Their juice is perfect for seasoning meats and flavoring iced drinks, as any islander will tell you. Mangoes grow wild in certain areas, but, despite reports to the contrary, the fruit is not top-grade and cannot compare in either sweetness or size with the delicious Philippine mango on Luzon.
The screw pine or pandanus exists on Guam in three varieties: a knob-fruited species whose kernels are edible, a fragrant-fruited type whose drupes are the particular fancy of the flying fox, and the textile screw pine, whose dry leaves are most favored by the natives as lashings for hut framework and for securing the lighter nipa-palm thatching. In aboriginal times the textile screw pine served as material for the sails of outrigger canoes and was called aggak tree. The tree is also a convenient roosting place for domestic fowl, placing them out of danger from wild life. The gnarled upper branches make superior walking sticks, and the tough leaves of the pandanus are also used in the plaiting of hats, mats, and carryall bags. It is probable that the rice sold to the early Dutch navigators by the natives was contained in bags woven from these same leaves.
A few native orchids do grow in the inner forests of Guam, although they are not conspicuous for their great beauty. Leis are frequently made from the yellow-flowering ilangilang tree, introduced from the Philippines because of its fragrance. It also furnishes a natural heavy perfume often used in a native cosmetic lotion made of coconut oil.
Yams and many edible wild roots abound. The purslane family offers varieties of greens and potherbs that are extremely palatable. Since the days of long voyages and the plague of scurvy, the preventive and curative qualities of potherbs have been well recognized, and most islanders also eat the young taro leaf to maintain their health. For taste, these must be thoroughly cooked, as must the root. The horseradish tree furnishes an edible pod, if gathered when young and tender, though not to be indulged in too freely, since it has cathartic qualities.
There are also plants to stay away from. Four of these can be used in reef fishing to stupefy fish (see Chapter 3—Animals of Guam), and five have the definite anthelmintic action of destroying intestinal worms. Tangantangan, a locust-like feathery shrub fast overruning the denuded hillsides of certain southern areas, causes the hair of cattle to fall out when eaten. The piga-palayi plant's juice can be used as a snakebite antidote or as a remedy for eating poisonous fish. It was also employed in aboriginal warfare, so legend goes, to poison arrows, although this is not substantiated by accounts.
Other plants have names almost too exotic to be credible. The candlenut tree, similar to the castor bean, is one of these; it is a mild cathartic, nuts of which are sometimes burned as candles. The futu tree, the seagoing pod tree mentioned earlier, is quite abundant on the eastern island shore near Pago Bay. Mangroves send down their multiple roots at the edge of the sea near the mouths of fresh-water streams. Most unusual of these is the milky mangrove, whose acrid sap was thought by the aborigines to be a cure for leprosy; its soft white wood is used for net floats. Most handsome is the many-petaled mangrove, whose astringent bark is employed in tanning leather.
The royal poinciana, also called the flame tree, is a recent introduction and is being propagated widely across the island in an effort to add color to the highways and towns of Guam. In season it has a flaming crest which makes a bright color contrast to the infinite tropical greens of the island. The Marianne caper, a low shrub whose seed capsules make good local pickles, grows on the strand with pink flowers of considerable beauty. It is, so far as records prove, an indigenous plant. Indian pennywort has been introduced and is considered, when an infusion of its leaves is drunk hot, to be excellent in reducing fever and settling the stomachs of children. There is a looking-glass tree, so named because of the silvered undercoating of its leaves, whose wood was once used as wheel spokes in the early-day carts. Jack-in-the-Box (nonag tree), a tinder-wooded tree which easily takes fire, was used for the wood hulls of canoes in earlier times, and its bark used as a depilatory by the native women, since it destroys hair painlessly. Inkberry, antidote lily (a white, flowering beach plant whose bulb is used as an emetic), the asthma herb, Spanish needles (a scorpion-bite remedy), zebrawood (for perfume), scorpion weed, maile (its flower bud is used in weaving floral garlands)—all these unusual and interesting plants, to mention but a few, have their definitive uses.
Several jasmines yield fragrant oil, and their hard wood was formerly used for making plows and outrigging native canoes. A physio nut, growing on a small evergreen shrub used for hedges and fences, is a natural cattle repellent and just what its name implies when eaten. Henna and acacia spread their spiced flowers across the island, the hedge variety being similar to the physio nut.
Although the hibiscus is not indigenous to Guam, it is a handsome touch of color all over the island. Finding the climate ideal, it responds by blooming constantly and growing into thick, trained hedges quickly forming a solid mass of green foliage and wide blossoms around sunlit gardens. The flowertree (for it reaches the height of a small tree in many instances) comes in myriad pastel shades, common among them peach, cerise, orange, cardinal red, lemon yellow, near-white, and many shades of pink.
The chocolate tree is an all-time favorite, for blossoms spring forth from the trunk itself, looking like tiny fragrant parasites. As recently as fifty years ago, cacao beans were put into a jar and given to friends departing for either Manila, the United States, or even Spain. Natives have always considered their chocolate the best in the world and have scorned the hermetically sealed, packaged variety until very recently, saying it tasted like medicine. Among the older inhabitants, it is still the custom to drink chocolate, served quite hot in the late afternoon, and offered to visitors in the home as a matter of etiquette, often with a sweet cake or cookie.
The botany of Guam and its ethnological aspects as studied and delineated by William Safford is an endlessly fascinating study, even to the layman, and it is unfortunate that more of it cannot be unfolded at this point. The history of Guam's flora parallels the history of its aboriginal people, and, the two can hardly be divorced at any point. Without its oasis-like botanical lure, the early navigators would have by-passed Guam for the more southerly islands, and its natural beauties would have been lost to early travelers and settlers. But this possible isolation would not have made any difference in the prodigious charm and wonder of its foliaged hillsides, its volcanic rock jungles garlanded with cascading vines, its prehistoric caves mouldering with picture writings, its hidden waterfalls pouring into shrimp-filled pools, its sword-grass savannahs and limestone spurs, or its weird, unearthly bristle of scrub forests spread over the northwestern plateau. They would merely have been preserved a while longer in their natural state, as would have the rich pattern of aboriginal life that disintegrated so rapidly under the yoke of religious colonization. The virgin island might have flourished through such a bonus period as a proud paradise existing on borrowed time; but sooner or later the Western world was bound to discover it and deem its exploitation expedient.
Today, with the island's conservation and restoration a vital issue, the accent throughout the island is on the cultivation of decorative flora rather than food plants, since the tiny world of Guam no longer depends on its home-grown crops for sustenance in times of typhoon, and edible plants are no longer cultivated as a vital necessity. The display of floral life in Guam, both indigenous and imported, dresses the island in ever brighter colors against its perennial green mantle.
It is not an unlikely prediction that with the final execution of the contemporary planting plan of conservation and the civic beautification now projected by the Government of Guam, the queen island of the Marianas will one day take her place as the most beautiful two hundred and twenty-five square miles of United States territory in any climate. With this distinction she will again become what she has been called in the past—the gem of Micronesia.
3
Animals of Guam
For all of the thriving plant life and the wealth of natural products that made Guam the traditional romantic, self-sustaining paradise it was before its
