Artocarpus altilis (Parkinson) Fosberg, breadfruit; with its seeded progenitor Artocarpus camansi Blanco, the breadnut, and the Micronesian hybrids of A. altilis with A. mariannensis Trécul
Breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis, is a large tree of the mulberry family whose round or oval fruit, a syncarp of many small fused flowers, can weigh up to five kilograms and is eaten not as a fruit but as a starch: roasted, boiled, steamed, pounded, fermented, or fried. It is one of the very few staple foods that grow on trees, and a single tree can bear fifty to a hundred and fifty fruits in a season.
It has two origins, and the genetic study published by Nyree Zerega, Diane Ragone, and Timothy Motley in 2004 is what separated them. Most breadfruit descends from the breadnut, A. camansi, a seeded species that grows wild and cultivated in New Guinea. People in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago selected it for flesh rather than seed and carried it east, propagating it from root shoots and cuttings as they went, so that across Polynesia the breadfruit became progressively less seeded, until most cultivars there have no seeds at all. In Micronesia a second lineage arose when that breadfruit crossed with a native wild species, A. mariannensis, of the Mariana Islands and Palau, and many of the breadfruits of Micronesia today are those hybrids. The atlas marks both origins.
When the first steps were taken is not recorded in the ground. Breadfruit leaves few remains that survive in the wet tropics, and the oldest archaeological traces are late: charcoal and starch grains in East Polynesian sites of the last millennium. The evidence for its antiquity is linguistic. Malcolm Ross reconstructs a Proto Oceanic word for breadfruit, *kuluR, which Proto Oceanic inherited from an older Malayo-Polynesian word, and Proto Oceanic was spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late second millennium BCE, the world of the Lapita potters. The people who set out from there into the Pacific already had a name for the tree, which is why the origin of this journey is dated 'before c. 1000 BCE' and not given a year.
The breadnut is kept within this entry. It is a different species, but it is the seeded form of the same crop and its ancestor, the two are sold and cooked side by side, and a reader looking for the chataigne of Trinidad or the kamansi of the Philippines will look here. The jackfruit, A. heterophyllus, is a different plant with a different history and belongs in an entry of its own.
Breadfruit crossed the Pacific in voyaging canoes as living shoots and cuttings, because the seedless forms could travel no other way. From the Bismarck Archipelago it went east with the settlement of Remote Oceania into Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, and on with the settlers of East Polynesia. Breadfruit starch on obsidian tools from the earliest settlement layer at Anakena, on Rapa Nui, dated between about 1000 and 1300, is the oldest record of the tree in East Polynesia, and remains in the Society Islands and Hawaiʻi in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in the Marquesas after 1400, follow. Westward, it was long established in the Moluccas and the Philippines when Rumphius described it on Ambon in the seventeenth century.
Europeans met it late. The Spanish expedition of Mendaña described it in the Marquesas in 1595; William Dampier described it on Guam in 1686 as 'big as a penny loaf', and gave it a brief paragraph against four pages on the plantain. Banks and Parkinson saw it in Tahiti in 1769, and it was Tahitian breadfruit that the British government sent William Bligh to fetch for the Caribbean: first in HMS Bounty, whose voyage ended in the mutiny of 28 April 1789, and then in HMS Providence, which landed several hundred plants at St Vincent on 23 January 1793 and at Jamaica on 5 February.
The French were there first. Pierre Sonnerat had the seeded breadnut growing on Réunion and Mauritius from 1772; a ship from Mauritius landed breadfruit at Cayenne in June 1788; and in 1791–92 the botanist Joseph Martin distributed trees across French Guiana and to Martinique and Guadeloupe. The seedless fruit followed from Tonga, carried by Félix Lahaie, the gardener of the d'Entrecasteaux expedition, who kept his plants alive alone in Java and reached Mauritius in 1797. From the Mascarenes the tree reached the Seychelles, and from the Dutch East Indies it reached Ceylon and the Malabar coast. In the Caribbean, where it had been brought to feed the enslaved, it was refused for a generation and became a staple only over the nineteenth century.
Breadfruit is grown in some ninety countries, and it is a staple in three great regions: across the Pacific islands, where it has fed people for millennia; in the Caribbean, above all in St Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and the French Antilles; and in the islands of the Indian Ocean, above all the Seychelles. It is eaten in quantity in Sri Lanka, southern India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and more lightly on the coasts of East and West Africa.
A single tree can feed a household through its season and needs little labour once it is established, which has made breadfruit the subject of a revival: the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaiʻi holds the largest collection of cultivars in the world and has distributed tissue-cultured plants of selected cultivars to tropical countries for food-security programmes. The obstacle is the one the Caribbean met in 1793. The fruit ripens all at once and spoils within days of picking, and fermentation pits, drying, chips, and flour are the old and new answers to the same problem.
Two naming confusions are worth clearing up. The African breadfruit, Treculia africana, whose seeds are the ukwa of Igbo cooking, belongs to a different genus and is not this plant. And the Highland kapiak of Papua New Guinea is a fig, Ficus dammaropsis, although on the coast kapiak means breadfruit.
Historical Journey of Breadfruit
New Guinea & the Bismarck Archipelago — before c. 1000 BCE
Breadfruit was made here, from the breadnut. Artocarpus camansi, a seeded tree with spiny fruit, grows wild and cultivated in New Guinea, and the genetic study of Nyree Zerega, Diane Ragone, and Timothy Motley (2004) found that most of the world's breadfruit descends from it through selection in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. The breadfruits of this region are still mostly seeded, and their chestnut-sized seeds are often the part that is eaten.
No archaeological remains of breadfruit survive here to date that domestication, and the date of this point is linguistic. Malcolm Ross reconstructs the Proto Oceanic word for the tree, *kuluR, which the language had inherited from Proto Malayo-Polynesian, and Proto Oceanic was spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late second millennium BCE by the people archaeologists know from their Lapita pottery. They knew the tree before they set out across the Pacific, which is the evidence for 'before c. 1000 BCE'; how long before, the record does not say.
Breadfruit remains a staple along the coasts and in the islands of Papua New Guinea, where it is roasted whole in the embers, and in Tok Pisin it is kapiak.
Tahiti & the Society Islands — 13th–14th century CE
From the Bismarcks breadfruit travelled east with the settlers of Remote Oceania, through Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, where the old word survives as ʻulu, and on into East Polynesia. It could only travel as a living plant: most of the breadfruits of East Polynesia are seedless, and every one of them was carried as a root shoot or a cutting in a voyaging canoe. It went with the first settlers to the farthest corner of the triangle, for breadfruit starch has been found on obsidian tools from the earliest settlement layer at Anakena, on Rapa Nui, dated between about 1000 and 1300.
In the Society Islands charred breadfruit remains come from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century contexts on Maupiti, as Paula Berenguer and her colleagues summarise, and the fruit, ʻuru, was the staple of Tahiti when Europeans arrived. Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson saw it there with Cook in 1769. Parkinson's name for it, Sitodium altile, gave the species its epithet, and Banks's advocacy made Tahiti the source for the British attempt to carry breadfruit to the Caribbean: HMS Bounty loaded more than a thousand plants at Tahiti in 1789, which were thrown overboard after the mutiny, and HMS Providence loaded them again in 1792.
Kohala & the Hawaiian Islands — late 13th century CE
Breadfruit reached Hawaiʻi with its Polynesian settlers, most probably from the Society Islands, and Mark McCoy, Michael Graves, and Gail Murakami dated its arrival by radiocarbon (2010): breadfruit wood charcoal from archaeological deposits in North Kohala, on Hawaiʻi Island, shows the tree growing there by the late thirteenth century. The Hawaiian ʻulu is a sterile, seedless cultivar, which can only have come as a living shoot, and Hawaiian oral traditions speak of more than one introduction.
ʻUlu became one of the staples of the islands alongside taro and sweet potato, and it was pounded into poi as taro was. It is now enjoying a revival: growers' co-operatives sell it fresh and frozen, and the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden holds the largest collection of breadfruit cultivars in the world.
Nuku Hiva & the Marquesas Islands — c. 1400–1600 CE
The Marquesas made breadfruit into a store against famine. The islands are steep and prone to drought, and at the height of the season breadfruit was packed into leaf-lined pits to ferment into mā, a sour paste that would keep for years and was pounded with fresh breadfruit into popoi. The stone pounder, the keʻa tuki popoi, is one of the characteristic objects of Marquesan archaeology. Breadfruit starch grains on shell tools from Marquesan sites dated between about 1400 and 1600, reported by Melinda Allen and Elizabeth Ussher and cited by Berenguer and her colleagues, are the dated evidence for this point; the tree itself most probably came with the first settlers, earlier still.
It was also here that Europe first saw breadfruit. The Spanish expedition of Álvaro de Mendaña reached the Marquesas in July 1595, and the account of its chief pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, is generally credited with the first European description of the tree, nearly a century before William Dampier's on Guam.
The Caroline & Mariana Islands — before 1686 CE
Micronesia is breadfruit's second origin. When breadfruit from the south reached the high islands of western Micronesia, it crossed with a native wild species, Artocarpus mariannensis, of the Mariana Islands and Palau, and the genetic study of Zerega, Ragone, and Motley (2004) found that many of the breadfruits of Micronesia are these hybrids, a lineage distinct from the breadfruit of Melanesia and Polynesia. Breadfruit became a staple across the high islands and the atolls, preserved in fermentation pits as it was in Polynesia.
The date is documentary, and late. The earliest European description found for this entry is William Dampier's, who stopped at Guam in 1686 and described the bread-fruit as 'big as a penny loaf' in the account he published in 1697. The hybrids are almost certainly far older, but no dated archaeological evidence was found for this entry, and so the date is written 'before 1686'.
In Chuuk breadfruit is mai, pounded hot into kon; on Guam it is lemmai, slow-cooked in coconut milk as gollai åppan lemmai.
Ambon & the Moluccas — late 17th century CE
West of New Guinea, breadfruit and breadnut were long established in the Moluccas when the Dutch arrived, and the first detailed account comes from Ambon. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a German-born naturalist in the service of the Dutch East India Company, lived on the island from 1653 until his death in 1702 and described its plants in the Herbarium Amboinense. He went blind in 1670 and carried on with the help of assistants, and the work was published only in 1741–50. He separated the seedless breadfruit, Soccus lanosus, from the seeded breadnut, Soccus granosus, and from a wild relative, a distinction that Pablo Ferrer-Gallego and Fernando Boisset (2018) have tied to the modern names Artocarpus altilis, A. camansi, and A. horridus.
How the tree came to the Moluccas is not recorded; the breadnut's native home in New Guinea lies just to the east. Indonesia now eats breadfruit, sukun, across the archipelago, fried, boiled, made into chips and flour, and simmered in coconut milk and palm sugar as kolak, and it cooks the young seeded keluwih as a vegetable.
Manila & Luzon — by 1772 CE
The breadnut, kamansi, and the breadfruit, rimas, were both at home in the Philippines by the eighteenth century, and the breadnut takes its scientific name from here: the Augustinian friar Francisco Manuel Blanco described Artocarpus camansi in his Flora de Filipinas of 1837, taking the epithet from its Tagalog name. How and when the seeded tree reached the islands from New Guinea is not settled.
The date of this point is a French one. The naturalist Pierre Sonnerat, whose account of his voyage in the eastern seas calls the tree by its Philippine name, rima, had it growing on Réunion and Mauritius from 1772, and the National Tropical Botanical Garden traces the breadnut of the French colonies to the Philippines. It was this seeded tree, not the seedless breadfruit of Tahiti, that first reached the Americas.
Filipino cooks use the young breadnut as a vegetable, sliced and simmered in coconut milk as ginataang kamansi, and boil the seeds of the mature fruit like chestnuts.
Pamplemousses & Mauritius — 1772 CE
The French Indian Ocean was the relay for the breadfruit's first crossing to the Americas. Pierre Sonnerat introduced the seeded breadfruit, his rima, to Île Bourbon (Réunion) and Île de France (Mauritius) from 1772, and the royal garden at Pamplemousses, directed by Jean-Nicolas Céré, became the nursery from which the ministry of the Marine repeatedly ordered useful plants, breadfruit among them, to be sent on to Cayenne and Saint-Domingue. In 1788 the ship L'Alexandre, chartered at great expense by the island's administrators, carried breadfruit, nutmeg, cinnamon, and other plants from here to Cayenne.
The seedless breadfruit came to Pamplemousses nine years later, and by an extraordinary road. Félix Lahaie, the gardener of the d'Entrecasteaux expedition sent in search of Lapérouse, collected about two hundred breadfruit plants in Tonga in 1793, and when the expedition broke up in Java he stayed behind alone to nurse them. Ten survived; he propagated them by layering, and early in 1797 he sailed for Île de France and handed most of them to Céré. Monique Pouliquen's account, drawn from the French naval archives, is the source for both voyages.
Mauritius eats breadfruit but has never made it a staple, and this point is a transit: from here the tree went on to the Seychelles and across the Atlantic.
Victoria, Mahé & the Seychelles — after 1772 CE
Breadfruit, friyapen, is as close to a national food as the Seychelles has, and it is spoken of locally as the tree of life. It is boiled, roasted, mashed, cooked in ladob with coconut milk, and fried into the chips sold all over Mahé, and a saying told to visitors holds that whoever eats it will return to the islands.
How it arrived is not recorded. The Seychelles were uninhabited until French settlers came from Île de France in 1770, and the tree most probably came from the Mascarenes, where Sonnerat had established the seeded form from 1772 and Lahaie delivered the seedless one in 1797. The date of this point is therefore written 'after 1772', and the record consulted for this entry does not narrow it. In 2007 A.-M. Moustache and M. Moustache described breadfruit as a traditional food crop, written into the national agricultural strategy of 1992–93, most of whose trees grow half wild, tall, and hard to harvest.
Breadfruit crossed from here to East Africa: the Swahili name shelisheli, the Seychelles, is usually taken to record that it reached Zanzibar and the Swahili coast from these islands.
Colombo & Sri Lanka — by c. 1780 CE
Breadfruit, del, is cooked in Sri Lanka as a vegetable and a staple: curried in coconut milk as del curry, or boiled and eaten with pol sambol in place of rice. How it reached the island is not recorded. It is usually credited to the Dutch, who held Ceylon's coasts from the 1650s until 1796 and moved plants between their Asian possessions, most probably from the East Indies, and the path on this map follows that attribution.
The date rests on the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg, who served the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon in 1777 and 1778 and was credited with establishing that breadfruit grew there; by 1780 the Royal Society in London had heard that it was being cultivated in botanical gardens in Ceylon and India. Hugh Boyd, who had gone as British envoy to Kandy in 1782, argued in papers published in 1800 that breadfruit had grown in Ceylon 'from time out of memory', and that the government had sent Bligh to Tahiti apparently unaware of it. On the Malabar coast of India the same fruit is sheemachakka, the foreign jackfruit, a name that remembers it came from outside.
Cayenne & French Guiana — 1788 CE
Cayenne was meant to be the entrepôt through which the useful plants of the Indies would pass to French America, and breadfruit reached the Americas here, before Bligh. The ship L'Alexandre arrived from Île de France on 14 June 1788 with nutmeg, cinnamon, and breadfruit, including three trees meant for Saint-Domingue that had to be left at Cayenne, and the gardener Joseph Martin multiplied them in the King's Garden. Between April 1791 and May 1792 he distributed 777 breadfruit trees in French Guiana and 81 more for Martinique, Guadeloupe, and France, and he wrote that the seeds were delicious boiled like chestnuts.
The seedless breadfruit followed from Tonga, by way of Java, Mauritius, and Paris. One of the three trees Félix Lahaie carried to Paris in 1797 was put aboard the corvette La Vaillante, which was taking the politicians deported after the coup of 18 Fructidor into exile; according to the memoirs of one of them, the deportees, who had not been told their destination, guessed from the carefully tended plant that they were bound for Guiana. It arrived on 11 November 1797.
This point is a transit on the road to the Antilles. French Guiana grows and cooks breadfruit, but Jean-Baptiste Leblond reported in 1797 that it was little eaten, because it needed care in preparation and the banana and cassava served as well.
Martinique & the French Antilles — 1791–1792 CE
Breadfruit reached Martinique and Guadeloupe from Cayenne, in Joseph Martin's distribution of 1791–92, and the seedless Tongan breadfruit followed by the end of the 1790s. The Antilles took both. The seeded breadnut is châtaigne, the chestnut, eaten boiled for its seeds, and the seedless breadfruit, fruit à pain, became a starch of the Creole kitchen: boiled, fried, baked in gratins, and cooked down with salt meat into migan.
Its adoption was slow. The breadfruit had been wanted as a cheap food for the enslaved, and those it was meant for preferred the banana and cassava they already grew. Over the nineteenth century it became ordinary, and the historian Monique Pouliquen records that under slavery a family's breadfruit tree passed to the next generation with its cabin and garden.
Port of Spain & Trinidad — after 1791 CE
Trinidad's breadnut is French in name and Indian in the pot. Chataigne is the French châtaigne, the chestnut, the name the French Antilles gave the breadnut, and it points to where the tree came from. The Cedula of Population of 1783 opened Spanish Trinidad to Catholic settlers, and French planters, free people of colour, and the people they enslaved came in large numbers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Grenada. The breadnut had reached the French islands only between 1788 and 1792, so it most probably came to Trinidad after that; the record consulted here does not give the year, and the date is written 'after 1791'. The seedless breadfruit came too, from the British garden at St Vincent after 1793.
The curry came with the Indian indentured labourers who arrived from 1845, and curry chataigne is now a fixture of Divali, of Hindu weddings, and of pujas.
Kingstown & St Vincent — 1793 CE
On 23 January 1793 HMS Providence, under William Bligh, anchored at Kingstown with the Tahitian breadfruit that the planters of St Vincent had been asking Joseph Banks for since 1772. The plants had come the long way round, west from Tahiti by way of Timor and St Helena. Enslaved men carried several hundred of them from the harbour to the botanic garden, founded in 1765, where the curator Alexander Anderson propagated them and sent them on to the other British islands. Genetic work led by Lauren Audi and Nyree Zerega (2023) has traced five of the Caribbean's breadfruit lineages to that single voyage, and a sucker in the garden is thought to descend from one of Bligh's own plants.
The plaque tells a tidier story than the record. Anderson had already obtained breadfruit from French sources, and he reported that the enslaved people for whom the tree had been fetched across the world preferred the plantain. Today roasted breadfruit and fried jackfish is the national dish of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Port Royal & Jamaica — 1793 CE
HMS Providence reached Port Royal from St Vincent on 5 February 1793, and the Tahitian plants were distributed to the botanic garden at Bath, in St Thomas, to Spring Garden, and to estates across the island. Jamaica's planters had asked for the tree as the cheapest possible food for the people they enslaved. Hinton East wrote to Banks in 1784 that it would be raised with 'infinitely less labour' than the plantain, and the planters, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey observes, had no intention of eating it themselves. Those it was meant to feed refused it for years, and it became Jamaican only slowly, over the nineteenth century.
Bligh's may not have been the first. Douglas Hall's reading of the island's records puts a 'breadfruit' among plants arriving in January 1786, but seeded and seedless breadfruit and the jackfruit were all given overlapping names at the time, and what arrived is uncertain. Roast breadfruit, eaten with butter or with ackee and saltfish, is now one of the island's defining foods.
St George's & Grenada — after 1793 CE
Breadfruit reached Grenada from the St Vincent garden, which propagated Bligh's plants after 1793 and supplied the neighbouring British islands with them; the record consulted for this entry does not give the date. It became the foundation of Grenada's national dish, oil down, a one-pot of breadfruit, salted meat, callaloo, and dumplings cooked down in coconut milk and turmeric until the liquid is gone and the coconut oil has separated in the bottom of the pot. Without the breadfruit, Grenadians would not call the result oil down.
Bridgetown & Barbados — after 1793 CE
Breadfruit most probably reached Barbados from the botanic garden at St Vincent, which propagated Bligh's plants after 1793 and supplied the British islands with them; the date and the ship are not recorded in the sources consulted. It became a household tree and a common starch on the island, boiled, roasted, fried, and turned in the pot into breadfruit cou-cou, the sibling of the cornmeal and okra cou-cou that is the national dish, served with flying fish steamed in a Creole sauce.
