A bird, goat, sheep or hog that drinks from the first water in which the federico has been soaked is apt to die. This does not happen with the second, much less the third, which can be consumed without danger.
Although this washing of the seeds was supposed to be effective in leaching out their poisons, several governors of Guam were to express reservations, especially when federico became the main article of the diet (as happened, typically, after typhoons, when all the vegetation was destroyed except for the tough cycads).
Thus Governor Pablo Perez wrote, in the famine of 1848, that
…not having sweet potatoes, yams and taro, food staples destroyed by the storm, [the Chamorros] have to betake themselves to the woods to seek there the few fruits which are left, which, though noxious, they use as a last resource…This is now their chief staple of food; and notwithstanding the precautions with which they prepare it, all believe that it is injurious to health.
This was echoed by his successor, Don Felipe de la Corte, seven years later, who singled out federico as the most dangerous of all the ‘fruits…of the forest.’[49]
Kurland, a century later, having found no clear evidence for an infectious or genetic origin for the lytico-bodig, now wondered whether some element of the Chamorro diet might be the pathogen he sought; and he invited Marjorie Whiting, a nutritionist working on Pohnpei, to come to Guam to investigate this. Whiting had a special interest in indigenous plants and cultures of the Pacific islands, and as soon as Kurland outlined the problem to her, she was fascinated and agreed to come. On her first visit to Guam, in 1954, she spent time in two very different communities – Yigo, which is close to Agana, and part of the Westernized, administrative center of the island; and Umatac, where she lived in a traditional Chamorro household. She became very close to the Chamorro family, the Quinatas, with whom she lived, and often joined Mrs. Quinata and the women of the village in preparing special dishes for Umatac’s frequent fiestas.
Cycads had never particularly attracted her attention before (there are no cycads on Pohnpei) – but now everything she encountered seemed to direct her attention to the local species, so common on Guam and the neighboring island of Rota. Cycas circinalis was indigenous, it grew wild, it was free, it required only the labor of collection and preparation.
I had met Marjorie in Hawaii, on my way to Micronesia, and she had told me some vividly personal anecdotes from her time on Guam. She had gone out to do field studies each day for six months, coming back each evening to her Chamorro family – she only discovered later, somewhat to her chagrin, that the rich soups she had been served every day had all been thickened with fadang. People were well aware of its toxic properties and the need for very elaborate washing, but enjoyed the taste of fadang, and especially prized it for making tortillas and thickening soup, ‘because of its peculiar mucilaginous quality.’ The Chamorros sometimes chewed the green outer seed husks to relieve thirst; when dried, the husks were considered a tasty sweet.
Whiting’s experience in Guam initiated an entire decade of research in which, collaborating at times with the botanist F.R. Fosberg, she made an encyclopedic investigation of cycads around the world, and their use by dozens of different cultures as foods, medicines, and poisons.[50] She undertook historical research, exhuming incidents of cycad poisoning among explorers as far back as the eighteenth century. She put together the scattered but voluminous evidence on the neurotoxic effects of cycads in various animals. Finally, in 1963, she published a detailed monograph on her work in the journal Economic Botany.
There were approximately a hundred species of cycad around the world, and nine genera,[51] she noted, and most of these had been used as sources of food, containing as they did large quantities of edible starch (sago), which could be extracted variously from the root, stem, or nut.[52] Cycads were eaten not merely, Whiting noted, as a reserve during times of shortage, but as a food with ‘a special prestige and popularity.’ They were used on Melville Island for first-fruit rites; among the Karawa in Australia for initiation ceremonies; and in Fiji, where they were a special food reserved only for the use of chiefs. The kernels were often roasted in Australia, where settlers referred to them as ‘blackfellows’ potatoes.’ Every part of the cycad had been used for food: the leaves could be eaten as tender young shoots; the seeds, when green, could be ‘boiled to edible softness; the white meat has a flavor and texture…compared to that of a roasted chestnut.’
Like Freycinet, Whiting described the lengthy process of detoxification: slicing the seeds, soaking them for days or weeks, drying and then pounding them, and, in some cultures, fermenting them too. (‘Westerners have compared the flavor of fermented cycad seeds with that of some of the best-known European cheeses.’) Stems of Encephalartos septimus had been used in parts of Africa to make a delicious cycad beer, she wrote, while the seeds of Cycas revoluta were used, in the Ryukyu Islands, to prepare a form of sake.[53] Fermented Zamia starch was regarded as a delicacy throughout the Caribbean, where it was consumed in the form of large alcoholic balls.
Every culture which uses cycads has recognized their toxic potential, and this was implied, she added, by some of the native names given to them, like ‘devil’s coconut’ and ‘ricket fern.’ In some cultures, they were deliberately used as poisons. Rumphius (the Dutch naturalist whose name is now attached to the widespread Pacific species Cycas rumphii ) recorded that in the Celebes ‘the sap from the kernels…was given to children to drink in order to kill them so that the parents would not be hampered when they went to follow their roving life in the wilderness of the forest.’[54] Other accounts, from Honduras and Costa Rica, suggested that Zamia root might be used to dispose of criminals or political enemies.
Nonetheless many cultures also regarded cycads as having healing or medicinal properties; Whiting instanced the Chamorro use of grated fresh seeds of Cycas circinalis as a poultice for tropical leg ulcers.
The use of cycads as food had been independently discovered in many cultures; and each had devised their own ways of detoxifying them. There had been, of course, innumerable individual accidents, especially among explorers and their crews without this cultural knowledge. Members of Cook’s crew became violently ill after eating unprepared cycad seeds at the Endeavour River in Australia, and in 1788 members of the La Perouse expedition became ill after merely nibbling the seeds of Macroza-mia communis at Botany Bay – the attractive, fleshy sarcotesta of these are loaded with toxic macrozamin.[55] But there had never been, Whiting thought, a cultural accident, where an entire culture had hurt itself by cycad eating.
There were, however, examples of animals poisoning themselves en masse, unprotected by any ‘instinctive’ knowledge. Cattle which browse on bracken may come down with a neurological disorder which resembles beriberi or thiamine deficiency – this is caused by an enzyme in bracken which destroys the body’s thiamine. Horses in the Central Valley of California have come down with parkinsonism after eating the toxic star thistle. But the example which Whiting especially remarks is that of sheep and cattle, which are extremely fond of cycads; indeed, the term ‘addiction’ has been used in Australia, where some animals will travel great distances for the plants. Outbreaks of neurocycadism, she noted, had been recorded in Australian cattle since the mid-nineteenth century. Some animals, browsing on the fresh young cycad shoots (this would especially occur in dry seasons, when other plants had died off, or after fires, when cycads would be the first plants to reshoot new leaves) would get a brief, acute gastrointestinal illness, with vomiting and diarrhea – this, if not fatal, would be followed by complete recovery, as with acute cycad poisoning in man. But with continued browsing on the plants, neurocycadism would develop; this would begin as a staggering or weaving gait (hence the colloquial name ‘zamia staggers’), a tendency to cross the hind legs while walking, and finally complete and permanent paralysis of the hind limbs. Removing the animals from the cycads at this stage was of no use; once the staggers had set in, the damage was irreversible.