A Craftsman's Legacy

The Professor, on Gilligan's Island, could make anything! Couldn't fix the boat, though.

Well, that would have ended the show. So not fixing the boat was a perverse incentive -- something like a health insurance company keeping someone alive. Financially, they're better off dead, and doing so quickly.

But he had to make everything out of coconuts which, obviously, weren't seaworthy enough to fix the boat.

They're really hard to glue into planks.

My dad, who fought in the South Pacific, said you don't want to try to cut down a coconut palm, either.

Why not? Palm wood isn't partuicularly hard.

From what he said, they were rubbery and resistant to an axe. That's what they had to cut them. Mostly they used the logs to cover their foxholes at Guadalcanal.

Interesting. I know that palm lumber has no heart or sap wood and the wood is referred to as "fibrous" which would probably make them a bit hard to chop down.

Why would you want to leave, you're on a tropical island with Mary Ann!

Mikek

Royal Palm is very hard to cut and very rot resistant.

Probably not a lot of Royal Palms growing in the South Pacafic.

Very common in West Africa and along all the slave routes in Africa

Its tough to really say, because no one really knows when slave routes there began. Its like they've always been there. A few even to today.

I lived in the south Pacific for years. Cocounut palm and Nut Palms are there. Most anything else was shipped in by a 'king' to make something different.

Martin

It is the same in most of S.E.A, coconut palms and Nut Palms.

It is very much the same in most of S.E.A, Coconut palms and oil palms. Cash crops, in other words.