Somewhere in the middle of the ocean, there’s an underwater grove of palm trees whose fruits, when ripe, fall upwards. As the fruits rise to the surface, the waves carry them (eventually, rarely) to land. The sea is an abode of treasures and monsters, and these “cocos de mer” (coconuts of the sea) are no different. They’re large, bigger than a human head, and precious, allegedly purifying any liquid stored within them.
At least, that’s the story you might hear at the dinner table of Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1576–1612), who paid 4,000 gold florins for a single coco de mer and had it mounted in a gold stand to serve as a ewer. To match its maritime origins, it was incised with designs of cavorting Tritons and surmounted with a silver Neptune riding a hippocampus—a lot of gaudy ornament around a big brown husk. In fact, the teardrop-shaped shell at the core of the ewer is only one half of a coco de mer; the full nut bears an uncanny resemblance to a plump behind, which may be why it was considered an aphrodisiac as well as a panacea.
It’s not so surprising that cocos de mer were supposed to be protection against poisoning, writes Isabel dos Guimarães Sá; these kinds of legends tend to attach themselves to precious rarities. (Besides the ewer, Rudolph II owned a cup made from rhinoceros horn and another made from a hollowed-out bezoar—both reputed, like the coco de mer, to protect against poisoning.) The legend of the underwater forest, however, is unique, based as it was on eyewitness accounts: Malay sailors had seen the nuts float up from the bottom of the ocean.
Most often, however, the sea coconuts washed up on the shores of the Maldives. Precious as they may have been, finding one didn’t necessarily signal good fortune. They were regarded as the property of the king, and it was dangerous to hold out on him. According to François Pyrard de Laval, a Frenchman shipwrecked in the Maldives in 1602, “all that is found along the sea-shore belongs to [the king]: a man dare not touch such a thing with a view toward keeping it.” This was true whether it was a treasure chest, ambergris, or
a certain nut, cast up by the sea from time to time, and as big as a man’s head, which one might liken to a couple of large melons joined together…. Often at the season for [the coco de mer], the king’s servants and officers harass the poor people when they suspect them of having found any; nay more, when they have a grudge against any man, they impute to him that charge, as they do here that of false money, to the end that he may be searched.
The king, perhaps, was anxious to maintain his control over the nuts as a diplomatic resource—a means of impressing important dignitaries. The Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta wrote that the Queen of Portugal sent for one every year (although he also said that he had “not known a case in which any one has been cured by it.”) The coco de mer came to be so associated with the Maldives that the scientific name of this flowering palm tree is Lodoicea maldivica, even though the species has never grown there, its seeds only washed up on its shores.
It wasn’t until 1768 that a French expedition happened upon the source of the floating seeds, some 3,000 miles from the Maldives, writes research geneticist A. B. Damania. The palm grows only on two small islands in the Seychelles, Praslin and Curieuse, neither of which was continuously inhabited before the 1770s (although Austronesian and Arab navigators may have passed through).
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The tree as a whole matches the seed in scale: the leaves grow up to 33 feet long, the length of a pontoon boat. It’s a model of intensive parental care: rather than scattering thousands of seeds to the wind, like a dandelion, it pours resources into its massive fruits and prepares the soil where its seedlings will sprout by collecting rainwater and debris with its funnel-shaped leaves. Oddly enough, unlike actual coconuts, the fruits of the coco de mer tree do not float. When one ends up in the water, it sinks to the bottom. It will only pop back up to the surface when it’s rotten and full of gas.
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Like many giants, the tree is a slow grower: its seeds take years to germinate, and its fruits can be a decade in ripening. It has a lifespan of some 800 years; trees growing today could have sprouted in the thirteenth century. The plant that bore Rudolph II’s ewer might still be fruiting somewhere.
The world has changed dramatically around these trees. The huge canopies they once dominated are shrinking, and their nuts are poached for the tourist trade, writes a research team led by Sidonie Bellot of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. They’re still precious—a coco de mer seed fetches such a high price that they’re out of reach of the average Seychellois person (who might want to plant one, if they could afford it). But there are promising signs: a program that offers coco de mer seeds to locals for planting outperformed all expectations, and new trees are beginning to sprout. We can hope that they will outlive us.
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