The Humble Breadfruit

The humble breadfruit is found at Theresa’s Backyard Garden. This lowly or not so lowly vegetable has a very interesting history. It was imported to the West Indies from the Polynesian islands in the late 18th century in the quest for cheap, high-energy food sources for British slaves in the Caribbean.





Captain William Bligh with a ship called The Bounty (although some say that Captain Cook) was the first to introduce the breadfruit to the Caribbean.

Have you ever seen the movie mutiny on the bounty? Well if you have, you will know that the breadfruit was the centre of the problem along with those beautiful Polynesian women.

Apparently, Captain Bligh left England bound for the Pacific to collect breadfruit plants and transport them to this side of the world. When he got there and the majority of his reserved English sailors set eyes on those hot blooded, scantily dressed beauties they promptly forgot all about the breadfruit and started romancing.

Well who could blame them; it took months to get to where you wanted to go on those ships.

Now the Captain, being a focused man tried to put an end to all that frolicking in the sun, got his plants and started to make his way to the West Indies.

This did not please his fellow sailors one bit. They were so annoyed that they had a mutiny on The Bounty. They put the Captain and some of his men in a boat, set them adrift, threw all the breadfruit plants in the sea and went back to their beauties.

To cut a long story short, Captain Bligh and his men made it back to England, there was an inquiry by the British Admiralty who cleared him of any blame, gave him another ship called The Providence, sent him back to Polynesia where he got more plants and successfully made his way to the West Indies. They left Tahiti with 2126 breadfruit plants.

The 678 surviving plants were first delivered to St Vincent and finally to Jamaica in 1793.

Would you believe after all that hullabaloo, the slaves refused to eat the breadfruit because they did not like the taste?

We in Grenada thank the good Captain Bligh or Cook because we would not have roast breadfruit, fried breadfruit, steam breadfruit and our wonderful national dish Oildown. All this, of course, is when the breadfruit is in season.

You are welcome to visit Theresa’s Backyard Garden and experience all there is to see, taste, touch and smell including the breadfruit.

Please leave me a comment on the Blog.