and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society, 



465 



PLANTING NOTES FROM PORTU- 

 GUESE WEST AFRIGA. 



BY LIEUT.-COL. J. A. WYLLIE, p.b.g.s. 



(Concluded from page 376, October issue.) 

 Portuguese W. Africa Enemies of Cacao. 

 III. 



St. Thome, Portuguese West Africa, 1st 

 August, 1909. 



Enemies of Cacao. 



Dear Sir,— My letter of the 28th ultimo will 

 have given you some idea of the difficulties the 

 cacao planter has to contend with. To return to 

 the cacao plant, it, too, has its enemies, in S. 

 Thome as elsewhere. A goat is a goat all the 

 world over, and in S. Thome he is just as fond 

 of the leaves and young capsules of cacao as in 

 Ceylon. But being too useful to mankind to 

 be dispensed with, on the plantations he is 

 rigorously confined to the barrack square, 

 where he is fed on the grass and leaves, brought 

 in as fodder for the cattle and mules of the 

 estate by the weeders at the close of their day's 

 work. In the centre and south of the island of 

 S. Thome\ apes are so troublesome that some 

 proprietors keep up a small corps of "chasseurs 

 d'Afrique " to make war against them. These 

 animals pluck the capsules from the trees, 

 break them with their teeth, suck the pulp 

 from the seeds, and throw the latter down .on 

 the ground. They do not confine themselves to 

 cacao. A planter told me that, some years ago, 

 when engaged in laying out 



a rubber plantation, 

 he was puzzled to account for the peculiar 

 from of mischief being daily worked upon his 

 seedlings, particularly those of Ceara rubber. 

 Setting himself to watch, he soon discovered 

 the author of the play. A monkey would deli- 

 berately take stock of the seedlings planted out, 

 begin upon a row, pull up a plant, examine it, 

 sniff at the tuberous roots, perhaps try his 

 teeth on them, then fling the plant down, with 

 a grimace of disgust too comical for words, 

 and pass on to the next, and the next, testing 

 and rejecting each in the same systematic 

 fashion. That planter is now sorry he interfered 

 with the monkey's beneficent task, for the is- 

 lands are overrun with Manihot as a weed, and 

 it is a remarkable fact that about fifty per cent, 

 of the mature trees contain little or no latex. 



Rats and mice are still more troublesome, 

 especially in the fermenting floors. But as they, 

 like the monkeys, content themselves with the 

 pulp of the bean, a certain proportion of the 

 cacao nibbled at by them is recoverable, but 

 when cleaned can only be shipped separately 

 from the rest as a lower-grade bean. War is 

 waged against them by means of fox-terriers, a 

 dog that stands the climate better than any 

 other. Snakes are very rare in the islands, and 

 the planters might do worse than import a few 

 pairs of the harmless Indian ratsnake to aid in 

 the campaign. 



white-ants, locally known as salaU, 

 are found, but not in anything like the 

 numbers or destructiveness of their Indian and 



Malayan congeners. One species (termes theo- 

 broma) has been classified as devoting itself to 

 the bark and dead wood of the cacao tree, 

 while another (a Calotermes), confines its atten- 

 tion, as in the F.M.S., to the heartwood of the 

 living tree ; with this curious difference, how- 

 ever, that while in the latter country it works 

 from the tap-root upwards, bringing the tree 

 down bodily with all its leaves green and 

 healthy, in S. Thome it works from the crown 

 downwards, killing the foliage branches down 

 to about four or five feet from the ground, 

 when the upper-half of the tree comes down 

 with a crash. The planter can generally save 

 the tree by sawing off the dead portion horizon- 

 tally and tarring the surface of the cut, leaving 

 the plant to re-form by means of stool shoots, 

 which it readily does. This method of heavy 

 pruning is also adopted to rejuvenate a treo 

 shewing signs of age in the diminution of its 

 crop, and is generally successful. 



A vegetable parasite attacking the fruit has, 

 for some time past, been causing anxiety to the 

 more thoughtful of the proprietors — so much so 

 that the Colonial Ministry at Lisbon has 

 deputed two agronomists to the islands to study 

 its nature and modus operandi. It is suspected 

 that more than one parasite must be held 

 responsible— a phytophthora causing the soft 

 black rot of the capsule and a botryodiplodia 

 following it up with a kind of dry rot of the 

 bean. But as the specialists have not com- 

 pleted their observations, it is premature to 

 speculate as to the remedy. 



a curious but very exceptional condition, 

 supposed to be due to bacterial agency, has 

 been pointed out to me. The tree is normal and 

 healthy in all respects except that its stem and 

 branches are dotted over with buds or excres- 

 cences of varying shape and size. It bears 

 abundant flowers all the year round, but never 

 produces a single fruit. The Portuguese call it 

 cacau macho or male cacao — a misnomer, of 

 course, as the flowers display the characteristics 

 of both sexes — and regard it as a freak of no 

 agricultural importance, interesting mainly for 

 its rarity. 



In S. Thome as in our own Eastern posses- 

 sions, cacao is capricious in its yield. Two crops 

 are gathered in the year, the Christmas one 

 being double or treble that of midsummer. At 

 four years of age, Chevalier records that the tree 

 may be reckoned upon as good for 6 capsules of 

 marketable bean, the annual yield rising to 45 in 

 the tenth year, 50 or 60 in the twelfth, the final 

 figure representing from J, 200 to 1,500 kilos of 

 cacao per hectare. As exceptional yields, 200, 

 300, and even 400 fruits have been recorded from 

 single trees in a single year, but M. Theo Masui, 

 a Belgian authority on tropical agriculture, who 

 visited S. Thome in 1900, estimates the average 

 annual production at from 600 to 700 kilos per 

 hectare cultivated. Official 



statistics op the area 



actually under cacao, and of the total annual 

 crop, do not exist. Mr Monteiro de Mendonca 

 has, however, placed his notes at my disposal as 

 regards the latter point. These show the total 

 average crop of the islands in recent years to be 



59 



