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Updated: May 17, 2025
If a few succeed in eluding the gatherer, they do so only to become a prey of as voracious animals, for the wild hogs, or quencos, of the forest relish much the soft substance of the palmiste when in a state of decomposition.
In that little garden, not thirty feet broad, what treasures there are! A tall palm whether Palmiste or Oil-palm has its smooth trunk hung all over with orchids, tied on with wire. Close to it stands a purple Dracaena, such as are put on English dinner-tables in pots: but this one is twenty feet high; and next to it is that strange tree the Clavija, of which the Creoles are justly fond.
Through the Palmiste pillars; through the usual black Roseau scrub; then under tangled boughs down a steep stony bank; and we were on a long beach of deep sand and quartz gravel. On our right the Shore- grapes with their green bunches of fruit, the Mahauts with their poplar-like leaves and great yellow flowers, and the ubiquitous Matapalos, fringed the shore.
Here the majestic palmiste towered grandly alone, crowned with its first, tardy, and only fruit; and when deprived of that diadem, like earthly monarchs, it perishes. We penetrated the wild native woods, where grew the iron-wood tree, the oak, the black cinnamon, the apple, the acacia, the tamarind, and the nutmeg.
Albumen is the substance which composes its body, and its blood is of a greenish tint. With a motion similar to that of the earthworm, it perforates with extraordinary rapidity into the substance of the tree in which it is found. When the moon is at her full, the gatherer of worms enters a neighbouring wood, and selects a young palmiste tree.
Steep slopes are gray with groo-groo palms, or yellow with unknown flowering trees. High against the sky-line, tiny knots and lumps are found to be gigantic trees. Each glen has buried its streamlet a hundred feet in vegetation, above which, here and there, the gray stem and dark crown of some palmiste towers up like the mast of some great admiral.
When a promising palmiste is found, the gatherer makes an incision into it with a cutlass or a hatchet. This incision is generally in the figure of a half-moon, with the base of the semicircle downwards, and the wound increasing in depth in that direction, so as to expose effectually the flesh of the tree.
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