"Polynesian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been cooked; ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... groups are curious pyramids, tall and slender, built of stones. The natives regard them with superstitious fear. The author of these papers, being a mariner, suggests that they are "landmarks or relics of ancient copper-colored voyagers of the Polynesian race during their great migrations." Remarkable structures of this kind are found on Tapituea, one of the Kingsmill islands, and on Tinian, one of the Ladrones, where, also, remarkable Cyclopean structures are found. They are solid, truncated pyramidal columns, generally ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... edibles. Bread-fruit is the chief resource; fish, a very important one, the chief dependence of many of the poorer natives. There is little industry amongst them, and on the spontaneous produce of the soil the shipping make heavy demands. Polynesian indolence is proverbial. Very light labour would enable the Tahitians to roll in riches, at least according to their own estimate of the value of money and of the luxuries it procures. The sugar-cane is indigenous to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... my surprise, enough of the words were familiar to enable me clearly to catch the meaning of the whole. They were Polynesian, the Polynesian of the Samoans which is its most ancient form, but in some indefinable way—archaic. Later I was to know that the tongue bore the same relation to the Polynesian of today as does not that of Chaucer, but of the Venerable Bede, to modern English. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... as well as on later occasions, I noticed two distinct types among the Bororos: one purely Papuan or Polynesian; the other strongly Malay. The characteristics of those two different types showed themselves markedly in every instance. The majority were perhaps of the Malay type. I was intensely interested at the astounding resemblance of these people to the piratical tribes of ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... by Polynesian emigrants from surrounding island groups, the Tokelau Islands were made a British protectorate in 1889. They were transferred to New Zealand administration in 1925. According to a UN report, these low-lying islands will disappear in the 21st century, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... are bound—remember that—patiently and lovingly to relight it for them; to give freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is capable of receiving ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... in the Pacific she met a young Polynesian of high birth who gravely told her, when asked about his proposed career in life, that he had not yet decided whether to enter the Church or to join a Circus. He was still sufficiently near to the large and beautiful ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Friday.—Returning from an extensive exploring trip in the South Seas, the auxiliary yacht Kawa, which reached this port today, reports the discovery of a new group of Polynesian Islands. The new archipelago has been named the Filbert Islands, because of the extraordinary quantity of nuts of that name found there, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... who would drive his poor relatives from his own door in England, would besiege in Samoa the doors of the rich; and the essence of the dishonesty in either case is to pursue one's own advantage and to be indifferent to the losses of one's neighbour. But the particular drawback of the Polynesian system is to depress and stagger industry. To work more is there only to be more pillaged; to save is impossible. The family has then made a good day of it when all are filled and nothing remains over for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously, like the unsubstantial fabric of a magic wand. With its jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you may imagine that there Polynesian knights guard with strange rites mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself together ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the Maories came in the first instance, some thirteen hundred years ago, from the Sandwich Islands. There is reason for believing this to be correct, when one reflects that the beautiful Polynesian race peopled all the archipelago sprinkled throughout ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... inches, and as the entire skull could hardly have held less than an additional 12 cubic inches, its capacity may be estimated at about 75 cubic inches, which is the average capacity given by Morton for Polynesian and Hottentot skulls. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... this interesting people are even to this day made entirely of wood, and have such a Polynesian look about them that I intend some time or other to bring some home and experiment on that learned Polynesian-culture-expert, Baron von Hugel, with them: — intellectually experiment, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... states of Kedah and Perak, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. It is spoken in all the states of the Peninsula, in Sumatra, Sunda, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Flores, Timor, and Timor Laut, the Moluccas, and the Philippines. Traces of it are found among the numerous Polynesian dialects, and in the language of the islanders of Formosa. Siam proper has a large Malay population, descendants mainly of captives taken in war, and the language is therefore in use there in places; it is found also here and there ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... and favouring winds gradually wore off the panic occasioned by the supernatural appearance, and if not forgotten, it was referred to either in jest or with indifference. They now had run through the Straits of Malacca, and entered the Polynesian Archipelago. Philip's orders were to refresh and call for instructions at the small island of Boton, then in possession of the Dutch. They arrived there in safety, and after remaining two days, again sailed on their voyage, intending to make their passage between ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by F. J. Roberts, Little Britain, E.C.), we proceed to appropriate such matters of curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial nor doggedly antiquarian. Parish registers among the civilised peoples of antiquity do not greatly concern us. It seems certain that many Polynesian races have managed to record (in verse, or by some rude marks) the genealogies of their chiefs through many hundreds of years. These oral registers are accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet we must remember that Pindar supposed himself to possess ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... to imagine how an analogous change might come about in the existing world. There is, at present, a great difference between the fauna of the Polynesian Islands and that of the west coast of America. The animals which are leaving their spoils in the deposits now forming in these localities are widely different. Hence, if a gradual shifting of the deep sea, which at present bars migration between the easternmost of these islands ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of leaves had been displaced during the night, but went on straight to Medlicot's Mill. He rode the nine miles in an hour, and at once entered the building in which the canes were crushed. The first man he met was Nokes, who acted as overseer, having a gang of Polynesian laborers under him—sleek, swarthy fellows from the South Sea Islands, with linen trowsers on and nothing else—who crept silently among the vats and machinery, shifting the sugar ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... was elected a member of the French Academy in 1891, succeeding to the chair of Octave Feuillet. Some of his writings are: 'Aziyade,' written in 1879; the scene is laid in Constantinople. This was followed by 'Rarahu,' a Polynesian idyl (1880; again published under the title Le Mariage de Loti, 1882). 'Roman d'un Spahi (1881) deals with Algiers. Taton-gaye is a true 'bete-humaine', sunk in moral slumber or quivering with ferocious joys. It is in this book that Loti has eclipsed Zola. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... society, which sends the Gospel in the hands of native missionaries into other islands at its own cost, and not only supports more than a dozen "foreign" missionaries, but translates parts of the Bible into other Polynesian tongues. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... others of our Polynesian Converts behindhand. The Native Churches in Mangaia have also given generous gifts, of which the Rev. W.W. ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... Work upon which I spent only special hours of delicious leisure and infinite labor. It held all that was forbidden to popular compositions; depth and sorrow and dissonances dearer than harmony. I called it a Symphony Polynesian, and I had spent years in study of barbaric music, instruments and kindred things that this love-child of mine might be more richly clothed by a tone or a fancy. Aunt Caroline had interrupted, this morning, at a very point of achievement toward which ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... most convenient materials for hasty comparison, I find words in common—not only with those of other divisions of the Pelagian Negroes,* as the inhabitants of the north coast of New Guinea on the one hand, and New Ireland on the other, but also with the Malay and the various Polynesian languages or dialects spoken from New Zealand to Tahiti.** This latter affinity between the woolly and straight-haired sections of oceanic blacks appears to me to render it more curious and unexpected that the language of the Louisiade ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... or when all these islands became inhabited is not definitely known. Since the Polynesian languages in general are similar, it is conjectured that the inhabitants of the islands have a common origin and that many of the more northerly groups were peopled by emigrants ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... large amount of ethnographic data derived from the Polynesian Islands, Micronesian Islands, Australia, etc., more than one-half of this important volume is devoted to philology, a large share relating to the tribes ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the first time it really came home to Frida's mind that Bertram Ingledew, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longden as much about the same sort of unreasoning people—savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible; but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an English officer on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... explicitly racial was the warning of a senior combat commander to the effect that the deployment of black depot units to the Polynesian areas of the Pacific should be avoided. The Polynesians, he explained, were delightful people, and their "primitively romantic" women shared their intimate favors with one and all. Mixture with the white race had produced "a very high-class half-caste," mixture with the Chinese a "very ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... seated and regaled with cocoanuts. The natives here are much darker than are those at Kerepunu; most of them suffer from a very offensive-looking skin disease, which causes the skin to peel off in scales. In their conversation with one another I recognized several Polynesian words. The water is obtained by digging in the sand, and ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... Red Men on a missionary settlement. But boys at school and among themselves, left to the wild justice and traditional laws which many generations of boys have evolved, are entirely different beings. They resemble that Polynesian prince who had rejected the errors of polytheism for those of an extreme sect of Primitive Seceders. For weeks at a time this prince was known to be "steady," but every month or so he disappeared, and his subjects said he was "lying off." To adopt ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang |
