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Updated: May 9, 2025
Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut. Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber, furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is, plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle.
So at nine o'clock the red ensign of England was run up on a flag pole in the centre of the little village amid the cheers of the crew cheers which were bitter to the ears of the two men who were lying, bound and guarded, in one of the native huts, awaiting to be taken on board again, and Barry nailed a copy of the Protection Order on the bole of a stately coco-palm, handing the original to Velo for safe keeping and telling him how to act in the event of a British man-of-war entering the lagoon.
And yet even the coco-palm must be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment, and through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a piece of ship's biscuit and a rusty nail. The pandanus comes next in importance, being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely. A green bush called miki runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and there are several useless weeds.
At sunset Barry and his men left the brig and rowed ashore, and as soon as they landed, the natives, at a word from Velo, lopped off the lateral branches of a tall pandanus palm, and collecting numbers of fallen and dried coco-palm branches built them into a pyramidal shape from the foot of the tree to its top. "Light it," said Barry.
I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own.
Nature sometimes works much greater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is called vegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut, allied to the coco-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarly absorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the young seedling.
Most of the people on board perished, and the few who saved their lives were made prisoners of war. Precise date unknown. Monsieur Moreau de Jonnès, in his work, says that this hurricane destroyed a coco-palm grove of 5 or 6 leagues in extent, which existed near Ponce. Other writers confirm this. 1772, August 28.
When all the juice is extracted, the tree is allowed to dry up, and is then cut into thin pieces which, after desiccation in the sun, are ground into meal. Pigafetta mentions that the natives were in the habit of making oil, vinegar, wine, and milk, from the coco-palm, and that they drank a great deal of the wine. Their kings, he says, frequently intoxicated themselves at their banquets.
Her house is on the European plan: a table in the midst of the chief room; photographs and religious pictures on the wall. It commands to either hand a charming vista: through the front door, a peep of green lawn, scurrying pigs, the pendent fans of the coco-palm and splendour of the bursting surf: through the back, mounting forest glades and coronals of precipice.
Once he sat down on the bole of a fallen coco-palm, leant his chin upon his hands, and seemed lost in thought. Then he rose again and set off at a rapid walk. At the north end of the little island he came to a stop, for further progress was barred by the wide channel separating Ujilong from the next island; the tide was flowing, and the connecting reef was covered by three feet of water.
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