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 1 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 spontaneously. 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 2 as provisions for their visit of three or four months, it is almost 



stores by, Discoveries and Surveys in. New Guinea and the D' Entrecasteaux 

 Islands, p. 7. (London, 1876.) 



"In 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 Card well." 



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 rive 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." 



2 Lang, View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation, p. 56 (London, 

 1834). 



