In 1902 a twenty-six-year-old German stepped off a mail steamer onto a coral island in the Pacific, took off his clothes, and essentially never put them back on again. He had 185 acres of coconut and banana palms bought with his dead father's money, a library of more than 1,200 books, and one unshakable conviction: the coconut is the only food a human being should ever eat. It grows highest on the tree, closest to the sun. And, as he liked to point out, it looks like a head. "God created coconuts based on the human head."
His name was August Englehardt. Within a dozen years his theory would kill several men, including him.
The gray years in Nuremberg
He was born in Nuremberg on November 27th, 1877, the middle child of four. His parents, Friedrich and Charlotte, were first cousins, and by Englehardt's own diary both of them beat their children. His mother died when he was seventeen, his father two years later. Add the Nuremberg sky — October to March, the sun rarely showed its face — and you have a young man with every reason to go looking for light.
He abandoned chemistry and physics at Erlangen University to work as a pharmacy assistant, which lit a passion for health that never went out. Germany was then deep in Lebensreform, life reform: a rejection of factories and cities, a call back to vegetarianism, naturopathy, nudism, dance. A book called Fruit and Bread, a Scientific Diet finished the job. And here is what separated Englehardt from every other crank with a diet obsession — the paint-and-varnish factory his father had owned left him wealthy. Money can fertilize the wildest dream there is.
In 1898 he and a fellow believer, August Bethman, published a manifesto stuffed with sermons and poetry. The poems had titles like The Coconut Spirit, How to Become a Coconut and Mother Coconut. A year later he moved to Jungborn — Fountain of Youth — a commune in the Harz Mountains run by the brothers Adolf and Rudolf Just, who told followers to throw out their mattresses and their shoes and sleep on bare earth. From there Englehardt toured the region lecturing: whosoever subsided solely on the coconut would become godly, would become immortal. Rooms full of pragmatic Bavarian farmers laughed him out of the building.
The Order of the Sun
On October 2nd, 1902, he bought his plantation on the island of Cabocon, in what was then German New Guinea. It was not a deserted island. At least forty Melanesians already lived there, and they melted into the brush whenever the pale, shaggy-haired stranger appeared at the lagoon.
He built a three-room thatched hut he called the Palm Temple, swam, harvested, and waited for his disciples. To speed things up, he and Bethman paid German newspapers to run advertorials. Come to Cabocon. Clothing not required, except a loincloth for greeting visitors. Nothing to fear in the tropics — not even malaria, since coconut treated it better than quinine did.
Admission was not casual. Applicants had to be of noble and excellent character, with two written recommendations from respected men Englehardt personally knew. Passage cost $250 of their own money, close to ten thousand in today's terms. Men only — Englehardt was either terrified of women or bitterly resentful of them, and the record doesn't settle which. And every member had to accept that life on the island would be permanently naked.
Bethman got there first, then had doubts. When his wife, Anna Schwab, arrived and insisted her husband eat something other than coconut, the two men fought. Bethman fell ill, probably with malaria, and died before he could board a steamer home. Englehardt blamed Anna for polluting the purity of his diet. Anna went to the governor of German New Guinea, who halted new immigration to the island.
Two graves side by side
Heinrich Eukens arrived in 1903, twenty-four years old and healthy, and left his clothes on the dock. Six weeks later he was dead of a fever no one would treat, because modern medicine was industrial poison.
Next came Max Litzl, a celebrated concert violinist, pianist and conductor from Berlin, burned out by the business side of his art. Looking around the island, he pronounced himself "convinced that anyone lucky enough to come to the island would surely stay there forever." He had no idea.
Litzl had brought his music with him, and Englehardt could not stand two of Litzl's favorite composers: Gaetano Donizetti and Georges Bizet. That sounds like nothing. On a small island, naked, hungry, half sunstruck, with the same hated records playing over and over, it was everything — and the deeper problem was that music was the one thing on Cabocon outside Englehardt's rule. One persuasive reading is that Englehardt was simply in love with him, and could not bear not being the sun and stars in Litzl's universe.
The fight, when it came, was vicious. Litzl asked a cutter full of Wesleyan missionaries anchored in the lagoon for one night's sleep aboard. That night the ship dragged its anchor and drifted; the cross currents made return too dangerous for two days. Litzl, still a man of nature, refused shelter and refused anything but fresh fruit, of which the ship had none. He shivered on the open deck in a cold wet wind, came back delirious, and died a week later. Englehardt buried him next to Eukens. When the missionaries suggested shipping the body home to Litzl's family, he exploded: "I own this island. It is mine to do as I see fit."
The entire religion rested on a resemblance — the coconut grows highest toward the sun and looks like a human head, so August Englehardt concluded God had designed it as the only food a person should ever eat. Grown men with money and letters of recommendation crossed the world to starve to death proving him right.
The heads in the newspapers
The recruits stopped coming, and headhunters were a large part of the reason. Papers from Butte, Montana to Rome and London ran breathless wire stories about "the most fearsome savages," including one in The Sun Journal in April 1910 explaining that a white man's head was the most highly prized of all. In 1901 a missionary had found a cache of 10,000 human skulls in a longhouse not far from Cabocon. Whether headhunting was ever the epidemic the papers sold is another matter — it caught fire the way things go viral now — but it was enough to keep respectable young Germans home.
A few trickled in anyway. They basked, they splashed, they gobbled coconut, and then they weakened. Some died of malaria and malnutrition, a couple drowned, a few went down with sunstroke, and one was killed by a falling coconut. The survivors told Englehardt they were finished. He raged that they had brought it on themselves by eating the other fruit growing everywhere around them.
Sixty-six pounds
The math was never going to work. A coconut carries about 1,400 calories, much of it saturated fat, and almost no protein or vitamin C; the water acts as a mild diuretic, and the potassium load is hard on a heart. Englehardt collected the whole catalog of deficiency diseases — beriberi, pellagra, scurvy — hollow-eyed and covered in sores that would not heal. Tourists detoured to photograph the legendary hermit of Cabocon. He waved off medical help every time.
Hauled to the hospital at Herbertshöhe under a doctor whose diagnosis included the phrase paranoid wreck, he refused food and care and slipped away home. The islanders themselves finally paddled to the capital to ask the authorities to take him — not because he was skeletal, but because he had begun preaching in German to the trees and shaking his fists at the sky. When World War I came, Australian forces took German New Guinea, briefly interned him, decided he was a harmless crackpot, and let him go inside a year. He went back to the hut, sent plant specimens to the botanic gardens in Brisbane and Sydney, and painted watercolors that may still be out there somewhere.
The likeliest of the several stories of his death puts it in May 1919, age forty-four, body wrecked by malnutrition and rheumatism. In his last known photograph his arms and legs are thin as sticks. He weighed perhaps sixty-six pounds. The plantation was judged worthless.
He'd have been a footnote if Christian Krott hadn't turned him into the award-winning satirical novel Imperium in 2012. Today "coconut cult" gets you a probiotic yogurt company, and Dr. Bruce Fyfe's Coconut Research Center in Colorado promotes coconut as nature's medicine chest. Which sounds like somebody. "The coconut is the philosopher's stone."