Here we could easily imagine that we had before us every blossom that blows. Exposed for sale at a nominal price are the most gorgeous of flowers still fresh with the morning dew; roses of every size and color; orchids of the most fantastic forms and of dazzling beauty, to possess which a New York belle, would, if necessary, pawn a favorite jewel.
And here one beholds in lavish abundance citrous fruits of every species, bananas of untold varieties, and scores of other fruits equally common here but scarcely known except by name in our northern latitudes. At every turn we see booths filled with guavas, mameys and mangoes; zapotes, avocados and chirimoyas; papayas, pomegranates and sapodillas; anonas, bread-fruit, mangosteens, and others too numerous to mention, that are prized by the natives for the preparation of dulces—sweets—and preserves.
The avocado, also called avocado pear, on account of its shape, is the fruit of the beautiful tree called by botanists Persea gratissima, after Perseus, the son of Jupiter and Danæ. The English in the Caribbean Islands name this delicious fruit alligator pear, or midshipman’s butter. It, indeed, somewhat resembles butter in appearance, and, to a certain extent, replaces butter on the table in the tropics, where real butter is difficult to procure and more difficult to keep. Of late years it has been introduced into the North as a salad, and promises, as soon as it becomes generally known, to be one of the most popular of tropical fruits.
Speaking for myself, I prefer it to any other, except possibly the piña—pineapple. But one must taste the fresh, ripe pineapple of the tropics to know its full lusciousness. It is incomparably more juicy and fragrant than anything our Northern markets offer. Old Benzoni says of it, “It smells well and tastes better,” and declares it to be “one of the most relishing fruits in the world.” Sir Walter Raleigh was right when he called it “the prince of fruits.” King James thought so highly of it that he remarked that “it was a fruit too delicious for a subject to taste of.” The poet Thomson doubtless entertained a similar view when he penned the following lines:
“Witness, thou best Anana! thou the pride
Of vegetable life, beyond whate’er
The poets imagined in the golden age:
Quick let me strip thee of thy tufty coat,
Spread thy ambrosial stores and feast with Jove.”
But delicious as is the pineapple it is, in the estimation of many, surpassed by the chirimoya. This fruit is likened by Paez to “lumps of flavored cream ready to be frozen, suspended from the branches of some fairy tree amidst the most overpowering perfume of its flowers.” Clements R. Markham was so enthusiastic about it that he declared that “He who has not tasted the chirimoya fruit has yet to learn what fruit is.” “The pineapple, the mangosteen, and the chirimoya,” Dr. Seeman writes, “are considered the finest fruits in the world. I have tasted them in those localities in which they are supposed to attain their highest perfection—the pineapple in Guayaquil, the mangosteen in the Indian Archipelago, and the chirimoya on the slope of the Andes, and if I were called upon to act the part of Paris, I would, without hesitation, assign the apple to the chirimoya. Its taste, indeed, surpasses that of every other fruit, and Haenke was quite right when he called it the masterpiece of nature.”