Word: polynesian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thor Heyerdahl, 63, the Norwegian anthropologist, explorer and adventurer, believes in dramatizing his theories. To show that the Polynesian islands could have been settled by ancient mariners from South America, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft. To demonstrate that Egyptians might have reached the New World centuries before Columbus, he conquered the Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus. Now Heyerdahl is about to take a reed boat down the Tigris River from the purported site of the biblical Garden of Eden, eventually reach the open sea and either sail to India or East Africa, or sink-whichever...
...Shakespearian connotations, as they are good guys.) Outside of Dosadi's wall is a complex universe with a tenuous power balance among humans, the frog-like Gowachins and the death-dancing wreaves--with their Kung-fu-like movements and poisoned mandibles. Jorj X. McKie, a red-haired man of Polynesian descent, is the only human accepted as a Legum in the Gowachin legal system. Herbert fails to give the legal cult the depth of Dune's Bene Gesserit witches but he still shows traces of his creative genius...
...hard times soon befell the kitchen brigade. Prices were skyrocketing on the Chicago commodities exchange, reflected, for example, in the one-week, hundredfold increase in the selling price of Polynesian Meatless Ball futures late last spring. Clearly, it just didn't pay to buy into semi-non-adulterated grains and lunchmeats anymore...
Leprosy was imported into Hawaii by Chinese laborers in the 1840s. The bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, found a fertile field in the Polynesian population, which, with no prior exposure to the disease, had no natural defenses. Soon hundreds of new cases were being reported annually. The panic that had swept Europe during its epidemics centuries earlier was repeated in Hawaii. In 1865, King Kamehameha V ordered all lepers confined to the most desolate part of his realm, the volcanic, 14-sq.-mi. peninsula of Kalaupapa jutting northward from the coast of Molokai. The first 35 patients were landed in January...
...Polynesian cultures, an act of violence to the land is regarded as an outrage against the people of that land. That is why the Navy's use of Kahoolawe Island as a target has always provoked bitterness among Hawaiians, now resulting in open protest. Ancient battles were provoked by cutting down coconut trees, thus obligating the owners to do battle as much as if a kinsman had been assaulted...