COOK—THE COCONUT PALM IN AMERICA. 295 
Porter notes the further fact that a native of the Society Islands 
had given to Captain Cook, fifty years before, a similar name for an 
island supposed to be located to the eastward of the Marquesas group. 
Like other Polynesians, the natives of this archipelago were accus- 
tomed to sail away with their families in large canoes well provisioned 
with food and with cuttings of their cultivated plants, to discover 
and colonize new islands. An Englishman, who had lived in the 
Marquesas for several years, informed Porter that he had known of 
the departure of more than 800 people who left ‘‘in search of other 
lands,” never to return. 
As an indication that some of these expeditions from Polynesia 
reached the American Continent we may refer to the presence of the 
banana, a plant certainly native of the Old World, and also widely 
distributed in pre-Spanish America. Balboa found, on his first 
expedition across the Isthmus of Panama, a tribe of dark-skinned, 
heavily tattooed people with frizzled hair, which various historians 
have described as negroes, following a statement to that effect by 
Peter Martyr. 
There is a region not past two dayes iourney distant from Quarequa, in which they 
founde only blacke Moores: and those excedynge fierce and cruell, They suppose 
that in tyme paste certeyne blacke mores sayled thether owt of Aethiopia to robbe: 
and that by shippewracke or sume other chaunce, they were dryuen to those 
mountaynes.@ 
Oviedo’s much more detailed account of these people makes it 
apparent that they were not negroes. Peter Martyr’s statement 
is in the nature of a casual report echoed from second-hand informa- 
tion. Oviedo’s narrative was drawn up on the Isthmus where he 
arrived in 1513, the year after Balboa crossed. It embodies the direct 
testimony of Balboa himself and other eyewitnesses of the events of 
his remarkable expedition.’ 
It is evident enough from Oviedo’s account that the black frizzle- 
haired people encountered by Balboa were recent intruders and not 
ordinary Indians, but there is not the slightest indication, expressed 
or implied, that they were African negroes, who were quite unable 
to make voyages to America, either by design or by accident. The 
Kroos and other maritime tribes of West Africa use only small 
canoes and make only short voyages along the coast, usually going 
ashore to sleep. The Pacific, however, was the scene of a general 
@ Martire in Arber, op. cit., p. 139. (See footnote, p. 276.) 
6 Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indics, vol. 3, pp. 8, 126-129. (Mad- 
rid, 1851: see above, p. 278.) The reason why the facts given in this most extensive of 
the early histories of America have not received more general consideration is doubt- 
less to be found in the fact that the work, though written in the early part of the 
sixteenth century, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth, except in 
the form of short extracts and abridgements, which gave small indication of the 
detailed circumstantial character of much of the information, 
51004°— vou 14, pr 2—10——3 
