Cocoa tree

“ It is tall and straight, without branches, and generally about thirty or forty feet high; at the top are twelve leaves, ten feet long, and half a foot broad; above the leaves, grows a large excrescence in the form of a cabbage, excellent to eat, but taking it off kills the tree. The cocoa is a species of Palm.
Is not the Indian liquor called Toddy, produced from the Cocoa Tree?
Yes, between the leaves and the top arise several shoots about the thickness of a man's arm, which, when cut, distil a white, [35] sweet, and agreeable liquor; while this liquor exudes, the tree yields no fruit ”

“ The cocoa-tree, in the other parts of America, is in general cultivated around farm-houses, and the fruit is eaten; in the gulf of Cariaco, it forms extensive plantations. In a fertile and moist ground, the tree begins to bear fruit abundantly in the fourth year ”

“ The cocoa-nut tree requires a sandy and well-drained soil; and although it flourishes where no other tree will grow, it welcomes a soil of a richer quality and produces fruit in proportion. Eighty nuts per annum are about the average income from a healthy tree in full bearing, but this, of course, depends much upon the locality. This palm delights in the sea-breeze, and never attains the same perfection inland that it does in the vicinity of the coast. There are several varieties, and that which is considered superior is the yellow species, called the "king cocoanut." ”

“ A great messenger of life, and one of the most transportable, is the solid cocoanut. Not only does it travel well, but, when thrown upon shoal or rock, if it find only a little poor white sand, which would support nothing else, the cocoanut contents itself there, finds brackish water not a jot less agreeable than the freshest; germinates, thrives, grows into a robust cocoa tree. ”

“ Almost the only difficulty in cultivating the cocoa-tree here is in removing the grass and small shrubs which are continually springing up; yet the natives are all so idle and untrustworthy that a gentleman must frequently inspect his garden himself, if he expects it to yield a fair return. ”

“ In the morning they were still among the cocoa-trees, and, as they looked out on the forest of tall trunks extending as far as they could see in any direction, the conversation naturally turned upon the uses of this product of the earth. The coffee-planter told them that there were fifteen varieties of the palm-tree in Ceylon, the most of them growing in [Pg 214] the hilly regions of the interior of the island. "The cocoa-nut palm," said he, "grows only along the coast; you find it occasionally among the hills, but not often, and it never seems to flourish there." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such is the rapidity of plant growth in the tropics that in three or four years the cacao tree is taller than a man, and begins to bear fruit in its fourth or fifth year. Now it is agreed that, as with men, the cacao tree needs protection in its youth, but whether it needs shade trees when it is fully grown is one of the controverted questions. When the planter is sitting after his day's work is done, and no fresh topic comes to his mind, he often re-opens the discussion on the question of shade. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lovely mosses that grow on the stems and branches are sometimes so thick that they have to be destroyed, or the fragile cacao flower could not push its way through. Whilst the flowers are small, the leaves are large, being as an average about a foot in length and four inches in breadth. The cacao tree never appears naked, save on the rare occasions when it is stripped by the wind, and the leaves are green all the year round, save when they are red, if the reader will pardon an Hibernianism. ”

“ The cocoa is another tree most worthy of being known, as in fruitfulness and sweetness of fruit it surpasses all other trees. Its fruit is a nut of large size; and taken altogether, this tree produces ten different commodities of value: as it produces wood most excellent for burning, nuts very pleasant to eat, cords or ropes that answer well for ships, fine cloth, which when dyed resembles silk. The wood is the best that can be found for making charcoal, and it yields wine, odoriferous water, sugar, and oil. ”

“ Of the thousands of flowers that bloom on one tree during the year, on an average only about twenty develop into mature pods, and each pod yields about 1-1/3 ounces of dry cured cacao. Taking the healthy trees with the neglected, the average yield is from 1-1/2 to 2 pounds of commercial cacao per tree. This seems very small, and those who hear it for the first time often make a rapid mental calculation of the amazing number of trees that must be needed to produce the world's supply, at least 250 million trees. ”

“ Or again, taking the average yield per acre as 400 lbs., we find that there must be well over a million acres under cacao cultivation. At the Government station at Aburi (Gold Coast) three plots of cacao gave in 1914 an average yield of over 8 pounds of cacao per tree, and in 1918 some 468 trees (Amelonado) gave as an average 7.8 pounds per tree. This suggests what might be done by thorough cultivation. It suggests a great opportunity for the planters—that, without planting one more tree, they might quadruple the world's production. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Unlike the cocoa-nut trees, which bend to every gale and are never quite straight, the coco-de-mer trees are as upright as iron pillars. At the ago of 30 the trees first put forth blossoms. The female tree alone produces the nut, and is 6 feet shorter than the male, which attains a height of 100 feet. ”

“ In appearance the cacao-tree is not greatly unlike one of our own orchard trees, and trained by the pruning knife it grows similar in shape to a well-kept apple tree, no very low boughs being left, so that a man on horseback can generally pass freely down the long glades. ”

“ The British Botanical Gardens of Aburi set an example by laying out experimental plots with cocoa trees fifteen feet apart, but the natives in that colony, and also in Southern Nigeria, ridicule this advice and declare that at such distance they find the rays of the sun are able to penetrate so freely that the ground becomes baked and the roots are robbed of the humidity which is vital to the growth of good cocoa trees. It is noteworthy that on Grenada and other West Indian estates, there is also a tendency to plant more closely than the experts advise. ”

“ Cocoa and chocolate are products of the seeds of a tree called the cacao tree. It is a tropical tree and grows in both the Old and the New World.
Although the cacao tree grows wild, it is also cultivated in orchards much like fruit orchards which you have seen. The trees are seldom more than twenty feet high, but they are rather inclined to spread out. They require some shade, and so other trees are often planted between the rows to shade them. The trees begin to bear when five or six years old, and [122] continue to yield for forty years. ”

“ 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 cacao will bloom in its third year, but does not bear fruit till its fourth or fifth. The flower is small, out of all proportion to the size of the mature fruit. Little clusters of these tiny pink and yellow blossoms show in many places along the old wood of the tree, often from the upright trunk itself, and within a few inches of the ground; they are extremely delicate, and a planter will be satisfied if every third or fourth produces fruit. In dry weather or cold, or wind, the little pods only too quickly shrivel into black shells ”

“ Neither in the Gold Coast nor in Southern Nigeria do many plantations give wider spacing than eight feet apart, and thus many of them crowd from 500 to 700 trees upon a single acre. The plantations in British West Africa being entirely [262] under native control, there are no very reliable statistics upon the annual yield per tree. One official at the Botanical Gardens of Aburi estimated that the natives obtain about 7 lbs. of cocoa per tree per annum; this is a very high average, and I am inclined to think seldom attained, for in Trinidad the annual yield is somewhere about 1 lb. ”

“ Just so the little patch above water protects the corals to leeward, and there the island increases fast; for the birds not only settle on it, hut they make their nests and rear their young, and so every year the soil increases; and then, perhaps, one cocoa-nut in its great outside shell at last is thrown on these little patches - it takes root, and becomes a tree, every year shedding its large branches, which are turned into mould as soon as they decay, and then dropping its nuts, which again take root and grow in this mould ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cocoa-nut tree, at first glance, seems to compose the whole wood; there are however, five or six other trees. One of these grows to a very large size, but, from the extreme softness of its wood, is useless; another sort affords excellent timber for ship-building. Besides the trees the number of plants is exceedingly limited and consists of insignificant weeds. In my collection, which includes, I believe, nearly the perfect Flora, there are twenty species without reckoning a moss, lichen, and fungus. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The distance at which cocoa trees are planted by the native is roughly from 7 to 10 feet apart, whereas that recommended for plantations in the West Indies and Ceylon varies, with the quality of the soil and the elevation, from 12 to 15 feet; the latter would be more suitable for most of the Gold Coast plantations. The advantage which the native planter sees in his method of planting is, that in addition to getting a larger number of trees into a given space, the density of their foliage soon becomes so great that weeds cease to grow beneath, rendering cultivation unnecessary. ”