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The heavy showers that fall irregularly after the rainy season, during the winter months, from December to March, are also very hurtful to the cacao-tree. The proprietor of a plantation of fifty thousand trees often loses the value of more than four or five thousand piastres in cacao in one hour.
The inhabitants are active in the cultivation of cotton, which is of a very fine quality. The capsules of the cotton-tree, when separated from the woolly substance, are carefully burnt; as those husks if thrown into the river, and exposed to putrefaction, yield noxious exhalations. The culture of the cacao-tree has of late considerably diminished.
A traveller in Louisiana in 1796 speaks of the cacao-tree among others as "covering with delightful shade the shores of the Mississippi," and on the banks of the Alatamaha in Georgia, but it is not cultivated so far north. At the present day the West India Islands rival the South American Continent in providing cocoa from the New World.
Cocoa, or, literally, cacao, from the cacao-tree, comes in the form of a thick seed, twenty or thirty of which make up the contents of a gourd-like fruit, the spaces between being filled with a somewhat acid pulp. The seeds, when freed from this pulp by various processes, are first dried in the sun, and then roasted; and from these roasted seeds come various forms of cocoa.
This is the region where the cacao-tree and prickly sarsaparilla grow. Here the underwood is less dense, the sipos retiring to weave their tracery among the upper branches alone. Though during the dry season the vegetation springs up with wonderful rapidity, it is swept away by the next overflow. Here the lovely orchis tribe adorn the gloomy shades with their brilliant flowers.
It is on the banks of the Upper Orinoco, after having crossed the Llanos, that we find the true country of the cacao-tree; thick forests, in which, on a virgin soil, and surrounded by an atmosphere continually humid, the trees furnish, from the fourth year, abundant crops. Wherever the soil is not exhausted, the fruit has become by cultivation larger and bitter, but also later.
This phenomenon appears the more surprising, as, according to the annual produce of the harvest, the number of trees in full bearing in the cacao-plantations of Caracas, Nueva Barcelona, Venezuela, Varinas, and Maracaybo, is estimated at more than sixteen millions. The wild cacao-tree has many branches, and is covered with a tufted and dark foliage.
There were shaddocks and sweet limes; and see! yonder is a clump of sugar-canes, with their thin silken leaves and yellow tassels waving in the wind. Oh, look here! Here is a coffee-shrub, with its ripe, aromatic berries; and here is the cacao-tree. Coffee and chocolate there was a choice of beverages! Ha! what have we here this plant like an orange tree? It is a species of holly.
The second-named, after it has produced very beautiful flowers about the size of a rose, is loaded with a fruit as large as a walnut, the outward coat of which is black. This fruit, when it is fully ripe, opens, and a down is discovered of extreme whiteness, which is the cotton. The seeds are separated from it by a mill. The stem of the cacao-tree is about four inches in diameter.
C. Scherzer, in his work on Central America, gives the cacao-tree an existence of twenty years, and says that each tree annually produces from 15 to 20 ounces of cacao. 1,000 plants will produce 1,250 lbs. of cacao, worth $250; so that the annual produce of a single tree is worth a quarter of a dollar. Mitscherlich says that from 4 to 6 lbs. of raw beans is an average produce.
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