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Updated: June 18, 2025
When the first British settlements were made in Fiji, the islanders were in a most degraded condition. They did no work except to grow a few yams, bananas, and breadfruit. Their chief employment was war, and this was carried on, not for conquest, but to capture as many as possible. A few captives were held as slaves, but most of them were fattened to be killed and eaten at the royal feasts.
Then every foot of ground from the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro, the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves and asked no cultivation. Now, except for the faint trail, I was on primeval ground, from all appearances. The cañon grew narrower and darker. The undefined path lay inches deep in water, and the levels were shallow swamp.
In Tahiti a feast is given in their honor, in a house seemingly made of banana-trees, "the floor covered with the finest mats, and the centre strewn with broad green plantain leaves, to form the table-cloth.... Before each guest was placed a half-cocoanut full of salt water, another full of chopped cocoanut, a third full of fresh water, and another full of milk, two pieces of bamboo, a basket of poi, half a breadfruit, and a platter of green leaves, the latter being changed with each course.
So it came about that the Marquesan was obliged to improvise a method of keeping breadfruit for a long time, and becoming habituated to sour food he learned to like it, as many Americans relish ill-smelling cheese and fish and meat, or drink with pleasure absinthe, bitters, and other gagging beverages.
In the Polynesian language araea, the "red earth" of the tale, is the same as vari, and in Indonesia there were the words fare or pare, in Malay padi or peri, and in Malagasy vari, all meaning rice. A Rarotongan legend relates that in Hawaiki two new fruits were found, and the vari discarded. These fruits were the breadfruit and the horse-chestnut, neither of which is a native of Polynesia.
The air was spicily and sweetly heavy with the scents of wild aromatic plants and gorgeous tropic blooms. Overhead three breadfruit trees interlaced their noble branches. Banana and plantain trees were burdened with great bunches of ripening fruit.
Song followed song, English and French, and when the lazy current pulsated again, the ball was over. We walked to the beach, Nance and I. "It's hell how this place gets hold of you," said Nance, who had shot pythons in Paraguay and had a yacht in Los Angeles harbor. "I dunno, it must be the cocoanuts or the breadfruit."
'E's a bleedin' trial to these ships." That was puzzling. Did not these natives of Tahiti themselves wear little clothing? Who were they to object to a white man doffing the superfluities of dress in a climate where breadfruit and bananas grow? Or the French, the governors of Tahiti? Were they, in that isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism unknown at home?
There was a time when each grove of breadfruit had its owners, who guarded it for their own use, and even each tree had its allotted proprietor, or perhaps several. Density of population everywhere causes each mouthful of food to be counted. I have known in Ceylon an English judge who was called upon to decide the legal ownership of one 2520th part of ten cocoanut-trees.
Garbed in brilliant yellow pareu, he bore on his shoulders an immense kooka, or basket of cocoanut fiber, filled with quite two hundred pounds of breadfruit. The superb muscles stood out on his perfect body, wet with perspiration as though he had come from the river. "Kaoha, Great Fern!" I said. "Where do you go with the mei?" "It is Meinui, the season of the breadfruit," he replied.
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