Sonnerat[1494] carried the bread-fruit tree to Mauritius, where the Intendant Poivre took care to spread it. Captain Bligh was commissioned to introduce it into the English West Indian Isles. The mutiny of his crew prevented his succeeding the first time, but a second attempt proved more fortunate. In January, 1793, he landed 153 plants at St. Vincent, whence the species has been diffused into several parts of tropical America.[1495]
Rumphius[1496] saw the species wild in several of the Sunda Isles. Modern authors, less careful, or acquainted only with cultivated species, say nothing on this head. Seemann[1497] says for the Fiji Isles, “cultivated, and to all appearance wild in some places.” On the continent of Asia it is not even cultivated, as the climate is not hot enough.
The bread-fruit is evidently a native of Java, Amboyna, and the neighbouring islands; but the antiquity of its cultivation in the whole of the archipelago, proved by the number of varieties, and the facility of propagating it by buds and suckers, prevent us from knowing its history accurately. In the islands to the extreme east, like Otahiti, certain fables and traditions point to an introduction which is not very ancient, and the absence of seeds confirms this.[1498]
Jack-Fruit—Artocarpus integrifolia, Linnæus.
The jack-fruit, larger than the bread-fruit, for it sometimes weighs as much as eighty pounds, hangs from the branches of a tree thirty to fifty feet high.[1499] The common name is derived from the Indian names jaca, or tsjaka.
The species has long been cultivated in southern Asia, from the Punjab to China, from the Himalayas to the Moluccas. It has not spread into the small islands more to the east, such as Otahiti, which leads us to suppose it has not been so long in the archipelago as upon the continent. In the north-west of India, also, its cultivation does not perhaps date from a very remote epoch, for the existence of a Sanskrit name is not absolutely certain. Roxburgh mentions one, punusa, but Piddington does not admit it into his Index. The Persians and the Arabs do not seem to have known the species. Its enormous fruit must, however, have struck them if the species had been cultivated near their frontiers. Dr. Bretschneider does not speak of any Artocarpus in his work on the plants known to the ancient Chinese, whence it may be inferred that towards China, as in other directions, the jack-fruit was not diffused at a very early epoch. The first statement as to its existence in a wild state is given by Rheede in ambiguous terms: “This tree grows everywhere in Malabar and throughout India.” He perhaps confounded the planted tree with the wild one. After him, however, Wight found the species several times in the Indian Peninsula, notably in the Western Ghauts, with every appearance of a wild and indigenous tree. It has been extensively planted in Ceylon; but Thwaites, the best authority for the flora of this island, does not recognize it as wild. Neither is it wild in the archipelago to the south of India, according to the general opinion. Lastly, Brandis found it growing in the forests of the district of Attaran, in Burmah, but, he adds, always in the neighbourhood of abandoned settlements. Kurz did not find it wild in British Burmah.[1500]
The species is, therefore, a native of the region lying at the foot of the western mountains of the Indian Peninsula, and its cultivation in the neighbourhood is probably not earlier than the Christian era. It was introduced into Jamaica by Admiral Rodney in 1782, and thence into San Domingo.[1501] It has also been introduced into Brazil, Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Rodriguez Island.[1502]
Date-Palm—Phœnix dactylifera, Linnæus.
The date-palm has existed from prehistoric times in the warm dry zone, which extends from Senegal to the basin of the Indus, principally between parallels 15 and 30. It is seen here and there further to the north, by reason of exceptional circumstances and of the aim which is proposed in its cultivation. For beyond the limit within which the fruit ripens every year, there is a zone in which they ripen ill or seldom, and a further region within which the tree can live, but without fruiting or even flowering. These limits have been traced by de Martius, Carl Ritter, and myself.[1503] It is needless to reproduce them here, the aim of the present work being to study questions of origin.
As regards the date-palm, we can hardly rely on the more or less proved existence of really wild indigenous individuals. Dates are easily transported; the stones germinate when sown in damp soil near the source of a river, and even in the fissures of rocks. The inhabitants of oases have planted or sown date-palms in favourable localities where the species perhaps existed before man, and when the traveller comes across isolated trees, at a distance from dwellings, he cannot know that they did not spring from stones thrown away by caravans. Botanists admit a variety, sylvestris, that is to say wild, with small and sour fruit; but it is perhaps the result of recent naturalization in an unfavourable soil. Historical and philological data are of more value here, though doubtless from the antiquity of cultivation they can only establish probabilities.