The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Compounding the similarities to human sexual anatomy is this palm tree’s flowers. The woody female blossoms are the size and shape of full breasts, with a moist ovule positioned precisely where you’d expect the nipple to be. The male flower, called a catkin, looks like a full-blown erection. When young, the phallic rod is about a foot long, orange and points stiffly upward. At maturity, this arm-sized tumescence becomes spangled with star-shaped yellow blossoms. The pollen from these blossoms fertilizes the female flowers. After pollination, the distended catkin wilts and sags, becoming increasingly brown and shriveled, until it falls to the forest floor with a dank damp thud. The female flowers swell into the coco-de-mer fruits.

  As mysterious as its erogenous qualities is the fruit’s history. Few even knew the island of Praslin existed until 1756, when European cartographers stumbled onto its sandy beaches. Before then, only some Arab traders, Maldeevian navigators, pirates and rogue seafarers had ever come across the Seychelles Islands, hidden away between East Africa, India and Madagascar. Although uninhabited by humans, the islands’ forests were teeming with coco-de-mers.

  Prior to the discovery of Praslin, the alluring shell was periodically found floating in the ocean like a wet dream, leading sailors to speculate that it grew underwater (hence the name coco-de-mer, or coconut of the sea). Mariners reported seeing its foliage blowing under the waves. Mermaidlike, it would instantly disappear into the depths, unless sought out by “stout not timorous, religious not superstitious, not weaklings or fools, but judicious and industrious men.”

  According to Malaysian shadow myths, it sprouted from the central whirlpool from which all life springs. Garcia de Orta, who provided the first detailed description of the fruit in 1563, suggested that it grew on a petrified underwater tree. In Magellan’s time, the coco-de-mer was believed to grow in a land called Puzzathar surrounded by maelstroms. Throughout the Middle Ages, coco-de-mers collected by sailors were sold for vast sums. In the seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II bought one for four thousand gold florins. The crowning glory of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s curiosity cabinet was a gold-mounted, coral-sprouting coco-de-mer goblet being hoisted aloft by a silver Neptune. In the Orient, any coco-de-mers found in the wild were automatically considered royal property. Potentates used the fruit in their harems, and Indian religious sects worshipped it in temple rituals.

  Before dying in Khartoum at the hands of Sudanese dervishes in 1885, British general Charles Gordon visited the Seychelles and was convinced that he’d found the Garden of Eden. In his manuscript Eden and Its Two Sacramental Trees, Gordon created frenzied diagrams attempting to prove that the coco-de-mer was the tree of knowledge of good and evil (the breadfruit being the tree of life).

  While flipping through botanical textbooks, I learn that the immature fruit contains a luscious custardlike flesh beneath its salacious exterior. Until the 1970s, distinguished visitors were sometimes honored with a taste of the coco-de-mer’s transluscent jelly, then known as the billionaire’s fruit. These days, nearly endangered, it is even harder to taste. Since the enactment of a 1978 conservation law, buying or selling a coco-de-mer without a government permit garners a five thousand rupee (eight hundred dollars) fine and two years incarceration. As a result, dozens of coco-de-mer poachers have served—and continue to serve—-jail sentences for harvesting the fruit. Lured by the thought of tasting a forbidden fruit, hoping that I am stout and judicious enough for it, I book a flight to the island of Praslin, a speck of equatorial dust somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

  PASSING THROUGH CUSTOMS at the Victoria International Airport on Mahé, the biggest island in the Seychelles, I notice a sign asking visitors to inform officials of any fruits or plants they’ve brought because they can threaten the local ecosystem. Handing them some Canadian Empire apples, my passport is stamped with the shapely outline of a coco-de-mer, the country’s official insignia. The airport is filled with Seychellois, the most exotic people imaginable: blue-eyed African princesses speaking French-inflected Creole; young mop-topped descendents of Kenyan slaves working as masseurs; tall, well-endowed Mauritian women with British accents and noses like parrots; and other miscegenated mishmashes of Chinese nomads, Spanish flâneurs, Indonesian vagabonds and Sri Lankan seekers.

  An hour later, the twelve-seater twin-engine plane to the nearby island of Praslin taxies onto the runway. A landscape bursting with craters and atolls unfolds below. Islets ringed with white sand merge into turquoise translucence as the plane flies low over waves full of leaping fish. Whirling eddies foam at the ocean’s surface, as if coco-de-mer trees disappearing into the abyss.

  Waiting for a cab outside the Praslin airport, I notice a sculpture of a ten-foot-wide coco-de-mer being spritzed by four bronze-cast fountains in the shape of male flowers. The penislike catkins are ejaculating life force onto an outsized bust of the female genital zone. The thighs, vulva and belly resemble a truncated Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf mother goddess figurine. It’s almost pornographic, yet so natural.

  The best place to view the fruits in their native habitat is the Vallée de Mai forest reserve. Driving up the steep road to the nature preserve’s entrance, I keep catching glimpses of the palms, festooned with creepers. Their trunks are fantastically tall and skinny, stretching over a hundred feet into the sky. The fruits and leaves burst out in a crown at the summit.

  It can take a couple of hours to hike through the winding footpaths, and I set off in the company of ranger Exciane Volcere, a jolly, rotund botanist in a khaki uniform. The first thing visitors notice, she says, is the forest’s messiness. The ground is strewn with dead branches, leaves, rotting palm fronds, seed husks, plant litter, termite mounds and other natural detritus.

  Volcere, who bears a resemblance to Queen Latifah, reaches into a large spiderweb connecting two coco-de-mer palms and plucks out an orange, black and purple spider whose spindly legs barely fit in her two cupped hands. Placing it on her chest, she assures me that it isn’t dangerous. It moves rapidly, like licks of flame, over her shirt. To prove its harmlessness, she places the spider on my forearm. It scampers about, surprisingly weightless given its size. It could be eyelashes kissing my skin. As she reaches to pick it back up, it squirts a load of silk at me.

  The paths are lined with other local fruiting trees. There’s a type of Pandanus that bears bristly fruits used as clothes brushes. The large spiky pod from a native spaghetti palm splits open and spills out long strands of al dente spaghetti with capers. The jellyfish tree’s stigmas resemble tentacles. The fruit of the kapisen recall the tonsured head of a monk.

  These trees are home to a number of endemic fauna: snails the size of grapefruit, rare black parrots and bronze lizards with podlike sucker pad fingers. Volcere points out a fluorescent green gecko licking nectar off a male coco-de-mer flower’s yellow anthers. Minute yellow blossoms peek out from between overlapping brown scales on the phallic inflorescence. On another nearby catkin, cell-phone-sized white slugs are also munching on blossoms. It’s like watching an educational film about venereal diseases in outer space.

  As the geckos’ tongues dart out, they flick the flowers, sending microscopic bursts of residual pollen into the air. Pollination occurs through wind dispersal, although legend has it that, at night, the trees move close together and the male and female flowers copulate noisily. Anyone unlucky enough to witness this phenomenon is, it’s said, instantly transformed into a black parrot or a coco-de-mer fruit.

  After fertilization, it takes seven years for the fruit to mature. When they are very young, the nuts are yellowish and contain a semenlike liquid. A year or so later, at their peak of edibility, the fluid gels to a puddinglike consistency. At this point, the fruit’s green outer husk has a thin golden band near the crown. If that golden band is too thick, the interior is too watery. Once this yellow ring is gone, the pinkish-white jelly congeals into a hard vegetable ivory, which lasts until the fruits reach maturity and fall to the ground.

  I as
k Volcere if it’s possible to taste one of the fruits. She says it’s strictly prohibited to taste anything in the Vallée de Mai, particularly the coco-de-mers. She does, however, allow me to pick up one of the full-sized shells that has fallen nearby.

  The fibrous green husk looks like a pumpkin-sized heart. Having cracked open upon impact, the heart-shaped box comes apart easily. It gives off a pleasant coconutty fragrance. Within this husk is the endocarp (or seed shell) that resembles the female anatomy. The largest seed in the world, coco-de-mers filled with ivory can weigh forty-five pounds. There are documented cases of fruits containing two, and even three seeds, reaching close to a hundred pounds.

  If left undisturbed, this seed becomes the beginning of a new tree. After it lands, an eerie cord starts to emerge from the fruit’s central slit. The embryonic germ of the new plant is located in the cord’s swollen tip. Called a cotyledon, this mutated umbilical cord feeds the baby plant. The cotyledon plunges into the ground, and can then travel up to sixty-five feet away. After burrowing to a spot where it won’t have to fight for root space with its parent, this heat-seeking embryonic cable then bursts out of the ground. This first shoot is protected by a pointed sheath so sharp that it can cut through an unwitting foot. Soon after, the first leaves come out, and the tree starts growing skyward.

  All that hard ivory within the seed is actually food that nourishes the plant for the first two years of its life, as it makes its way through the understory and up into the light of day. A mature coco-de-mer is a twin tank of fuel that feeds the growing plant. Once the new palm has consumed the ivory, the cord rots and crumbles away, and the empty husk just lies there, having fulfilled its biological obligations. These shells are sometimes washed into the ocean in heavy rains, and can end up floating around for years. When full of ivory, the coco-de-mers do not float, so water dispersal is not an actual means of propagating the species. Even if a full seed were to float to another island, it wouldn’t be able to reproduce because it needs a tree of the opposite sex to pollinate its flowers.

  The life span of coco-de-mer palms remains open to interpretation. Most people speculate the age to be somewhere between two hundred and four hundred years, although some suggest that they can live for eight hundred years. We haven’t been around them long enough to ascertain. Everything we know today about the Seychelles’s history has been deduced since they were discovered in the eighteenth century.

  The archipelago’s geology, notably the granite boulders jutting out of the seashore, offer insight into this area’s past. These bare rock faces, mute observers of history’s variations, have been dated at over 650 million years old, ranking these Precambrian islands among the world’s oldest. This suggests that, until 75 to 65 million years ago, the Seychelles were part of the enormous megacontinent called Gondwana that linked South America, Africa, Madagascar and India. After India started drifting away from Africa, the Seychelles broke off midway and were stranded in the ocean, where they’ve stayed till this day, full of life-forms that evolved in isolation.

  Dinosaurs became extinct around the same time the Seychelles got ditched in the Indian Ocean, leading to speculation that these fruits may have once been eaten by brontosauruses. “The coco-de-mer could have been a tasty dessert for a seventy-five-foot-high herbivore,” says Volcere, doing a lumbering dino-dance.

  People are afraid of going into the forest after dark, especially when it’s windy. Even in the daylight, the forest is a loud place, with all those immense leaves clashing against one another and those palms straining from their loads of heavy nuts in the wind. Things are constantly creaking loudly and snapping. Ancient, guttural gruntings and groanings pierce the air. It sounds like heavy oak doors being broken apart.

  I look up at all the looming coco-de-mer palms surrounding us, their enormous green hearts swaying ominously above. According to Volcere, nobody’s ever been hit on the head with a falling coco-de-mer. “But if one day it happens, they will surely stay here in paradise,” she says, laughing morbidly. “It’s a good souvenir for them, no?”

  The Seychellois have a complicated relationship with the tourism industry that both keeps this economy afloat and also threatens to destroy its ecology. I ask if Volcere’s ever spent the night in the Vallée de Mai. Yes, she says. Last night in fact.

  “Why were you here?” I ask.

  “Did you hear about the kerfuffle with the opposition party?”

  I had, earlier that morning, read in the newspaper about how the police had battered the opposition leader at a demonstration outside parliament over the right to start their own radio station. (There is only one radio station, owned and operated by the state.) As tensions mounted, the head of police pistol-whipped the opposition leader, who required twenty-six stitches to the back of his head.

  “Last night, the army was deployed to guard the Vallée de Mai because the opposition followers threatened to burn it down. I spent the night here with them.”

  “Why would they burn down the forest?”

  “Supposedly to protest the beating, but also as a way of eradicating tourism,” she says, unsure whether she should even be discussing this. Freedom of speech is still approached with uncertainty in this fledgling democracy. According to Volcere, opposition supporters say the threat of burning the forest is just a smear tactic by the government and they would never dream of destroying their arboreal heritage. An accidental 1990 forest fire in nearby Fond Ferdinand wiped out wide swaths of forest that will take hundreds of years to recover. It’s staggering to think that something so ancient and precious is also so precarious.

  THE ARE ONLY 24,457 coco-de-mer palms left. Two-thirds of them are too young to bear fruit and half are male trees. The 2005 census revealed that only 1,769 fruits actually reach maturity each year—not many when you consider that close to one hundred thousand tourists visit annually. The commerce must be regulated to ensure that coco-de-mers won’t be overharvested, says Lindsay Chong-Seng, director of the Seychelles Island Foundation, an environmental group that oversees the Vallée de Mai. “There’s a lot of poaching going on,” he explains. “Thieves even cut entire trees down to get the nuts. They take off on fishing ships in the middle of the night.”

  Although extinction concerns have classified the fruit as vulnerable on the World Conservation Union’s Red List, management efforts have been successful so far. The entire neighboring island of Curieuse, where the palm also grows, has been cordoned off as a nature reserve. The government maintains a database listing every coco-de-mer tree in the Seychelles, and it is the owners’ responsibility to submit—under penalty of law—quarterly statements about each fruit’s level of maturity.

  After the fruits fall, their ivory is extracted. The hollow shells are then issued permits and sold to tourists at licensed outlets for two hundred to a thousand dollars. Anyone attempting to export an unlicensed coco-de-mer has it confiscated and is fined. There are loopholes in the legislation, including forged permit tags and repeated use of the same tags, which are flimsy green stickers stamped with an official seal. “There should be proper certification,” says Chong-Seng, “perhaps a computerized system, or microchips.”

  New avenues of coco-de-mer conservation are also being explored, including selling fiberglass nuts to tourists. The prototypes I saw were utterly realistic and lifelike. Another idea being proposed is that rather than merely bringing home an empty shell, visitors should be offered the option of buying a mature seed full of ivory and then planting it. Once the plant grows up, there would be a plaque with the donor’s name next to the tree, and the emptied husk would be held for them until they next return. The concept reminds me of Ken Love’s Hawaiian lychee-planting project.

  I ask Chong-Seng whether there is any way to taste the fruit. Shrugging, he says there is only one legal recourse. “If I myself had a coco-de-mer palm on my property with immature fruit ready to be eaten—which I don’t—I could invite you to taste it, but I wouldn’t be allowed to sell it.” In other words, buyin
g it may be illegal, but sharing it isn’t. “If you can find someone with a tree in their backyard, all your dreams will come true,” says Chong-Seng. As we say good-bye, he gives me a tip: “Do what you’d do anywhere else—speak to the taxi drivers.”

  EATING AN IMMATURE fruit involves an ethical consideration: it will not become a new tree. Chong-Seng has assured me that isn’t necessarily a problem—none of the mature fruits sold to tourists are used to grow new trees either. The vegetable ivory that would otherwise be nourishing young plants is removed by a company called Island Scent, Ltd.

  At their small factory in Mahé, I watch employees chisel pieces of coco-de-mer flesh out of the husk. These chunks are dried and packaged, and then maintained in a temperature-controlled chamber before being shipped off to the Far East. In China and Hong Kong, coco-de-mer slices sell for 130 dollars a kilo in herbal shops alongside tiger bones, flying lizards and powdered rhinoceros tusk. The flesh serves many functions: in Malaysia, it is blended into face-whitening creams; in Pakistan, it is used as an aphrodesiac; in Indonesia, it is added to cough syrups. One Middle Eastern businessman pays Island Scent to ship loads of shells to El Paso, Texas, where they are then smuggled underground into Mexico to be inlaid with Arabic designs, motifs and letters. Called kashkuls, they are sold to homeowners and mosques in Kuwait and Iran.

  “Coco-de-mers have long been used in rituals by Persian fakirs and Indian mendicants,” explains Kantilal Jivan Shah. Kanti, as he is known, is an octogenarian Seychellois historian, and environmentalist. I’ve come to see him because he was instrumental in persuading UNESCO to designate the Vallée de Mai as a World Heritage Site. The owner of an old knickknack emporium that sells fabric by the yard, Kanti is somewhat of an authority on the fruit. “It’s used in so many bloody ways,” he tells me, his tired eyes sparkling and his smile shining with gold teeth.