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- How different from the volatile Polynesian in this, as in all other
respects, is our grave and decorous North American Indian. While the
former bestows a name in accordance with some humorous or ignoble
trait, the latter seizes upon what is deemed the most exalted or
warlike: and hence, among the red tribes, we have the truly patrician
appellations of “White Eagles,” “Young Oaks,” “Fiery Eyes,” and “Bended
Bows.”
CHAPTER LXIX.
THE COCOA-PALM
While the doctor and the natives were taking a digestive nap after
dinner, I strolled forth to have a peep at the country which could
produce so generous a meal.
To my surprise, a fine strip of land in the vicinity of the hamlet, and
protected seaward by a grove of cocoa-nut and bread-fruit trees, was
under high cultivation. Sweet potatoes, Indian turnips, and yams were
growing; also melons, a few pine-apples, and other fruits. Still more
pleasing was the sight of young bread-fruit and cocoa-nut trees set out
with great care, as if, for once, the improvident Polynesian had
thought of his posterity. But this was the only instance of native
thrift which ever came under my observation. For, in all my rambles
over Tahiti and Imeeo, nothing so much struck me as the comparative
scarcity of these trees in many places where they ought to abound.
Entire valleys, like Martair, of inexhaustible fertility are abandoned
to all the rankness of untamed vegetation. Alluvial flats bordering the
sea, and watered by streams from the mountains, are over-grown with a
wild, scrub guava-bush, introduced by foreigners, and which spreads
with such fatal rapidity that the natives, standing still while it
grows, anticipate its covering the entire island. Even tracts of clear
land, which, with so little pains, might be made to wave with orchards,
lie wholly neglected.
When I considered their unequalled soil and climate, thus unaccountably
slighted, I often turned in amazement upon the natives about Papeetee;
some of whom all but starve in their gardens run to waste. Upon other
islands which I have visited, of similar fertility, and wholly
unreclaimed from their first-discovered condition, no spectacle of this
sort was presented.
The high estimation in which many of their fruit-trees are held by the
Tahitians and Imeeose—their beauty in the landscape—their manifold
uses, and the facility with which they are propagated, are
considerations which render the remissness alluded to still more
unaccountable. The cocoa-palm is as an example; a tree by far the most
important production of Nature in the Tropics. To the Polynesians it is
emphatically the Tree of Life; transcending even the bread-fruit in the
multifarious uses to which it is applied.
Its very aspect is imposing. Asserting its supremacy by an erect and
lofty bearing, it may be said to compare with other trees as man with
inferior creatures.
The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year, the
islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its
fruit; he thatches his hut with its boughs, and weaves them into
baskets to carry his food; he cools himself with a fan platted from the
young leaflets, and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the
leaves; sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance
which wraps round the base of the stalks, whose elastic rods, strung
with filberts, are used as a taper; the larger nuts, thinned and
polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet: the smaller ones, with
bowls for his pipes; the dry husks kindle his fires; their fibres are
twisted into fishing-lines and cords for his canoes; he heals his
wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut; and with the
oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.
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