Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

This unique and handsome palm has the stem from ten to fifteen feet high, curved or crooked and deeply ringed. The leaves are very large, entire, rigid and furrowed, and have a serrated margin; they are often thirty feet long and four or five wide, and split irregularly with age. The petioles are slender with a broadly expanded fibrous-edged sheath at the base. These sheaths are persistent and often cover the stem down to the ground.

The spadices are numerous, growing from among the leaves, and are simply branched and drooping. The fruit is of an olive colour, somewhat three-lobed and with a rugose or papillate exterior covering. The spathe is fusiform and entire, of a fibrous cloth-like texture and of a brown colour. As the spadix expands it breaks open irregularly, but in some cases a dead unopened flower bunch is found enclosed in an entire half-rotten spathe, as if the vital powers of the plant had not been sufficient to tear asunder the tough fibrous sheath.

The “bussú” produces the largest entire leaves of any known palm, and for this reason, as well as on account of their firm and rigid texture, they form the very best and most durable thatch. The leaves are split down the midrib and the halves laid obliquely on the rafters, so that the furrows formed by the veins lie in a nearly vertical direction and serve as so many little gutters to carry off the water more rapidly. A well-made thatch of “bussú” will last ten or twelve years, and an Indian will often take a week’s voyage in order to get a canoe-load of the leaves to cover his house.

The spathe too is much valued by the Indian, furnishing him with an excellent and durable cloth. Taken off entire it forms bags in which he keeps the red paint for his toilet or the silk cotton for his arrows, or he even stretches out the larger ones to make himself a cap,—cunningly woven by nature without seam or joining. When cut open longitudinally and pressed flat, it is used to preserve his delicate feather ornaments and gala dresses, which are kept in a chest of plaited palm leaves between layers of the smooth “bussú” cloth.

This species inhabits the tidal swamps of the Lower Amazon. A palm called “bussú” is also found on the Rio Negro and Upper Amazon, but it is of a smaller size and is probably a distinct species.

A spathe is represented on the Plate and a dead stem from which the leaves have entirely fallen.

Plate II. fig. 3, a fruit of Manicaria saccifera of the natural size.

Male flowers on the upper parts of the branches of the spadix, females on the lower. Spathe fusiform, woody, at length deciduous. Male flowers with six stamens and linear acute anthers. Female flowers with a short style and three stigmas and six small scaly rudiments of stamens.

Stems slender, flexible, climbing over shrubs or trees. Leaves alternate, pinnate, much sheathing, with long hooked spines in the place of the three or four terminal pair of leaflets. The spadices are axillary and simply branched, the spathes double, fusiform or ventricose, and the fruits are small, round, and generally red. The stems and leaves are more or less prickly.

Fourteen species of these curious Palms are found in various parts of South America, principally in the low lands, as they are not known at a greater height than 2000 feet above the level of the sea. They differ remarkably from all other American palms in their long climbing stems, in which they resemble the Calami or Canes so abundant in the East Indies.