The Coconut Palm

I HAVE now lived on various islands in the South Sea for more than twelve years, and during that time I have heard at least twice that many legends concerning the origin of the coconut palm. I like best the one old Mama Tu told me one sultry February afternoon when I came upon her gathering plants and roots near the head wall of Vaipopo Valley.

Mama Tu is a little wizened Tahitian woman who might be of any age between seventy and ninety. She is famous on this side of Tahiti for her native remedies, and, being as spry as she is small and wrinkled, she makes long journeys into the mountains in search of the plants of which they are concocted.

‘May you live, Mama Tu,’ I said.

‘And may you live. Where are you going?’

‘I’ve been walking to look.’

‘If you are going back to the village, you can carry my bundle for me,’ she said; ‘but sit down and rest for a little.’

She was sitting under a clump of ancient coconut palms near the river. One tree, all of sixty feet high, held its cluster of nuts and fronds almost directly overhead, and while we were sitting there a ripe nut fell with a terrific thud not more than a yard from where we were.

‘That was close,’ she said, quietly; but she neither moved nor glanced overhead where other ripe nuts hung precariously.

I think we’d better move,’ I replied. ‘I have no desire to have my skull cracked.’

‘There is no danger,’ she said. ‘Coconuts never fall where people are sitting.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Have you never heard how the coconut palm came to these islands?’

‘Often,’ I replied; ‘and each time a different story.’

‘The truth is in but one of them, and that I will tell you,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago, when there were few people on any of these islands. They had little to eat in those days. There were no yams or bananas or taro, or fei; the people lived mostly on fish. The lizard people lived in the mountains and the human people lived by the sea.

‘There was a man —his name was Ori. One day he was going along the beach near the mouth of the river, and he saw a sea eel not far from the beach. It was a very large eel; in fifty steps you could not walk from its head to the tip of its tail.

‘“My friend,’’ said the eel, “you see that I am caught here.”

“‘Yes, I see it,” said Ori.

‘A great creeping vine had wrapped itself half a dozen times around the eel’s body; and this vine was securely fastened to many great rocks and the trunks of enormous trees.

“‘One of the lizard people must have done this,” said the eel. “I was sleeping here in the sun. I went to sleep in the dry season and I awoke in the rainy season and found this vine wrapped round and round me, so that I can’t get loose. Maybe you can help me?”

“‘Maybe I can,” said Ori.

‘He found a splinter of rock, very sharp along one edge, and he climbed up on the eel’s great body and sawed and sawed at the creeper until he had sawed it through. A moon had waxed and waned before this work was done. The eel’s body was deeply marked in the places where the vine had bound it.

“‘Thank you for this service,” said the eel. “Is there anything you want?”

“‘Well, I’m rather hungry,” said Ori. “ There is very little food here. I wish there were more.”

‘“Bring me that round stone from the river there,” said the eel.

’Ori brought it. It was round and smooth, like a ball.

“‘Make three little marks on it, close together, on one side,” said the eel.

’Ori did this.

‘“Now dig a hole and plant it in the ground,” said the eel.

’Ori thought it was foolish to plant a stone in the ground, but he did as the eel told him. And the eel said, “Wait and see what happens here, my friend”; then he slid back into the sea.

’In the course of time a fine tree grew out of that place — such a tree as no one had ever seen before. It was the coconut palm. Ori plaited the fronds of the palm and made him a house. He ate the meat of the ripe nuts, and the white milk squeezed from the grated meat of the nuts was delicious with fish. He drank the cool water from the green nuts. He used the shells for dishes, and from the tough fibre of the husks he made fishlines and nets. The coconut palm furnished him with whatever he needed, and from that day every coconut that has appeared on any tree has three little eyes in the shell on that part of the nut where Ori had made the three small marks on the stone he had planted. And the eyes of the nuts always look down before the nuts fall; for the coconut palm is man’s friend and will not allow him to be injured by falling fruit.’

Mama Tu waited for me to speak.

‘But the eyes of the coconut are in the shell,’ I said. ‘How can they see through the thick husk that covers them?’

‘Does that seem strange to you in the fruit of so wonderful a tree?’ she replied. ‘Of course they can see, just as, when the nut has fallen, if it is left on the ground roots will grow from two of the eyes and thrust themselves deeply into the ground, and a green stalk will grow from the third eye and make a new tree. Thousands and thousands of nuts fall every day. Why are we never injured by them ? ’

’A year or two ago, I heard of a man in the Hitia district who had his arm broken by a falling coconut,’ I replied.

‘I know of him,’ said Mama Tu. ‘It was his right arm that was broken. He was always beating his wife. He was justly punished.’

JAMES NORMAN HALL