Well, I did.

But first, let's see what Antonio Pigafetta had to say about coconuts, 500 years ago. 

Pigafetta's account of coconuts was one of the first to be read in the Western world.

"In March 1521, after escaping the thieves in the place they christened Ladrones Island (Guam, much the same now as it was then), they (Guam, much the same now as it was then), they (Magellan & his scurvy crew) sailed toward Samar and anchored on an island south of Samar called Suluan. 

Magellan ordered tents set up by the beach. While they were resting there and fetching fresh water, a boat with nine men on board arrived. Magellan offered food and drink to the men who were ornately dressed and later presented some fabulous (to him) gifts to what he presumed were heathen primitive natives. The gifts consisted of red caps, mirrors, combs, bells and other trinkets. In return, the men gave Magellan fish, a jar (earthenware

or perhaps even Oriental ceramic vessel) with palm wine they called “vraca” and bananas

which Pigafetta, who was seeing them for the first time, described as "figs more than a foot long." (Probably the local variety of cooking plantains - tinduk). They were also given smaller better-tasting bananas and two coconuts.

Due to the language barrier, the men spoke in sign language and made it understood that they would return in four days with rice, other types of food, and, again, coconuts. So Pigafetta describes the coconut and its uses in great detail:

"...Just as we have bread, wine, oil and vinegar in their several kinds, these people have the aforesaid things which come only from the palm trees. Wine is obtained from these in the following manner. They make an aperture into the heart of the tree at its top which is called palmito, from which is distilled along the tree a liquor like white must, which is sweet with a touch of greenness. Then they take canes as thick as a man's leg, by which they draw off this liquor, fastening them to the tree from the evening until next morning, and from morning to the evening so that the said liquor comes little by little".

"This tree bears a fruit named cocho*, which is as large as the head, and its first husk is green and two fingers thick, in which are found certain fibers of which those people make the ropes by which they bind their boats. Under this husk is another, very hard and thicker than that of a nut. The second husk they burn and make of it a powder that is useful to them. And under said husk there is a white marrow of a finger's thickness, which they eat fresh with meat and fish, as we do bread, and it has the flavor of an almond, and if it were dried it would make bread. 

(Poor Pigafetta had had no fresh-baked bread for about a year).

From the center of this marrow there flows a water which is clear and sweet and very refreshing, and when it stands and settles it congeals and becomes like an apple. And when they wish to make oil, they take this fruit called cocho and put it in the sun and let said marrow putrefy and ferment in the water, then they boil it, and it becomes oil like butter.

When they wish to make vinegar, they let the water of the said cocho ferment and put it in the sun, which turns it into vinegar like white wine. From the said fruit milk can also be made, as we proved by experience. For we scraped the marrow, then mixed it with its own water, and being passed through a cloth it became like goat's milk. This kind of palm is like the palm tree that bears dates, but not so knotty. And two of these trees will sustain a family of ten persons."

Ambeth Ocampo - Philippine Inquirer

Pigafetta calls the nut cocho - this doesn't sound like the 'coco' (Spanish) = 'monkey' often given as the origin of 'coconut'.  (Magellan was Portuguese and Pigafetta a Venetian). Perhaps in the local Suluan/Samar dialect, the word really was 'kotcho'.  Or perhaps, being an Italian, Pigafetta was just used to the hard 'ch'.  

Similaly 'vraca' wine doesn't sound at all like the modern 'tuba' - I suspect that word came from Mexico - the Spanish were masters in denigrating the 'Indios' of the Philippines (who looked exactly like the Aztecs and Incas they'd previously decimated with the help of the Great God, smallpox) and positive pedagogues in imposing their own language. To this day, Filipinos count ordinary things in their own dialects, but 'alien' things, like cash, dates, times, and so on, in Spanish.

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The inner nut, (7cm x 4.5 cm) while not so large as a domesticated nut (11x12)  has about the same thickness (about 1cm) of flesh, but much less water - (23cc flesh in wild coconut,  93cc in domesticated* - quadrupled). But the water/air volume goes up from 9cc to 105cc - 12x

Were nuts human-selected primarily for water-carrying capacity? Fresh coconut water, with its own insulation, tastes cooler, sweeter, purer, and fresher by far than a glass or plastic bottle of Coke, after a sun-drenched trip by boat or on foot.

Or did people select the biggest ones as water tanks, ballast, buoyancy aids, fire material, and food reserves on long raft or boat trips?

The husks are about the same length (20cm) as a domesticated coconut, with a distinctive 'waist' so they don't seem to have been 'selected for longer fibre length' as recently suggested - but perhaps that writer saw a 'wild-looking' nut on a truly Oceanic island where such a selection might have been very useful.

The top end is proportionately more fibre-packed (and swollen) than a domesticated nut. 

Surprise, surprise - this helps it float germinating end up. It's a perfect natural buoy, and if it wasn't so damned edible, would probably still be used for that. A naval architect (perhaps He was one) could not have done better:

• The centre of gravity is low down, and has its own sub-buoyancy control (air & water)

• The whole thing is (almost) water-tight, but the top of the inner nut and and the top of the husk have weak points to allow leaf sprouts and roots relatively easy exit routes. The one we cut open already has a tiny germination point, and 'vertical' striations on the husk suggest that it is just about to split open and sprout.

• When it lands, the nut falls over - the roots have only 5cm to reach ground, instead of 5+20 if it stayed upright.

• It also rolls - back down the beach, into the water - until the highest wave from the highest tide pitches it up onto almost safe dry land. The husk has a definitely triangular cross-section, but more 'rounded', without the definite 'keels' that many domesticated nuts have.

I don't know if these are the niu kafa type of nut suggested by Hugh Harries as 'the ancestral, naturally-

evolved, wild-type coconut, disseminated by floating'

but I don't think he could have a more convincing model to show his theory, even if he made it himself.

Wild coconuts, Layaaw, are plentiful in the mangroves. They only grow very near the sea. Nobody bothers with them very much. Which leads to a host of questions:

• Did they arrive by sea and not make it very far inland?

• Exactly how far can coconuts make it inland without human help?

• Have ancient natural groves been cut down years ago for new model coconuts?

• Presumably, if they grow slower, the wood is tougher - were they at all valued for timber? 
  (Coco lumber is about all that is left now for building here).

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Or are they maybe just pathologically weakened domestic coconuts ?

Wild Nuts and Sick Nuts

Since I first wrote this, I have been seeing 'wild' coconuts everywhere. One was even left behind after the owner harvested the nuts from my rented garden. But these are genuinely sick nuts - ones that, for one reason or another, have not developed because of a lack of water - these are the buang nuts - the crazy ones. 

My neighbours are well aware of the quite different wild coconuts (they call them layaaw or payaw) and tell me they are frequent in mangrove areas.

Finding Wild Coconuts doesn't sound like much of a discovery, but it has important implications for the history of mankind. 

• If wild coconuts are here now (and nobody deliberately planted them in the swamp) then they've been here for a very, very long time. 

Siargao Island might well be the ancestral home of all coconuts.

• It's almost as if  an archaeologist, stumbling around a swamp, came across a living ancestor of mankind - a little skinnier, and not quite as presentable, but recognizably human, just as the wild Layaaw is recognizably coconut.

• Coconuts have been floating across oceans and to and from islands like mine for millenia, if not for several million years.

• Humans have also been here for a very long time (in the Philippines' Northern Luzon (Cagayan Valley) for about 700,000 years, and in Java, just a wee bit south, for about 1.8 million years.

• So coconuts and humans have had a very long time to get acquainted. 

• Just suppose (or Just So ?) Ms* Homo erectus, out foraging while her husband 'hunted' big game (stegodon elephants in the Philippines in those days, but only tarsiers and tree shrews now) picked up just one extra fat, large wild coconut, got fed up with waiting for dear hubby (out with the lads again) and left it for later - just there.
  *I am not all sure of the status of marriage that far BC,  and I hate political correctness,  so I use what I understand is the term for 'common-law' wives, or  even multiple or sequential ones.

• The long story of the 'domestication' of the coconut - one of the most miraculously providing fruits in the world - might well have started at just that moment.

• If the good Ms H. erectus found some of these, a new batch every month, and a hatchling on the ground under the tree, she may well have put two and two together and made five. Behold the very beginnings of agriculture!

• Did she have enough sense for that, being only, in (H sapiens) terms, a half-wit ? 

• Steven Mithen ('The Prehistory of the Mind' - Thames & Hudson 1996) doesn't seem to think so - but then he once suggested that the classical bifacial handaxes, made for over a million years by Homo erectus and his successors were really phallic symbols made by displaying males, while the women made the practical tools, as usual. He is just about to publish a new book, claiming 'Neanderthal voices were loud, womanly and probably highly melodic....They must have been able to communicate complex ideas and even spirituality'.  Presumably they sang in the bath, like many semi-aquatic mammals. I would humbly suggest they weren't communicating complex ideas and spirituality at all, but sitting around half-sozzled and singing the Neanderthal version of 'My Way'.

• He is also a 'classical' palaeoanthropologist who still believes apes came out of the forests onto the wide-open savannah, where they gambolled in the sunshine, stole meat from lions, jackals, hyaenas, and vultures (or their truly horrendous ancestors) and, just so, became the human beings we all love today. 

• Mr & Ms H. erectus (and later human species strandloping along the coasts of the Indian Ocean over the next 2 million years) had no idea they were supposed to press on East and discover America. 

• So, just as many of them were coming back and forth the other way. It takes no more than a moment's calculation to show that coconuts could easily have been subconsciously selected for larger size and fleshiness, and transmitted by humans back West to India and Africa somewhat quickly. Perhaps in less than the 10,000 years it has taken us to develop from the very beginnings of classical grass agriculture to the complexities and insanities of agricultural subsidies and monoculture crops 'designed' to survive the death and destruction of all around them by vicious herbicides.

• Could Ms H erectus' finding of the first coconut be the real origin of the story of Eden, and the reason why only some of Ms H.e's descendants still live in paradise, while most of them just exist in places like Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Cairo, with not a coconut to be seen ?

Furthermore, I don't think wild coconuts are all that rare in the Philippines - during idle chatter with a 'professional' lady of my acquaintance, she told me that her grandparents' graves in Toledo, South Cebu, had a pair growing above them.

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