The copra trade is of course carried on all over these and the adjoining islands, but one sees more of it going on in the New Hebrides than in the Solomons or New Guinea.

Copra is the white of the cocoa-nut and is not eaten by the natives at all; all they do with the nuts is to drink the milk and use the fibre. Nearly everything out there is made either of the leaves or fibre, and even the trunks of the tree come in very handy for manufacturing articles. When gathering copra the natives scale the trees to get at the nuts, and having collected a good supply they sit down, break them open, and lay them out to dry in the sun.

The oil of the cocoa-nut is chiefly made in England and America, and the only process the nut goes through in the islands is that of drying. When the nuts have been collected they are split in halves very carefully with an axe, and then the halves are laid out in the sun. Very soon the heat loosens the kernel, which comes away and is then broken up into pieces. It is again put in the sun on mats, where it remains until it is thoroughly dried; then it is collected in sacks and sold by weight. Some traders, however, go in for making cocoa-nut oil, but not many, and if they do, a different process {186} has to be gone through. The nut, instead of being split open, has the husk cracked on a sharp pointed stake, it is then torn off and the inside split in two. Next the kernel is scraped out on an iron scraper, which is attached to a stool on which the native squats during the operation, and the white part drops from the scraper into a vessel underneath, and is then put into a cask to rot, after which it is pounded and made into a pulp and placed at the end of a tilted trough—a hollowed-out log or old canoe—until all the oil runs out of it. This oil is then strained and put into casks.

The stench of a copra boat is proverbial, and this, without the copra bugs, is enough to make one keep clear of them as much as possible. Each trader has his copra shed and drying ground, and when Burns Philp’s trading boats call, the sacks of copra are taken out by the resident trader’s “boys” and again sold, this time to be shipped home for further handling. When the oil is extracted in England, nearly double the quantity is obtained from the same amount of nuts, and the refuse is made into cakes for cattle.