Note 3 — Chapter VII

The plantain and the banana are varieties of the same plant. They not only constitute marked features in the luxuriant foliage of the tropics, but their fruit supplies the place of bread, and forms the principal part of the food of the people. They thrive best in a rich, moist soil, and are generally grown in regular walks, from shoots or bulbs like those of the air-plant, which continually spring up at the roots of the parent stem. They are very rapid in their growth, producing fruit within a twelvemonth. Moreover, not being dependent upon the seasons, a constant supply is kept up during the year; for, while one stem drops beneath its load of ripe fruit, another throws out its long flower-spike, and a third shows the half-formed cluster. The fruit is very nutritive, and is eaten in a great variety of forms—raw, boiled, roasted, and fried—and in nearly every stage of its growth, as well when green as when yellow and mature. Humboldt tells us, that it affords, in a given extent of ground, forty-four times more nutritive matter than the potato, and one hundred and thirty-three times more than wheat. As it requires little if any care in the cultivation, and produces thus perennially and abundantly, it may be called an “institution for the encouragement of laziness.” On the banks of all the rivers on the Mosquito Shore, it is found growing wild, from shoots brought down from the plantations of the Indians, and which have taken root where they were lodged by the current.