"West Indian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... year; but at a little distance or in a discreet light, it was no courtier's flattery to say that she might very well have passed for thirty. Her tall, elegant figure was girlish in its supple slimness, and she had an easy and natural grace in every movement, which she inherited with her tropical West Indian blood. Her features were delicate, and I have heard that in her youth she was strikingly beautiful; but, like most Creole women, she had become passee in early middle age. She had made a brave fight, however—with art as her ally—against ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the English. An agreement, it is very probable, might be readily entered into with the Portuguese for the possession of that place, which could not fail to prove most convenient for our eastern commerce. An equivalent may be found among the West Indian islands; but it is perhaps equally vain and invidious to speculate on such very distant concerns, when the wonderful events now occurring in a kingdom so long the torment and the teacher of nations, arrest the imagination from every trivial ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... suitors of almost every variety of rank and character had knelt in real and assumed adoration before the virtuous shrine of the beautiful West Indian heiress, she had turned from them all with almost loathing indifference, and the summons which she received (about three months previous to the commencement of our story) calling upon her to join her father, in company ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... regain her former colonial power, would use the Mississippi Valley as a means of provisioning her West Indian islands; of dominating Spanish America, and of subordinating to her purposes the feeble United States, which her policy assigned to the lands between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... furnished the answer to this query. These men were cattle-rustlers and horse-thieves, than which no more hazardous existence ever was since the gentle days of West Indian piracy, and to them merely a single pistol shot might mean betrayal of ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... and the soldiers were forced to forage for themselves in the neighbouring country. At last the fleet set sail (8 Oct., 1625). Its destination proved to be Cadiz, whither it was despatched in the hope of securing West Indian treasure on its way home. The expedition, however, turned out to be as complete a failure as that under Mansfeld in the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... claim to his own past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rochefort, added the squadrons lying in these two places to its own strength, and, anchoring in the Aix Roads, prepared for a dash on the West Indies. The success with which the blockade at Brest had been evaded, and the menace offered to the West Indian trade, alarmed the British Admiralty. Lord Gambier, with a powerful fleet, kept guard outside the Aix Roads; but if the blockade failed once, it might fail again. Eager to destroy the last fleet France possessed, the Admiralty strongly urged Lord Gambier to attack the enemy with fire-ships; ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... of West Indian life by an author who combined abundant personal experience with keen observation, sprightly temper, and delightful humour. "Tom Cringle's Log" has been many times reprinted, and has lost nothing of its popularity and power ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... life and spirit, and danced to perfection, never getting tired, so that the officers had no lack of partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... poor daughter, and I knew him well enough to be aware that to put her entirely and secretly out of his reach was the only chance preserving her from his pursuit. I had excellent accounts of the worthy man to whom I meant her to be consigned, and I knew that when she wrote to you as a West Indian queen you would be able to forgive your poor cousin. I see what you would say, but sending her to you was impossible, since I had to secure her both from Amyas and from Mar. It would only have involved you in ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and wife of Philip were sold into slavery, (as were also about eight hundred persons of the Tuscaroras, and also many others of the Indians that were taken captive during the Colonial wars.) "Yes," says a distinguished orator, (Everett,) "they were sold into slavery, West Indian slavery. An Indian princess and her child, sold from the cold breezes of Mount Hope, from a wild freedom of New England forest, to drop under the lash, beneath the blazing sun ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... of training being completed, I was sent back to the 'Impregnable' on draft for sea. Within a few days an order was received stating that a large company of boys were required for the North American and West Indian Station, and ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... gradually extinguished Slavery in Europe. Foreign slavery, such as that in our West Indian possessions, is an artificial thing, and may be abolished by the stroke of a pen. But domestic slavery has to die a natural death. The progress of education and refinement, and the growth of the sentiment of justice, help to extinguish it; but ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... the Queen also, but as he based his joy at her accession on an assurance that she would follow in William's footsteps, the compliment might be construed as an exhortation. Shortly afterwards, in another poem, The Spanish Descent, he took his revenge upon the fleet for not carrying out his West Indian scheme by ridiculing unmercifully their first fruitless cruise on the Spanish coast, taking care at the same time to exult in the capture of the galleons at Vigo. In yet another poem—the success of the True ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... of the sea. That act of the British Parliament, and he might add in this case with peculiar emphasis, of the British nation, passed on the 12th day of August, 1833, to take effect on the first day of August, 1834, and which enfranchised 800,000 West Indian slaves, was an event sublime in its nature, comprehensive and mighty in its immediate influences and remote consequences, precious beyond expression to the cause of freedom, and encouraging beyond the measure of any government on earth to the hearts of all enlightened and just men. This act was the ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... Among these species C. mamillaris seems to have stood as the type, not only of the Linnaean genus Cactus, but also of Haworth's Mamillaria, and as such should retain the original generic name. Besides, Mamillaria was used as the generic name of an alga in 1809. Cactus mamillaris L. is the West Indian ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,—a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... there was one channel of trade, to and from the British West Indies, long very profitable to both sides, during colonial times, but now legally hampered by American independence. The New England States had lumber, fish, and farm products desired by the West Indian planters, and these in turn offered needed sugar, molasses, and rum. Both parties desired to restore the trade, and in spite of the legal restrictions of the colonial system, the trade was in fact ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... our pyjamas. It was Oswald who asked father to let us have pyjamas instead of nightgowns; they are so convenient for dressing up when you wish to act clowns, or West Indian planters, or any loose-clothed characters. Then we got into bed, and then we got ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... even in this hour of their triumph that the end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great effort against the world-power of Britain they had utterly failed. She had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact. Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea, and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... years Spain struggled vainly with the West Indian problem. Four large islands and forty small ones, peopled by barbarians, were beyond the range of Spanish experience in the art of government. Grants of land were made, with the condition that the holder should exercise a paternal ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... slavery in every form, in which I, with all deference, thought that he discovered 'a zeal without knowledge.' Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, 'Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.' His violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity. Towards the conclusion of his Taxation no Tyranny, he says, 'how is it that we hear the loudest YELPS for liberty among ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... usual annual reports from the Secretary of the Navy and the Board of Commissioners will be exhibited to the view of Congress the execution of the laws relating to that department of the public service. The repression of piracy in the West Indian and in the Grecian seas has been effectually maintained, with scarcely any exception. During the war between the Governments of Buenos Ayres and of Brazil frequent collisions between the belligerent acts ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Margarita was at no great distance to the westward. And not only was Margarita the spot where the Spaniards had established a vastly profitable pearl-fishing industry, but it was also a kind of depot where all sorts of supplies from Old Spain for the maintenance of her West Indian possessions were landed and stored, to be drawn upon as occasion might demand. There was, therefore, the double possibility of securing a more or less rich booty of pearls, and of replenishing the stores, somewhat depleted by two months of usage, ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... between the blue and white bales in Don Ramon's darkened storeroom, at Kingston, I saw the door open before the figure of an old man with the tired, long, white face, that day I am not likely to forget. I remember the chilly smell of the typical West Indian store, the indescribable smell of damp gloom, of locos, of pimento, of olive oil, of new sugar, of new rum; the glassy double sheen of Ramon's great spectacles, the piercing eyes in the mahogany face, while the tap, tap, tap ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... first. The British West Indies furnish 5.8 per cent of these foreign Negro immigrants, while the Danish West Indies, Cuba, and those islands not specified, together make up 3.6 per cent, a total of 9.4 per cent West Indian.[47] Table XIII (p. 59) gives a survey of this part of the population and shows its relation ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... Kingdon left me one day without a warning word to break the blow. I had been waiting and watching for him through two weary days and nights, when there came a letter to tell me he was on his way to Vienna with a West Indian gentleman and his daughter. He was to be married to the daughter. It was his poverty, he told me, which compelled this step. He advised me to go back to my friends in Yorkshire. To go back!—as if he did not know that death would be easier to me. There was a small ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the Wild West Indian and buffalo days, so wild a country that it never lived down its reputation. Buffalo, antelope, and elk ranged in common in herds of hundreds of thousands, while in the rough shores of the river lived countless bighorns, hundreds ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... privateers and prizes to our ports; and here, as any one could see, and as the sequel amply proved, was a fertile source of dangerous complications. Then by the treaty of alliance we guaranteed to France her West Indian possessions, binding ourselves to aid her in their defense; and a proclamation of neutrality when France was actually at war with a great naval power was an immediate and obvious limitation upon ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... was none of that heavy-tongued enunciation which characterizes even the best-educated colored people of the South. It is remarkable, after all, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... mate of a Castle Liner gets the sack they will be able to tell you what he said to the captain, what the old man said to him, and what both said to the Board, and having finished off that affair they will cheerfully turn to discussing whether Bill Stevens sank his barge outside the West Indian No.2 ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... you, was the officer my father had described to Gordon as knowing so little of navigation that he had, after cruising out of sight of land for some months, mistaken the Mainland of Orkney for one of the West Indian Islands. ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... quarter-deck. The sky was of a deep azure. The sea was covered with herbs and flowers as far as the eye could reach—sometimes in compact masses of several miles in extent, and at other times in long straight ribbons, as regular as if they had been spread by some West Indian Le Notre. The ship seemed merely displaying her graces in the sunshine, so gentle was she moving in the water. The air was laden with perfumes, and a soft dreamy languor stole over the friends, which they were trying in vain to shake off. In one direction rose the misty ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... Spaniards to have been much further advanced in civilization than the races occupying the other portions of South America; and there is a strong probability that they are of a different origin from the races occupying Chili, Patagonia, Brazil, and the great district washed by the waters of the West Indian Sea. Science as yet cannot give anything like an accurate idea of the time man has existed in these widely-diversified countries, but we cannot go wrong in accepting the statement of Darwin, who observes that "we must admit that man has inhabited South ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... sea in the merchant service, and was in command of a trading schooner at an early age. The American trading vessels of that period were supposed to be excluded by the navigation laws from commerce with the British West Indian Islands, though with the concealed or very slightly disguised assistance of the planters, they engaged in a good deal of contraband commerce. The war between France and Great Britain tended further to make the carrying trade of neutrals difficult. Bainbridge had therefore to expect, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. But there was no lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. He had the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that called out its tenacity, not his own. While holding an appointment on his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour. This Shelleyan act involved ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... before the letter came, as she had guessed it would be. He had written on shipboard, and the letter came back to her from Greater Inagua, the first West Indian island at which his ship had touched. Coming in one September evening from a long walk through the hazy air, its breath fragrant with the peculiar pungent odour of distant forest fires, Dorothy found the letter on the hall table. She knew it was his before she saw the postmark; ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... axis-ends, Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels in slanting rings, it does not set for months, Stretch'd in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon and sinks again, Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups, Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands. ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... seemed that Taper was right. There was a great clamour in every quarter, and the clamour was against the Whigs and in favour of Conservative principles. What Canadian timber-merchants meant by Conservative principles, it is not difficult to conjecture; or West Indian planters. It was tolerably clear on the hustings what squires and farmers, and their followers, meant by Conservative principles. What they mean by Conservative principles now is another question: and whether Conservative principles mean something higher than a ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the presence but the active influence of the garrisons at these posts encouraged Indian hostilities. England had also seized French goods in American (neutral) vessels, though in passage to the United States, and treated as belligerent all American ships plying between France and her West Indian colonies, on the ground that this commerce had been opened to them only by the pressure of war. The English naval officers were instructed to regard bread-stuffs as contraband if bound for France, even though owned by neutrals and in neutral ships; such cargoes, however, to be paid for by England, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... from the trade with the Colonies were estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years. Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the kingdom. With peace and security, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... 300 species, mostly Mexican, with a few Brazilian and West Indian, is called nipple cactus, and consists of globular or cylindrical succulent plants, whose surface instead of being cut up into ridges with alternate furrows, as in Melocactus, is broken up into teat-like cylindrical or angular tubercles, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the West Indian Islands, and perhaps in and out and along the coasts of the Southern American States—wherever, in fact, the plantations are worked by slaves whose supplies are kept up by traders such as the scoundrel who cheated us into a run up that river where his schooner ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... around to the garage, Andrews," said the young man. He nodded to the dummy-chucker. In a daze, the mendicant followed his rescuer. He entered a gorgeously mirrored and gilded hall. He stepped into an elevator chauffeured by a West Indian of the haughtiest blood. The dummy-chucker was suddenly conscious of his tattered garb, his ill-fitting, run-down shoes. He stepped, when they alighted from the lift, as gingerly as though ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Jamaica spirits, and some rich West Indian fabrics for ladies' dresses. A cask of spirits and a box of cigars have gone up to the castle. Old Mr. Cuthbert took ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... like a comfortable corner somewhere by himself, and wouldn't expect to be talked to or entertained at all. If he does come, he'll keep to himself pretty well. He wouldn't be any company for you. I mean,—for you or Alfred either. I think he's a Canadian or West Indian,—British subject, at all events,—but he's lived all his life in the West, and he wouldn't know what to do in a drawing-room, or that sort of thing. You'd better just not pay any attention to him. Pass the time of day, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... she was the part which was most likely to be menaced if the war was renewed. Under these circumstances Grenville determined that a small army of ten thousand men should be kept in America, under the distinct promise that it was never to serve beyond that country and the West Indian Isles, and he asked America to contribute 100,000l. a year, or about a third part ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Mrs. Mayow, was the wife of a gentleman in a high position in one of our Government offices. She was a West Indian creole, and a singularly beautiful person. Her complexion was of the clear olive-brown of a perfectly Moorish skin, with the color of a damask rose in her cheeks, and lips as red as coral. Her features ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... believed that the plant came from India to Egypt in the seventh century; it still forms a most important article of commerce in the markets of Cairo and Alexandria. In the year 1516, the banana was brought to the West Indian Islands by a monk, since which time it has rapidly spread over the tropics of America, and is found to the twenty-fifth degree north and south of the equator. It is equally indispensable and is appreciated by the immigrant and by the native ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... cannikin, several sticks of tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch, and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells. I have often wondered since why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have heard Cuba named as his government; and it might have been that, the short time Cuba was in {56} the possession of the English, he was governor of it; but I am uncertain. If any correspondent, versed in West Indian affairs, can give me any particulars of the family and antecedents of the above, or any reference to his services (for I suppose him to have been a military ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... earliest work is unknown in this country. It consists of poems written and published in his native Jamaica. I was fortunate enough to run across this first volume, and I could not refrain from reproducing here one of the poems written in the West Indian Negro dialect. I have done this not only to illustrate the widest range of the poet's talent and to offer a comparison between the American and the West Indian dialects, but on account of the intrinsic worth of the poem itself. I was much tempted to introduce several more, in spite of ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... her own father," answered Helm, warmly; "a man among a thousand. Mr. Kinzie is an Indian trader, and has been here for several years, if indeed he be not the first white settler, for old Pointe Au Sable was a West Indian mulatto. His relations with these savages who dwell near the Great Lake, and especially those of the Pottawattomie and Wyandot tribes, are so friendly that he has felt safe to remain with his family unguarded in his own home. They have always called ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... misery in exaggerated proportions, and still a vassal of Rome, set out for the port of Cadiz. There, in company with the Apostolic Delegate and Envoy Extraordinary to the Republic of Colombia, he embarked on the West Indian trader Sarnia, bound for Cartagena, in the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... acquired an enviable reputation for her sailing qualities, but, like many others, she was driven out of the trade by the introduction of steam and more modern methods of transit. She, however, still continued to make for her owners large profits in the West Indian and American trades. In 1873 freights were very good out and home from the higher Baltic ports, and the owner decided to make a short voyage in that direction before resuming the West Indian employment. She had made a rapid passage ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Spain being completely broken, under which she abandoned all claims of sovereignty, not only over the island of Cuba, the original cause of war, but over various other islands in the Philippine, as well as in the West Indian, archipelagoes. These islands, in all said to be some 1,200 to 1,500 in number, are moreover not only inhabited by both natives and foreigners to the estimated number of ten to twelve million of souls, but they contain large cities and communities speaking different tongues, living ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... cat, a dog, or a pig, and who was sometimes accompanied by a black man. Louder next related his experience of being changed to a horse and ridden to a witches' ball, and of seeing Rebecca Nurse ride through the air on a broomstick. The West Indian negro man John, the husband of Tituba and servant of Mr. Parris, was next put on the witness stand. The magistrate ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... continued, "as true and as kind-hearted as yourself. I'm not speaking about the West Indian heiress, Miss Osborne, but about a poor girl whom George once loved, and who was bred from her childhood to think of nobody but him. I've seen her in her poverty uncomplaining, broken-hearted, without a fault. It is of Miss Sedley I speak. Dear Miss Osborne, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Santo Domingo. He pushed to a conclusion the work on the cathedral and other religious edifices then building, repaired the edifices belonging to the state and constructed the walls and bastions which still surround the city. He was able to ward off the attacks of corsairs, who multiplied in West Indian waters to such an extent that in 1561 the Spanish Government forbade vessels to travel to and from the new ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... between rich and poor? England knows no line of demarcation, save the shore of the great sea; and even that her generosity is overleaping at this moment at the call of mere humanity, in bounty to sufferers by the West Indian hurricane, and by the Chicago fire. Will you send your help across the Atlantic; and deny it to the sufferers at your own doors? At least, if the rich be confined by an imaginary line across, the poor on the other side will not—they will cross it freely enough; and what they will bring with them ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... on the sixty-acre stretch of turf known as Indian Field, up in Van Cortlandt Park. Here there are baseball games by the hundred and football games by the score—all the known varieties of football games too, Gaelic, Soccer, Rugby and others; and coal black West Indian negroes in white flannels, with their legs buskined like the legs of comic opera brigands, play at cricket, meanwhile shouting in the broadest of British accents; and there is tennis on the tennis courts and boating on the lake near-by and golf ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... permanently organizing the government at home but showed remarkable ability in his foreign negotiations. He formed an alliance with France, and English troops aided the French in winning a great victory over Spain. England gained thereby Dunkirk, and the West Indian island of Jamaica. The French king, Louis XIV, at first hesitated to address Cromwell, in the usual courteous way of monarchs, as "my cousin," but soon admitted that he would have to call Cromwell "father" should he wish it, as the Protector was undoubtedly the most powerful ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... American independence, and the first salute ever paid by a foreign naval power to the Stars and Stripes. It is true that a salute had been given to the American brig, the Andrea Doria, before this, by the Governor of one of the West Indian Islands; but a salute which his Government immediately disowned and for which he was called home is rather an individual than a national salute. Then, too, there is no proof that the flag flown by the Andrea Doria was the ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... were with the North, both on the imperative duty of maintaining the Union and on the slavery issue. He was an intense abolitionist. As a lad of sixteen or seventeen, he had given up sugar, at the end of the 'twenties, because in those days sugar was grown by slaves on the West Indian plantations. He would not support a slave industry, and until the slaves were freed he did ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... recognize it in the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, which is a Celtic legend; in the cornucopia of the Romans; in the goat Amalthea among the Greeks; in the wishing-cow and wishing-tree of the Hindoos; in the pumpkin-tree of the West Indian Ananzi stories; in the cow of the Servian legends, who spins yarn out of her ear; in the Sampo of the Finns; and in all those stories of cups, and glasses, and horns, and rings, and swords, seized by some bold spirit in the midst ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... a minute and describe how it happened that the two old negroes were living on that out-of-the-way farm in Cornwall. My father had been a West Indian proprietor, and had resided out in the West Indies for many years. It was in the days when Wilberforce and true and noble philanthropists who fought the battle of emancipation with him first began to promulgate their doctrines. My father, like most other proprietors, was at first very indignant ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... paralleled to-day when steamships hold to a single route like a trolley car between two towns. The East Indies was a favorite trading point. Carrying a cargo suited to the needs of perhaps a dozen different peoples, the vessel would put out from Boston or Newport, put in at Madeira perhaps, or at some West Indian port, dispose of part of its cargo, and proceed, stopping again and again on its way, and exchanging its goods for money or for articles thought to be more salable in the East Indies. Arrived there, all would be sold, and a cargo of tea, coffee, silks, spices, nankeen cloth, sugar, and other ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... destroyed; and the pirates sailed away, exulting over their adversaries' discomfiture. Rejoicing over their victories, the followers of Morgan then planned a venture that should eclipse all that had gone before. This was no less than a descent upon Panama, the most powerful of the West Indian cities. For this undertaking, Morgan gathered around him an army of over two thousand desperadoes of all nationalities. A little village on the island of Hispaniola was chosen as the recruiting station; and thither flocked pirates, thieves, and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... by birth a West Indian, engaged to dive under the ship's bottom, and to acquaint us with the state of it, which was gladly accepted. In his youth he had been a fisherman on the coast of the island of Jamaica: the weather being rough, it was thought unsafe for ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... oppositionist was pronouncing a glowing panegyric upon the eloquent and statesmanlike speech of the gallant colonel—myself; then I thought I was making arrangements for setting out for my new appointment, and Sancho Panza never coveted the government of an island more than I did, though only a West Indian one; and, lastly, I saw myself the chosen diplomate on a difficult mission, and was actually engaged in the easy and agreeable occupation of outmaneuvering Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo, when Peter suddenly drew up at the door ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... do their respective systems of colonial government. Whether the devil himself possesses ingenuity in inflicting suffering, superior to that displayed by the Spanish conquerors and their immediate followers, has never been demonstrated. The gentle, unresisting natives of the West Indian Islands, whose delicate constitutions incapacitated them to bear labours their masters exacted of them, were their first victims. The descriptions penned as of the cruelties practised on these harmless creatures dispense me from the ungrateful task of attempting to depict them. But, ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... at the vanishing of her noble vision of the heroic self-devoted father, and ready on the other hand to believe him a villain, like Bertram Risingham, or 'the Pirate,' being possessed by this idea on account of his West Indian voyages. At any rate, she was determined not to be accepted or acknowledged without her mother, and was already rehearsing magnanimous letters ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the age and with his personal character, appears to have been connected with this design. It had entered into his head to marry his daughter to the Electoral Prince Palatine, and perhaps to give his daughter the appearance of a higher rank by getting himself declared independent prince of some West Indian conquest—Jamaica had attracted his ambition[484]:—a hope not altogether chimerical; for he was still all-powerful with Charles. Foreigners were astonished that he undertook the most extensive negotiations before ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... formation—where the lights and shades in my character were intended. I was pretty confident my poems would meet with some applause; but, at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make me forget neglect. I threw off six hundred copies, of which I had got subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty.—My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides I pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... days, I had been exposed, half naked and bareheaded, in an open boat, without water, or food, or shade. The third fierce cloudless West Indian noon was long passed, and once more the dry burning sun sank in the west, like a red—hot shield of iron. In my horrible extremity, I imprecated the wrath of Heaven on my defenceless head, and shaking my clenched hands against the brazen sky, I called ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the world. First the Indians spread cacao over the tropical belt of the American continent and cultivated it as far North as Mexico. Then came the Spanish explorers of the New World, who carried it from the mainland to the adjacent West Indian islands. Cacao was planted by them in Trinidad as early as 1525. Since that date it has been successfully introduced into many a tropical island. It was an important day in the history of Ceylon when Sir R. Horton, in 1834, had cacao plants brought ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay; or Koenigsberg by its ship canal, carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Haff to the Baltic;[417] or Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary.[418] In northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are ice-bound. Otherwise the outer port ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... ceased boasting about it since. But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this waste Continent of humanity—three million human beings who are enslaved—some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian overseer, all of them to destitution ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... compared with the huge society of the present period, was limited in its proportions, and composed of elements more refined though far less various. It consisted mainly of the great landed aristocracy, who had quite absorbed the nabobs of India, and had nearly appropriated the huge West Indian fortunes. Occasionally, an eminent banker or merchant invested a large portion of his accumulations in land, and in the purchase of parliamentary influence, and was in time duly admitted into the sanctuary. But those vast and successful ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... were able to get out of the schooner, and the admirable seamanship of her commander enabled them to reach the sought-for shelter before the fury of the West Indian hurricane came on. It was rough work, but with two anchors down, the Teal managed to ride out the blast, and fortunately for her crew the storm subsided as quickly as it had risen, leaving them free to run in for Velova with a gentle breeze over a heavy swell, ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... with marvellous sallow complexions. The inn where we put up was a pretty good one, and as this lake abounds in fish, we had some excellent trout and pike for supper; among other dishes there was one that was very gratifying to me, an old East and West Indian; and that was the Peveroni or large red and green peppers or capsicums fried in oil. Some excellent Orvieto wine crowned our repast, and helped to ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... odious to me. If I know myself I would not own a negro though he could sweat gold on my behoof. I glory in that bold leap in the dark which England took with regard to her own West Indian slaves. But I do not see the less clearly the difficulty of that position in which the Southern States have been placed; and I will not call them wicked, impious, and abominable, because they now hold by slavery, as other ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... Forester was drawn by some business on an excursion on the continent; and that Collins, whose health when I saw him was in a very precarious state, was at this time confined with an alarming illness. His constitution had been wholly broken by his West Indian expedition. The audience I met at the house of the magistrate consisted of several gentlemen and others selected for the purpose; the plan being, in some respects, as in the former instance, to find a medium between the suspicious ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the Mediterranean, in the Gulf of Mexico, on the coast of Africa, on the continent of America, she had been compelled to cede the fruits of her victories in former wars. Spain regained Minorca and Florida; France regained Senegal, Goree, and several West Indian Islands. The only quarter of the world in which Britain had lost nothing was the quarter in which her interests had been committed to the care of Hastings. In spite of the utmost exertions both of European and Asiatic enemies, the power of our country in the East had been greatly augmented. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... utter it." This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa- nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... geologists think that in ages to come the coral insects which are at work on the Bahamas and those that are so busy on the Florida reefs will build up a vast country where it is now sea, and that ages and ages hence the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, and perhaps even the West Indian Islands may be a part of the main land. While this is only a theory, it should be interesting to you in making you realize that the building of the world is going on now, from day to day, as steadily as it did in the days when the bed of the Niagara River was carved ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... you artful young scholards left a letter to his ma on his table, open for everybody to see, talking some gammon about a West Indian island, and saying you was going to lay hold of the Long Stork, to get your hands in. I can tell you you have got your hands in, my beauties. There's a cart-load of birches been ordered for you at ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... dear relation of the then treasurer of the navy. With this interest they thought, of course, that he would have the selection of his own station. And so he had. They either did not know, or had forgotten, that Captain Reud was a West Indian creole, and that he had ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... terms of a treaty made at Paris in 1773, United States produce for British West Indian ports could only be carried by British subjects in British ships. Britain's men-of-war were also authorized to seize any vessel laden with produce for or from any French colony. Brock was a soldier, not a policeman, and coast-guard duties palled ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... which thunders its annual joyous return. They must renew the slave trade, with all its train of atrocities. They must suppress the workings of British philanthropy, seeking to meliorate the condition of the unfortunate West Indian slave. They must arrest the career of South American deliverance from thraldom. They must blow out the moral lights around us and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world—pointing the way to their rights, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the expense of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates: and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation, but frequently ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... at once became the most formidable power in the world, dictated terms of peace to the United Provinces, avenged the common injuries of Christendom on the pirates of Barbary, vanquished the Spaniards by land and sea, seized one of the finest West Indian islands, and acquired on the Flemish coast a fortress which consoled the national pride for the loss of Calais. She was supreme on the ocean. She was the head of the Protestant interest. All the reformed Churches scattered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in Iceland, in which the horns sometimes grow to the number of eight—though four is the more common number. America, too, has its varieties. These are the Brazilian sheep, the Demerara breed, the South American sheep, and a variety known as the West Indian. ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... president of Liberia College, a West Indian, is a scholar of marvellous erudition, a writer of rare abilities, a subtle reasoner, a preacher of charming graces, and one of the foremost Negroes of the world. He is himself the best argument in favor of the Negro's capacity for Christian civilization. He ranks amongst the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Grecians, and ascribe the first inventions to men, yet you will rather believe that Prometheus first stroke the flints, and marvelled at the spark, than that when he first stroke the flints he expected the spark; and therefore we see the West Indian Prometheus had no intelligence with the European, because of the rareness with them of flint, that gave the first occasion. So as it should seem, that hitherto men are rather beholden to a wild goat for surgery, or to a nightingale for music, or to the ibis for some ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... the Spanish expedition led by Hernando Cortes landed on the coast. The expedition was the fruit of an age and a people eager for adventure, for gain, for glory, and for the conversion of barbaric peoples to the Christian faith. The Spaniards were established in the West Indian Islands, and sought further extension of their dominions in the West, whence rumours of great treasure had reached them. Thus it happened that Velasquez, the Spanish Governor of Cuba, designed to send a fleet to explore the mainland, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... name. Or when it is intended to make, for good or for ill, an entire breach with the past, this is one of the means by which it is sought to effect as much (2 Chr. xxxvi. 4; Dan. i. 7). How far this custom reaches, how deep the roots which it casts, is exemplified well in the fact that the West Indian buccaneer makes a like change of name on entering that society of blood. It is in both cases a sort of token that old things have passed away, that all ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... street from her shirt shop, where the red light district begins, is a bar frequented by natives, soldiers and sailors. Tourists seldom go there, for it is a bit off the beaten track. In front of the bar is a West Indian boy with a tripod and camera with a telescopic lens. He never photographs natives, and wandering tourists pass him by, but he is there every day from eight in the morning until dark. His job is to photograph everyone who ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... German commercial centre, Hamburg, 267—over one-third—were British; the Dutch but 146, the Hamburgers themselves 157. A curious and suggestive comparison is afforded by the same port in 1769. From the extensive, populous, and fruitful country of France, the entrepot of the richest West Indian colony, Santo Domingo, there entered Hamburg 203 ships, of which not one was French; whereas from Great Britain there came a slightly larger total, 216, of which ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Busrah, and Mohammrah, the summer temperature is still higher; and, owing to the moisture of the atmosphere, consequent on the vicinity of the sea, the heat is of that peculiarly oppressive character which prevails on the sea-coast of Hindustan, in Ceylon, in the West Indian Islands, at New Orleans, and in other places whose situation is similar. The vital powers languish under this oppression, which produces in the European a lassitude of body and a prostration of mind that wholly unfit ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... an alert, intelligent little woman with a trace of West Indian blood in her, denied entering his stateroom. Shown the handkerchief and invited to sniff it, she professed utter ignorance concerning it, assured him that no lady in her section used that perfume, and offered to show it ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... was in every one's eyes save his father's, his own sister, and lamely concluded "to take a draught of water," blushing under his brown skin as he spoke. Poor fellow! the Queen, even while she wished him in the farthest West Indian isle, could not help understanding that strange doubt and dread that come over the mind at the last moment before a longed-for meeting, and which had made even the bold young sailor glad to rally his hopes by this divination. Fortunately she thought only herself and one ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Cunard Company was followed up in 1840 and 1841 with contracts for steam mail-carriage to the West Indies and South American ports.[AD] The first (1840) went to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, for the West Indian service, the mail subsidy fixed at two hundred and forty thousand pounds a year;[AE] the second (1841), to the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. The latter enterprise was promoted by an American,[AF] after he had failed to obtain ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... navy of the United States, to allow public women to come on board at some of the ports and to go down to the men between decks, the Department of the Navy being probably actuated by the same humane principle that used to induce some of the West Indian cannibals to lend their wives to their prisoners of war who were intended, in the shape of roast or fricandeau, to grace the festive board, as it was deemed inhuman by these philanthropists to deprive a man of his necessary sexual intercourse, even if they were soon to roast him ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... decay, while within a stone's-throw of it there is a street of smart white edifices of one and two stories, occupied chiefly by thriving mechanics, which has been laid out where Knox meant to have forests and parks. On the banks of the river, where he intended to have only one wharf for his own West Indian vessels and yacht, there are two wharves, with stores and a lime kiln. Little appertains to the mansion except the tomb and the old burial-ground, and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could be endangered by a single careless word, or act. The whole affair seemed more a nightmare than a reality. I was actually serving as first officer on a pirate ship in search of vessels to rob on the high seas, commanding a crew of West Indian cut-throats—the very scum of hell, and under the order of a Portuguese devil, whose ambition coolly plotted murder. I was sailing under the black flag, to be hung if captured, compelled to act out the masquerade, a satellite of the most infamous villain who ever sacked a merchantman. ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... Coromandel Coast, at Madagascar, in the African waters, and above all in the West Indian and American seas, the pirates were a constant menace. With an insolent luxury they would regulate their depredations by the comfort of the seasons, harrying New England in the summer, and dropping south again to the tropical islands ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was an armed transport of 215 tons burden. Her mission was to convey breadfruit to the West Indian islands, the planters having represented to George III. that the introduction of the plant would be very beneficial as an article of food. The ship was fitted up in a manner peculiar, but adapted to the service she was upon. She was 90 feet long, her greatest beam 24 feet, and her greatest ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... forces. He was decoyed by Captain Driver aboard his ship; his suite of twenty men were made drunk with rum; the ship weighed anchor; and the prince, with all his men, were sold as slaves in one of the West Indian Islands. Here Oroonoko met Imoin'da (3 syl.), his wife, from whom he had been separated, and whom he thought was dead. He headed a rising of the slaves, and the lieutenant-governor tried to seduce Imoinda. The result was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer |
