THE TREE OF SOLOMON
Wide forests, deep beneath Maldivia's tide,
From withering air the wondrous fruitage hide;
There green-haired nereids tend the bowery dells,
Whose healing produce poison's rage expels.
The Lusiad.
If Japan be still a sealed book, the interior of China almost unknown, the palatial temple of the Grand Lama unvisited by scientific or diplomatic European—to say nothing of Madagascar, the steppes of Central Asia, and some of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago—how great an amount of marvel and mystery must have enveloped the countries of the East during the period that we now term the middle ages! By a long and toilsome overland journey, the rich gold and sparkling gems, the fine muslins and rustling silks, the pungent spices and healing drugs of the Morning Land, found their way to the merchant princes of the Mediterranean. These were not all. The enterprising traversers of the Desert brought with them, also, those tales of extravagant fiction which seem to have ever had their birthplace in the prolific East. Long after the time that doubt—in not a few instances the parent of knowledge—had, by throwing cold water on it, extinguished the last funeral pyre of the ultimate Phœnix, and laughed to scorn the gigantic, gold-grubbing pismires of Pliny; the Roc, the Valley of Diamonds, the mountain island of Loadstone, the potentiality of the Talisman, the miraculous virtues of certain drugs, and countless other fables, were accepted and believed by all the nations of the West. One of those drugs, seldom brought to Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East, and its extreme rarity, was a nut of alleged extraordinary curative properties—of such great value, that the Hindoo traders named it Trevanchere, or the Treasure—of such potent virtue, that Christians united with Mussulmen in terming it the Nut of Solomon. Considered a certain remedy for all kinds of poison, it was eagerly purchased by those of high station at a period when that treacherous destroyer so frequently mocked the steel-clad guards of royalty itself—when poisoning was the crime of the great, before it had descended from the corrupt and crafty court to the less ceremonious cottage. Nor was it only as an antidote that its virtues were famed. A small portion of its hard and corneous kernel, triturated with water in a vessel of porphyry, and mixed, according to the nature of the disease and skill of the physician, with the powder of red or white coral, ebony, or stag's horns, was supposed to be able to put to flight all the maladies that are the common lot of suffering humanity. Even the simple act of drinking pure water out of a part of its polished shell was esteemed a salutary remedial process, and was paid for at a correspondently extravagant price. Doubtless, in many instances it did effect cures; not, however, by any peculiar inherent sanative property, but merely through the unbounded confidence of the patient: similar cases are well known to medical science; and at the present day, when the manufacture and sale of an alleged universal heal-all is said to be one of the shortest and surest paths that lead to fortune—when in our own country 'the powers that be' encourage rather than check such wholesale empiricism—we cannot consistently condemn the more ancient quack, who having, in all faith, given an immense sum for a piece of nut-shell, remunerated himself by selling draughts of water out of it to his believing dupes. The extraordinary history of the nut, as it was then told, assisted to keep up the delusion. The Indian merchants said, that there was only one tree in the world that produced it; that the roots of that tree were fixed, 'where never fathom-line did touch the ground,' in the bed of the Indian Ocean, near to Java, among the Ten Thousand Islands of the far East; but its branches, rising high above the waters, flourished in the bright sunshine and free air. On the topmost bough dwelt a griffin, that sallied forth every evening to the adjacent islands, to procure an elephant or rhinoceros for its nightly repast; but when a ship chanced to pass that way, his griffinship had no occasion to fly so far for a supper. Attracted by the tree, the doomed vessel remained motionless on the waters, until the wretched sailors were, one by one, devoured by the monster. When the nuts ripened, they dropped off into the water, and, carried by winds and currents to less dangerous localities, were picked up by mariners, or cast on some lucky shore. What is this but an Eastern version—who dare say it is not the original?—of the more classical fable of the dragon and the golden fruit of the Hesperides?
Time went on. Vasco de Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, and a new route was opened to Eastern commerce. The Portuguese, who encountered the terrors of the Cape of Storms, were not likely to be daunted by a griffin; yet, with all their endeavours, they never succeeded in discovering the precious tree. By their exertions, however, rather more of the drug was brought to Europe than had previously been; still there was no reduction in its estimated value. In the East, an Indian potentate demanded a ship and her cargo as the price of a perfect nut, and it was actually purchased on the terms; in the West, the Emperor Rodolph offered 4000 florins for one, and his offer was contemptuously refused; while invalids from all parts of Europe performed painful pilgrimages to Venice, Lisbon, or Antwerp, to enjoy the inestimable benefit of drinking water out of pieces of nut-shell! Who may say what adulterations and tricks were practised by dishonest dealers, to maintain a supply of this costly medicine? but, as similar impositions are not unknown at the present day, we may as well pass lightly over that part of our subject.
The English and Dutch next made their way to the Indian Ocean; yet, though they sought for the invaluable Tree of Solomon, with all the energy supplied by a burning thirst for gain, their efforts were as fruitless and unsuccessful as those of the Portuguese. Strange tales, too, some of these ancient mariners related on their return to Europe: how, in the clear waters of deep bays, they had observed groves of those marvellous trees, growing fathoms down beneath the surface of the placid sea. Out of a mass of equally ridiculous reports, the only facts then attainable were at length sifted: these were, that the tree had not been discovered growing in any locality whatever; that the nut was sometimes found floating on the Indian Ocean, or thrown on the coast of Malabar, but more frequently picked up on the shores of a group of islands known as the Maldives; from the latter circumstance, the naturalists of the day termed it Cocus Maldivicus—the Maldivian cocoa-nut. Garcius, surnamed Ab Horto (of the garden), on account of his botanical knowledge, a celebrated authority on drugs and spices, who wrote in 1563, very sensibly concluded that the tree grew on some undiscovered land, from whence the nuts were carried by the waves to the places where they were found; other writers considered it to be a genuine marine production; while a few shrewdly suspected that it really grew on the Maldives. Unfortunately for the Maldivians, this last opinion prevailed in India. In 1607, the king of Bengal, with a powerful fleet and army, invaded the Maldives, conquered and killed their king, ransacked and plundered the islands, and, having crammed his ships with an immense booty, sailed back to Bengal—without, however, discovering the Tree of Solomon, the grand object of the expedition. Curiously enough, we are indebted to this horrible invasion for an interesting book of early Eastern travel—the Bengalese king having released from captivity one Pyrard de Laval, a French adventurer, who, six years previously, had suffered shipwreck on those inhospitable islands. Laval's work dispelled the idea that the nut grew upon the Maldives. He tells us, that it was found floating in the surf, or thrown up on the sea-shore only; that it was royal property; and whenever discovered, carried with great ceremony to the king, a dreadful death being the penalty of any subject possessing the smallest portion of it.
The leading naturalists of the seventeenth century having the Maldives thus, in a manner, taken away from beneath their feet, took great pains to invent a local habitation for this wonderful tree; and at last they, pretty generally, came to the conclusion, that the vast peninsula of Southern Hindostan had at one time extended as far as the Maldives, but by some great convulsion of nature, the intermediate part between those islands and Cape Comorin had sunk beneath the waters of the ocean; that the tree or trees had grown thereon, and still continued to grow on the submerged soil; and the nuts when ripe, being lighter than water, rose to the surface, instead—as is the habit of supermarine arboreal produce—of falling to the ground. Scarcely could a more splendid illustration of the fallacies of hypothetical reasoning be found, than the pages that contain this specious and far-fetched argument. Even the celebrated Rumphius, who wrote so late as the eighteenth century, assures his readers that 'the Calappa laut,' the Malay term for the nut, 'is not a terrestrial production, which may have fallen by accident into the sea, and there become hardened, as Garcias ab Horto relates, but a fruit, growing itself in the sea, whose tree has hitherto been concealed from the eye of man.' He also denominates it 'the wonderful miracle of nature, the prince of all the many rare things that are found in the sea.'
In the fulness of time, knowledge is obtained and mysteries are revealed. Chemistry and medicine, released from the tedious but not useless apprenticeship they had served to alchemy and empiricism, set up on their own account, and as a consequence, the 'nut of the sea' soon lost its European reputation as a curative, though it was still considered a very great curiosity, and the unsettled problem of its origin formed a famous stock of building materials for the erecters of theoretical edifices. In India and China, it retained its medicinal fame, and commanded a high price. Like everything else that is brought to market, the nuts varied in value. A small one would not realise more than L.50, while a large one would be worth L.120; those, however, that measured as much in breadth as in length were most esteemed, and one measuring a foot in diameter was worth L.150 sterling money. Such continued to be the prices of these nuts for two centuries after the ships of Europe had first found their way to the seas and lands of Asia. But a change was at hand. In the year 1770, a French merchant-ship entered the port of Calcutta. The motley assemblage of native merchants and tradesmen, Baboos and Banians, Dobashes, Dobies, and Dingy-wallahs, that crowd a European vessel's deck on her first arrival in an Eastern port, were astounded when, to their eager inquiries, the captain replied that his cargo consisted of cocos de mer.3 Scarcely could the incredulous and astonished natives believe the evidence of their own eyesight, when, on the hatches being opened, they saw that the ship was actually filled with this rare and precious commodity. Rare and precious, to be so no longer. Its price instantaneously fell; persons who had been the fortunate possessors of a nut or two, were ruined; and so little did the French captain gain by his cargo, that he disclosed the secret of its origin to an English mercantile house, which completed the utter downfall of the nut of Solomon, by landing another cargo of it at Bombay during the same year.
A singular circumstance in connection with the discovery of the tree, a complete exemplification of the good old tale, Eyes and no Eyes, is worthy of record, as a lesson to all, that they should ever make proper use of the organs which God has bestowed upon them for the acquisition of useful knowledge. Mahé de la Bourdonnais, one of the best and wisest of French colonial governors, whose name, almost unknown to history, is embalmed for ever in St Pierre's beautiful romance of Paul and Virginia, sent from the Isle of France, in 1743, a naval officer named Picault, to explore the cluster of islands now known as the Seychelles. Picault made a pretty correct survey, and in the course of it discovered some islands previously unknown; one of these he named Palmiers, on account of the abundance and beauty of the palm-trees that grew upon it; that was all he knew about them. In 1768, a subsequent governor of the Isle of France sent out another expedition, under Captain Duchemin, for a similar purpose. Barré, the hydrographer of this last expedition, landing on Palmiers, at once discovered that the palms, from which the island had, a quarter of a century previously, received its name, produced the famous and long-sought-for cocos de mer. Barré informed Duchemin, and the twain kept the secret to themselves. Immediately after their return to the Isle of France, they fitted out a vessel, sailed to Palmiers, and having loaded with nuts, proceeded to Calcutta. How their speculation turned out, we have already related. We should add that Duchemin, in his vain expectation of making an immense fortune by the discovery, considering that the name of the island might afford future adventurers a clue to his secret, artfully changed it to Praslin, the name of the then intendant of marine, which it still retains.
We shall speak no more of the Tree of Solomon; it is the Lodoicea Seychellarum—the double cocoa-nut of the Seychelles—as modern botanists term it, that we have now to deal with. As its name implies, it is a palm, and one of the most nobly-graceful of that family, which have been so aptly styled by Linnæus the princes of the vegetable kingdom. Its straight and rather slender-looking stem, not more than a foot in diameter, rises, without a leaf, to the height of from 90 to 100 feet, and at the summit is superbly crowned with a drooping plume, consisting of about a score of magnificent leaves, of a broadly-oval form. These leaves, the larger of which are twenty feet in length and ten in width, are beautifully marked with regular folds, diverging from a central supporting chine; their margins are more or less deeply serrated towards the extremities; and they are supported by footstalks nearly as long as themselves. Every year there forms, in the central top of the tree, a new leaf, which, closed like a fan, and defended by a downy, fawn-coloured covering, shoots up vertically to a height of ten feet, before it, expanding, droops gracefully, and assumes its place among its elder brethren; and as the imperative rule pervades all nature, that, in course of time, the eldest must give place unto their juniors, the senior lowest leaf annually falls withered to the ground, yet leaving a memento of its existence in a distinct ring or scar upon the parent trunk. It is clear, then, that by the number of these rings the age of the tree can be accurately determined; some veterans shew as many as 400, without any visible signs of decay; and it seems that about the age of 130 years, the tree attains its full development.
As in several other members of the palm family, the male and female flowers are found on different individuals. The female tree, after attaining the age of about thirty years, annually produces a large drupe or fruit-bunch, consisting of five or six nuts, each enveloped in an external husk, not dissimilar in form and colour to the coat of the common walnut, but of course much larger, and proportionably thicker. The nut itself is about a foot in length; of an elliptic form; at one end obtuse, at the other and narrower end, cleft into two or three, sometimes even four lobes, of a rounded form on their outsides, but flattened on the inner. It is exceedingly difficult to give a popular description when encumbered by the technicalities of science; we must try another method. Let the reader imagine two pretty thick vegetable marrows, each a foot long, joined together, side by side, and partly flattened by a vertical compression, he will then have an idea of the curious form of the double cocoa-nut. Sometimes, as we have mentioned, a nut exhibits three lobes; let the reader imagine the end of one of the marrows cleft in two, and he will have an idea of the three-lobed nut; and if he imagines two more marrows placed side by side, and compressed with and on the top of the former two, he will then have an idea of the four-lobed nut. In fact, almost invariably, the four-lobed nut parts in the middle, forming two of the more common two-lobed nuts, only distinguishable by the flatness of their inner sides from those that grew separately. When green, they contain a refreshing, sweetish, jelly-like substance, but when old, the kernel is so hard that it cannot be cut with a knife.
The enormous fruit-bunches, weighing upwards of fifty pounds, hang three or four years on the tree before they are sufficiently ripened to fall down; thus, though only one drupe is put forth each season, yet the produce of three or four years, the aggregate weight of which must be considerable, burdens the stem at one time. This great weight, suspended at the top of the lofty and almost disproportionately slender stem, causes the tree to rock gracefully with the slightest breeze; the agitated leaves creating a pleasing noise, somewhat similar to that of a distant waterfall. Some French writers have enthusiastically alluded to this rustling sound as a delightful adjunct of the interesting scene; nor have our English travellers spoken in less glowing language. 'Growing in thousands,' says Mr Harrison, 'close to each other, the sexes intermingled, a numerous offspring starting up on all sides, sheltered by the parent plants, the old ones fallen into the sear and yellow leaf, and going fast to decay to make room for the young trees, presents to the eye a picture so mild and pleasing, that it is difficult not to look upon them as animated objects, capable of enjoyment, and sensible of their condition.'
Though no longer producing a drug of great value for the exclusive use of the wealthy, the double cocoa-nut of the Seychelles affords many humbler benefits to the inhabitants of those islands. The trunk, when split and cleared of its soft, fibrous interior, serves to make water-troughs and palisades. The immense leaves are used, in that fine climate, as materials for building: not only do they make an excellent thatch, but they are also employed for walls. With one hundred leaves, a commodious dwelling, including doors, windows, and partitions, may be constructed. Baskets and brooms are made from the ribs of the leaves and the fibres of their footstalks. The young leaf, previous to its expanding, is soft, and of a pale-yellow colour; in this state it is cut into longitudinal stripes, and plaited into hats; while the downy substance by which it is covered, is found valuable for stuffing beds and pillows. Vessels, of various forms and uses, are made out of the light, strong, and durable nut-shells. When preserved whole, with merely a perforation at the top, they are used to carry water, some holding nearly three gallons. When divided, the parts serve, according to their size and shape, for platters, dishes, or drinking-cups. Being jet-black, and susceptible of a high polish, they are often curiously carved, and mounted with the precious metals, to form sugar-basins, toilet-dishes, and other useful and ornamental articles for the dwellings of the tasteful and refined.
The group of islands termed the Seychelles lie to the northward and eastward of Madagascar, in the latitude of 6 degrees south of the equinoctial. The tree, in its natural state, is found on three small, rocky, and mountainous islands only—Praslin, containing about 8000 acres; Curieuse, containing but 1000; and Round Island, smaller still; all three lying within a few hundred yards of each other. These islands are about 900 miles distant from the Maldives; and as Garcias ab Horto, in the sixteenth century, supposed, the nuts, many of which grow on rocky precipices overhanging the sea, drop into the waves, and are transported by the prevailing currents to other shores. It is a remarkable fact, that the trees will not flourish on any other of the adjacent islands of the Seychelles group. Many have been planted, but they merely vegetate, and are wretchedly inferior to the splendid natural trees of Praslin and Curieuse. From the time that the nut falls from the tree, a year elapses before it germinates; it only requires to lie on the ground without being covered, for the germ shoots downwards, forming a root, from which ascends the plumule of the future plant.
Several attempts have been made to grow this tree in some of the larger horticultural establishments in Great Britain, but hitherto without success. Hopes, however, are now entertained; for the interesting spectacle of a double cocoa-nut in the act of germination may be witnessed at this moment in the national gardens at Kew.