Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive c10.364

c10.364

ANANAS, s. The Pine-apple (Ananassa sativa, Lindl.; Bromelia Ananas, L.), a native of the hot regions of Mexico and Panama. It abounded, as a cultivated plant, in Hispaniola and all the islands according to Oviedo. The Brazilian Nana, or perhaps Nanas, gave the Portuguese Ananas or Ananaz. This name has, we believe, accompanied the fruit whithersoever, except to England, it has travelled from its home in America. A pine was brought home to Charles V., as related by J. D’Acosta below. The plant is stated to have been first, in Europe, cultivated at Leyden about 1650 (?). In England it first fruited at Richmond, in Sir M. Decker’s garden, in 1712.* But its diffusion in the East was early and rapid. To one who has seen the hundreds of acres covered with pine-apples on the islands adjoining Singapore, or their profusion in a seemingly wild state in the valleys of the Kasia country on the eastern borders of Bengal, it is hard to conceive of this fruit as introduced in modern times from another hemisphere. But, in the case of tobacco, the name bewrayeth its true origin, whilst the large natural family of plants to which it belongs is exclusively American. The names given by Oviedo, probably those of Hispaniola, are Iaiaima as a general name, and Boniana and Aiagua for two species. Pine-apples used to cost a pardao (a coin difficult to determine the value of in those days) when first introduced in Malabar, says Linschoten, but “now there are so many grown in the country, that they are good cheape” (91); [Hak. Soc. ii. 19]. Athanasius Kircher, in the middle of the 17th century, speaks of the ananas as produced in great abundance in the Chinese provinces of Canton, Kiangsu and Fuhkien. In Ibn Muhammad Wali’s H. of the Conquest of Assam, written in 1662, the pine-apples of that region are commended for size and flavour. In the last years of the preceding century Carletti (1599) already commends the excellent ananas of Malacca. But even some 20 or 30 years earlier the fruit was grown profusely in W. India, as we learn from Chr. d’Acosta (1578). And we know from the Āīn that (about 1590) the ananas was habitually served at the table of Akbar, the price of one being reckoned at only 4 dams, or 1/8 of a rupee; whilst Akbar’s son Jahāngīr states that the fruit came from the sea-ports in the possession of the Portuguese.—(See Āīn, i. 66-68.)