The Island of the Colorblind

Whiting’s experience in Guam initiated an entire decade of research in which, collaborating at times with the botanist F.R. Fosberg, she made an encyclopedic investigation of cycads around the world, and their use by dozens of different cultures as foods, medicines, and poisons.[50] She undertook historical research, exhuming incidents of cycad poisoning among explorers as far back as the eighteenth century. She put together the scattered but voluminous evidence on the neurotoxic effects of cycads in various animals. Finally, in 1963, she published a detailed monograph on her work in the journal Economic Botany.

There were approximately a hundred species of cycad around the world, and nine genera,[51] she noted, and most of these had been used as sources of food, containing as they did large quantities of edible starch (sago), which could be extracted variously from the root, stem, or nut.[52] Cycads were eaten not merely, Whiting noted, as a reserve during times of shortage, but as a food with ‘a special prestige and popularity.’ They were used on Melville Island for first-fruit rites; among the Karawa in Australia for initiation ceremonies; and in Fiji, where they were a special food reserved only for the use of chiefs. The kernels were often roasted in Australia, where settlers referred to them as ‘blackfellows’ potatoes.’ Every part of the cycad had been used for food: the leaves could be eaten as tender young shoots; the seeds, when green, could be ‘boiled to edible softness; the white meat has a flavor and texture…compared to that of a roasted chestnut.’

Like Freycinet, Whiting described the lengthy process of detoxification: slicing the seeds, soaking them for days or weeks, drying and then pounding them, and, in some cultures, fermenting them too. (‘Westerners have compared the flavor of fermented cycad seeds with that of some of the best-known European cheeses.’) Stems of Encephalartos septimus had been used in parts of Africa to make a delicious cycad beer, she wrote, while the seeds of Cycas revoluta were used, in the Ryukyu Islands, to prepare a form of sake.[53] Fermented Zamia starch was regarded as a delicacy throughout the Caribbean, where it was consumed in the form of large alcoholic balls.

Every culture which uses cycads has recognized their toxic potential, and this was implied, she added, by some of the native names given to them, like ‘devil’s coconut’ and ‘ricket fern.’ In some cultures, they were deliberately used as poisons. Rumphius (the Dutch naturalist whose name is now attached to the widespread Pacific species Cycas rumphii ) recorded that in the Celebes ‘the sap from the kernels…was given to children to drink in order to kill them so that the parents would not be hampered when they went to follow their roving life in the wilderness of the forest.’[54] Other accounts, from Honduras and Costa Rica, suggested that Zamia root might be used to dispose of criminals or political enemies.

Nonetheless many cultures also regarded cycads as having healing or medicinal properties; Whiting instanced the Chamorro use of grated fresh seeds of Cycas circinalis as a poultice for tropical leg ulcers.

The use of cycads as food had been independently discovered in many cultures; and each had devised their own ways of detoxifying them. There had been, of course, innumerable individual accidents, especially among explorers and their crews without this cultural knowledge. Members of Cook’s crew became violently ill after eating unprepared cycad seeds at the Endeavour River in Australia, and in 1788 members of the La Perouse expedition became ill after merely nibbling the seeds of Macroza-mia communis at Botany Bay – the attractive, fleshy sarcotesta of these are loaded with toxic macrozamin.[55] But there had never been, Whiting thought, a cultural accident, where an entire culture had hurt itself by cycad eating.