THE QUEENSLAND COAST. 279 
of Australia presents the results of a gigantic and totally negative 
experiment which could scarcely have been better arranged to test the 
value of such a hypothesis. The colony of Queensland presents a 
thousand miles of tropical coast line facing eastward toward the 
currents which set against it from the innumerable cocoanut islands 
of the central and western Pacific. And yet in the latter part of the 
last century Moresby! found cocoanuts only where they had been 
planted at a European settlement, the beginning of a considerable 
industry in tropical Queensland where the natural conditions have 
been found very favorable for the present species. As in the time of 
Dampier, Moresby found cocoanuts in great abundance on the coast of 
New Guinea, and even on some of the islands in the narrow Torres 
Straits where a complication of tides, winds, and currents would give 
great opportunities for the interchange of floating objects. And yet 
neither here nor in the remaining 3,000 miles of tropical northern and 
western coasts has the cocoa palm been reported by travelers or 
explorers as growing spontancously. Curiously enough, taro was 
found by Captain Cook wild in North Australia, a possible indication 
of attempted colonization by an agricultural people. And in view of 
the fact that large fleets of Malay proas from Macassar had long been 
accustomed to make annual voyages to the trepang fisheries of Marega, 
the northern coast of Australia, bringing with them rice and cocoa- 
nuts? as provisions for their visit of three or four months, it is almost 
‘Moresby, Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D’Entrecasteaux 
Islands, p. 7. (London, 1876.) 
“Tn front of Mr. Sheridan’s house young cocoanut trees, planted by him as an 
experiment, are growing vigorously—the only ones, strange to say, to be found in 
North or East Australia, although they grow on Cocoanut Island, only about 20 miles 
off Cardwell.” 
Thirty miles from Cardwell Moresby rescued the remnant of a crew of Solomon 
Islanders from a boat which had drifted 1,800 miles from Fiji to the coast of Australia 
in about five weeks. 
Nearly a century before the same coast had been scrutinized from a small boat by 
Captain Bligh and his starving companions. They found empty shells of the cocoa- 
nut on Restoration Island and also on a small reef near Sunday Island. 
“Many pieces of cocoanut shells and husk were found about the shore, but we 
could find no cocoanut trees; neither did we see any on the main,” 
Strangely enough Bligh also found with the cocoanut shells signs of the accidental 
presence of Polynesians on the Australian coast in the form of a large canoe and an 
abandoned hut, structures evidently not made by the natives of Australia. (See 
Bligh: A Voyage to the South Sea, London, 1792, pp. 204, 210, 213.) 
With the settlement of this coast by Europeans it has become certain that the 
stranding of cocoanuts is by no means a rare occurrence, and Hedley well remarks: 
‘‘But, if the popular idea were correct, the Queensland beaches should have pre- 
sented many hundred miles of cocoanut groves to their earliest explorers, receiving, 
as I can testify they do, abundance of drifted nuts and fulfilling every requirement of 
soil and climate.”’ 
? Lang, View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation, p. 56 (London, 
1834). 
