Word: lateen
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...products of their time. On a ship from Marseilles to Greece, for example, De Monfreid scowls at a throng of Russian peasants, whom he finds "as uncouth and primitive as the Somali Bedouins." And the book is further marred by the same sort of excessive nautical argot (starboard this, lateen that) that makes Moby Dick such a tough sea of words to oar through. But whenever De Monfreid reaches land and begins to describe the gallery of rogues and brutes and generally weird people he claims to meet on his journeys, the book can spellbind...
...Canaille, Cassis, Opus 200, 1889, is a superb example. The day is fading. The tartans, or lateen-rigged fishing boats, triangular scraps of white sail on the blue, are flocking back to port. The pallid horizon is delicately tinted with pink, lavender, yellow. The foreground, with its purple house and lavender rocks, is already darkening. But the sunset has lit up the prismatic shape of the headland to a blazing orange-yellow, a thrilling and almost transcendent intensity. It is the kind of painting that can absorb any amount of looking, and after 10 minutes with it you can appreciate...
...Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal organized a naval academy of engineers, mapmakers and ship's pilots. Borrowing from Arab vessels, they designed the first caravels. Propelled by lateen rigging, the three-masted ships were fast and tacked into the wind...
...Welsh has assembled many of the best-known paintings, from the burning and writhing Sunflowers through the spiky lateen-rigged boats on the Camargue beach at Stes.-Maries; from the bedroom in the Yellow House at Aries to the tiny, dense icon of The Sower, a stubborn black lump distributing flakes of seed under the vast Apollonian wheel of the setting sun. Yet although these images have joined the noble cliches of art history, they can be seen afresh through their relationship with the work of other artists. The service this show does for Van Gogh is to place...
...Tanganyika. Once the major headquarters for Arab slavers, it is a lady island, pungent with the odor of cloves and the glamour of Araby. Tourists can ride the streets in dilapidated rickshas, visit the old Arab waterfront fort and the harbor, where old wooden dhows with odd-looking lateen sails load up for trips to the mainland. They can buy French perfumes, Indian craft jewelry, or copies of the famed, huge oaken "elephant doors," which are covered with spikes to keep elephants from leaning on them. They are an unusual curio, since Zanzibar does not have elephants and never...