I82 



THE BREADFRUIT. II.* 



By Henry E. Baum. 



{Continued from the Bullet 171 for July.) 



The breadfruit is a common tree in the Malay Archipelago, 

 having its original home, according to De Candolle, in the Sunda 

 Islands, the group having Sumatra at its western end and Timor 

 at its eastern, or in the Moluccas, which lie to the northeast of 

 this group. The sterile variety is to be found side by side with 

 the seeded in this labyrinth of islands, and the tree has been re- 

 ported by Rumphius as growing wild on some of the Sunda 

 Islands. The seedless variety was, however, carried to the Pacific 

 Islands at an early date, and when the first Europeans made their 

 way into the South Sea it was found under cultivation on all the 

 islands from the Malay Archipelago to the Marquesas group and 

 from the Low Archipelago in the southern hemisphere to the Ha- 

 waiian Islands in the northern. The open-boat journeys of the 

 Polynesians in their peopling of the Pacific islands are marvelous 

 from the point of view of seamanship alone, but become even 

 more wonderful when the record of their agricultural introductions 

 is considered. Probably a hundred species of plants were intro- 

 duced into Hawaii by the Polynesians, and as a majority of their 

 principal food-producing plants were propagated by cuttings alone, 

 the difficulty in successfully carrying them across a wide expanse 

 of ocean in open boats is obvious. 



The tree has at present, however, a cosmopolitan distribution in 

 the tropics as the result of the introductions and care of civilized 

 man, although it does not flourish equally in all parts of the warm 

 portions of the earth. 



As an indication of the distribution of the breadfruit in former 

 times may be mentioned the records of its occurrence in the geo- 

 logical formations of Greenland and of its discovery near Denver, 

 Colorado, while a third instance has been reported from California. 



HISTORY. 

 While the home of the breadfruit in the Asiatic islands has 

 never been seriously questioned, and the fact of its extensive pre- 

 Magellanic distribution among the islands of the Pacific is un- 

 doubted, nevertheless it seems pardonable to briefly trace the 

 growth of knowledge regarding this vegetable curiosity among 

 Europeans. 



The breadfruit was in all probability seen by the Portuguese 

 and Dutch pioneers in the East Indies in the early years of the 

 1 6th century. But as it was obliged to compete with the spices 

 and other marketable tropical products of the Moluccas, it did not 

 attract sufficient attention to be noticed in the published accounts 

 of their voyages. Although the fruit is supposed to be native in 

 the Sunda Islands and the Moluccas, points reached by Europeans at 



* Reprinted from The Plant World, VI., 225, Oct 1903. 



