Living on an island and eating nothing but coconuts can be harmful to your health.
The Sanskrit name for the coconut tree it is kalpa vrishka, or “tree that gives everything one needs to live.” At the beginning of the 20th century, a 26-year-old German named August Engelhardt took this idea literally – he decided to build a utopian, sun-worshipping sect where members would eat nothing – and absolutely nothing – except coconuts.
Born in 1875, Engelhardt was a dissatisfied chemistry and physics college student who later became a pharmacy assistant. There, he became deeply involved in the popular Lebensreform (“life reform”) movement that rejected Germany's ever-advancing industrialism, embracing back-to-nature ideals such as alternative medicine, raw foods, sexual liberation, and the rejection of life-altering substances. mind . substances and vaccines.
He had a very long beard and didn't wear many clothes. Both attributes place him as something of a hippie in an ultra-outraged European society. He spoke publicly about his beliefs, for which he was ridiculed, but still remained undeterred in his spiritual and nutritional pursuits.
Cuckoo for Coconuts
In 1898, he co-authored a book with the unwieldy title “A Carefree Future: The New Gospel; Glimpse of Depth and Distance for the Selection of Humanity, for the Reflection of All, for Consideration and Stimulation”, which was filled with lifestyle ideals and even poems with titles such as “Mother Coconut”, “The Spirit of the Coconut” and, of course, “How to Become a Coconut.” He hoped to attract like-minded vegetarians to join him in escaping to the South Pacific, far from the reach of his restrictive homeland.
Thanks to a substantial inheritance, Engelhardt had the means to make his coconut-crazy dreams come true. He purchased 185 acres (75 hectares) on Kabakon, a small, sparsely populated island located between what is now Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. He took his library of 1,200 books with him, discarded all his clothes, and began living in a simple hut. He bought, of course, a coconut and banana plantation, which never made any money.
Engelhardt was certain that the bright tropical sun that hung overhead was the life source of the universe and that by eliminating clothing he was moving closer to a healthy life. He was convinced that the brain, being closest to the Sun, was humanity's most important organ, elevated above the dark recesses of the intestine. And because coconuts bore a slight resemblance to the human head and grew in the tops of sun-loving trees, he believed that these nuts were the grandest of all the crops on Earth, containing everything the body needed for nourishment. So, that's all he ate.
Although coconuts have good amounts of fat and carbohydrates, they lack vitamins A, K, B6 and B12, as well as calcium. One cup of coconut meat only contains about 3 grams of protein or 5% of your daily needs. Assuming three or four cups in a coconut, Engelhardt would have to eat more than 14 coconuts a day to get enough protein for his 5-foot-9 frame.
Not that knowledge of such mundane nutritional facts would have deterred Engelhardt. “He maintained that man was a tropical animal, not destined to live in caves called houses, but to wander, as Adam did, with the sun beating down on him all day and the dew from the sky as a cloak at night,” explained one article from 1905. A New York Times story sensationally titled “The Failure of a Womanless Eden in the Pacific—A Strange Story from the South Seas.” Engelhardt believed that living such a life “would eventually make a man so immune that the disease could be overcome” and he would conquer death “and be like a god,” the NYT wrote.
Hell is other people
The cult created by Engelhardt was called Sonnenorden (Order of the Sun), and he wrote letters that convinced about 15 people to join him in his sunny paradise. Do not be afraid of malaria, he wrote to his prospects, the heat of the sun and the healing powers of the coconut will cure everything that ails you.
Two of these converts were particularly noteworthy. One of them was Heinrich Eukens, a 24-year-old vegetarian in love with Engelhardt's extreme lifestyle. The other was Max Lutzow, who was once a conductor and musician at the renowned Lutzow Orchestra in Berlin.
Eukens enthusiastically dove into the sun-worshipping coconut, but his constitution was unable to withstand the abrupt physical changes. Within weeks he dropped dead. The other sect followers were horrified, but continued.
Lutzow, on the other hand, got along very well with the island's leader, but for one thing: he brought his music collection with him and often played pieces that irritated Engelhardt. After a fight, Lutzow ended up trapped on a mission boat far from shore and, as there was no fresh fruit on board, he refused to eat. When he returned to land, he was suffering from an irreparable fever, dying under the hot sun.
Other members of the group met their end through heatstroke, drowning and, of course, malaria, because the sun definitely did not serve as an adequate substitute for quinine. Ironically, at least one cultist died after being hit by a falling coconut.
Those who did not die fled the island, leaving their leader to a lonely existence. The German government, aware of Engelhardt's madness, actively prohibited other young rebels from similarly dark ends.
Engelhardt himself continued, certain that his followers died simply because they betrayed their mono-coconut diet, polluting their bodies with impurities and poisons from other food sources. But his health was also failing. Photographs, some taken by tourists who went out of their way to visit the lonely madman, show the cult leader as little more than a bearded bag of bones, his skin riddled with lesions and deformities that clearly demonstrate his nutritional inadequacies.
Eventually, even he was too weak to refuse modern medical care, and a local doctor managed to nurse him back to health in Papua New Guinea. Engelhardt rewarded his doctor's efforts by escaping back to his island, managing to survive until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The following year he was captured as a prisoner of war, but released from the camp, at least in part, because he was clearly mentally ill. Still, he continued until 1919, when his body could no longer handle the malnutrition. He died at age 44, reportedly weighing less than 70 pounds, when he was found on the beach.
Now this is interesting
Engelhardt might have been completely forgotten, except that in 2012, Swiss author Christian Kracht published a fictionalized account of the ordeal titled “Imperium,” resurrecting the coconut-obsessed reject for at least one more round of publicity.
