Your loving friend,
Will.
THE COCOANUT ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC
Imagine yourself on a great ocean steamship, gliding over the blue water of the Pacific Ocean toward the Samoan Islands. Among the first things that you will see as you near the shores of these islands will be tall, slender, graceful trees, rising without a branch to a height of thirty to eighty feet. At the top is a sort of crown, composed of long, drooping leaves. These beautiful trees lean out over the water and toss their leaves in the strong and steady breeze from the ocean. They seem to nod a friendly greeting to you as you approach, and to wave a loving farewell to you as you sail away. These trees are the cocoanut palms. They grow on all of the tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, in the West Indies, and along the shores of most warm countries, but never far from the sea.
When the cocoanut falls into the water, it is rocked and tossed by the waves and drifted about by the currents, but it is safe within its shell, for the salt water cannot penetrate this. When it finally comes to rest upon some strange shore, it is ready to give to the world another cocoanut palm, if the climate is like that from which it sailed. In this way nature has helped the trees to become widely distributed.
There are cocoanut plantations as well as wild groves of the trees. When a plantation is to be established, the planter selects the ripest nuts and dries them for several weeks. They are then planted, and by and by a little palm springs from the small end of the nut and the roots from the large end. When the young trees are from six months to two years old, they are transplanted in rows thirty or forty feet apart. They begin to bear nuts in about five years, but they do not yield a full crop for fifteen or twenty years. Do you think that a poor man could afford to go into the business of cocoanut raising?
Fig. 49.—A Cocoanut Grove.
As you see in the picture, cocoanuts grow in clusters. You notice also that they grow close to the stem instead of at the ends of the branches. They do not all ripen at once, but nuts may be picked at almost any time. A tree will produce from fifty to one hundred nuts each year. If you were to go into an apple, a peach, or a cherry orchard, you could easily pick the ripe fruit. Gathering cocoanuts is quite a different matter, however. Let us observe this shiny-skinned Samoan boy and see how he picks them. He fastens a short piece of rope in the form of a loop to each foot. Letting one of the loops catch on a rough place on the bark of the tree he places the hollow of his foot against it, clasps the trunk with his hands, and raises himself a little. Then the other loop is fastened a little higher up, and he raises himself again. In this way he finally reaches the nuts. With a knife he cuts off the ripe ones, which fall to the ground and are then piled up. They are then placed in baskets which are hung from a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men or are loaded on to donkeys and taken to the shed.