296 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM. 



maritime activity, as shown not only by the Polynesians, but by the 

 dark, frizzle-haired Melanesian people who were extending them- 

 selves to the eastward and had reached not only to Fiji and Tonga, 

 but to Tahiti a and the Marquesas. 6 



The place where these frizzle-haired people were found by Balboa 

 was close to the Pacific Ocean and very far from the Atlantic. Nor 

 is it entirely impossible that additional present-day evidence is still 

 to be obtained by careful ethnological study of the Panama region, 

 where a rather peculiar clan of frizzle-haired, seafaring people still 

 exists, locally called Chiricanos. They are commonly supposed to 

 represent an intermixture of negroes and Indians, but are worthy 

 of study as a possible remnant of Polynesian influence. 



The period in which the coconut was first carried westward across 

 the Pacific was, in all probability, so extremely remote that shore 

 lines and land masses may easily have been different from what 

 they are now. Other low-lying islands between Cocos and the 

 Marquesas group may have disappeared, but the biological and 

 historical facts do not leave us dependent on such speculations for 

 an assurance of human contacts between the Pacific islands and the 

 coasts of tropical America. It becomes obvious that the possibility of 

 communication with the islands of the Pacific may have continued 

 nearly to the time of the coming of the Spaniards, and that not by 

 ocean currents or shipwrecks, but by deliberate voyages of maritime 

 people, whose other exploits in the Pacific show that they were quite 

 capable of carrying the coconut into the Pacific, and, many genera- 

 tions later, of bringing the banana back. 



THE COCONUT PALM UNABLE TO MAINTAIN ITSELF ON 



SEACOASTS. 



The disappearance of the coconut palms from Cocos Island is a 

 striking example of the general fact that the coconut palm is not 

 only unable to establish itself on seacoasts, but is unable to persist 

 after it has been planted. The greater the emphasis laid upon the 

 idea that the coconut can float, and can be cast up and grow on the 

 beach, the greater appears the discrepancy between the theory of 

 maritime distribution and the actual facts, for the palm is not known 

 to exist except as a cultivated plant in the care of agricultural people. 



That nuts are sometimes carried for long distances by the sea 

 there can be no doubt; everything is carried that has a sufficiently 

 low specific gravity. A striking instance of this kind has been 



a Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World (1766-1769), trans, by John Forster, 

 p. 249. (London, 1772.) 



& Quiros (1595), in Dalrymple, Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries, 

 vol. 1, p. 69. (London, 1770.) 



