CULTIVATED AND WILD 



ELETTARIA 



CARDAMOM UM 



History 



hut 



will In- 



practically 



ti\ at.xl. 



i ..:.. PI am, 





M ili/ i-.- ir 



i . ir i mam. 



during his t im>< ; on the contrary, he says the cardamom is not sown nor planted, 

 up after the forest is burned down. He then tells us of there being 

 on tin- mountains, thirty mil.-s inland inun <'o<-hm and Calicut. It, 

 below that Garcia de Orta, a century before Rheede's time, made 

 same observation except that he regarded the cardamom tut cul- 

 doscribes one of his plants as having round white fruits, 

 with longer but less valual>l fruits, and the third pointed fruits, the least 

 \ alu.d of all. It is thus quite possible that the two forms, the small round fruit 

 and th elongated fruit, were both known to Bontius, as also to Rheede. Sonnerat, 

 a .-in in -y later, gives two admirable plates, one being undoubtedly the Malabar 

 cardamom, and he speaks of its fruit as a round capsule with three angles or 

 edges lengthwise, having many parallel nerves and divided within into three 

 .-. impart monts, each with several black seeds. The Ghats (or coast mountains) 

 of Malabar take the name, he adds, of " The Mountains of the Cardamom," 

 from the abundance there of the plant, which grows wild and supplies the car- 

 damoms of all the Indies. Farther on Sonnerat (Voy. Ind. Or., 279) discusses 

 ii>r cardamom (under the name of Amomum angustifolium) a plant which 

 he says is wild in the island of Madagascar. It grows on marshy soils, and its 

 cultivation has been undertaken in Mauritius. It has a reddish capsule, oval- 

 oblong, almost triangular. He does not describe nor figure it as winged, like the 

 " bungali elachi" the greater cardamom of the Calcutta shops (see p. 66) 

 though it is doubtless another of the many large fruits of which i. m-i , immn of 

 Java, the nutmeg cardamom of the Arabs (Pharmacog. Ind., iii., 436) and of the 

 Bombay shops, as also the prickly cardamom of Tavoy .1. j-nntiiuiiii-n are cardamom 

 cardamom substitutes that have been all at times designated Greater Cardamoms. Substitutes. 

 \Cf. Kew Mus. Guide, ii., 9.] 



History. It is hardly necessary to attempt to furnish a detailed account History, 

 of the early history of the Cardamom. Garcia de Orta was the first European 

 who studied the plant practically in India (1563, Coll., xiii.). He speaks of two Q &t da. de Orta's 

 kinds major and minor, furnishes an accurate series of Indian and Ceylon Account, 

 vernacular names, and mentions that the Arabs knew the two forms and had 

 separate names for them. It is highly unlikely that the Nepal greater cardamom 

 was carried to the west coast of India to be traded in by the Arabs at the time 

 of Garcia's residence there, and it is certainly not so traded in to-day. Far more 

 likely is it, therefore, that he alluded to the large and small fruited forms of 

 i :i ft tnrin, above described. But there are many surprises for the student of this 

 subject, in Garcia's brief account. He says it was cultivated. Both varieties 

 are found in India, chiefly in Calicut as far as Kananor and other parts of Malabar 

 and in Java. An especially large kind, but less aromatic, was produced in Ceylon 

 and carried to Hormuz and Arabia. This was doubtless the uar. majr above 

 discussed a plant also said to be indigenous to Ceylon. But it is significant 

 that Garcia, after apparently a personal study of the plant and of the fruit, should 

 have arrived at the emphatic opinion that the eldttari or elachi of India was 

 the cardamom of the Greeks, whatever that may have been (see Capsicum, p. 264). 

 He says that the descriptions given by Galen, Dioscorides and Pliny do not 

 agree with the Indian cardamom. Bontius, while agreeing that Pliny was wrong, B ,. 

 takes exception, however, to Garcia's statement that it is cultivated and bears 

 the fruits on the top like peas. In Java, Bontius says it is produced abundantly 

 and its fruits are formed near the ground while the greater cardamom produces 

 its fruits above. In this view Bontius and Garcia were practically followed by 

 Clusius and the two Bauhins. Until the appearance of Rheede's account Rheede. 

 (approximately 100 years afterwards), the plant could not, however, be said 

 to have been fully known in Europe. It is surprising that errors committed 

 by Commelin (Fl. Malab., 1696, 18), Burmann (Thes. Zeyl., 1737, 54) and 

 Linnaeus (Fl. Zeyl., 1747, 2) should have continued to disfigure the literature 

 of the subject, during the succeeding century or so, until Maton and White esta- 

 blished the genus Kivtin <. 



\Cf. The Bower Manuscript (Hoernle, transl.), 1893-7, 80, 85, etc. ; Januensis, 

 Liber Serapionis, 1473, 61 ; Ruellius, De Nat. Stirp., 1537, 48 ; Amatus, on Dio- 

 corides, 1554, 12-4 ; Baber, Memoirs, 1519 (no mention) ; Ain-i-Akbari, 1590 

 (Blochmann, transl.), 64; Acosta, Tract, de las Drogas, etc., 1578, 383; Linschoten, 

 Voy. E. Ind. (ed. Hakl. Soc.), 1598, ii., 86-8 ; Clusius, Hist. Exot. PI., 1605, 

 185-6; Foster, E.I.C. Letters, 1901, iii., 108; v., 236 ; Jacobus Bontiua, Hist. 

 Nat. et Med. Ind. Or., 1629, in Piso, Ind. Utri. re Nat. et Med., 1658, 126-7) ; 

 Tavernier, Travels Ind., 1676 (ed.,. Ball), 1889, i., 184; ii., 12-3; Rheede, 



513 



33 



