it into slices after it was thoroughly baked in the Mexican ovens and then drying these slices thoroughly in the sun or in the ovens. Slices dried like this will last from one breadfruit season to another, and the Chamorros often put aside supplies such as this until refrigeration made this precaution against famine unnecessary.
Breadfruit's fine ripe yellow fruit and large green leaves make it a handsome dooryard tree, but though the lemae may grow to a sizeable height, it is not very hardy. The wood, in fact, is rather brittle in texture and is susceptible to typhoon damage. Often trees are snapped completely in half, as happened in the case of one in our front garden during the 1949 hurricane; its upper half was carried off into the air and probably dropped in the sea by the wind's force. However, from the lower half of the trunk a new umbrella of foliage grew up in about a year and made a second canopy of graceful, filigreed leaves to shade our porch.
The breadfruit was once of great economic value to the native. A kind of tapa cloth similar to the Tahitian fibrecloth (made from the paper mulberry, which is not grown on Guam) was fashioned from the fibrous inner bark of young trees or branches. A lumpy glue and crude calking material was also obtained, much in the manner of rubber-tree milking, from the viscid milky juice (latex) which flows from the incised trunk. Bark cloth is no longer made even for decorative reasons, and it is interesting to recall that during the eleven years after the Spanish discovery of the island (and before the Jesuit "occupation"), when no ship visited Guam, there was such a scarcity of woven fabrics for women's undergarments that they were fashioned from the bark of the breadfruit tree, as they had been in aboriginal times.
The breadfruit's latex has also been employed for the mixing of paint and as a sizing for whitewash. In aboriginal paint, the blacks and reds commented on by early explorers and used on native outriggers were a red ferruginous earth and a kind of lampblack. The latter was made by burning coconut shells, and the former of earth scooped from the northern plateau's cliff deposits of iron.
Fruit from the dugdug (the variety of breadfruit used for other purposes than food) is quite inferior to that of the lemae, and smaller. The fruit is not frequently eaten, but its seeds (nangka) are rich in oil. Sometimes they are boiled or roasted, having the taste of chestnuts, and are much enjoyed by the natives.
Leaves and bark of the breadfruit are a favorite forage for cattle, and young trees therefore must be protected. In dry seasons during scarce pasture the large glossy dark-green leaves are often gathered and fed to livestock, and today, being as little harvested as it is, the fruit is often so abundant that it will support a whole ranch of cattle, horses, and pigs.
Dampier was introduced to breadfruit and found it sweet and pleasant, and explained that "the Natives of this Island use it for Bread; they gather it when full grown, whilst it is green and hard: then they bake it in an oven, which scorcheth the rind and makes it black; but they scrape off the outside black crust, and there remains a tender thin crust, and the inside is soft, tender and white, like the crumb of a Penny Loaf. There is neither seed nor stone in the inside, but all is of a pure substance like Bread. This fruit lasts in season 8 months in the year, during which time the Natives eat no other sort of food of Bread kind. I did never see of this Fruit anywhere but here. The Natives told us, that there is plenty of this Fruit growing on the rest of the Ladrone Islands; and I did never hear of any of it anywhere else."
OTHER FOOD STAPLES
Rice and maize are both cultivated at the present time, though only rice was grown on the island before Magellan. It is among the products mentioned by Pigafetta (1521), by Legazpi (1565), and by Oliver van Noort of the Nassau Fleet expedition (1600).
According to early accounts it was cultivated in many spots on the island by natives who sold it to visiting ships in mat bags weighing 70 to 80 pounds. The practical Dutch complained that the natives were dishonest in their dealings, for not one parcel of rice bought from them was without false stone weights hidden in the bulk of the rice and not discovered until the ships were at sea. The product, however, was considered excellent. Today, rice is cultivated in the traditional Filipino manner. It is a common sight in the southern end of the island to see rice fields being plowed with the classic wooden, iron-pointed instrument, drawn by a plodding grey carabao.
The aboriginals had three kinds of rice: red (agaga), coarse-grained (basto), and a fine fragrant variety brought from the island of Rota by the Spanish and called palay aromático. According to one of the principal rice-growers, Don Antonio Martinez, at the time of the 1898 occupation, rice was formerly cultivated both in and near the flooded natural marshes of the island, and also on dry land. Now what little cultivation there is is entirely in controlled wet areas.
Maize was introduced with success from Mexico by the Spaniards, and also the sweet potato, although the yam was already widely cultivated by the natives as a food staple. Coffee and cocoa were also Spanish introductions, and even today some families maintain their single coffee and chocolate trees adjacent to the family dwelling. No tea seems to have been cultivated in Guam, although in recent times both the Chinese and English types of tea have come into popular use, served hot and iced.
NARCOTIC PLANTS
In aboriginal times, without the occasional beneficence of distilled liquors, wines, or tobacco, the natives of the Pacific islands discovered, probably because they had need of it, the areca palm and the betel pepper vine. The native Chamorros were forced to cultivate the pepper vine, growing it about their homes and villages, while the areca palm grew wild. This palm, which was introduced in prehistoric times and not considered indigenous, was originally planted for the sake of its aromatic seeds, more commonly known as betel nuts. The tree has a tall trunk, slender and ringed, and its white flowers are fragrant. The fruit is an orange-colored nut about the size of a pullet's egg, with a fibrous outer husk and similar in flavor and consistency to nutmeg. It grows in pendant bunches below dark green leaves. The tree thrives in damp forest regions, along the margins of running streams, and for this reason, although the use of betel nut is still prevalent among modern Guamanians, the nut must now be sought considerably inland, thereby becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain.
For eating, the nut is divided in sections and a portion of it wrapped in a fresh pepper-vine leaf, together with a pinch of quicklime. The quicklime imparts a red bloodlike color to the saliva, so that, while chewing, the lips and teeth appear to be smeared with blood. In time this action turns the teeth completely black and will generally destroy the enamel and cause extensive decay. A packet made up for chewing is called a mamao, which has become a subject of Chamorro song.
Besides its social use, the betel nut's active principle is arecaine, a powerful agent for destroying tapeworms. As powerful as nicotine, in its pure state, one half a grain of arecaine would kill a small animal and would be highly dangerous to a human being. Its native dosage as a vermifuge is a teaspoon of freshly grated kernel. Throughout the Malay archipelago the nut has always been of considerable commercial importance, and one wonders if the diversion of its use from a pure medicine to a pleasurable social instrument among island people was not the secondary discovery of its efficacy in aboriginal times.
CONSTRUCTION PLANTS
Materials are abundantly at hand for the building of huts. Stands made of the chopag tree still exist—an excellent, hard, fine-grained and durable wood formerly used as posts and beams in all the finest native huts. Pandanus leaves are available for lashings, and the omnipresent nipa palm, hardly used in modern times except in the southern villages for storehouse construction, is at hand near the mouths of all the island streams for thatching material.
The nipa palm was at one time the cause for many communal get-togethers among the islanders. Natives would gather at the homesite of a friend and assist in the thatching. A pig might be slaughtered and roasted, betel-pepper and areca nuts were passed around, homemade cigars were lit, even bamboo jugs of tuba were dispensed—and the work of finishing a house festively went forward to completion in a very short time.
IFILWOOD
Before the import of wood from the west coast of the United States, the ifilwood tree was Guam's most important timber tree. The heartwood is prodigiously heavy, hard, and not elastic. It is termite-resistant, and such a blessing in the tropics could hardly escape use as fence and house foundation posts, or as furniture.