Word: loon
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...careful reading of the passages in the book dealing with Captain Cook's death leads to the inference that the natives of the Sandwich Islands were cannibals, but Van Loon is careful not to make the specific charge...
...Hawaii feel that the review (TIME, July 8) of Hendrik Willem Van Loon's volume, The Story of the Pacific, does a rank injustice to the people of these Islands, once known as the Sandwich Isles, and to their forefathers...
...Says Author Hendrik Willem Van Loon to TIME: "It's you who are in Dutch, not me." But though he did not mention cannibalism, Author Van Loon believes that, like other primitive peoples, the Sandwich Islanders customarily ate the heart, liver and eyes of people whom they killed, did so to Captain Cook. Reason: thereby they hoped to gain the virtues of their victims...
...readers to whom, as geography or politics, the Pacific is still a great waste of water filled with hidden reefs, treacherous winds and currents, Author Van Loon's book is no chart. His concern is with the explorers of this vast, lonely, misnamed ocean - from prehistoric Polynesian vikings and the Bounty's Captain Bligh, of open-boat fame, to Charles Darwin, who spent four highly uncomfortable years among its atolls, pondering the theory of the survival of the fittest, between bouts of seasickness aboard H. M. S. Beagle...
Favorite Van Loon explorer is Captain James Cook, R. N. In the course of three voyages Captain Cook discovered most of the essential facts about the Pacific - that New Zealand is two islands, that Australia is an island continent, that New Guinea is no part of it, that there is no continent between Australia and South America. He also discovered that lime or lemon juice prevents scurvy, and was so far in advance of his age that he flogged his seamen only when they preferred rum to fruit juice. In the end he fell a victim to meat eaters...