Similar considerations apply to ‘arrowroot,’ which, properly speaking, is obtained from the rootstock of the arrowroot, Maranta, but is also extracted from other plants, including the cycad Zamia. The Seminole Indians in Florida had long made use of the Zamia (or koonti) which grew wild there, and in the 1880s a substantial industry was set up, producing twenty tons or more of ‘Florida arrowroot’ annually, for use in infant foods, biscuits, chocolates, and spaghetti. The industry closed down in the 1920s, after overharvesting the cycad almost to extinction.
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The consumption of this sake prepared from C. revoluta, David Jones remarks,
…is almost as deadly as a game of Russian roulette, since it is slightly poisonous and occasionally a potent batch kills all who partake.
It would go well, one feels, with a meal of puffer fish, or fugu.
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Georg Rumpf (known to posterity as Rumphius), already a passionate naturalist and botanist in his twenties, enlisted with the Dutch East India Company and set sail for Batavia and the Moluccas in 1652. In the following decade he travelled widely in Southeast Asia, spending much time on the Malabar coast of India, where in 1658 he documented a new plant – this was the first cycad ever described, and the one which Linnaeus, a century later, was to call Cycas circinalis, and to take as the cardinal ‘type’ of all cycads. A few years later, Rumphius was appointed assistant to the Dutch governor of Ambon, in the Moluccas, where he embarked on his magnum opus, the Herbarium Amboinensis, describing 1,200 species of plants peculiar to Southeast Asia.
Though stricken by blindness in 1670, he continued his work, helped now by sighted assistants. H.C.D. de Wit, in a 1952 address on Rumphius at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam (on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Rumphius’ death) described in detail his labors on the Herbarium, which were to take forty years and were punctuated by a relentless series of travails, including the death of his wife and daughter:
It was the 17th of February, 1674. In the gathering dusk Mrs. Rumpf and her youngest daughter went for a visit to a Chinese friend to look at the Chinese New Year celebrations, a colourful procession through the streets, to be held later in the evening. They saw Rumphius [who was by now completely blind] passing by to take some air. Some minutes later a disastrous earthquake destroyed the larger part of the town.
Both women were killed by collapsing walls.
Rumphius returned to work on his manuscript, but in 1687 a calamitous fire burned the town of Amboina to the ground, destroying his library and all his manuscripts. Still undaunted, and aided by his remarkable abilities and determination, he began rewriting the Herbarium, and the original copy of the first six books finally started on its way to Amsterdam in 1692, only to be lost when the ship carrying it was sunk. (Fortunately, the governor-general of Batavia, Cam-phuys, had taken the precaution of having Rumphius’ manuscript copied before shipping it on to Holland.) Rumphius continued working on the last six volumes, but suffered another setback when sixty-one colored plates were stolen from his office in Batavia in 1695. Rumphius himself died in 1702, some months after completing the Herbarium – but his great work was not published until the middle of the century. The final work, despite all these mishaps, contains nearly 1,700 pages of text and 700 plates, including half a dozen magnificent plates of cycads.
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Sidney Parkinson, the artist who voyaged on the Endeavour with Cook, described the plants they encountered:
Of vegetables we found…Cicas circinalis, the kernels of which, roasted, tasted like parched peas; but it made some of our people sick, who ate it: of this fruit, they make a kind of sago in the East Indies.
Cycas circinalis does not occur in Australia, and the cycad which Cook’s crew encountered there, David Jones suggests, was probably the native C. media.
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Lathyrism is a form of paralysis long endemic in parts of India, where it is associated with eating the chickling or grass pea, Lathyrus sativus; a little lathyrus does no harm, but sometimes it is the only food available – and then the hideous choice is to be paralyzed or starve.
It was similar, in some ways, with the ‘jake paralysis’ which paralyzed tens of thousands of Americans during Prohibition. Driven to seek some source of alcohol, these unfortunates turned to a readily available extract of Jamaica ginger (or ‘jake’), not knowing it contained large quantities of a poison (later found to be a toxic organophospho-rus compound) which could lead to paralysis. (My own research, as a student, was an attempt to elucidate its mechanism of action, using chickens as experimental animals.)
The Minamata Bay paralysis first became apparent in the mid-1950s, in Japanese fishing villages surrounding the bay. Those affected would first become unsteady, tremulous, and suffer various sensory disturbances, going on (in the worst cases) to become deaf, blind, and demented. There was a high incidence of birth defects, and domestic animals and seabirds seemed affected too. The local fish fell under suspicion, and it was found that when they were fed to cats, they indeed produced the same progressive and fatal neurological disease. Fishing was banned in Minamata Bay in 1957, and with this the disease disappeared. The precise cause was still a mystery, and it was only the following year that it was observed by Douglas McAlpine that the clinical features of the disease were virtually identical to those of methyl mercury poisoning (of which there had been isolated cases in England in the late 1930s). It took several more years to trace the toxin back to its source (Kurland, among others, played a part here): a factory on the bay was discharging mercuric chloride (which is moderately toxic) into the water, and this was converted by microorganisms in the lake to methyl mercury (which is intensely toxic). This in turn was consumed by other microorganisms, starting a long ascent through the food chain, before ending up in fish, and people.
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That lytico or bodig can remain almost stationary for years in this way is utterly unlike the relentless progression of classic Parkinson’s disease or ALS, but such an apparent halting of the disease process was sometimes seen in post-encephalitic parkinsonism or amyotrophy. Thus one patient I have seen, Selma B., immediately following the encephalitic epidemic in 1917, developed a mild parkinsonism on one side of her body, which has remained essentially unchanged for more than seventy-five years. Another man, Ralph G., developed a gross, polio-like wasting of one arm as part of a post-encephalitic syndrome – but this has neither advanced nor spread in fifty years. (This is one reason why Gajdusek regards post-encephalitic syndromes not as active disease processes but as hypersensitivity reactions.) And yet such arrests are the exception, and lytico-bodig, in the vast majority of cases, is relentlessly progressive.