"Yucatan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man destroyed his father made four incisions on the front of his son's body. Speaking of certain Congo people, Tuckey says that they scar themselves principally with the idea of rendering themselves agreeable to the women of their tribe. Among the Itzaex Indians of Yucatan, a race with particularly handsome features, some are marked with scarred lines, inflicted as ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Colima, Distrito Federal*, Durango, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Mexico, Michoacan, Morelos, Nayarit, Nuevo Leon, Oaxaca, Puebla, Queretaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Yucatan, Zacatecas ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... places, in one of which they were lucky enough to find and release a Spanish captive named Geronimo de Aguilar, who had been wrecked on the Yucatan coast while on a voyage from the Spanish settlement in Darien and had been taken captive by the Mayas and held for several years. The hospitable Mayas had eaten most of the expedition. There were then but two alive. One had renounced his ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Campeche, west of Yucatan. At the beginning of this Campeche voyage of the Good Hope ("formerly the Fortune of Courland"), in October, 1689, she had been detained by the royal officers in Boston, for evasion of the customs laws, but made her escape. Mass. Hist. Soc. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... day arrived in our city a particular courier from the Bishop of Senora, bearer of dispatches rather important for the welfare of our government. The spirit of rebellion is abroad; Texas already has separated from our dominions; Yucatan is endeavouring to follow the pernicious example, and California has just now lighted ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... the world is placed in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, but who would expect to find it in America many centuries ago? Yet the traditions of Peru have it that Cuzco was founded by the gods, and that its name signifies 'navel'; and traditions of Mexico describe Yucatan as 'the centre and foundation' of both heaven and earth. We must, however, go back to the East as the most likely quarter in which to find it, and as the quarter to which the eyes of man have ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... which is named after the export harbor of Sisal (in the north-western part of the peninsula), is by far the most important product of Yucatan; and this rocky, sun-burnt country seems peculiarly adapted to the growth of the fiber. In Yucatan the fiber is known as jenequem, as indeed the plant is obtained from it. Of the latter there are seven sorts or varieties for purposes of cultivation; ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... woman, appeared to understand it all. She had crammed on a copy of Stephens's "Travels in Yucatan" that had belonged to her father, and she gave Pohlsen no end of pleasure by asking him about such things as the four-headed altars before the great idols at Copan, and the nature of the great closed house at Labphak. If you will look in Pohlsen's book ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... But clever and competent. He has just returned from Yucatan, where he accompanied an expedition of exploration sent out by the Geographical Society—and, by the way, nearly lost his life in the venture. Before that, he made a trip to the frozen North with a rescue party. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... Neal Emery, embark on the steam yacht Day Dream for a cruise to the tropics. The yacht is destroyed by fire, and then the boat is cast upon the coast of Yucatan. They hear of the wonderful Silver City, of the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, and with the help of a faithful Indian ally carry off a number of the golden images from the temples. Pursued with relentless vigor at last their escape is effected in ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... never had paid any attention to Yucatan. I had always seen it on the map of Mexico, a little strip of land a-runnin' out into the water, and washed by the waves on both sides. But, good land! I would have paid more attention to it if ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... of each ripple is equally distant from the spot where the stone fell; but if the stone of civilization were to have fallen, for instance, into New Orleans, equally near to that spot we would find the people of New York City and the naked Indians of Yucatan. Civilization does not radiate, or diffuse. It leaps; and as to where it will next strike it is as independent as forked lightning. During hundreds of years it passed over the continent of Africa to settle only at ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... writers have maintained that the Indians procured their golden ornaments from Yucatan and other points of the main-land, by way of traffic. But they had nothing to barter, and their ornaments were numerous. Besides, the Spaniards found in various places near the rivers the holes and slight diggings whence the gold had been procured. It is said that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... may as well omit from consideration, in this connection, the merely pictographic signs of the hunting tribes, although they were used for mnemonic purposes. Let us rather proceed, at once, to the highest specimens of the graphic art in ancient America, and inquire their scope. In Mexico, in Yucatan, in Nicaragua, and in one or two districts of South America, the early explorers found systems of writing which seemed to resemble that to ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... crossing the Rocky Mountains in that excursion six different times. Within this time I have thrice visited the Jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, besides my visit to the city of Mexico, Tehuantepec, and Yucatan.... I have also, at the request of the mayor and council of Vicksburg, twice visited that city during the last year, to examine its harbor with ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains, of buried cities in Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Gloucestershire meadows, or beautiful statues fished out of the Tiber, or mediaeval treasures dug from below old castles, it grows an ever greater wonder to me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole earth beneath ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the Mayas, resident on the peninsula of Yucatan, would seem to have approached nearest a true phonetic system. They had a regular and well understood alphabet of twenty seven elementary sounds, the letters of which are totally different from those of any other nation, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the south of Florida, sighted the high land of Cuba, and stood across through the Yucatan channel to commence her peddling business in Honduras, and at some twenty ports she came to an anchor six miles off shore, and hooted with her siren till lighters came off through the ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... still discussed; very likely inspired by Seward and by his Yucatan schemes. Senator Doolittle runs himself down at a fearful rate. I regret Doolittle's mistake. Those colonizers forget that if they should export even 100,000 persons a year, an equal number will be yearly born at home, not to speak of other impossibilities. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... roots of another family of monocotyledons (of some cyperaceae) possess also diaphoretic and resolvent properties. The Carex arenaria, the C. hirta, etc. furnish the German sarsaparilla of druggists. According to Clusius, Europe received the first sarsaparilla from Yucatan, and the island of Puna, opposite Guayaquil.) In reading the works of Clusius, it can scarcely be conceived why our writers on the Materia Medica persist in considering a plant of the United ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Archaeology goes the same way. A detailed description of Mr. Squier's discoveries, is an accession to ethnology which is anxiously expected. At any rate, stone ruins and carved decorations have been found; so that what Mr. Stephenson has written about Yucatan and Guatemala, may be repeated in the case of Nicaragua. Be it so. The difficulty will be but increased; since whatever facts makes Nicaragua Mexican, isolates the Moskitos. They are now in contact with Spaniards and Englishmen—populations whose civilization differs from their own; and populations ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... Indian does essentially the same thing to-day, making pictures that crudely record his successes in war and the chase. The Northern Indian had got no farther than this when the white man discovered America; but the Aztecs of the Southwest and the Maya people of Yucatan had carried their picture-making to a much higher state of elaboration.(3) They had developed systems of pictographs or hieroglyphics that would doubtless in the course of generations have been elaborated into alphabetical systems, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to New Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the ship had run against ...
— Options • O. Henry
... in pairs. The parroquets go in flocks. The Hyacinthine macaw (the Araruna of the natives) is one of the finest and rarest species of the parrot family. It is found only on the south side of the Amazon. The macaw was considered sacred by the Maya Indians of Yucatan, and dedicated to the sun. The Quichuans call it guacamayo, guaca meaning sacred. Of toucans there are many species; the largest is the toco, with a beak shaped like a banana; the most beautiful are the curb-crested, or Beauharnais toucans, and the P. ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... with the rest it would seem incredible to the reader. Of all which, because I have written a particular treatise of the West Indies, I will omit the repetition at this time, seeing that in the said treatise I have anatomized the rest of the sea towns as well of Nicaragua, Yucatan, Nueva Espana, and the islands, as those of the inland, and by what means they may be best invaded, as far as any mean judgment ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... parts of Central America are found numerous signs that the country was, in bygone days, inhabited by a numerous population far more advanced in civilisation than the tribes which peopled it when first discovered by Columbus and his companions. In Yucatan and Chiapas, especially, ruins of numerous houses exist, with elaborately carved monuments and large buildings, bearing a remarkable resemblance to those of Egypt and Babylon. Throughout Nicaragua and other ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Yucatan is one of the most interesting States of Mexico, owing to the splendid ancient palaces and temples of once grand cities, now hidden in the forests. That country also presents great attractions for geologists and botanists, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand. The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan—the work of a ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... liners Pedro and Miguel Jover, the snow-white Argonauta, the brigantine Frascito, and a dozen or more fishing-schooners intercepted by the blockading fleet while on their way back to Havana from the Yucatan banks. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... map of Central America will observe a vast region, lying between Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatan, and the republic of Guatemala, and comprising a considerable part of each of those states, which, if not entirely a blank, is only conjecturally filled up with mountains, lakes and rivers. It is almost ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... "The Greek fret is as old as the hill. And, with the single exception of the swastika, it is the design most universally known to man. You may find it on a bit of ancient Greek pottery, or on a crumbling wall in Yucatan. Many people refer to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... evidence, links them with the still earlier Alligewi, or "Moundbuilders," as conquerors with the conquered. Thus the annals of this portion of the continent need no longer begin with the landing of the first colonists, but can go back, like those of Mexico, Yucatan and Peru, to a ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... ruins of Mayan civilization, excavated once, were buried anew. The demolition engineers measured their daily progress in feet, the Grass in miles. When the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific met in Lake Nicaragua, the Grass was in Yucatan. When the first green runners invaded Guatemala, a bare twenty miles of northern Panama had been demolished and hardly a start had been made in ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... partial barrier to the outlet of the Gulf of Mexico, as if at some ancient period it had been a part of the American continent, severed on its north side from the Florida Peninsula by the wearing of the Gulf Stream, and from Yucatan on its southwestern point by a current setting into the Gulf. Two channels are thus formed by which ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... a hard country, quite so, but nothing like Mexico during the revolution. Mexican sugar and mahogany, it transpired, had occupied Mr. Gray's attention for a time, as had Argentine cattle, Yucatan hennequin, and an engineering enterprise in Bolivia, not to mention ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... that the will had been sent home ten years ago from Yucatan, and had ever since been in their hands. Search had been made for a later one, but none had been found, nor did they believe ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was. The papers in our respective pockets seemed to prove it. The papers in mine connected me with the intended rebellion. A swift military trial, and within a few hours I was on my way to serve a life sentence of imprisonment in Yucatan. ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... one claiming Saddles as his guest, while the other, Mr. J. P. Montross, conducted me to his attractive tree-embowered home; and with the soft and winning accent of an educated gentleman of Yucatan, the country of his birth, placed his house and belongings at my disposal. "I was in New Orleans when you went through that city," he said, "and learning that you would pass through Biloxi, I at once telegraphed to my agent here to detain you if possible ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... had been knocking around without me they'd fallen in with an Indian from Yucatan, from the tribe called the Toltecs. This Indian called himself Queza—he'd been exiled because he was too lazy to work. The boys got him drunk one night, and he blabbed everything he knew about his tribe—how rich it was; how they'd discovered ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of in Spain; the next, there was sure intelligence that he was still lurking between Manchester and Liverpool, or along the border of Wales; and the day after, a telegram would announce his arrival in Cuba or Yucatan. But in all this there was no word of an Italian, nor any ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and adventurous man, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, landed on the peninsula of Florida, and established the right of Spain to its possession. Five years after, Fernandez landed on the coast of Yucatan; and ere long Garay explored the coast of the Gulf ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... explorers,—Layard to Nineveh, and Stephens to Yucatan. And we were as fond of good story-books as any girls that live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a character-picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days. It is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to modern girlhood,—Ware's "Zenobia." ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom |
