BananasIn 1633, an unripe bunch of bananas was given to apothcary Thomas Johnson by John Argent, President of the College of Physicians (who received it from a merchant just returned with it from the Bahamas). Johnson hung it at his shop in Snow Hill, London, where it ripened about the beginning of May, and lasted until June. Being the first bananas seen in Britian, the display caused a sensation. Johnson was a field botanist, and he recorded the date in his 1636 edition revising John Gerard's 1597 Herball. The pulp, he wrote, was as soft and tender, and ate somewhate like a musk-melon. He described the leaves as being “of bigness sufficient to wrap a child of two yeeres old”. It was not until 1884, though, that bananas were regularly imported, from the Canary Islands into Britain by Elder Dempster and Co.*[Image: the 'Plantaine fruit', in Thomas Johnson's 1633 edition of Gerard's Herball.] |
