Word: tahiti
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From the blue and surf-ringed isolation of French-owned Tahiti, Author James Norman Hall (Pitcairn's Island, Mutiny on the Bounty) decided that the world's dirty, teeming and fear-ridden old nests of civilization needed a word of cheer. After noting, with obvious satisfaction, that French Oceania was free of the ships, planes and men which cluttered it up during World War II, he sent TIME two items of news about its people...
...explorers found in Tahiti an odd, crow-sized bird with a flute-like cry. It was named the bristle-thighed curlew,* Numenius tahitiensis...
...reproducing. It winters in the South Seas, as many New Yorkers winter in Florida, but it does not make its nest there. In 1869, a bristle-thighed curlew was spotted on the Alaska coast. But no nest was found. Apparently the curlews, having flown over 5,000 miles from Tahiti, penetrated still farther into Alaska to raise their families...
...cinemaddicts will stand up to cheer these tender graces, but fewer will want to miss those of a Fairbanks find: a 23-year-old, Tahiti-born "Tyrolean blonde" named Paule Croset. Her performance (as a Dutch farm girl) is as clear as a brook, and audiences may well object that the camera does not linger longer on her cool, inviting beauty...
...Indians might have traveled across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia on big, homemade rafts, carried by the south equatorial current. Sailing on, as the Indians may have done, until wind and currents actually cast it on the beach of some island, the Kon-Tiki expedition hopes to reach Tahiti, 750 miles dead ahead...