Asserting its supremacy by an erect and lofty bearing, it may be said to compare with other trees as man with inferior creatures.
The blessings it confers are incalculable.

Tear after year, the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit; he thatches his hut with its boughs, and weaves them into baskets to carry his food; he cools himself with a fan platted from the young leaflets, and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves; sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks, whose elastic rods, strung with filberts, are used as a taper; the larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet: the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes; the dry husks kindle his fires; their fibres are twisted into fishing-lines and cords for his canoes; he heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut; and with the oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.
The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless.

Sawn into posts, it upholds the islander's dwelling; converted into charcoal, it cooks his food; and supported on blocks of stone, rails in his lands.

He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the wood, and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material.
In pagan Tahiti a cocoa-nut branch was the symbol of regal authority.
Laid upon the sacrifice in the temple, it made the offering sacred; and with it the priests chastised and put to flight the evil spirits which assailed them.

The supreme majesty of Oro, the great god of their mythology, was declared in the cocoa-nut log from which his image was rudely carved.