Coconut E-Book

Robin Laurance

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Coconuts have been around for longer than Homo sapiens; they have been turned into art, taken part in religious rituals and been a sign of wealth and success. They have saved lives, not only by providing nourishment, but also as part of the charcoal filers in First World War gas masks. It was coconuts that triggered the mutiny on the Bounty, and coconuts that saved the life of the man who went on to become the 35th President of the United States. The coconut has long been the unseen player in the endeavours of industrialists and bomb makers, physicians and silversmiths, smugglers and snake charmers. To this day, coconuts shape the lives of people around the world. At a time when coconut products crowd the shelves of supermarkets, health food shops and beauty salons, Robin Laurance looks beyond the oils and health drinks to uncover the unexpected, often surprising, and vital roles played by the coconut palm and its nut in times past and present.

Leseprobe

For Aileen

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Robin Laurance, 2019

The right of Robin Laurance to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9273 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1Sex and Mutiny

Chapter 2Adventures in the South Pacific

Chapter 3Clean Living and a Taste of Paradise

Chapter 4The Coconut Goes to War

Chapter 5In Sickness and in Health

Chapter 6Dark Arts, Black Magic and Fair Games

Chapter 7Coconuts and the Arts

Chapter 8For God and Country

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

PROLOGUE

Imagine, if you will, a baronial hall with a huge open fire, burning logs from the estate. The logs crackle and spit onto the flagstone hearth. Deep leather armchairs and a couple of settees piled with cushions invite a pleasant dalliance – an invitation enhanced by the goblets and decanters of red wine that line the dark, Jacobean sideboard with its finely turned legs.

Let not your imagination be constrained by the passage of time, as into this convivial environment comes an unlikely collection of men and women, from times past and times present, who seemingly have little in common. Yet within minutes they are engrossed in each other’s stories and the conversations sparkle in company with the energy of the open fire.

Here is William Hesketh Lever (Lord Leverhulme) the Bolton-born soap king of post-industrialised Britain. Next to him is a diminutive Vietnamese monk of uncertain age known to his followers as Dao Dua. Here too is William Wilson, a Scot aka Edward Price, who made candles for Buckingham Palace. Joining them comes Louis Fieser who had been an organic chemist at Harvard University where, with a degree of soul-searching, he invented napalm. Then comes the bearded German nudist August Engelhardt who as it happens studied physics rather than chemistry. He still has the look of a bohemian student about him, but in deference to his fellow guests, is wearing clothes. Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, is wearing shoes which she will have selected carefully and laboriously for the occasion: she had 1,600 pairs to choose from.

You may be tempted to avert your gaze from the disgraced man handcuffed to a prison warder. But examine this man without flinching: his story is shameful – but rather extraordinary. And if you don’t recognise Captain William Bligh from The Bounty, no matter. What matters is that there was something about the 1789 mutiny on his ship you don’t know, and he will certainly want you to know. He will have a satisfied-looking auctioneer from Christie’s in tow. The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire will be espousing the merits of the British legal system to all the other Anglophiles in the room. From China come the white-gloved drivers of Shanghai’s electric buses.

A cluster of devout Hindus from Kerala in southern India will indulge in quiet exchanges with Catholic farmers from the Philippines. Silversmiths from Antwerp and Augsburg will discuss their trade. A young John F. Kennedy in his naval lieutenant’s uniform will be recalling his adventures in the South Seas during the Second World War. William Procter and James Gamble will turn up if their steamship makes it across the Atlantic, and Robert Pearce will speed through the Channel Tunnel from southern France where the world’s largest experimental fusion reactor is under construction. Two friends, the sons of Errol Flynn and John Steinbeck, will reminisce about the Vietnam War.

The portly bespectacled French chemist Michel Chevreul, whose name is inscribed on the Eiffel Tower (together with those of France’s seventy-two other leading scientists) will be recalling his life’s story spanning 101 years – for anyone who will listen. And two horses without legs will clip-clop towards any hand offering sugar lumps. There will be many others too, but you will have no trouble in hearing above the general chatter what it is that these men and women have in common. And the goblets on that Jacobean sideboard provide the answer if doubts remain.

The wine goblets are fashioned from coconuts, and coconuts are what these people have in common. Coconuts have shaped the lives of some of them, while the others have used coconuts to shape profoundly the lives of others. No plant, nor any group of plants, has had a part in so many and such diverse areas of human activity as the venerable coconut. The current craze for coconut-based health foods and beauty products is just the latest manifestation of this remarkable plant’s contribution to the lives of Homo sapiens. And doubtless in fifty years from now it will have become indispensable in those areas of human enquiry so far blind to the coconut’s seemingly endless potential to be the answer.

1

SEX AND MUTINY

To botanists the coconut palm is the Cocos nucifera, a member of the Arecaceae or palm family. And the seed (or fruit) is strictly not a nut but a drupe, a fleshy fruit in the same family as the cherry and plum. Cocos probably comes from coco, the Spanish and Portuguese word for grinning face apparent in the face-like markings at the base of the hairy nut. Coconuts have been around longer than Homo sapiens, but where exactly the coconut palm began life is still a matter of conjecture amongst botanists and historians. The oldest coconut fossils, found in Gujarat, India’s most westerly state, date back to the Eocene period some 37 million years ago – a period when dormice, hedgehogs and rhinoceroses, orchids and delicate lilies were already in evidence.

Writings in Sanskrit refer to coconut oils being used in Ayurvedic medicine 3,500 years ago. Coconuts appear again in the Hindu epic story of Shri Rama written in the Sanskrit language a thousand years later and known as the Ramayana. And the Arabic folk tales of One Thousand and One Nights include the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, whose crew throw stones at monkeys who retaliate by throwing down coconuts – which the sailors promptly sell to finance their next voyage. (Monkeys, mostly pig-tailed macaques, are trained today throughout southeast Asia to assist with the coconut harvest, proving at least twice as efficient as their human counterparts at tossing the nuts to the ground, but troubling animal rights campaigners as they do so.)

The Song of Solomon, that celebration of love and sex which appears in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible and in the last section of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, likens the woman’s body to the coconut palm: ‘How beautiful and how delightful you are, My love, with all your charms! Your stature is like a palm tree. And your breasts are like its clusters.’

Seafaring Arab traders likely carried coconuts from India to East Africa as long as 2,000 years ago. These mariners encountered coconuts as they traded with their Indian counterparts who sailed small, nimble dhows made from coconut-wood planking lashed together with coconut fibre (coir). The dhow was adopted by Arab merchant mariners themselves, and the boats continue to be used today, but made with modern materials. By the sixth century, these Arab merchants had brought the coconut to Egypt from East Africa. The celebrated Venetian merchants found coconuts lining the shores of the eastern tropics. In his 24-year exploration of Asia at the end of the thirteenth century Marco Polo came across coconuts first in India. He referred to them often in his diaries, The Travels of Marco Polo, writings that were to prove an inspiration for his fellow Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Seemingly mindful of the arrival of coconuts in Egypt, Polo called his coconuts Pharaoh’s Nut and reckoned each one was a meal in itself ‘both meat and drink’, he wrote.

During the Middle Ages when Kublai Khan was founding his Yuan dynasty in China and Genghis Khan his empire in Mongolia, coconuts were a prized rarity in Europe, encouraging nobles and leading churchmen to have them formed into cups mounted on gold or silver legs. Walter Kirkham had one. He had been elected Bishop of Durham in preference to King Henry III’s half-brother Aymer de Valence. (Despite being an illiterate secularist, de Valence was already the Bishop of Winchester.) Kirkham, who became instrumental in the foundation of Balliol College at Oxford University, bequeathed his fine coconut goblet to his niece Isabella a year before he died in 1230, but what happened to the cup thereafter is a mystery. (Oxford’s New College has a rare coconut cup decorated with a flowering hawthorn motif in silver. Oriel College has another. There are six altogether at Oxford and more in the colleges at Cambridge University and a particularly fine one at Harvard.)

Coconuts on Hawaii. (Photograph by Brother Gabriel Bertram Bellinghausen via Wikimedia Commons)

Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, found coconuts on the east coast of Africa and the west coast of India and brought them to the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century. Coconuts continue to flourish there today. Da Gama’s fellow countryman Ferdinand Magellan, encountered coconuts during his first circumnavigation of the globe in 1521 when, reduced to the point of starvation, he and his crew went ashore on the island of Guam. There they fed on coconuts and took plenty back on board. Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian nobleman travelling with Magellan and documenting the voyage, wrote, ‘As we have bread, wine, oil, and vinegar, so they get all these things from [coconut] trees … With two of these palm trees, a whole family of ten can sustain itself.’

Francis Drake found the Cape Verde coconuts a century later, and considering them a rarity, recorded the find in his journal:

Amongst other things we found here a kind of fruit called Cocos, which because it is not commonly knowen with us in England, I thought good to make some description of it. The tree beareth no leaves nor branches, but at the very top the fruit groweth in clusters, hard at the top of the stemme of the tree, as big as severall fruite as a mans head: but having taken off the uttermost barke, which you shall find to bee very full of strings or sinowes, as I may terme them, you shall come to a hard shell which may holde a quantitie in liquor a pint commonly, or some a quart, and some lesse: within that shell of the thichnesse of halfe an inch good, you shall have a kinde of hard substance and very white, no lesse good and sweete then almonds: within that againe a certaine clear liquor, which being drunke, you shall not onely finde it very delicate and sweete, but most comfortable and cordiall.

The rarity value of the coconut was soon to pass. Sailors and adventurers took note of Marco Polo’s observation that the nuts provided both food and water and started adding the nuts to their provisions for longer journeys. When the holds of the great sailing ships were full, coconuts were piled on the decks. The value of the young coconut lay in its ability to keep its water fresh and its meat edible for months on end. Polynesian, Asian and Arab seafarers had long used coconuts as reserve rations. In the Philippines an edict issued by Spain’s Governor General Hurtado de Corcuera ordered each native to plant 200 coconut trees primarily to satisfy the thirst of the Galleon Trade’s seafarers – generations of men who risked their lives operating the trade route between Mexico and the Philippines which began in 1565. Without coconuts, the exploration of our planet would likely have proceeded at a more tentative pace.

While the coconut proved an invaluable aid to the early merchant explorers, the nut did some travelling of its own. Coconuts float and not only do they float but their husk and tough shell can protect the seed for months. Carried on ocean currents and later on the ships of those early South Seas explorers, coconuts travelled the southern hemisphere, depositing their seed on beaches and shore lines from the South Pacific to the Indian sub-continent and on to South America.

The French Enlightenment philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, referred on one occasion to the ease with which coconuts took root in a variety of locations comparing this to the transplanting of one nation’s laws and virtues to another. Describing the English as ‘an unaccountable nation fond of their liberty’, he observed how English laws were, in his words, on the side of humanity whereas French laws were against humanity. ‘Why can’t the laws that guarantee British liberties be adapted elsewhere?’ he asked. ‘There is no reason why coconuts should not flourish everywhere (which is not quite true) so let’s start planting them now.’

When the direction of ocean currents failed to ensure dispersal, accidents with silver linings did the job. A Spanish brig, the 175-ton Providencia with a cargo of coconuts harvested in Jamaica, foundered soon after leaving Cuba on its way to Spain. Early on 9 January 1878 it finally ran aground on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, scattering its cargo along the Sunshine State’s shore line. Local residents rushed to the beach: ‘I was greeted by the mate of the vessel, with a bottle of wine and a box of cigars, as a sort of olive branch,’ wrote Will Lanehart, one of the men on the beach. ‘There were 20,000 coconuts, and they seemed like a godsend to the people. For several weeks, everyone was eating coconuts and drinking wine.’ Within a decade, the area was filled with palm trees and became known as Palm Beach.

As long as the palm can enjoy sandy soil, daytime temperatures above 25°C, high humidity, lots of rain and plenty of sunlight it can live for 100 years. Thriving on the ocean’s edge, it has learnt to lean towards the water to absorb reflected light in addition to the direct light from the sun above. A young palm will start to produce fruit when it is five years old and as it reaches its prime of life will produce seventy-five fruits a year. (The palm itself can survive in less than ideal conditions but is very unlikely to bear fruit.) The centre of the young nut contains the coconut water, not to be confused with coconut milk which is made from the coconut flesh by grating it and soaking it in hot water. The coconut cream rises to the top and can be skimmed off. The remaining liquid is squeezed through a cheesecloth to extract a white liquid that is coconut milk.

The Providencia aground off the Florida coast.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the coconut was already widely dispersed. It had sustained countless explorers, saved the lives of many, appeared in a variety of sacred texts and graced the mantle shelves of bishops, princes and the wealthy burghers of central Europe. The nut had been used to make drinking cups while the palm fronds had been used to provide roofing and baskets, and the coir – the husk of the nut – had been woven into rope and rigging for ships.

A cross-section through a coconut.

But this unsung hero of the plant kingdom had so far stepped only lightly on the human stage. In time, its footprint would stretch from the sandy tropical beaches of the South Seas to Britain’s industrial heartland; to the bomb makers and chocolate makers of America; to Europe’s goldsmiths and silversmiths; to the Hindus in India; to nuclear scientists in France; to smugglers from Mexico to London and onto supermarket shelves from Barcelona to Birmingham in Alabama. And it would be an unlikely catalyst for events that became firmly lodged in the annals of history.

One such event unravelled in the 1780s in the seas of the South Pacific. Those seafarers who had found salvation in the coconut persuaded ships’ captains to carry coconuts as a matter of course. William Bligh, the stocky, blue-eyed, hot-tempered master of the three-masted Royal Naval vessel HMS Bounty, was one to take notice, carrying large reserves of coconuts wherever he went. His 1787 mission was no exception. Sanctioned by a still sane King George III, Bligh was to collect breadfruits from Tahiti in the South Pacific and transport them to the West Indies to provide cheap food for slaves. Bligh, an experienced sailor who had been the chief navigator on James Cook’s third and final voyage on HMS Resolution, had set sail with a crew of forty-four Royal Navy seamen and two civilian botanists. Fletcher Christian, the 23-year-old son of a wealthy Cumbrian attorney was on board as the master’s mate – one of two unpaid ‘young gentlemen sailors’. Mr Christian, it turned out, was to have ideas above his station.

Having left Deptford on 15 October 1787, five months to the day after the first criminals to be shipped to Australia left Portsmouth (there were 736 of them in eleven ships), the Bounty almost immediately ran into bad weather and failed to reach Spithead until 4 November where it waited for final orders. Cautious officers at the Admiralty finally gave Bligh the go-ahead at the end of the month, but once again unfavourable winds trapped him in the Solent until two days before Christmas. Come the new year, they were at last on their way. Conditions on board were not as comfortable as they might have been. The great cabin had been converted into a giant hothouse for hundreds of potted breadfruit plants that were to be transported from Tahiti for re-planting in the Caribbean. This led to serious overcrowding below decks. Nevertheless, the journey began well enough with the irascible Bligh establishing particularly warm relations with his master’s mate Fletcher Christian.

Bligh was a disciplinarian especially when it came to matters of hygiene and diet. The ship had to be kept spotless and the food prepared and served with the utmost attention paid to all-round cleanliness. The two cooks, Thomas Hall and his assistant William Muspratt, responded to their captain’s demands in good spirit, and the able seamen who took it in turn to clean the ship tackled their tasks with subordinate good grace. But all was not well above decks. John Fryer, the sailing master and Bligh’s second in command resented, not unreasonably, Fletcher Christian’s promotion to the rank of acting lieutenant and with it the role of the captain’s number two. Then as the Bounty neared Cape Horn it ran into more bad weather. Storms drove the ship back time and time again, and after two weeks of gale-force winds, hail and sleet the crew were exhausted. Bligh admitted that the sea had beaten them and ordered a change of course that would take them to the Cape of Good Hope. Here they spent just over a month working on necessary repairs and re-provisioning before setting out across the Indian Ocean for Tasmania where the Bounty moored in Adventure Bay, a sweeping sheltered anchorage on the north-east corner of Tasmania’s Bruny Island.

It was here that further signs of discord between Bligh and his men became evident with matters becoming worse on the final leg of the trip to Tahiti. John Fryer, whose nose had been put out of joint by Bligh’s favoured treatment of Fletcher Christian, refused to sign the ship’s accounts unless his captain provided a written appraisal of Fryer’s overall competence on the journey so far. On top of that, the incompetence of the ship’s surgeon, Thomas Huggan, who had been drunk for most of the trip, led to the death of James Valentine, one of the able seamen, and to a further decline in morale.

Once in Tahiti with the gathering of the breadfruit underway, spirits lifted and the Bounty’s crew enjoyed themselves ashore with the island’s women. During the five-month stay, eighteen officers and crew contracted and were treated for venereal disease. Discipline began to falter. Fletcher Christian was amongst the officers harangued by Bligh for misdemeanours both real and imagined. Floggings became common. The potting and loading of the breadfruit took on a new urgency. After nearly twenty hedonistic weeks in their Polynesian paradise, it was time for the Bounty’s crew to make ready for the long journey to the Caribbean.

During the first two weeks of the voyage, tensions began to mount. Bligh would fly into rages not infrequently directing his wrath at Fletcher Christian. By the time they reached Tonga to replenish food and water supplies for the last time, the Bounty was not a happy ship. Christian led the party ashore to collect water but was constantly harassed by the islanders against whom they were unable to defend themselves because Bligh refused to let them carry arms. When the party returned to the ship with considerably less water than was necessary, Bligh tore at Christian calling him ‘a damned cowardly rascal’.

Christian also took the flak for the loss of a small anchor which had been stolen by a group of unfriendly locals. By the time they set sail, Christian was angry and resentful. What happened next was to determine the fate of the Bounty’s mission. In addition to the ship’s supply of coconuts, Captain Bligh had stashed away a private supply of his own, hiding them behind two of the ship’s cannons. But his supply had mysteriously diminished in number, and Bligh pointed the finger at Christian, punishing the whole crew by cancelling their rum ration and halving their daily food allowance. It was the last straw. Christian, apparently in tears, sought refuge in his cabin. He did not brood for long. At about 5.15 a.m. on the morning of 28 April, Fletcher Christian went below, distributed arms to his companions and made for Bligh’s cabin.

Bligh recorded events as they unfurled:

Just before sun-rising, Mr. Christian, with the master at arms, gunner’s mate, and Thomas Burket, seaman, came into my cabin while I was asleep, and seizing me, tied my hands with a cord behind my back, and threatened me with instant death, if I spoke or made the least noise: I, however, called so loud as to alarm everyone; but they had already secured the officers who were not of their party, by placing sentinels at their doors. There were three men at my cabin door, besides the four within; Christian had only a cutlass in his hand, the others had muskets and bayonets. I was hauled out of bed, and forced on deck in my shirt, suffering great pain from the tightness with which they had tied my hands.

I demanded the reason of such violence, but received no other answer than threats of instant death, if I did not hold my tongue. The boatswain was now ordered to hoist the launch out, with a threat, if he did not do it instantly, to take care of himself.

The boat being out, Mr. Hayward and Mr. Hallet, midshipmen, and Mr. Samuel, were ordered into it; upon which I demanded the cause of such an order, and endeavoured to persuade some one (sic) to a sense of duty; but it was to no effect: ‘Hold your tongue, Sir, or you are dead this instant,’ was constantly repeated to me.

I continued my endeavours to turn the tide of affairs, when Christian changed the cutlass he had in his hand for a bayonet, that was brought to him, and, holding me with a strong grip by the cord that tied my hands, he with many oaths threatened to kill me immediately if I would not be quiet: the villains round me had their pieces cocked and bayonets fixed. Particular people were now called on to go into the boat, and were hurried over the side: whence I concluded that with these people I was to be set adrift.

I therefore made another effort to bring about a change, but with no other effect than to be threatened with having my brains blown out.

With Bligh and eighteen men in the launch it settled dangerously low in the water. The nearest land was the island of Tofua about 35 miles to the north. Five hours after the mutineers first entered Bligh’s cabin, Fletcher Christian ordered the rope holding the launch to the ship be cut. (See p.2 of colour section.)

A few pieces of pork were then thrown to us, and some cloaths [sic], also the cutlasses I have already mentioned; and it was now that the armourer and carpenters called out to me to remember that they had no hand in the transaction. After having undergone a great deal of ridicule, and been kept some time to make sport for these unfeeling wretches, we were at length cast adrift in the open ocean.

The 23ft launch with no cabin was overcrowded, under supplied and had just two masts for sails and just two pairs of oars.

On board the Bounty, Christian threw all the breadfruit plants overboard and turned the ship towards the island of Tubuai some 520 miles south of Tahiti. They arrived a month later to a hostile reception and changed course for Tahiti. The Bounty was provisioned and with thirty Tahitians on board, headed back to Tubuai where they struggled to establish a community. Bligh meanwhile was putting his considerable navigating skills to good effect. Having reached Tofua and met natives who grew more aggressive by the day, Bligh decided their best option was to sail for Timor – a mere 4,000 miles to the west. As the launch pulled away from the shore, an angry mob caught hold of the stern rope and tried to prevent them from leaving.

Quartermaster John Norton jumped into the water to cut the rope free. He was immediately set upon, dragged out of the water and stoned to death while Bligh and his men, desperate for their own lives, escaped into deep water. But they were badly shaken and fearful of what lay ahead. And they had good reason. The 4,000-mile voyage met with wild storms and mountainous seas. Bligh endeavoured to keep up morale while the wet, wind, cold and strict rationing sapped the crew’s strength.

‘At night,’ wrote Bligh in his journal, ‘I served a cocoa-nut to each person for supper.’ As the voyage progressed, the coconuts had to stretch a lot further: ‘Our supper, breakfast, and dinner, consisted of a quarter of a pint of cocoa-nut [sic] milk, and the meat, which did not exceed two ounces.’

Yet within four of the toughest weeks imaginable with the small open launch tossed mercilessly and relentlessly by ruthless seas, and with a crew badly under-nourished and desperately short of sleep, Bligh had steered the battered launch through a gap in the coral of the Great Barrier Reef to the safety of a calm lagoon. The men, shattered and sickly but thankful to be alive, feasted on oysters and fruit. But fresh food and the opportunity to rest did not prevent tensions once again coming to the surface and Bligh argued bitterly with William Purcell, the Bounty’s carpenter. But Timor was still more than a thousand miles away and after three days in the lagoon, Bligh and his men headed out into the open sea again to face some of the harshest conditions of the whole voyage. Battered by huge seas and soaked to the skin, many of the men in the launch were near collapse when on 12 June, the coast of Timor came into view. Two days later with a crude union flag flying from the masthead, they sailed into the harbour at Coupang (now Kupang in West Timor), their epic voyage at an end.

From Coupang, Bligh and his party sailed to Batatvia (now the Indonesian capital Jakarta) and thence by commercial vessel back to England. Six of the men who had survived the terrible conditions at sea were in poor health, were terribly weak and did not make it home. Bligh was court-martialled for the loss of the Bounty, acquitted, promoted to the rank of post-captain, and given command of HMS Providence. With an escort vessel, Bligh and the Providence were despatched to Tahiti to fulfil the breadfruit mission the Bounty had failed to complete. The voyage was without incident. But the slaves in the West Indies did not like the breadfruit and refused to eat them.

A frigate was despatched to find the Bounty and arrest the mutineers. Fourteen of them were rounded up on Tahiti. At a court martial on board HMS Duke in Portsmouth six of them were found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to death. Of these, two received royal pardons and a third was given a stay of execution. Able seamen Thomas Burkett, Thomas Ellison and John Millward were hung from the yardarm of a guard ship in Portsmouth Harbour. Coconuts, greed and the cruel sea had taken a heavy toll. Yet Bligh was promoted to vice-admiral. He retired, and in 1817 died at the age of 63.

In 2002, almost 200 years after Bligh’s death, the National Maritime Museum paid £71,700 for the coconut shell used by Bligh as a drinking cup during the epic forty-one-day journey to Timor from Tofua in the Bounty’s launch. The world’s most expensive piece of coconut, it bears his initials and the words ‘the cup I eat my miserable allowance out of’.

Christian meanwhile had sailed the Bounty to the Pitcairn Islands where it was broken up and, when all the useful pieces of timber had been collected for use in buildings on the island, set ablaze. The mutineers settled into a comfortable life until the Tahitians grew tired of the way the sailors were treating their women. In a series of well-planned attacks, Fletcher Christian and four of his comrades were murdered.

The fifty or so people who inhabit Pitcairn today – most of them direct descendants of the mutineers – lead a simple life as Seventh Day Adventists, having been converted by a visiting American missionary at the end of the nineteenth century. But just as the original community nearly destroyed itself fighting over sexual access to a dozen Polynesian women, so in 2004 the island was in the grip of a sex scandal. Seven men appearing before a New Zealand judge (appointed by the British government) were accused of molesting young girls on the island. The defendants argued that sex between young girls and much older men was all part of the island’s culture, a claim supported by older women who said they needed the sex as much as the men did. But pleas of a culture having supported the men’s behaviour over the centuries failed to move the judge. Six of the accused were found guilty and sent to prison. (One of the islanders, Tania Christian, 26, has long maintained that the prosecutions were part of a British plot to dismantle the community on Pitcairn and save the British taxpayers’ money.)

A study of island records confirmed anecdotal evidence that most girls bore their first child between the ages of 12 and 15. Mothers and grandmothers were resigned to the situation, saying their own childhood experience had been the same; they regarded it as just a part of life on Pitcairn. One grandmother wondered what all the fuss was about. Not surprisingly the incestuous nastiness of the attacks (given Pitcairn’s gene pool, it is inevitable that many of the victims and perpetrators were related) shocked the outside world. A community founded over two hundred years ago on psychological violence seemed unable to cast off its bullying past.

Nobody wants to move to Pitcairn these days. The population on Britain’s smallest colony has been dwindling for years, and there are now fewer than fifty islanders left and locals are struggling to find new settlers. Only one application has been received to move to the island, even though the government provides all immigrants with a plot to build their own house and temperatures stay above 62°F (17°C) all year round.

Matters were made worse in 2016 when Michael Warren, a former Pitcairn mayor, was found guilty of downloading scores of hardcore child abuse images and films featuring children as young as 6. The legacy of trouble and violence sparked by a mutiny over stolen coconuts lives on. With just forty-two ageing islanders who busy themselves on the land, and make souvenirs for occasional tourists, the future for this tiny British outpost in the South Pacific, about halfway between Chile and New Zealand, looks a little bleak.

Across the South Pacific, coconuts had been sustaining a trade route that had its beginnings in the 1560s and which paved the way for globalisation. By the time Captain Bligh had lost the Bounty to Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers, trading galleons had been plying the ocean between Manila and Acapulco in New Spain for more than two hundred years. Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, a Basque seaman, colonial administrator and trusted lieutenant of Spain’s Philip II (after whom the Philippines were named) was the first to cover the 9,000 miles from Acapulco to Manila during 1565 and in so doing to claim the Philippines for his king. Under orders from Luis de Vasco, the viceroy of New Spain, he made the journey in three months, arriving nearly half a decade after Magellan’s unsuccessful Spice Islands adventures. He secured the Philippines for Spain and established a trade route across the Pacific that was to last 250 years. Sustained by coconuts – water from the younger green nuts, meat from the older mature ones and caulking made with coconut husk – the crews of the Manila galleon trade criss-crossed the Pacific between the Philippine capital and New Spain, carrying precious cargos of silks, silver, spices, ivory and diamonds. The passengers were a mixed bunch: Chinese traders, Spanish priests, Filipino labourers, nuns, merchants, condemned prisoners and colonial administrators. Food was scarce, conditions cramped and insanitary, and diseases of various sorts a constant companion. When passengers had to share space below deck with livestock, the journey became insufferable. The passengers were seasick, had animal urine and faeces to contend with, the smell was nauseating, and sleep came only with exhaustion.

The westerly journey was the easier of the two as the galleons sailed more or less due west on a line between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, their sails filling with the northeast trade winds while the helmsman held a steady course that took good advantage of the north Equatorial current.

Map of the Manila Galleon Trade.

Silver was the most valuable of the cargos and there was plenty of it. Just twenty years before Legazpi’s maiden voyage, huge deposits of the precious element had been found in the foothills of the Cerro Rico mountains in what is now Bolivia. Popular legend suggests an Inca searching for an escaped llama stopped to build a fire at the foot of a peak known as ‘Potosi’.

The fire grew so hot that the very earth beneath it started to melt releasing a shiny liquid that ran in little rivulets across the parched earth. In April of 1545, the Spanish colonisers began work on a huge settlement at the foot of the mountains and began excavations in earnest. African slaves were imported to bolster the local labour force and mines began to take shape along the foothills for mile after mile. News of the find spread quickly and the colonial government had to impose licences for travel to the region. But this did not deter Spaniards determined to make their fortune from getting to Potosi by fair means or foul. Many took jobs on merchant ships heading for south America, and jumped ship when they docked. A trader at the time wrote: ‘In every port where merchant vessels put down anchor, they jump ship and leave behind their duties and occupations, absenting themselves in anticipation of the liberties and uncertain riches of Potosi and the other mining centres.’

The warnings of uncertainties were well founded. The mines became home to thousands of rootless people forced to work under appalling conditions. The work was dangerous, causing numerous fatal accidents while hundreds more suffered silicosis pneumonia. To increase productivity, Francisco de Toledo, Peru’s fifth viceroy who had taken charge of mining operations, issued a public order act requiring all African slaves over the age of 18 to work in shifts of twelve hours. But rather than coming to the surface at the end of a shift, the miners were to remain underground where they would work, eat and sleep for four months at a time. The death toll began to rise not least from the miners’ contact with mercury in the smelting mills. By the end of nearly three centuries of colonial mining hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in the pursuit of the riches that had for so long lain hidden under the Andes.

For the mariners of the Manila galleons, sailing back in the other direction was more of a challenge and took much longer. It was Legazpi’s pilot Fray Andres de Urdaneta who discovered the Kuroshio current. It took him north towards Japan where an easterly current and westerly winds took him on to Guam and then to the north of Hawaii and on to California where he turned south and followed the coast down to Acapulco. But the beginning of the voyage was particularly hazardous as the galleons had to negotiate dozens of tiny islands and their coral reefs in unpredictable and often violent winds. Many ships were wrecked soon after leaving port. More floundered in storms, while others were becalmed as disease and starvation decimated the crews. The Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, under its inexperienced 22-year-old master, who happened to be the nephew of Manila’s governor general, lost its way and was caught in a storm that broke its mast. Out of control, the ship was hurled onto a coral reef off the Mariana islands. Most of the 400 passengers and crew perished while its cargo of treasures was thrown into the sea. The site of the wreck is now overlooked by a golf course. Shards of Ming dynasty porcelain can still be found along the coastline. By contrast, the San José was found drifting off the Mexican coast more than a year after it left Manila. Every one of the passengers and crew had died either of starvation or disease. Rotting corpses, bundles of silk, spices, porcelain – much of it still in one piece – languished in what had become a ghost ship, its hull creaking as it swayed in the gentle swell.

The galleons were built at a shipyard in Manila Bay. Tropical hardwoods such as lauan, dangan and teak – and they were very hard – formed the decking and the hull. So tough were the hulls that pirate ships, including those of the British Navy, found their cannons did little damage. The shipwrights made the galleons’ rigging – the sheets for the sails, the halyards, the shrouds – from the woven husk of coconuts and made the all-important caulking from a combination of husk and pili nut oil. Native and Chinese craftsmen meticulously worked the caulking into every seam between the planks and then sailed with the ships to manage the inevitable leaks: they hardly had a moment’s rest.