288 ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COCOA PALM. 



of the Pacific is a matter of a few centuries only. 1 Seeman had already 

 dismissed the idea of an American origin of the cocoa palm, but find- 

 ing it unreasonable to believe that both the Polynesians and the cocoa- 

 nut came from Asia, he was impelled to raise the question whether the 

 direction of the Polynesian migration has not been misinterpreted. 



The light-skinned Polynesians are assumed to he of a Malay stock, and to have 

 migrated somewhere from Eastern Asia. . . . Did these Polynesians leave the 

 cradle of their race before the cocoanut tree had found its way to it? Or are we to 

 assume that they have migrated with the trade wind rather than against it ; that 

 Malayan Asia was peopled from Polynesia rather than Polynesia from Malayan Asia? 



And even if it be admitted that the Polynesians have never been in 

 Asia, other facts remain which can scarcely be explained except by 

 supposing that the cocoanut also passed from east ;o west. At the 

 time of Captain Cook's visit Forster found two names at Tahiti con- 

 nected with the cocoanut palm, nia for the fruit and ari for the tree. 

 Although this distinction is often lost in the islands to the westward, 

 yet both names in numerous modifications have a very wide distribu- 

 tion throughout the Pacific, the Malay region, Hindustan, Arabia, and 

 Madagascar. The word nia becomes niog in the Philippines, and in 

 other localities suffers a vast number of other changes, of which the 

 following samples may suffice: nu, niuh, njo, nieor, nieo, niau, nikau, 

 njog, nivel, niwer, niyur, nicljoe, nieh, nicoera, njioer, noohhoe, and 

 nijor. The other term ari is supposed to be represented in various 

 Polynesian groups by haari, hari, erei, and akari, and has been con- 

 jectured to be the original of the Maori kakari, and may well be the 

 root of the Arabic harel, and the extremely numerous Hindustan forms 

 like nari, naril, narel, narjil. nardjil. and narikel. It can scarcely 

 be denied that the existence of such series of names, when used for 

 the same product by peoples separated by thousands of miles and dif- 

 fering totally in racial characteristics, languages, and customs, affords 

 another proof that the cocoa palm was not distributed by the waves, 

 but by human beings engaged in colonization or commerce. 



1 This idea has undoubtedly been fostered by the fact that the occupation of many 

 of the small coral islands and groups of the Pacific is obviously recent, as must, indeed, 

 be the case where the land itself has existed for only a few centuries. Thus islands 

 of the Ellice Group, to the north of Fiji, were settled in historic times from the 

 Gilbert Group, still farther to the north. It is also of interest to note that the cocoa- 

 nuts are also known To have been introduced from the north and that the natives 

 make toddy and do not use kava, facts which are used by ethnologists to show that 

 the people of the Gilbert Group were derived from Micronesia and not from Melane- 

 sia or Polynesia. According to Captain Moresby the Papuans of the coasts and 

 islands explored by him in 1873 used neither toddy nor kava, 



""We never saw any intoxicating drink among the Papuans, and were struck by 

 the peculiarity, as the making of ava is general amongst the South Sea Islanders." 

 See Moresby, Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D'Entrecasteaux 

 Islands, p. 324. (London, 1876. ) 



