The Island of the Colorblind

[which] I gained from maps, in grade-school geography books, and a wonderful book, read at an early age, titled Australia and the Islands of the Sea, I gravitated toward islands at my first opportunity. This was a Sierra Club visit to Santa Cruz Island, off the California coast. The vision of [its] beauty…has never left me.

During the Second World War, he worked in the tropical jungles of Colombia in search of cinchona bark to provide quinine for combat troops in malarial areas and helped to export nine thousand tons of the bark. After the war, he devoted himself to the islands of Micronesia, cataloguing minutely their plant life and studying the effects of human development and the introduction of alien species upon the vulnerable habitats of islands with their native flora and fauna.

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Botanists now recognize more than two hundred cycad species and eleven genera – the newest genus, Chigua, was discovered in Colombia in 1990 by Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden.

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Cycas revoluta is sometimes called the sago palm (or king sago), and C. circinalis the false sago palm (or queen sago). The word ‘sago’ is itself a generic one, referring to an edible starchy material obtained from any plant source. Sago proper, so to speak (such as English children in my generation were brought up on), is obtained from the trunks of various palms (especially Metroxylon ), but it also occurs in the stems of cycads, even though they are botanically quite different. The male trunks of C. revoluta contain about fifty percent starch, the female ones about half this. There is also a good deal of starch in their seeds – and the seeds, of course, are replenishable, whereas harvesting of the trunk kills the entire plant.

Similar considerations apply to ‘arrowroot,’ which, properly speaking, is obtained from the rootstock of the arrowroot, Maranta, but is also extracted from other plants, including the cycad Zamia. The Seminole Indians in Florida had long made use of the Zamia (or koonti) which grew wild there, and in the 1880s a substantial industry was set up, producing twenty tons or more of ‘Florida arrowroot’ annually, for use in infant foods, biscuits, chocolates, and spaghetti. The industry closed down in the 1920s, after overharvesting the cycad almost to extinction.

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The consumption of this sake prepared from C. revoluta, David Jones remarks,

…is almost as deadly as a game of Russian roulette, since it is slightly poisonous and occasionally a potent batch kills all who partake.

It would go well, one feels, with a meal of puffer fish, or fugu.

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Georg Rumpf (known to posterity as Rumphius), already a passionate naturalist and botanist in his twenties, enlisted with the Dutch East India Company and set sail for Batavia and the Moluccas in 1652. In the following decade he travelled widely in Southeast Asia, spending much time on the Malabar coast of India, where in 1658 he documented a new plant – this was the first cycad ever described, and the one which Linnaeus, a century later, was to call Cycas circinalis, and to take as the cardinal ‘type’ of all cycads. A few years later, Rumphius was appointed assistant to the Dutch governor of Ambon, in the Moluccas, where he embarked on his magnum opus, the Herbarium Amboinensis, describing 1,200 species of plants peculiar to Southeast Asia.

Though stricken by blindness in 1670, he continued his work, helped now by sighted assistants. H.C.D. de Wit, in a 1952 address on Rumphius at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam (on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Rumphius’ death) described in detail his labors on the Herbarium, which were to take forty years and were punctuated by a relentless series of travails, including the death of his wife and daughter: