slices and drying it, or by making it into flour. Ripe bananas were always used for the process, peeled and then sliced lengthwise, dried first by oven heat, and then by the sun. Packed in boxes in a wrapping of dried leaves, they were thus exported. In this form they retained their sun-sweetness and were sugary and flavorful.
Banana flour is still made in the same fashion as in ancient days: from unripe bananas scalded in hot water to facilitate their peeling, sliced and dried, pulverized, sifted, and then packed in moisture-proof containers. Green fruit is best for the process, harvested before the starch has had a chance to convert to sugar. In the old method banana flour was packed into boxes or barrels lined with paper. It is still yellowish of color, sweetly agreeable to the taste. It combines readily with water, eggs, milk, or any sort of broth but will not mold into bread, though it is pleasant for sweet biscuits and cakes.
THE BREADFRUIT TREE
Of all the truly indigenous trees of Guam, perhaps the breadfruit was the most important food staple of the islanders outside of the coconut and rice. Today it would hardly be called an important food staple, although it is used in the remote southern portions of the island as an ancient delicacy on festive, religious, and family occasions. Now it is more admired for its really magnificent shape, its handsome leaves, and the beauty of its melon-like fruit than for its basic usefulness.
There are two main types of breadfruit on Guam: the seedless variety (lemae) and the seeded type (dugdug). The lemae must be propagated by hand and thus grows only in accessible and generally cultivated regions, around homes and in the towns and villages of the island, and its sterility has given rise to the anthropological argument that the tree must certainly have been brought to Guam by the aboriginal settlers when they migrated from Malaysia.
The fruit of the tree, when yellow-ripe, has the consistency and taste of newly baked bread and sweet potato. Although its flavor is not wholly attractive at first sampling, a taste for it can be acquired. In Guam the breadfruit was cooked in the traditional Pacific island fashion, by means of heated stones placed in the ground, with layers of hot stones and leaves alternating with breadfruit, then the whole of this covered over with earth or more stones and allowed to steam until cooked. Even today it is baked in this manner, although the method most popular with early voyagers and the colonial Spanish was to boil or bake it in ovens, or to fry it like sliced potatoes. The Guamanian ovens used in the 19th century were Mexican in origin, their design having been brought by Mexican soldiers who were introduced to assist in one of the periodic "reductions" of the native populace. By the use of this oven the Chamorros eventually devised a long-lasting staple from the shortlived breadfruit by cutting 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
