COCOA-PLANTATIONS. 
291 
Rea), alone Lave tlie property of the cocoa-tree: that of 
temg watered equally well with fresh and salt water. This cir- 
cumstance is favourable to their migrations ; and if the sugar- 
cane of the sea-sliore yield a syrup that is a little brackish, 
^ believed at the same time to be better fitted for the 
distillation ot spirit than the juice produced from the canes 
in inland situations. 
lhe cocoa-tree, in the other parts of America, is in 
general . cultivated^ around farm-houses, and the fruit is 
eaten; in the gulf of Cariaco, it forms extensive planta- 
tions. In a fertile and moist ground, the tree begins to 
bear fruit abundantly in the fourth year; but in dry soils it 
bears only at the expiration of ten ‘years. The duration of 
the tree does not in general exceed eighty or a hundred 
years; and its mean height at that age is from seventy to 
eighty feet. This rapid growth is so much the more rernark- 
, e , a 3 other palm-trees, for instance, the moriclic * and the 
palm oi Sombrero, f the longevity of which is very great, fre- 
quently do not attain a greater height than fourteen or eighteen 
leet in the space of sixty years. In the first thirty or forty 
> ears, a cocoa-tree of the gulf of Cariaco bears every luna- 
11011 a cluster of ten or fourteen nuts, all of which, however, 
do not ripen. It may be reckoned that, on an average, a 
tree produces annually a hundred nuts, which yield eight 
fiascos % of oil. In Provence, an olive-tree thirty years old 
yields twenty pounds, or seven fiascos of oil, so that it pro- 
duces something less than a cocoa-tree. There are in the 
gulf of Cariaco plantations (haciendas) of eight or nine 
thousand cocoa-trees. They resemble, in their picturesque 
appearance, those fine plantations of date-trees near Elclie, 
in Murcia, where, over the superficies of one square lean-iic 1 
there may be_ found upwards of 70,000 palms. The cocoa- 
tree bears fruit in abundance till it is thirty or forty years old; 
after that age the produce diminishes, and a trunk' a hundred 
years old, without being altogether barren, yields very little, 
in the town of Cumana there is prepared a great quantity of 
cocoa-nut oil, which is limpid, without smell, and very fit for 
uriimg. I lie trade in this oil is not less active than that 
on the coast of Africa for palm-oil, which is obtained from tlm 
* Mauri tia flexuosa. + Curypha tectorum. 
4 One fiasco contains 70 or 80 cubic inches, Paris measure. 
17 2 
