palm and the betel pepper vine. The native Chamorros were forced to cultivate the pepper vine, growing it about their homes and villages, while the areca palm grew wild. This palm, which was introduced in prehistoric times and not considered indigenous, was originally planted for the sake of its aromatic seeds, more commonly known as betel nuts. The tree has a tall trunk, slender and ringed, and its white flowers are fragrant. The fruit is an orange-colored nut about the size of a pullet's egg, with a fibrous outer husk and similar in flavor and consistency to nutmeg. It grows in pendant bunches below dark green leaves. The tree thrives in damp forest regions, along the margins of running streams, and for this reason, although the use of betel nut is still prevalent among modern Guamanians, the nut must now be sought considerably inland, thereby becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain.
For eating, the nut is divided in sections and a portion of it wrapped in a fresh pepper-vine leaf, together with a pinch of quicklime. The quicklime imparts a red bloodlike color to the saliva, so that, while chewing, the lips and teeth appear to be smeared with blood. In time this action turns the teeth completely black and will generally destroy the enamel and cause extensive decay. A packet made up for chewing is called a mamao, which has become a subject of Chamorro song.
Besides its social use, the betel nut's active principle is arecaine, a powerful agent for destroying tapeworms. As powerful as nicotine, in its pure state, one half a grain of arecaine would kill a small animal and would be highly dangerous to a human being. Its native dosage as a vermifuge is a teaspoon of freshly grated kernel. Throughout the Malay archipelago the nut has always been of considerable commercial importance, and one wonders if the diversion of its use from a pure medicine to a pleasurable social instrument among island people was not the secondary discovery of its efficacy in aboriginal times.
CONSTRUCTION PLANTS
Materials are abundantly at hand for the building of huts. Stands made of the chopag tree still exist—an excellent, hard, fine-grained and durable wood formerly used as posts and beams in all the finest native huts. Pandanus leaves are available for lashings, and the omnipresent nipa palm, hardly used in modern times except in the southern villages for storehouse construction, is at hand near the mouths of all the island streams for thatching material.
The nipa palm was at one time the cause for many communal get-togethers among the islanders. Natives would gather at the homesite of a friend and assist in the thatching. A pig might be slaughtered and roasted, betel-pepper and areca nuts were passed around, homemade cigars were lit, even bamboo jugs of tuba were dispensed—and the work of finishing a house festively went forward to completion in a very short time.
IFILWOOD
Before the import of wood from the west coast of the United States, the ifilwood tree was Guam's most important timber tree. The heartwood is prodigiously heavy, hard, and not elastic. It is termite-resistant, and such a blessing in the tropics could hardly escape use as fence and house foundation posts, or as furniture. The pillars of the old Spanish church at Agaña, ruined by war, were hewn from solid ifil trunks cut near the site of the building. The wood is saffron when cut, finally turning black walnut in color. Although coarse-grained, it takes a glossy polish which does not dull with time.
In 1898 Americans found all the better houses of Guam furnished with tables and settees made from this remarkable wood, and in exceptional cases, even floors, which were polished with grated coconut wound in a soft cloth to emphasize their lustrous tone.
Houses made of newly cut ifilwood are not whitewashed or painted until the wood has had time to dry and season and turn its final dark shade. The tobacco-colored sap of the wood rises to the outer surface of the wood as it dries and will ruin whitewash unless the wood is completely cured before it is applied. Old and properly seasoned ifil becomes so hard that holes must be bored into it in order to drive in nails or fit screws.
Two types of functional bamboo grow profusely on Guam—the thorny bamboo and the smooth bamboo. The thorny variety is studded with spines and in the moist, decaying interior valleys it sometimes attains a height of fifty feet, growing so fast that it can literally be seen to rise several inches a day on its stalk. The thorny variety is the stronger of the two types. Large canes are cut into six- to eight-foot lengths, hollowed out at one end and used for water-carrying vessels, or a pair is tied together with fibre rope and slung over the back of a carabao, as in aboriginal times. Single joints make attractive flowerpots and served in early days as vessels for collecting coconut sap.
Both the thorny and smooth bamboos were used extensively in construction of native huts in aboriginal days, were split into slats and employed as platforms and bed frames, and were used for drinking troughs and pen fences beneath homes for the protection of young fowl from marauding animals. Today bamboo appears more frequently in furniture than in any other role and is ideally adapted to the functional frame chairs and cushioned settees which are now so popular everywhere in the Pacific areas and are spreading through the Americas and Europe.
UNUSUAL PLANTS
Although the range of plant life in Guam when judged by Pacific-island standards is not prodigious, the infinite variety of tropical forests, strand growth, interior valley cultivation, and wild foods is a source of constant awe and wonder to a Statesider used to the more formally controlled aspects of botanical expression. Being able to live—if one had to, and as many Guamanians did during the near-famine periods of the Japanese occupation—only on what one can "pick right off a tree" is still quite possible in some portions of the southern mountains or in the matted cliff jungles of the northern plateau. And this could be a thoroughly interesting and agreeable experience if one cared to explore its possibilities.
William Safford lists scores of edible plants in his Useful Plants of Guam which can be eaten after simply bringing them to a boil, and many others which can be consumed in their natural state. Cashew nuts now grow wild, having spread from their original plantings in villages. The glue-weed, a coarse fodder plant frequently cooked as a potherb, is also used in the treatment of dropsy but is dangerous to small birds feeding on it, for the viscid milk which catches insects will also seal shut the eyes of young fowl if they brush against it.
A four-winged flying bean—tender, free of stringiness, agreeable in flavor—is an excellent cooked vegetable, with its pods often used for native pickles. Having escaped from the fences surrounding green gardens, it now runs wild across the island. New varieties of taro, a succulent plant with edible starchy rootstocks, have been introduced. Thoroughly cooked, it is quite palatable; and raw, after a fermentation process, it becomes the Polynesian poi so highly favored by Hawaiians and southern islanders, though not a native taste of the Chamorros.
The papaw (papaya) tree, looking very much like a palm, yields melon-shaped fruit whose juice, when green, may be used as a natural tenderizer for meat, and when ripe and yellow, may be eaten with either sugar or salt, or in its natural state. Inferior to a musk melon, the papaya is usually an acquired taste for visitors. The soap orange, mentioned earlier, is identical with the species found in Samoa and the Fijis, and it is considered to be of prehistoric indigenous origin throughout the Marianas. It is a wild orange and was falsely called by the Spanish "the bitter Seville orange." It is not easily edible and has a tough skin which upon drying becomes shell-like in its hardness. In Guam at the beginnng of the 1898 occupation, it was a common sight to see scores of women and girls standing waist deep in the winding, dammed-up Agaña River with their oblong shallow wooden trays (bateas) before them. On these trays the family linen would be spread, rubbed with orange pulp from the soap orange, and vigorously scrubbed with a corncob. Often the entire surface of the river where the current was sluggish would be covered with decaying orange skins. The soap orange, which is not sweet, is particularly fine for tart marmalade.
Guam lemons are miniature, of fine quality, and grow almost spontaneously in the warm atmosphere of the island. Formerly planted to make impenetrable thicket defenses against foraging animals, the plants now grow wild and range throughout
