America's Crop Heritage


the West Indies would be smuggling in lower priced sugar from
the United States!
 Work With Plants-Perrine was quite interested in agaves,
particularly the Agave sisalana. Many species of these plants were
common in Mexico and Central America and one species, the
century plant, could be used in more than a dozen different ways.
Perrine claimed to have invented a method of separating the
fibers from the leaves of the Henequen Agave, commercially
known as Sisal Hemp, by means of rotary scrapers. This invention,
which he compared to Whitney's cotton gin, he expected would
revolutionize agriculture.
 A great many tropical plants other than the agaves attracted
Perrine's attention. He thought of the logwood tree in Yucatan
and suggested that a monopoly on logwood be established by
plantings in America. The demand for vegetable dyes caused him
to study many other dye-producing plants. Among these were the
cochineal cactus with its insect parasite which produces a reddish
dye, the "shrub Indigo," the common indigo of Tabasco, and a
tree indigo. He sent seeds of these and of nankeen colored cotton,
the India rubber tree, the "Pasture tree," a soap tree (its sapona-
ceous fruit was used as a substitute for soap), the "Purgative Pin-
ion," "Spanish Cedar," a large ground gourd, tree-cotton, and
others.
 The House and Senate each originated bills in 1838 for a land
grant to Perrine and each published a Report on his activities. (7)
The grant became a law in July of 1838. Perrine and his associates
were awarded a township of 23,040 acres in any portion of the
public lands below twenty-six degrees north latitude. It was to
be occupied within two years and each section had to be occupied
within eight years from the date of the location of the tract by an
actual settler cultivating useful tropical plants-otherwise the land
would be forfeited.
 Perrine apparently planned to spend the rest of his life on his
 plant work at Indian Key, a twelve-acre island in Florida where
 his land grant was located. Against the advice of the Secretary of
 War who warned him that the Seminoles were rising, Perrine
 landed his family on Indian Key, Christmas morning of 1838. Six
 months later Perrine was shot, and his home and valuable notes
 on his work burned by a Seminole war party. (8) Most of Perrine's
 plants were destroyed during the massacre, but some of them were
 later carried off by Army officers to greenhouses in the North or