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Updated: May 27, 2025
She climbed the rigging, and the captain ordered two men to go aloft and bring her to him. "Every one came to look, with yells and with songs. The sailors climbed after her, and she went higher and higher, until near the top of that tall mast, taller than the greatest cocoanut-tree in Atuona. There she held to the wood, calling upon Maria Peato. The captain was like a man mad with namu.
Suddenly it occurred to him that fire might be made use of to facilitate the work. Selecting a tall cocoanut-tree, he piled dry wood all round the foot of it. Before setting it on fire he dipped a quantity of cocoanut fibre in the sea and tied a thick belt of this round the tree just above the pile, so as to protect the upper parts of the spar from the flames as much and as long as possible.
"One afternoon I was starting for the river to bathe, when that girl was making herself a bed of cocoanut-leaves under the house. She said she expected the baby, as, when she climbed a cocoanut-tree a moment earlier, she had felt a movement. She would not lie in a bed, but, like her mother before her, must make her a nest of cocoanut-leaves. When I returned from my bath, Tamaiti was born.
Each cocoanut-tree produces on an average from fifty to a hundred full and perfect nuts, yielding about a score the first year of its coming into bearing. The cocoanut palm is the most common and most valuable of this family of trees, and next to it is the areca.
"I don't think these are very nice cookies," she said, as she tried to keep up the pretence that she was very hungry. "I wish they were cocoanuts. They would be ever so much nicer." "I wish this was a big, tall cocoanut-tree," Ruby went on. "And that it was just full of cocoanuts, and that some monkeys had a nest in it, and would throw me down cocoanuts whenever I wanted one.
The last-named tree thrives best, and bears most fruit, when growing near the salt water, a peculiarity which does not apply specially to other members of this family. It is a fact worthy of mention that the cocoanut palm, like the camel, is always found associated with man. There are no wild camels, and the cocoanut-tree does not flourish in the wilderness.
We are minus a chimney on this insinuator, but we are bettin' on you and the reindeers just the same, to slip one over on us and come shinnin' down a cocoanut-tree with your pack. Never mind the trimmin's and holly, just bring plenty of cut plug and dry matches." And so the day worn on.
As in the old days of war or other crisis, the cry had been raised, and was echoed from all directions, and from hut to cocoanut-tree to crag the call was heard, growing fainter and more feeble, dying gradually from point to point, echoing farther and yet farther in the distance.
Darwin said that their feat in entering the cocoanut "is as curious a case of instinct as was ever heard of, and likewise of adaptation in structure between two objects apparently so remote from each other in the scheme of nature, as a crab and a cocoanut-tree." When darkness descends and all is quiet, the robber crab ascends the tree by gripping the bark with his claws.
Yet all these people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance, and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced the cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the west was a myth.
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