A strange coconut!
Belonging to the borassés tribe, within the large palm family, Sa Majesté le coco de mer is one of the six species of palm indigenous to the Seychelles. It has a majestic stature - its straight, clean trunk reaches some thirty meters - and rigid, fan-shaped leaves. Staminate (i.e. male) or pistillate (female), it grows in colonies, with the male trees, around 5 m tall, seeming to watch over their protégés, their phalluses held high. Indeed, the male inflorescence of the coco de mer resembles a virile limb, the size and thickness of an arm! But no filmmaker has yet succeeded in filming the curious love affairs of the coco de mer, on the nights of great storms or full moons, according to legend, from which one or two bunches of fruit are born each year, each containing two or three bilobed nuts, more rarely four. In the 19th century, the adventurer Henry de Monfreid, who had seen others, did not hide his astonishment: "This nut is the size of a large pumpkin; it is double and its two hemispheres are reminiscent of a pair of buttocks, between which nature has taken pleasure in meticulously reproducing certain particularly suggestive anatomical details"
Although weighing between 10 and 15 kg and measuring around 30 centimetres, each nut has its own specificity: flat or rounded... to each his own! Just as no two butts are alike, no two cocofesses are alike. Miniature coconuts range from 15 cm long to 60 cm.
It takes three years for a coco de mer to germinate and seven years to reach maturity, with the tree having to wait a quarter of a century to start bearing fruit and nearly a thousand years to reach its maximum size, an age not yet reached by the venerable coco de mer trees of the Vallée de Mai, which are only eight hundred years old..
The May Valley, the sanctuary
The Vallée de Mai and nearby Fond Ferdinand in Praslin are the last sanctuaries of this king of coconuts, who originally also took to the skies on the neighboring island of Curieuse and three satellite islets: Saint-Pierre, Ronde and Juliette (now Chauve-Souris). It's hard to explain why this palm tree has made its home on only a handful of islands. One hypothesis is that it is one of the few plants to have survived the break-up with the African continent of lands that have since become an archipelago. In addition to this island isolation, there's another factor that prevents the nut from spreading: its weight, which a priori hinders its natural dispersal by ocean currents. It's too heavy to float! Finally, the fact that at least one male and one female tree are required for reproduction, and that this type of coconut only bears fruit in communities, has obviously not helped this astonishing palm to acclimatize elsewhere. Confined to a few long-uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean, the coco de mer remained an unknown plant until the second half of the 18th century.
A prodigious discovery
It was an engineer, Brayer du Barré, who, in 1768, during a Royal Navy expedition to the Seychelles on the Marion-Dufresne, had the honor of noting that the mythical coco de mer was growing on land that had been French since 1756.
This prodigious discovery was to inspire others to follow in his footsteps. As early as 1769, Captain Duchemin, who the previous year had led the fruitful expedition during which Barré had discovered the revered coconut palm, rushed back to Praslin, the treasure island. There, he loaded the flute L'Heureuse Marie with cocos de mer and set off to sell them on the Indian market, forgetting that the good old law of supply and demand would soon cause the nut to lose its fabulous value.
Although devalued, the singular coconut will nonetheless continue to fascinate. The French naturalist and traveler Philibert Commerson, who took part in Bougainville's famous round-the-world expedition, took a keen interest in this haughty coconut, whose unusual callipygous nuts long made the fortune of Maldivian kings and sultans. Commerson is even said to be the first scientist to have described the coco de mer in detail, with fifteen plates to support his description, and to have given it the generic name of Lodoicea, derived from the Latin Lodoicus (Louis), in honor of King Louis XV.
A protected and worked coconut
Today, it is illegal to leave Seychelles with a coco de mer that has not been approved by the authorities. Cocofesse has been nationalized, and the Republic of Seychelles closely controls the trade in this work of art, which nature reproduces in only around 3,000 copies each year. Craftsmen working with coco de mer must buy the raw material from the State, and each nut sold must be accompanied by a special authorization to leave the country.
It is in Praslin that the craftsmen prepare the nuts to make their already highly suggestive shape even more legible. Although superb in their raw state, in their original veneer, most of them are worked. Once sawn and emptied, the two half-shells are generally polished and varnished, before being glued back together. The half-shell can also be carved and sold as a jewelry box. Fishermen use it in its raw state to bail their pirogues, while small traders still sometimes use it as a cocossier, i.e. a container, to decant sugar, rice, flour or seeds sold in retail outlets.
As for the extracted pulp, it must first be dried in the sun before it can be used in marquetry, since it produces an ivory inlay effect. Finally, the leaves are used not only in basketry (baskets, mats, hats...), but also in architecture, where these broad palms become light partitions of a beautiful golden yellow.
In short, although the only coconut plantation on the island (along with the Fond Ferdinand, also on Praslin) covers a mere 20 hectares in the fascinating niche of primitive greenery that is the Vallée de Mai, it is undoubtedly a major asset. So it was only logical that UNESCO should designate it a World Heritage Site.
