Duarte Pacheco Pereira, whose defence of the Fort at Cochin (c. 1504) against a great army of the Zamorin's, was one of the great feats of the Portuguese in India. [Comm. Alboquerque, Hak. Soc. i. 5.]
MS. communication from Prof. Terrien de la Couperie.
It may be noted that Theophrastus describes under the names of κύκας and κόϊξ a palm of Ethiopia, which was perhaps the Doom palm of Upper Egypt (Theoph. H. P. ii. 6, 10). Schneider, the editor of Theoph., states that Sprengel identified this with the coco-palm. See the quotation from Pliny below.
This mythical story of the unique tree producing this nut curiously shadows the singular fact that one island only (Praslin) of that secluded group, the Seychelles, bears the Lodoicea as an indigenous and spontaneous product. (See Sir L. Pelly, in J.R.G.S., xxxv. 232.)
Kalāpā, or Klāpā, is the Javanese word for coco-nut palm, and is that commonly used by the Dutch.