Crossword-Solution: MORICHE 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through the Serpent’s Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of pitch, where all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos, ‘pheasant’ (Penelope), ‘palmitos’ (Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await the return of the expedition from the last day of December to the middle of February.

This rapid growth is so much the more remarkable, as other palm-trees, for instance, the moriche,* (* Mauritia flexuosa.) and the palm of Sombrero,* (* Corypha tectorum.) the longevity of which is very great, frequently do not attain a greater height than fourteen or eighteen feet in the space of sixty years.

After having passed two nights on horseback, and sought in vain, by day, for some shelter from the heat of the sun beneath the tufts of the moriche palm-trees, we arrived before night at the little Hato del Cayman,* (* The Farm of the Alligator.) called also La Guadaloupe.

Where tufts of the moriche palm were found growing in long ranges, the extremities of these green rows were suspended like the capes which were, for so long a time, the subject of my observations at Cumana.

The araguato monkeys eat it with avidity; and the nation of the Guaraounos, whose whole existence, it may be said, is closely linked with that of the moriche palm-tree, produce from it a fermented liquor, slightly acid, and extremely refreshing.