach is overburdened with food (kalau kita ’nak sangat berak) ; run quickly and throw the cocoa-nut into the hole prepared for it without straightening the arm; if you straighten it the fruit-stalk will break. Plant them in the evening, so that they may bear fruit while they are still near the ground. When you pick seed cocoa-nuts off the tree somebody should stand at the bottom of the tree and watch whether the “monkey-face” of each seed cocoa-nut, as it is thrown down, turns either towards himself or the base of the tree, or whether it looks away from both. ”

“ The stem is so strong and tough, being composed of closely-interwoven fibres, 96that the entire top may be torn off by the hurricanes and the trunk remain uninjured. The cocoanut commences to bear when from three to ten years old and will continue to produce fruit, year after year, for from seventy-five to one hundred years. The nut is used for both food and drink, and the shell is made into dippers, jars, spoons and other household utensils. The dried cocoa is a valuable article of commerce, but the real value of the oil prepared from the fresh meat is only beginning to be realized. ”

“ The cocoa-nut—the tree of a thousand uses—grows luxuriantly on the coral-made land, after it has emerged from the ocean; and the scanty dresses of the natives, their drinking-vessels and other utensils, mats, cordage, fishing-lines, and oil, besides food, drink, and building material, are all supplied from it. The Pandanus, or screw-pine, flourishes well, and is exactly fitted for such regions: as it enlarges and spreads its branches, one prop after another grows out from the trunk and plants itself in the ground ”

“ When the fruits reach us, the albumen has hardened and become somewhat tough and indigestible. This nut is one of the sources of wealth—in some cases, perhaps, the only one—of the coral islands of Oceania and some other tropical regions. With the top in the sun and its roots bathed by the sea-waters—its favorite station—the cocoa-tree (Cocos nucifera) continues in good condition to the age of seven or eight hundred years. The dry nut, called copra, is marketed by the thousand tons every year, to be employed in various uses for which fats are ”

“ They resemble, in their picturesque appearance, those fine plantations of date-trees near Elche, in Murcia, where, over the superficies of one square league, there may be found upwards of 70,000 palms. The cocoa-tree bears fruit in abundance till it is thirty or forty years old; after that age the produce diminishes, and a trunk a hundred years old, without being altogether barren, yields very little. In the town of Cumana there is prepared a great quantity of cocoa-nut oil, which is limpid, without smell, and very fit for burning. ”

“ In the early green stage at which cocoa-nuts are generally picked for household use in the tropics, the shell hasn't yet solidified into a hard, stony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cut through with a sharp table-knife—just like young walnuts picked for pickling. If you cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated state, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and the part borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut. ”

“ The seeds take root in the new soil, and young plants begin to appear on the glistening white surface. Floating cocoa-nuts often lodge on the shores, and cocoa-nut-trees are among the first to grow upon them. As the plants drop their leaves and decay, the soil is enriched little by little, and fitted for the home of various animals and birds, which in some mysterious manner find their way to these lonely spots far out at sea. ”

“ Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the cocoa-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he is so great a master, that it is really "a drupaceous fruit with a fibrous mesocarp." Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice, hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will still call a nut a nut, and that the cocoa-nut is the highest known development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most richly stored seed of any known plant ”

“ In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young cocoa-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big, spreading leaves, not raised as afterward on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young cocoa-nuts. ”

“ A bunch or cluster, often contains as many as a thousand nuts. Nothing can be more striking than this tree under the burden of its fruit, over which the branches form a kind of dome, supported by the column-like stem. The fruit resembles in every respect the tropical cocoa nut; the kernel is globular, having a space in the centre, which, when the nut is green, is filled with an agreeable [Pg 102] milky tasted liquor, but when dry is quite empty. A curious method is employed for divesting the nuts of their outer rind. ”

“ The almost endless cocoa forests, which we were traversing by splendid, broad, level roads, not alone provide the native with, to him, the most important necessary for supporting367 existence, but the fruit itself forms at the same time so important and valuable an article of produce, that the cultivation of the cocoa-nut has been regularly and systematically carried on by European enterprise since 1841—at present covering an area of 23,000 English acres—while the proportion of native land on which this, the most useful growth of the tropics, is cultivated, amounts to about 100,000 acres. ”

“ After being macerated, the fibers, called coir or cair, are combed. Ropes made of them are elastic and hardy against decay. They are worked into articles of esparto and brushes, and we tread them under feet in cocoa mattings. From the hard shell of the nut are made cups and dishes, which are susceptible of a ready polish, and can be carved. The leaves can be utilized, like those of other palms, but lack the suppleness of the leaves of other kinds.
Not all the species of Cocos bear fruits as large as those of nucifera. The small species also contribute to the maintenance of man and industries. ”

“ Some Trinidad planters believe that their trees would die without shade, yet in Grenada, only a hundred miles North as the steamer sails, there are whole plantations without a single shade tree. The Grenadians say: "You cannot have pods without flowers, and you cannot have good flowering without light and air." Shade trees are not used on some estates in San Thomé, and in Brazil there are cocoa kings with 200,000 trees without one shade tree. It should be mentioned, however, that in these countries the cacao trees are planted more closely (about eight feet apart) and themselves shade the soil. ”

“ Large quantities of this are exported, and used for sweetmeats, in the manufacture of which in great variety the natives of India are consummate adepts.
The cocoa-nut is consumed in a greater variety of ways than even the sap, and not a portion of it, or of the palm on which it grows, is without its special use. Besides the refreshing drink extracted from the young undeveloped nut, which is also made into a dye, the pulp inside the soft crust is considered a delicacy, and is used in the preparation of various dishes. ”

“ The shell of the nut is made into cups, and from the kernel, cocoa-nut oil is pressed out and largely used in making soap and for other purposes.
In Ceylon, the tree is cultivated extensively. It is estimated that there are twenty million trees in that island, and that each tree produces about sixty nuts yearly. The wealth of a native is based upon the number of cocoa-nut palms he owns. ”