y all, but especially
persons of rank, occasionally regaled themselves on pigs, fowls, and
turtle. But bread-fruit, taro, yams, bananas, and coco-nuts formed the
staff of life in Samoa. As the soil is very rich and the hot, damp
climate is eminently favourable to the growth of vegetation, food was
always abundant, and the natives could procure the necessaries and even
the luxuries of life at the cost of very little labour; if they tilled
the soil, it was rather to vary their diet than to wring a scanty
subsistence from a niggardly nature. Coco-nut palms, bread-fruit and
chestnut trees, and wild yams, bananas, and plantains abound throughout
the islands, and require little attention to make them yield an ample
crop. For about half the year the Samoans have a plentiful supply of
food from the bread-fruit trees: during the other half they depend
principally upon their taro plantations. While the bread-fruit is in
season, every family lays up a quantity of the ripe fruit in a pit lined
with leaves and covered with stones. The fruit soon ferments and forms a
soft mass, which emits a very vile smell every time the pit is opened.
In this state it may be kept for years, for the older and more rotten
the fruit is, the better the natives like it. They bake it, with the
juice of the coco-nut, into flat cakes, which are eaten when the ripe
fruit is out of season or when taro is scarce. For taro is on the whole
the staple food of the Samoans; it grows all the year round. The water
of the coco-nut furnishes a cool, delicious, slightly effervescing
beverage, which is peculiarly welcome to the hot and weary wayfarer far
from any spring or rivulet.[39]

[39] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 147; W. T. Pritchard,
_Polynesian Reminiscences_ (London, 1866), pp. 126-128;
Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa,"
_Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 87 _sq._; G. Turner,
_Samoa_, pp. 105-107; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 53-55; G.
Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 130 _sqq._ According
to Dr. Brown, there are generally three crops of bread-fruit in
the year, one of them lasting about three months.

To obtain land for cultivation the Samoans went into the forest and cut
down the brushwood and creeping vines with small hatchets or large
knives. The large forest-trees they destroyed by chopping away the bark
in a circle round the trunk and then kindling a fire of brushwood at the
foot