Word: formosae
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...Formosa, an island about 100 miles off the South China coast, is slightly larger than Maryland. Two-thirds of Formosa is covered with tropical forest-banyans, Japanese cedars, teak, black ebony and most of the world's camphor trees...
Snakes & Pirates. The Portuguese, who first sighted the island in 1590, were so entranced by its vistas of purple mountains rising out of lush, green lowlands that they named it Ilka Formosa (Beautiful Isle). But the Beautiful Isle has its shortcomings. In August and September it is whipped by destructive typhoons. It averages 330 earthquakes a year. Formosa also boasts twelve varieties of poisonous snakes, including the "hundred pace snake." (The legend: the victim walks 100 paces and falls dead...
...Dutch and the Spaniards arrived in Formosa in the 1620s. They fought the head-hunting Formosan aborigines and each other. In 1644 the Dutch captured the Spanish stronghold of La Santissima Trinidad at Keelung, but their victory was short-lived. Formosa was being inundated with South Chinese fleeing before the Manchu invaders of China. In 1661 one refugee, the pirate Koxinga, turned up at Formosa with a fleet and an army of 25,000 men, overwhelmed Formosa's small Dutch garrison and proclaimed himself king of the island. Though he ruled for only a year before his death, Koxinga...
Wasps & Head-Hunters. Until Koxinga's time, Formosa had been bedeviled by Japanese pirates. Formosans still maintain that the Chinese residents of Kaohsiung beat off one Japanese attack in the 16th Century by setting afloat a host of bamboo tubes filled with live wasps. The curious pirates opened the tubes, were so badly stung that the Chinese captured the whole invading force...
...Formosa became a part of the Chinese Empire. Chinese settlers wrested control of the best land from the aborigines. This land steal aroused in the aborigines a hatred so implacable that even after World War I a traveler reported of the headhunters: "Mongolian [Chinese] heads are preferred, though those of other tribesmen, of domesticated natives or of Japanese are esteemed...