ABSTRACT
The whole fruit is in appearance something between a pine-apple and a gigantic fir-cone with the interstices filled in; and this outer cover contains many "nuts," though the term is not very appropriate, for each resembles a yellow plum more than anything else. The skin of the latter is soft and silky, tinted gamboge and vermilion, and beneath it there lies a mass of fibre and yellow grease. The bushman either scrapes this away or stamps the whole affair up in a foot-mortar, and the pulp is boiled, when the grease rises to the top, is skimmed off, and becomes the best
palm-oil, worth from £16 to £22 a-ton, and each cargo costs it is hard to say how many lives. Then there is still left an inner shell something like a walnut, which is cracked, and the two or three little black kernels it contains are flung into another calabash. These kernels are shipped to Great Britain and the Continent-the latter principally-in millions of tons, and in Hamburg and .....l\..ntwerp are pressed for an oil inferior to the outer layer. It-is said to figure largely in the composition of Dutch margarine. Lately, however, Liverpool, after transhipping the kernels in endless quantities to the Hollanders and Germans, is commencing the extraction of the oil on a large scale. The whole process is very simple, and yet it is not accomplished without loss of life, for slaves are stolen to gather it, and the native markets where it is sold are periodically fought over. Marauders armed with flintlock guns waylay the canoe-trains bearing it to the coast, or the weary trade-caravans, and the Europeans who ship it home suffer many things and perish of fever. If it were not for palm-oil and rubber there would probably be few white traders in Western Africa.
