The Seychelles archipelago unites 115 pieces of land in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Although these lands were discovered by Portuguese navigators back in 1502, they did not belong to anyone for more than two centuries. In 1742 and 1744, the islands were explored by the French captain L. Pico and gave them the name La Bourdonnais, after the name of the then French governor, Fr. Ile-de-France (Mauritius) of Count Bertrand F. Mahe de la Bourdonnay (his name bears the main island of the archipelago - Mahe). And in 1756 they were renamed the Sechelle Islands, in honor of the French Minister of Finance, Viscount Jean Moreau de Sechelle, who sent a sea expedition here.
And that's what you can find there …
At first, the Seychelles was formally considered a colony of France; in the 19th century, the British took possession of them. On the refined arable plots of the coral atolls, the colonists set out to cultivate coffee and vegetable crops. It turned out that even with the help of oxen and mules, it is very profitable to manage here. Only in 1976 did the Seychelles become an independent republic.
Among the 40 inhabited islands, almost half are natural reserves, by the way, well protected. Here you can meet amazing representatives of the animal world, which are not found in other parts of the planet. For example, the paradise flycatcher, the Seychelles warbler, the black parrot, the giant elephant turtle, the Seychelles flying dog. But the most famous endemic of the Seychelles is the fruit of the Lodoicea maldivica fan palm.
The girth of this "nut" reaches almost a meter, the length is more than half a meter, and the weight is over 25 kilograms. They call it differently: double coconut, sea coconut - coco de mer, Maldivian, or Seychelles, nut. However, the fetus amazes not only in size, but also in shape: its two fused lobes strikingly resemble naked female buttocks. I can't even believe that this is a product of nature itself.
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Botanists are unanimous that the Seychelles palm tree, which gives birth to giant seeds, is as magnificent in the plant world as the Californian sequoia, African baobab or Lebanese cedar. However, they wonder why it grows so slowly. The first sprout from a seed placed in the ground appears only after a year. During its long life (which is about 800 years), the tree reaches a height of 30 meters, but the first 10 meters is gaining only at two hundred years of age. Begins to bear fruit in the 25th year of life.
Unlike many other types of palms, lodoicea trees are heterosexual. After pollination, the ovary of a female flower develops into a double drupe covered with a thick green skin. It takes 7 to 10 years for the fruit to fully mature. Fresh nuts are heavier than water; Once in the depths of the sea, they drown and lose their ability to germinate, therefore, they cannot spread by sea currents to other continents, like the fruits of the Cocos nucifera palm.
In the Middle Ages, news of fabulous giant nuts roamed the vast Indo-Arabian-African spaces, passed from mouth to mouth. People did not immediately establish which plant brings them. Dead nuts, carried over great distances by ocean waves, were found in the coastal zone of the Maldives, on the southwestern coast of India, Sumatra and Java. Since they were never seen growing on the shore, it is believed that they grow on trees that are swallowed by the sea (hence the name "sea coconut").
In those days, coco de mer was worth a fortune. For each fruit, they gave as much gold as could fit in its shell. And all because doctors and healers, who tried to deal with the contents of the skillfully hewn gift of nature, unanimously passed the verdict: very useful, eliminates ailments, like no other medicine, effectively multiplies the sexual capabilities of men. It was also widely believed that sea coconut is an irreplaceable remedy for poisons, colic, paralysis, epilepsy, numerous nervous diseases, and intestinal diseases that cause vomiting. In the form of a drug, they began to make water infused on the shell with the addition of almonds, and a tonic drink from the pink-white juice of young nuts.
In the Maldives, tribal leaders proclaimed in advance all the "coconuts of love" coming here as their own and promised to mercilessly cut off the hands of anyone who dared to hide the find.
The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II of Austria announced at the end of the 16th century that he would give 4,000 gold florins for one nut. The owners of the nut were not seduced by the price and refused him. In the end, Rudolph II managed to acquire a goblet made from sea coconut shells.
In the 17th century, Maldivian nuts came to Russia, but only the king could buy them, paying with precious sables. Carvers made brothers, ladles, aromatics from nutshells.
In the middle of the 18th century, when the French discovered a reserved palm tree on the Seychelles island of Praslin, in the Valley de Mei, the mystery of the mysterious nuts was solved.
Today the plantation of the Lodoicea fan palm in the mentioned valley has about 4,000 trees and covers an area of 20 hectares. As they say, up to 3000 nuts are harvested here a year (one palm tree brings a maximum of 30). Each fruit is numbered, but it can only be exported if there is a certificate attesting that the nut was purchased from an official seller. The price of an exotic product is from 250 to 300 dollars, large copies are sometimes several times more expensive. Souvenir cabinets and boxes are made from whole walnut. Local craftsmen make “Praslin faience” from small parts - scoops, bowls, plates, flasks and other rather elegant handicrafts.
The trunks of palm trees, 30 meters high, go into the sky. There, blocking the sunlight, huge leaves - fans - creak metallic. Clusters of large dark nuts hang under the very leaves. The ground is strewn with yellow "fans". Nothing is touched here, leaving nature to live according to its own laws. This array of several thousand trunks of coco de mer (scientifically, Lodonese Maldivian) is now declared a nature reserve. UNESCO gave it the status of an object of world importance. High above the ground, on the trunk of one of the palms, is an earring - about a meter long. This is a male flower. The palm tree gathers strength for a long time before bearing fruit - it ripens for seven years. A palm tree gives up to 30 nuts a year, and lives for more than one century. They say that there is a palm tree in the reserve, which is 800 years old!
The tree that gives birth to these fruits has been sought for centuries. His nuts were sometimes nailed by sea currents to the shores of India, Ceylon, the Maldives, less often - Indonesia. But nobody knew what it was. Fruit or Mineral? Where does it ripen or where does it come from? This natural wonder was called "Solomon's nut", "sea coconut" and attributed a thousand medicinal properties to it. It is not surprising that the cost of the walnut was fabulous: for it you could get the cargo of an entire merchant ship. It was believed that the sea coconut grows right in the ocean and is guarded by the mythical bird Garuda. It is curious that even such a serious researcher of the 17th century as Georg Eberhard Ramf, a merchant of the East India Company, who created a wonderful work on plants of South Asian countries, laughing at the legend of the bird Garuda, also came to the conclusion that the nut is a gift from the sea, and invented plant,which supposedly grows at the bottom, not far from the shores, where the fruits were found….
Only in the middle of the 18th century, the Frenchman Barre, exploring the island of Pralen, discovered tall palms in the interior of the island, literally covered with these nuts … The secret of the coco de mer was revealed.
In medieval Europe, vessels for drinking were made from giant nuts, enclosed in silver and gold; today, these largest and heaviest seeds on Earth have become the national symbol of Seychelles.
Sea coconut as a symbol and talisman in the Seychelles is beyond competition. The monument to independence is crowned with it. The “mother” of the nut, a slender tall palm tree, is placed on the emblem of the republic, surrounded by fish, turtles and birds.
Seychelles annually receive almost 100 thousand tourists. And this is with 80 thousand inhabitants! The islanders are food lovers. The usual menu includes chicken broth, red lentil puree, octopus, bat stew, stewed bananas, boiled corn. And, of course, coconut dishes. Aborigines and guests eat a lot of fish, willingly drink the local light beer "Saber" with a strength of 4.9 degrees.