The Bounty voyage was a mission to carry breadfruit across the world
William Bligh's ill-fated voyage on HMS Bounty had a botanical purpose: fetching breadfruit from Tahiti to feed enslaved workers in British Caribbean colonies. That attempt failed, but Bligh tried again in 1791 and delivered seedless trees to St. Vincent and Jamaica. The fruit, cooked, tastes like fresh bread.
Breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis, belongs to the mulberry and jackfruit family. DNA fingerprinting shows its wild ancestor is the seeded breadnut of New Guinea, the Maluku Islands and the Philippines. Polynesians bred it into mostly seedless forms, and Austronesian voyagers carried it by canoe into Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia around 3,000 years ago. Micronesian varieties carry genes from a local species that Polynesian ones lack, a sign that Micronesia was settled by a separate migration.
It is one of the most productive food plants known. A tree up to 26 metres tall can bear 200 or more grapefruit-sized fruits a season with little care, and trials in Barbados suggest 15 to 30 tonnes per hectare. Each fruit is a compound structure formed from 1,500 to 2,000 flowers, whose remains show as hexagonal patches on the skin. Wild trees are pollinated mainly by fruit bats, but cultivated varieties set fruit without pollination and are propagated from root cuttings or suckers. The tree's latex was used to caulk boats, and its light timber went into houses and surfboards.
The late-18th-century push to move it was driven by plantation owners seeking cheap, high-energy food for enslaved people. Joseph Banks, who had seen breadfruit in Tahiti in 1769 on Cook's Endeavour voyage, used his position as president of the Royal Society to offer a cash bounty and gold medal and to lobby for the naval expedition.
Big harvests arrive all at once, so preservation matters. Across Oceania, peeled fruit was buried in leaf-lined pits to ferment into a sour paste that can last a year or more; some pits reportedly still held edible contents after 20 years. Archaeologists in French Polynesia use stone-lined pit remains as clues to prehistoric settlement. Raw breadfruit is mostly water and starch, with a good dose of vitamin C.
Source: Breadfruit
