"Tahiti" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Bible where Saul's melancholy is said to be an evil spirit sent from God. A furious madman was supposed to have been carried off by a demon, and in Persia the insane were said to be God's fools. In Tahiti they were called Eatooa, that is, possessed by a divine spirit; and in the Sandwich Isles they were worshipped as men into whom a divinity had entered. In German the plica polonica is called Alpzopf, or hobgoblin's tail. All nations believed that the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... guided only by a calico map of a local cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew out, from his own knowledge of the coast between Smith Channel and Cape York, a map of it, varying only in minute details from the Admiralty chart. A native of Tahiti, named Tupaia, drew out for Cook a map of the Pacific, extending over forty-five degrees of longitude (nearly 3000 miles), giving the relative size and position of the main islands over that huge tract of ocean. ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... means that the canes are used for eating, or rather sucking like a sugar-stick. The varieties of sugar-cane are numerous, and the names vary much in different districts. According to Balfour, the Otaheite (Tahiti) cane is 'probably Saccharum violaceum'. The ordinary Indian kinds belong to the species Saccharum officinarum. The Otaheite cane was introduced into the West Indies about 1794, and came to India from the Mauritius. It is more suitable for the roller mill than for the indigenous ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... teachers from Tahiti, in the early stage of the mission, when such stones were given up to them, had them taken off to the beach and broken into fragments, and so stamp out at once the heathenism with which they were associated. Hardly a single relic of the kind can be found ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... the more humid districts, taking the place of the lemon, and one variety—the Tahiti—has proved itself to be a heavy and regular bearer. The West Indian lime, from which the lime juice of commerce is made, is very easily grown, particularly in the more tropical parts, where it is often met with growing in an entirely uncultivated condition, and bearing heavy crops of fruit. Kumquats ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... rather a notable moment in Apia, for two reasons. In the first place, the German traders were shaking in their shoes for fear of what the French squadron might do to them, and we were the bearers of the good news from Tahiti that the chivalrous Admiral Clouet, with a very proper magnanimity, had decided not to molest them; and, secondly, the beach was still seething with excitement over the departure on the previous day of the pirate Pease, carrying with him the ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... breadfruit expedition. Flinders in the Providence. Notes from Santa Cruz. At the Cape. Tahiti. In Torres Strait. Encounter with ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... like the name of Rover—but liked Chance. Conscience suggested the name as a palliative, as something between true proprietorship and theft—it gave you a protective right, and took away the sting of the possession. You fortified yourself in this position, as cunningly as the French at Tahiti. But how happened it, Eusebius, that when any friend asked you if you had found the owner, you turned off the subject always so ingeniously, or denied that you had a Rover, but one Chance, certainly a fine dog?—and how came it that you never took him in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... merit insertion here. The curious Jew's ear (Hirneola auricula-Judae, Fr.), with one or two other species of Hirneola, are collected in great quantities in Tahiti, and shipped in a dried state to China, where they are used for soup. Some of these find ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... discovered in 1767, by Captain Wallis, who called it King George's Island; but it is better known by the name of Tahiti. It is of volcanic formation, and consists of two peninsulas joined by a neck of low land, about two miles across. The whole island is about thirty miles in circumference. The smaller portion, called Tairaboo, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... come home from the Sandwich Islands, where I have been living; I spent a few years, too, in New Zealand and Tahiti, and so have seen many wonderful things on the land and sea; but a Lord Mayor going to be sworn in to his duties, attended by thirteen elephants and a London crowd, would be a novelty to me. I thought, too, that certain little boys and girls in the Sandwich Islands and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... the initial standard of astronomical measurements—the earth's distance from the sun. Have you personally measured the earth's radius, observed the transit of Venus in 1769, from Lapland to Tahiti at the same time, calculated the sun's parallax, and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit? Would you profess yourself competent to take even the preliminary observation for fixing the instruments for ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the infanticide practised in Japan and China, which was then, as it is now, a means of regulating the population. The same practice—common to Bushmen, Hottentots, Fijians, also existed among the natives of Hawaii and America. In the Island of Tahiti, according to the testimony of missionaries, two thirds of the children born are ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... important results of the labors in this direction has been to establish the serious value of the historical songs preserved, among the Maoris, by the Tohungus, or wise men, who represent the Aiepas of Tahiti. Thanks to these living archives, we have been able to reconstruct a history of the natives, to fix almost the epoch of the first arrival of the Polynesians in that land, so distant from their other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... little attention to them at first, but because one of my men killed a Kanacka who was a protege of the missionaries there came a great ship (the Styx) into my port. The captain sent for me. I went on board without fear, but my confidence was betrayed. I was made a prisoner and transported to Tahiti. It was six years before I saw my tribe again: they had already mourned me as dead. I will tell you what happened in my absence. My people prepared for vengeance: the French were apprised of the fact. They came again. And as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... "Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants", Second Edition (London, 1870), page 117. Compare E. Shortland, "Maori Religion and Mythology" (London, 1882), pages 21 sq.) A very generally received tradition in Tahiti was that the first human pair was made by Taaroa, the chief god. They say that after he had formed the world he created man out of red earth, which was also the food of mankind until bread-fruit was produced. Further, some say that one day Taaroa ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a very powerful god from Tahiti, came to visit Hawaii he built a grass hut and made his home on the long, low rock—now known as Maui's canoe—in ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... Consulate, went on board the SPERBER (German war ship) in the afternoon, called on my lawyer on my way out to American Consulate, and talked till dinner time with Adams, whom I am supplying with introductions and information for Tahiti and the Marquesas. Fanny arrived a wreck, and had to lie down. The moon rose, one day past full, and we dined in the verandah, a good dinner on the whole; talk with Lafarge about art and the lovely dreams of art students. Remark ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and asked Bill what he would advise me to do. Looking round the deck to make sure that we were not overheard, he lowered his voice and said, "There are two or three ways that we might escape, Ralph, but none o' them's easy. If the captain would only sail for some o' the islands near Tahiti we might run away there well enough, because the natives are all Christians; an' we find that wherever the savages take up with Christianity they always give over their bloody ways, and are safe to be trusted. I never ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... is feet of lumber they are speaking of; and when you see the monstrous piles of sawdust which encumber the mill ports, the vast quantities of waste stuff they burn, and the huge rafts of timber which are towed down to the mills, as well as the ships which lie there to load for South America, Tahiti, Australia, and California, you will not longer wonder that ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... record of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams, in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, with whom I was joyous or melancholy; the adventures at sea or on the reef, upon the sapphire lagoon, and on the silver beaches of the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... natives, which is rather the exception than the rule in the south-east corner of the Low Archipelago. There we shall fill up with fresh water, bananas, bread-fruit, and perhaps a wild hog or two, and resume our voyage to Tahiti. But this is the least favourable view of the matter, and we must hope to fall in with the trades soon, and that they ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... kept on their garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool, They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They passed away as the tiar Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich earth which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands. Only a mournful remnant remains to observe ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... are. Plant we, then, here at Paea, a garden of excellent fruits; Plant we bananas and kava and taro, the king of roots; Let the pigs in Paea be tapu {1l} and no man fish for a year; And of all the meat in Tahiti gather we threefold here. So shall the fame of our plenty fill the island, and so, At last, on the tongue of rumour, go where we wish it to go. Then shall the pigs of Taiarapu raise their snouts in the air; But we sit quiet and ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sub-collector of taxes, we say, doing all this, shows very clearly that some change or other was needed; and we will only say, that the moment we see similar proceedings going on in the same rank of life in England, we shall emigrate to some happy island—not Tahiti—where poets and poetesses, and sub-collectors of taxes, are utterly unknown. We shall extract from the memoire—which, we again remind the reader, is a strictly legal document, though rather different from the dull concerns our Solons in Lincoln's Inn are the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... that. A blase man of the world, who had found it all not worth the bothering about, neither code nor people— he saw in this rich impetuous nature a new range of emotions, a brief return to the time when he tasted an open strong life in Algiers, in Tahiti. And he would laugh at the world by marrying her—yes, actually marrying her, the dompteuse! Accident had let him render her a service, not unimportant, once at Versailles, and he had been so courteous and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... remarkably absent from oceanic islands. This, however, may be very largely due to their extreme specialisation and dependence on insect agency for their fertilisation; while the fact that they do occur in such very remote islands as the Azores, Tahiti, and the Sandwich Islands, proves that they must have once reached these localities either by the agency of birds or by transmission through the air; and the facts I have given above render the latter mode at least as probable as the former. Sir ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... work in Tahiti, in the South Sea Islands, who is said to be a whole Bible society in himself, expending twenty dollars a month out of a salary of twenty-five dollars, for Bibles to distribute among his ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... savage, pastoral people who inhabit the pampas of South America. Longitudinal friction must have preceded that obtained by rotation. It is still in use in most of the islands of Oceanica (Fig. 4), and especially in Tahiti ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... determined to devote himself to this work. His services were accepted by the London Missionary Society; and his master allowed him to leave the ironmonger's shop before the expiry of his indentures. The islands of the Pacific Ocean were the principal scene of his labours—more particularly Huahine in Tahiti, Raiatea, and Rarotonga. Like the Apostles he worked with his hands,—at blacksmith work, gardening, shipbuilding; and he endeavoured to teach the islanders the art of civilised life, at the same time that ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Tripoli tombs are adorned with such sweet and fragrant flowers as the orange, jessamine, myrtle, and rose. In Mexico the Indian carnation is popularly known as the "flower of the dead," and the people of Tahiti cover their dead with choice flowers. In America the Freemasons place twigs of acacia on the coffins of brethren. The Buddhists use flowers largely for funeral purposes, and an Indian name for the tamarisk is the "messenger of Yama," the Indian God of Death. The ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer |
