The wood of the Ceiba tree is often used to make dugout canoes, which are still used today.
The wood of the Ceiba tree is often used to make dugout canoes, which are still used today. | The buttresses themselves can be up to ten feet tall and extend ten feet from the main trunk. The tree has a broad, flat crown of horizontal branches. The leaves are compound with five to eight lance-shaped leaflets that are three to eight inches long. From December to February the tree produces numerous five-part whitish to pink flowers which occur in dense clusters and bloom before the leaves appear. The tree produces three-to-six-inch long, elliptical fruits. These fruits contain many seeds surrounded by a dense mat of cottony fibers. The tree gets its common name from these fibers which rain from the tree when the fruits ripen. The fibers are almost pure cellulose, buoyant, impervious to water, and have a low thermal conductivity, but they do not lend themselves to spinning. Called Kapok in Asia, the fibers are used for insulation, padding in sleeping bags and life preservers, and for stuffing mattresses and pillows. | |
| According to Hernandez Aquino (1977), Ceiba (pronounced "sayba") is a Taino word. Christopher Columbus in 1492, and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo in 1526, were both impressed by the size of the canoes that the Indians in the West Indies and coastal Central and South America made from the Ceiba tree. These canoes (another Taino word) were hollowed out of tree trunks all in one piece. Some were 10 to 12 spans wide (a "span" measures 9 inches or 1/8th of a fathom), and could carry more than 100 men. The wood is exceedingly lightweight (specific gravity = 0.23), and is easily worked. However, because the wood lacks durability and is susceptible to insects and decay, it is not used for other kinds of construction. [Back] | ||