The Naturalist in Nicaragua

by Thomas Belt

The village is bounded to the eastward by the mines and hacienda of the Chontales Mining Company, whose houses, workshops, and machinery are on rising ground on each side of the valley, with the brook running down between. About fifty acres of the forest have been cut down, and a great deal of this is fenced in and covered with grass. Going up the valley from the village, on the right hand side, about fifty yards from the road, on a grass-covered slope, stand the houses of the commissioner and cashier, in the latter of which the medical officer also lives. The former, a large, white-washed, square, two-storied, wooden house, with verandahs round three sides of it, and communicating by a covered passage with a detached kitchen behind, had been built by one of my predecessors, Captain Hill, R.N., who did not live to inhabit it. It was a roomy, comfortable house, commanding a view of the machinery, workshops, and part of the mines on the other side of the valley, and formed my residence for upwards of four years.

The slope in front of the house, down to the river, was covered with weedy bushes when I arrived; but I had these cleared away, and a fine greensward of grass took their place. On this I planted young orange, lime, and citron trees; and I had the pleasure, before I left, to see them beginning to bear their fine fruit. To the west of the house was a dell, covered with fallen logs and rubbish thrown from the hill, in which was a perennial spring of limpid water. I had the logs and rubbish gathered together and burnt, put a light fence round it, and formed a small vegetable, fruit, and flower garden. The mango and avocado trees had not come into bearing before I left; but pineapples, figs, grenadillas, bananas, pumpkins, plantains, papaws, and chioties fruited abundantly. The last named is a native of Mexico; it is a climbing plant with succulent stems and vine-like leaves, and grows with great rapidity. The fruit, of which it bears a great abundance, is about the size and shape of a pear, covered with soft prickles. It is boiled and eaten as a vegetable, and resembles vegetable marrow. At Santo Domingo it continues to bear a succession of fruits during eight months of the year.

Next to maize, plantains and bananas form the principal sustenance of the natives. The banana tree shoots up its succulent stem, and unfolds its immense entire leaves with great rapidity; and a group of them waving their silky leaves in the sun, or shining ghostly white in the moonlight, forms one of those beautiful sights that can only be seen to perfection in the tropics. There are a great many varieties of them, and they are cooked in many ways—boiled, baked, made into pastry, or eaten as a fruit. The varieties differ not only in their fruits, but in the colour of their leaves and stems; the natives can distinguish them without seeing the fruit, and have names for each, by which they are known throughout all Central America, Mexico, and Peru. These names are of Spanish origin; and this fact, together with the absence of any native, Mexican, or Peruvian name for the fruit, inclines me to adopt the opinion of Clavigero, who contends, in opposition to other writers, that the plantain and banana were not known in these countries before the Spanish conquest, but were first brought from the Canaries to Hayti in 1516, and from thence taken to the mainland.

Neither the sugar-cane* nor the plantain is given in the list of the indigenous productions of Mexico by the careful and accurate Hernandez. (* The sugar-cane is said never to bear seed in the West Indies, Malaga, India, Cochin China, or the Malay Archipelago. —Darwin's "Animals and Plants under Domestication" volume 2 page 169.) The natives made sugar from the green stems of the maize. Humboldt thinks that some species of plantain were indigenous to America; but it seems incredible that such an important fruit could have been overlooked by the early historians. In the old world the cultivation of the banana dates from the earliest times of which tradition makes mention. One of the Sanscrit names was bhanu—fruit, from which probably the name "banana" was derived.* (* Humboldt's "Aspects of Nature" volume 2 page 141.)

Both the plantain and the banana are always propagated from shoots or suckers that spring from the base of the plants; and it is to be remarked that the pineapple and the bread-fruit, that are also universally grown from cuttings or shoots, and have been cultivated from remote antiquity, have in a great measure lost the faculty of producing mature seed. Such varieties could not arise in a state of nature, but are due to selection by early races of mankind, who would naturally propagate the best varieties; and, to do this, seed was not required. As the finest kinds of bananas, pineapples, and bread-fruit are almost seedless, it is probable that the nutriment that would have been required for the formation of the seeds has been expended in producing larger and more succulent fruits. We find some varieties of oranges, which also have been cultivated from very early ages, producing fruits without seeds; but as these trees are propagated from seeds, these varieties could not become so sterile as those just mentioned. There can be no doubt that the seedless varieties of banana, bread-fruits, and pineapples have been propagated for hundreds of years; and this fact ought to modify the opinions generally entertained by horticulturists that the life of plants and trees propagated from shoots or cuttings cannot be indefinitely prolonged in that way. Perhaps this may be the case in trees, such as apples, that have come under their notice; and the reason that the varieties die out after a certain time, if not reproduced from seed, may be that the vigour of the trees is at last used up by the production of mature seed, but that in the seedless bananas, pineapples, and bread-fruits this does not happen.

Figs grow well in Nicaragua, and by many their luscious fruit is preferred to all others. My trees suffered greatly from the attacks of a large and fine longicorn beetle (Taeniotes scalaris, Fab.) which laid its eggs in the green bark, and produced white grubs that mined into the stem. I had to dig down to them with a knife to extricate them and prevent them destroying the young trees. We were surrounded at a short distance by the forest, in which grow many species of wild fig-trees; and this probably was the reason that my trees suffered so much, for at Granada the fig-growers were not troubled with this insect.

The grenadilla is the fruit of one of the passion-flowers (Passiflora quadrangularis), and is shaped like a large oblong apple, which it also resembles in perfume. It makes fine tarts and puddings, being somewhat like the gooseberry in taste. I had much difficulty in preserving it from being eaten by small forest rats that came out of the woods, where they had already been accustomed to eat the wild fruit of this climber.

The moist, warm climate seemed to suit the papaw tree, as it grew with great vigour, and produced very large and fine melon-like fruits. The green fruits are excellent for making pastry, if flavoured with a little lime-juice.

In vegetables, I grew three species of sweet potatoes—yellow, purple, and white skinned, and which differ also in their leaves and flowers; cabbages, kidney-beans, pumpkins, yuccas (Jatropha manihot), quequisque (a species of arum, Colocasia esculenta), lettuces, tomatoes, capiscums, endives, parsley, and carrots.

The climate was too damp to grow onions; neither could I succeed with peas, potatoes, or turnips. Scarlet runners (Phaseolus multiflorus) grew well, and flowered abundantly, but never produced a single pod. Darwin has shown that this flower is dependent, like many others, for its fertilisation upon the operations of the busy humble-bee, and that it is provided with a wonderful mechanism, by means of which its pollen is rubbed into the head of the bee, and received on the stigma of the next plant visited.* (* "Gardener's Chronicle" October 24, 1857 and November 14, 1858; also T.H. Farrer in "Annals of Natural History" October 1868.) There are many humble-bees, of different species from ours, in tropical America; but none of them frequented the flowers of the scarlet runner, and to that circumstance we may safely ascribe its sterility. An analogous case has been long known. The vanilla plant (Vanilla planifolia) has been introduced from tropical America into India, but though it grows well, and flowers, it never fruits without artificial aid. It is the same in the hothouses of Europe. Dr. Morren, of Liege, has shown that, if artificially fertilised, every flower will produce fruit; and ascribes its sterility to the absence, in Europe and India, of some insect that in America carries the pollen from one flower to another.* (* Taylor's "Annals of Natural History" volume 3 page 1.) When those interested in the acclimature of the natural productions of one country on the soil of some distant one, study the mutual relations of plants and animals, they will find that in the case of many plants it is important that the insects specially adapted for the fertilisation of their flowers should be introduced with them. Thus, if the insect or bird that assists in the fertilisation of the vanilla could be introduced into and would live in India, the growers of that plant would be relieved of much trouble, and it might be thoroughly naturalised. Judging from my experience, it would be useless to attempt the acclimature of the scarlet-runner bean in Chontales unless the humble-bee were also introduced.