About Two Leagues Up These Rivers There Are Several
Indian Villages, Who Furnish The Spanish Ships Which Come Here With
Cocoa-Nuts, Plantains, Bananas, And Other Kinds Of Fruit.
The cocoa-tree is generally from fifty to an hundred feet high, and
for the most part straight and slender.
The leaves are four fathoms, or
four and a half long, at the very top of the tree, and serve excellently
for thatching houses. At the bottom of the leaves the cocoa nuts grow in
clusters of ten, fifteen, or twenty, hanging by a small string which is
full of joints. Each nut, with its outer rind, is larger than a man's
head, and within this outer rind is a hard woody shell which will hold
near a quart of liquid. The nut or kernel lines the inside of this
shell, and within this kernel is about a pint and half of pure clear
water, very cool, sweet, and pleasant. The kernel also is very good and
pleasant; but when old, we scrape it all down, and soak it in about a
quart of fresh water for three or four hours, which is then strained,
and has both the colour and taste of milk, and will even throw up a
thick head not unlike cream. This milk, when boiled with rice, is
accounted very wholesome and nourishing by the doctors, and was given to
our sick men. When the nut is very old, the kernel of itself turns to
oil, which is often used to fry with, but mostly for burning in lamps.
The outer end of the nuts may be applied to the purposes of flax, and of
it the natives make a kind of linen, and it is also manufactured into
ropes and cables, which are sold in most parts of America and the West
Indies.
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