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 "hi 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. a 



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. 6 



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 



a Martire in Arber, op. cit., p. 139. (See footnote, p. 276.) 



&Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indies, 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 earh histories of America have not received more general consideration is doubt- 

 be found in the fact that the work, though written in the early part of the 

 sixteen! h 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°— vol 14, pt 2—10 3 



