IF YOU had to move some elephants across water on a raft of logs, it might help to secure a lot of empty gourds underneath the craft to provide some extra buoyancy. According to legend, this is what the Carthaginian, Hannibal, did when crossing the Strait of Gibraltar during the Punic Wars.

If, on the other hand, you had a more mundane need — to devise the head for a scarecrow, say, or there was a bucketful of water you needed to transport from one place to another and you lacked a bucket — a dried and cleaned out gourd might answer to the need quite niftily.

Gourds — the fruit produced from a family of vine plants called Curcurbitaceae — have been put to use throughout history for a wide variety of purposes. Like many of life's simplest things, gourds can be elegant and beautiful yet also decorative and unassuming, and people have always grown and harvested them. Some fruits grow in bold pear-like shapes, some long and narrow, others neat and round, and from these latter can be made bowls and containers of all sorts, used to store seeds and beads, to serve food and drink, or to cut in half and put on your head like a battle helmet; this last seen once at a fair in Oaxaca City, Mexico. In fact, in some cultures in Central America, also in Africa and the Native American southwest, wild masks are carved from large gourds and these are used in ceremonial dances to call forth powerful spirits. They are painted in astonishing colors and have feathers and fringes attached to them, making a marvelous display. In Guatemala large gourds are sometimes used to hold the snakes featured in snake dances.

Emblems of knowledge and status

As salt carriers gourds have been seen in use in the southeastern United States, and all through Appalachia carved and polished gourds have served as water dippers and drinking cups. When Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions crossed the North American continent on foot in the 1530s (something to do after having been shipwrecked), they saw a good many gourds in use by the natives. In addition to cups and containers, they were used as cook pots, rattles, and even carried about as emblems of knowledge and status. Headhunters in Ecuador and the Solomon Islands used gourds to hold the poison with which they coated their spears and darts.

There are small gourds that are carved and painted simply as decorative objects, fashioned into toys such as small birds or other figures, or used to hold incense on altars. Filled with pebbles, sand, dried corn or beans, gourds have been popularly used as rattles by peoples on all continents. Larger fruits have been cleverly made into drums, marimbas, and the bodies of sitars and lutes.