Word: polynesians
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...December 1789, eight of the Bounty mutineers, under their leader, Fletcher Christian, with 18 Polynesian natives, landed on Pitcairn's Island. Tiny (two miles by one) but isolated and fertile, it looked like a safe refuge from the long arm of the British Government. Safe in that respect it proved to be but at the end of ten years only one man and ten women were left alive; "of the sixteen dead, fifteen had come to violent ends." Principal causes of dissension were women and liquor. There were not enough women to go around; when one of the colony...
...join the company of rulers who have governed the Sandwich Islanders. In 1820 in the days of the sandalwood trade, when missionaries began to arrive by shiploads, the islands were ruled by the native dynasty founded by the great Kamehameha. The missionaries undertook more than the care of Polynesian souls. They became advisers and ministers to the native monarchs. Their lay offspring became merchants and, with Yankee traders who settled there, took the islands' economic upbringing firmly in hand. Thus sprang up a benevolent white aristocracy which developed the islands and dominates them socially and economically to this...
Were American Indians Polynesians? Ales Hrdlicka (Smithsonian anthropologist now in Alaska) is certain that Mongolian-like peoples traveled across Bering Strait and eventually became Amerinds. Helen H. Roberts (of Yale's Institute of Human Relations) last week argued that Amerinds were originally Polynesians transported by canoe from the Pacific Islands. The Polynesian and American aborigines seem to have made cultural contacts long before European ships joined the two primitive races. Mis Roberts bases her arguments on 60 remarkable similarities between Polynesian and Amerind customs. Both groups make flutes of human bones, blow them through their noses, have conches for trumpets...
Tabu (Paramount). This film, if translated from pictures into words, would emerge in the form of a bare and gloomy island ballad. It tells the Polynesian legend of a love affair between an island boy and a girl who has been selected by her tribe for vestal consecration. The boy, Matahi, and the girl, Reri, escape from their own island to a more civilized one where he becomes the best pearl diver in the harbor. One night he dives into dangerous water to get a pearl which will enable them to go further away from the pursuing warrior Hitu. When...
...engagement. The totality band of this year's eclipse spread across the southern Pacific from Australia to the tip of South America. On its way it crossed only two tiny points of land: Nurakita, an inaccessible island, and Niuafou in the Tonga group, home of 1,500 Polynesian natives. Because it stands so proudly high in a treacherous sea, ships can not approach Niuafou. Mail is sent to shore in tin cans. Hence the island is familiarly called Tin Can Island. Astronomers had no choice. To see the eclipse they had to dare a difficult landing, pack themselves...