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Updated: May 7, 2025
The trees were now not the lesser growths of bamboo, lime and sago-palm that covered the foot-hills. They were the great forest giants, enormous teak, sal and simal trees, towering up bare of branches for a good height above the ground, rising to the green canopy overhead and thrusting their leafy crowns through it, seeking their share of the sunlight.
Their teeth are generally black from the continual chewing of the betel-nut, and I noticed small children of four or five years of age going in for this dirty habit, and still younger children smoking cigarettes, the covering of which is made out of the dried leaf of the sago-palm.
We were rewarded for our exertions, by reaching another hollow in which a number of the sago-palms grew. The sago-palm has a creeping root-stem, like a nipa-palm, and Mr Hooker had told me that when it is nearly fifteen years old it sends up an immense terminal spike of flowers, after which it dies. It is not so tall as the cocoa-nut tree, but is thicker and larger.
It was composed of remarkably unbleached sago, which they make from the sago-palm, boiled down with sugar to nearly a jelly. It was on an earthenware plate, and the woman who was preparing it mixed sugar with cocoa-nut milk, and whipping it with a bunch of twigs to a slight froth, poured it over the jelly.
"Are there any more kinds of palm trees?" asked the children. "Yes," was the reply; "there are a great many members of this most useful family, but the one that will interest you most, after the date-and cocoanut-palm, is, I think, the sago-palm." "Why, Miss Harson!" exclaimed Clara, in surprise; "does sago really grow on a tree?"
We raised, in the upper part of the river, a sort of dam, made with stakes and stones, from whence the water flowed into our channels of the sago-palm, laid down a gentle declivity nearly to our tent, and there it was received into the shell of the turtle, which we had raised on some stones of a convenient height, the hole which the harpoon had made serving to carry off the waste water through a cane that was fitted to it.
This space was entirely devoted to flowers: on each side was a grove of orange trees, and in the lower garden were the fig, India-rubber and date-palm, the golden date of Africa. Of trees there were the camphor tree, coffee, Portuguese laurel, "tree of Paradise," crape-myrtle, guava, lime, orange, citron, pomegranate, sago-palm and many others whose home is in the tropics.
Dried beef and venison are also used, and wild pig and chickens and ducks are plentiful; other articles of food being maize, sweet potatoes, and many kinds of fruit, such as cocoa-nuts, bananas, mangoes, mangusteens, and so on. In the Moluccos the staple crop is not rice, but sago, which is prepared from the sap of the sago-palm.
Fritz and Ernest had even cut down an immense sago-palm, seventy feet high, intending to extract its precious pith; but this they had been unable to accomplish alone, and waited for my assistance.
Up to this time you have thought, perhaps, there was only one, and that was the palm-tree itself. Maybe you had heard of more, such as the sago-palm, the cocoa-nut palm, the date-palm, or the cabbage-palm; and you fancied there might be others perhaps as many as a dozen!
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