But This Was The Only Instance Of Native
Thrift Which Ever Came Under My Observation.
For, in all my rambles
over Tahiti and Imeeo, nothing so much struck me as the comparative
scarcity of these trees in many places where they ought to abound.
Entire valleys, like Martair, of inexhaustible fertility are
abandoned to all the rankness of untamed vegetation.
Alluvial flats
bordering the sea, and watered by streams from the mountains, are
over-grown with a wild, scrub guava-bush, introduced by foreigners,
and which spreads with such fatal rapidity that the natives, standing
still while it grows, anticipate its covering the entire island. Even
tracts of clear land, which, with so little pains, might be made to
wave with orchards, lie wholly neglected.
When I considered their unequalled soil and climate, thus
unaccountably slighted, I often turned in amazement upon the natives
about Papeetee; some of whom all but starve in their gardens run to
waste. Upon other islands which I have visited, of similar fertility,
and wholly unreclaimed from their first-discovered condition, no
spectacle of this sort was presented.
The high estimation in which many of their fruit-trees are held by the
Tahitians and Imeeose - their beauty in the landscape - their manifold
uses, and the facility with which they are propagated, are
considerations which render the remissness alluded to still more
unaccountable. The cocoa-palm is as an example; a tree by far the
most important production of Nature in the Tropics. To the
Polynesians it is emphatically the Tree of Life; transcending even
the bread-fruit in the multifarious uses to which it is applied.
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