Graceful, sensual, yet almost cartoonish in appearance, the spreading fingers and swaying globes of the breadfruit tree beckon for attention.
And it has gotten it all the way back from its mythic beginnings. Local myths speak to the tree's nearly human forms, tracing their origin to the god Kuka'ilimoku, who loved and married a mortal woman. To save their family during a famine, Ku planted himself headfirst in the garden. Watered by her tears, his body became the trunk of the breadfruit ('ulu), his limbs the branches, his fingers the leathery leaves, and his head the large fruit -- or other body parts, according to the mischievousness of the storyteller.
Other legends credit more human sources for the breadfruit's arrival. Seafaring Polynesians are said to have brought root shoots from Tahiti and planted them at Pu'uloa on O'ahu for a local chief.
Historians believe the breadfruit, a native of Java, traveled from Malaysia to the Marquesas Islands on board Polynesian ships about 700 years ago, where it eventually spread throughout the South Pacific.
European sailors first spied the handsome trees in the Marquesas in 1595. Reports of a race of strong people living off the large fruits sparked the interest of plantation owners in the British West Indies, who set out to transplant trees in the Caribbean as cheap food for their African slaves.
The disastrous outcome of that 1787 expedition is familiar to all as the mutiny on the Bounty. After gathering more than a thousand trees in Tahiti and loading them on the ship in tubs, Captain William Bligh and his officers were set adrift by their crew with hardly enough food to last a week. The breadfruit trees were all thrown overboard. Bligh survived the journey back to England and eventually returned to Tahiti, where he collected twice as many plants and successfully delivered them to Jamaica in 1793. But the slaves would not eat breadfruit, and it wasn't until after their emancipation that it became an important part of the Caribbean diet.
In Hawai'i, the Europeans found just one variety growing, the so-called seedless Hawaiian breadfruit, Artocarpus incisa or altilis, which was also seen throughout Polynesia. This breadfruit will not grow from seed, but root shoots are transplanted. This is how it is believed to have spread from the Marquesas about 700 years ago.