Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

by Alfred Russel Wallace

The purposes to which the different parts of Palms are applied are very various, the fruit, the leaves, and the stem all having many uses in the different species. Some of them produce valuable articles of export to our own and other countries, but they are of far more value to the natives of the districts where they grow, in many cases furnishing the most important necessaries for existence.

The Cocoa-nut is known to us only as an agreeable fruit, and its fibrous husk supplies us with matting, coir ropes, and stuffing for mattresses; but in its native countries it serves a hundred purposes; food and drink and oil are obtained from its fruit, hats and baskets are made of its fibre, huts are covered with its leaves, and its leaf-stalks are applied to a variety of uses. To us the Date is but an agreeable fruit, but to the Arab it is the very staff of life; men and camels almost live upon it, and on the abundance of the date harvest depends the wealth and almost the existence of many desert tribes. It is truly indigenous to those inhospitable wastes of burning sand, which without it would be uninhabitable by man.

A palm tree of Africa, the Æleis guianensis, gives us oil and candles. It inhabits those parts of the country where the slave trade is carried on, and it is thought by persons best acquainted with the subject that the extension of the trade in palm oil will be the most effectual check to that inhuman traffic; so that a palm tree may be the means of spreading the blessings of civilization and humanity among the persecuted negro race.

Sago is another product of a palm, which is of comparatively little importance to us, but in the East supplies the daily food of thousands. In many parts of the Indian Archipelago it forms almost the entire subsistence of the people, taking the place of rice in Asia, corn in Europe, and maize and mandiocca in America, and is worthy to be classed with these the most precious gifts of nature to mankind. Unlike them, however, it is neither seed nor root, but is the wood itself, the pithy centre of the stem, requiring scarcely any preparation to fit it for food; and it is so abundant that a single tree often yields six hundred pounds weight.

The canes used for chair bottoms and various other purposes, are the stems of species of Calamus, slender palms which abound in the East Indian jungles, climbing over other trees and bushes by the help of the long hooked spines with which their leaves are armed. They sometimes reach the enormous length of 600 or even 1000 feet, and as four millions of them are imported into this country annually, a great number of persons must find employment in cutting them.

A variety of species, in all parts of the world, furnish a sugary sap from their stems or unopened spathes, which when partly fermented is the palm wine of Africa and the Toddy of the East Indies; and a similar beverage is procured from the Mauritia vinifera and other species in South America. Indeed, at the mouth of the Orinoco dwell a nation of Indians whose existence depends almost entirely on a species of Palm, supposed to be the Mauritia flexuosa. They build their houses elevated on its trunks, and live principally upon its fruit and sap, with fish from the waters around them.

Among the most singular products of palm trees are the resins and wax produced by some species. The fruits of a species of Calamus of the Eastern Archipelago are covered with a resinous substance of a red colour, which, in common with a similar product from some other trees, is the Dragon’s blood of commerce, and is used as a pigment, for varnish, and in the manufacture of tooth powder. The Ceroxylon andicola, a lofty palm growing in the Andes of Bogotá, produces a resinous wax which is secreted in its stem and used by the inhabitants of the country for making candles and for other purposes. Again, in some of the northern provinces of Brazil is found a palm tree called Carnaúba, the Copernicia cerifera, having the underside of its leaves covered with white wax, which has no admixture of resin, but is as pure as that procured from our hives.

The leaves of palms, however, are applied to the greatest variety of uses; thatch for houses, umbrellas, hats, baskets and cordage in countless varieties are made from them, and every tropical country possesses some species adapted to these varied purposes, which in temperate zones are generally supplied by a very different class of plants. The Chip, or Brazilian-grass hats, so cheap in this country, are made from the leaves of a palm tree which grows in Cuba, whence they are imported for the purpose: the palm is the Chamærops argentea; and in Sicily an allied species, the Chamærops humilis (the only European palm), is applied in a similar manner to form hats, baskets, and a variety of useful articles.

The papyrus of the ancient Egyptians, and the metallic plates on which other nations wrote, were not used in India, but their place was supplied by the leaves of palms, on whose hard and glossy surface the characters of the Pali and Sanscrit languages were inscribed with a metallic point. The leaves of the Corypha taliera are used for this purpose, and when strung together, form the volumes of a Hindu library.

A favourite stimulant too of the Malays is furnished by a palm. The fruit of the Areca catechu is the betelnut, which they chew with lime, and which is their substitute for the opium of the Chinese, the tobacco of Europeans, and the coca of the South Americans.