32 Vegetable Materials for Cordage^ ^c. 



out,") then "served," and finally covered v^^ith the Indian dubbing 

 called dammer. Thus protected, rigging will last for years. Euro- 

 pean and American ships hire coir cables when in an Indian port, to 

 save their own. The article (coir) constitutes a grand staple of In- 

 dia, the value of which is considerable. 



4, Agave Americana. — While I was engaged in examining a coil of 

 Manilla rope, in the course of my inquiries about that article, my at- 

 tention was drawn to another parcel of glossy white cordage, which 

 I was informed by tlie ship chandler, had been made ixom Sisal 

 hemp, and was much used. Of the vegetable producing it, and the 

 reason of the specific name attached to the raw material, he knew as 

 little, as respecting the Manilla hemp, which he had been working 

 up for several years. But by continued inquiry, I heard of the 

 merchant who first introduced the article into Philadelphia, and from 

 him I learnt, that having been told by a mariner of the rope made 

 from the prepared fibre in Yucatan, he imported a cargo of it in the 

 year 1825, from Sisal, referring me to my old acquaintance Capt. 

 ■Patrick Hayes, for further information, he having attended to the pro- 

 cess of preparing the article for sale in Yucatan, and seen the plants in 

 the open lot before the Pennsylvania hospital ! Upon visiting that insti- 

 tution with Capt. H., and entering the green house, he pointed out the 

 plant, which I immediately recognised as the well known Agave Amer- 

 icana — that eminently useful plant to the people of the countries in 

 which it is native, and whose distant periods of flowering when remov- 

 ed therefrom, have given rise to a popular error, which will require ages 

 to remove.* According to my informant, the preparation is extreme- 

 ly simple. By means of two sharp corners made by hollowing out 

 the ends of a wooden tool like a flat ruler, the fleshy leaves are slit 

 into two or three longitudinal strips, and the pulpy substance being 

 scraped off, the fibrous material appears, which is then shaken loose, 

 lied in a knot, and when dried in the sun, is put up in bales for ex- 



* I allude to the idle sfory of the plant (the popular name of which is the Ameri- 

 can aloe) flowering only once in an hundred years. — In Mexico they flower every 

 ten years, according to Bullock, p. 282. In the year 1804, an Agave flowered at the 

 Woodlands, the seat of the late Wm. Hamilton, which grew from a sucker of one 

 that flourished thirty six years before, (1778) at Springetsbury, (Bush-Hill) both 

 near Philadelphia. 



