"Polynesians" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adventures: the separation of sky and earth, and so forth. Where this belief prevails we find little or no trace of the primal maker and master, though we do find strange early metaphysics of curiously abstract quality (Maoris, Zunis, Polynesians). As far as our knowledge goes, Greek mythology springs partly from this stratum of barbaric as opposed to strictly savage thought. Ouranos and Gaea, Cronos, and the Titans represent the primal beings ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... the Fijian Nanga, or 'bed of the ancestors,' a cult introduced by native castaways many generations ago. These castaways may have been Polynesians. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... because, having lived for all those years among the coral islands of the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific, he was now sailing to the New Hebrides, where the fierce black cannibal islanders of the Western Pacific slew one another. As he thought of the fierce men of Erromanga he thought of the waving forests of brown hands ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... scenery, much land that is fruitful, even under native cultivation, and mighty rivers that take their rise far inland. Its savage inhabitants have aroused powerfully the interest and sympathy alike of Christian Polynesians and English missionaries, who, taking their lives in their hands, have, in not a few instances, laid them down in the effort to win ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... with the Peruvian ports, the advanced natives being quite as mercenary and keen of knife and scent as the retrograde Spaniards; while, owing to the bad odor in which all Europeans lie, in the minds of aboriginal savages who have chanced to hear aught of them, to desert the ship among primitive Polynesians, is, in most cases, a hope not unforlorn. Hence the Enchanted Isles become the voluntary tarrying places of all sorts of refugees; some of whom too sadly experience the fact, that flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... modes adopted to show friendship in salutation, taking the place of our shaking hands. Some Pacific Islanders used to show their joy at meeting friends by sniffing at them, after the style of well-disposed dogs. The Fuegians pat and slap each other, and some Polynesians stroke their own faces with the hand or foot of the friend. The practice of rubbing or pressing noses is very common. It has been noticed in the Lapland Alps, often in Africa, and in Australia the tips of the noses are pressed a long time, accompanied with grunts of ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... they can be handled that way, and I believe you. I have had no experience with them. But you have had no experience with the blacks, and I ask you to believe me. They are different from your natives. You are used to Polynesians. These boys are Melanesians. They're blacks. They're niggers—look at their kinky hair. And they're a whole lot lower than the African niggers. Really, you know, there is a ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... differences within the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands caused the Polynesians of the Ellice Islands to vote for separation from the Micronesians of the Gilbert Islands. The following year, the Ellice Islands became the separate British colony of Tuvalu. Independence was granted in 1978. In 2000, Tuvalu negotiated a contract ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... semi-savage, wandering about the gun-deck in his barbaric robe, seemed a being from some other sphere. His tastes were our abominations: ours his. Our creed he rejected: his we. We thought him a loon: he fancied us fools. Had the case been reversed; had we been Polynesians and he an American, our mutual opinion of each other would still have remained the same. A fact proving that neither was wrong, but ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... connection, there is a striking contrast between the American Indians and the primitive Polynesians. The chief economic plants encountered by early explorers on the islands of the Pacific Ocean were identical with well known Asiatic species. Coconuts, breadfruit, taro, sugar cane, yams and bananas, the most important food staples ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... comparisons of races made to determine the amounts and characters of the higher feelings to which the relation of the sexes gives rise. The lowest varieties of mankind have but small endowments of these feelings. Among varieties of higher types, such as the Malayo-Polynesians, these feelings seem considerably developed: the Dyaks, for instance, sometimes display them in great strength. Speaking generally, they appear to become stronger with the advance of civilization. Several subordinate inquiries may be named. (a) How ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... W. H. R. Rivers' and Dr. C. G. Seligmann's inquiry into the practice and theory of native customs. Challis developed his study more particularly with reference to the earlier evolution of Totemism, and he was able by his patient work among the Polynesians of Tikopia and Ontong Java, and his comparisons of those sporadic tribes with the Papuasians of Eastern New Guinea, to correct some of the inferences with regard to the origins of exogamy made by Dr. J. G. Frazer in his great ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... two of four races which have given rise to the population of the Malay Archipelago — namely, Malayans, Indonesians, Negritos, and Papuans. He regards the Indonesians (used in a wide sense to include Malays) as most closely akin to the Polynesians; but he expresses no opinion as to their relations to ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... dilated, hands small and delicate, legs thin and weak, hair black, coarse and lank, beard absent or scant;" but these Indonesians to whom belong most of the indigenous inhabitants of Celebes, are taller and have fairer or light brown complexions and regular features, connecting them with the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific "who may be regarded as their descendants," and Professor KEANE accounts for their presence by assuming "a remote migration of the Caucasic race to South-Eastern Asia, of which evidences are not lacking in Camboja and elsewhere, and a further onward movement, first to the ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part. It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another .. homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the Author.—Nearly all Polynesians and Micronesians believed most firmly that the dissolution of soul from body always (excepting in cases of sudden death by violence or accident) occurred when the tide is on the ebb. From a long experience of life in the Pacific Islands, ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... into copartnery with living fishers, and haunt the reef and the lagoon. The conclusion attributed to the nameless lady of the legend would be reached to-day, under the like circumstances, by ninety per cent of Polynesians: and here ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his family or clan, and are shared among cousins. This condition is responsible for that absence of personal ambition and that fatal contentment with existing conditions, which strikes the white man as so illogical, but which is nevertheless the dominant feature of the social fabric of the Polynesians, and which has hitherto prevented the introduction of "ideals of modern progress." The natives are happy; why work when every reasonable want is already supplied? None are rich in material things, but none are beggars excepting in the sense that all are such. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... mother she tattoos the figure of a child on her forehead. After they marry Mojave girls tattoo the chin with vertical blue lines; and when an Eskimo wife has her face tattooed with lamp-black she is regarded as a matron in society. The Polynesians have carried this dermal art to an extent which is unequaled by any other people, and it is universally practiced among them. Quoted by Burke, Sullivan states that the custom of tattooing continued in England and Ireland down to the seventh ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... domestication of various animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others, such as the boomerang ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White |
