"West Indian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the shape of a black cat, a dog, or a pig, and who was sometimes accompanied by a black man. Louder next related his experience of being changed to a horse and ridden to a witches' ball, and of seeing Rebecca Nurse ride through the air on a broomstick. The West Indian negro man John, the husband of Tituba and servant of Mr. Parris, was next put on the witness stand. The magistrate ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... Mistaken Ideas. Civil Service Reform. Perfecting of Party Organization in the Country. Jackson and the United States Bank. His Popularity. Revival of West Indian Trade. French Spoliation Claims. Paid. Our Gold and Silver Coinage. Gold Bill. Increased Circulation of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... be on my account," Captain Brisco assured the young operator. "A few more details, and we'll be ready for sea. About time, too, for this good weather won't hold any too long down among those West Indian islands." ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... day of renewed studies—while the girls were in the grounds, after tea—Francine had at last completed the arrangement of her rooms, and had dismissed Mrs. Ellmother (kept hard at work since the morning) to take a little rest. Standing alone at her window, the West Indian heiress wondered what she had better do next. She glanced at the girls on the lawn, and decided that they were unworthy of serious notice, on the part of a person so specially favored as herself. ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... the coloring matter derived from the seeds of an evergreen plant, Bixa Orellana, which grows in the East and West Indian Islands and South America, in the latter of which it is principally prepared. Two kinds are imported, Spanish annatto, made in Brazil, and flag or French, made mostly in Cayenne. These differ considerably in characters and properties, the latter having a disagreeable putrescent ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... edifices then building, repaired the edifices belonging to the state and constructed the walls and bastions which still surround the city. He was able to ward off the attacks of corsairs, who multiplied in West Indian waters to such an extent that in 1561 the Spanish Government forbade vessels to travel to and from the new ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... pupils, and had an opportunity to observe the clock-like life of the place. All the girls I have known to be educated there were better scholars than any brought up elsewhere. There were many English and American girls, besides Poles, Germans and West Indian Creoles. The war of 1860-64 left traces of strange animosity among the Northern and Southern children: it was hardly credible that such a spirit could animate young children so long removed from the immediate home influences that would otherwise have accounted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... besides country squires were interested in Mr. Grenville's budget, notably the West Indian sugar planters, virtually and actually represented in the House of Commons and voting there this day. Many of them were rich men no doubt; but sugar planting, they would assure you in confidence, was not what it had been; and if they were well off after a fashion, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... discovered 'a zeal without knowledge.' Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, 'Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.' His violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity. Towards the conclusion of his Taxation no Tyranny, he says, 'how is it that we hear the loudest YELPS for liberty among ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Abernethy of the brig Enterprise, the last of whom, I may tell you, was the officer my father had described to Gordon as knowing so little of navigation that he had, after cruising out of sight of land for some months, mistaken the Mainland of Orkney for one of the West Indian Islands. ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... ring of white water-lilies, which you dare not stoop to pick, lest the peat, bending inward, slide you down into that clear dark gulf some twenty feet in depth, bottomed and walled with yielding ooze, from which there is no escape? Most transparent, likewise, is the water of the West Indian swamps. Though it is of the colour of coffee, or rather of dark beer, and so impregnated with gases that it produces fever or cholera when drunk, yet it is—at least when it does not mingle with the salt water—so clear, that one might see every marking on ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... pains to show that England forced slavery upon her colonies, and that it was maintained by numerous acts of Parliament and public policy, and, in short, that the system of slavery was not only established by Great Britain in her West Indian colonies, but that it was popular and profitable to many of the wealthy and influential people of England, who were engaged in trade, or owned and cultivated plantations in the colonies. No one can read his elaborate views, ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... car around to the garage, Andrews," said the young man. He nodded to the dummy-chucker. In a daze, the mendicant followed his rescuer. He entered a gorgeously mirrored and gilded hall. He stepped into an elevator chauffeured by a West Indian of the haughtiest blood. The dummy-chucker was suddenly conscious of his tattered garb, his ill-fitting, run-down shoes. He stepped, when they alighted from the lift, as gingerly as ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... must remember that we introduced it when they were our colonists. It is not so easily got rid of. Its abolition by France exterminated the white race in St. Domingo, as the white race had exterminated the red. Its abolition by England ruined our West Indian colonies. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... features, bluff straightforwardness and crooked diplomacy, faithful affection—such as his bold schemes to help his captured comrades proved—balanced by a hard indifference that ignored the misery of the wretched negroes he sold to West Indian planters. Pluck and daring were the only qualities he showed consistently from first to last. His zeal in slave-hunting, repulsive to us, is excused by Froude on the ground that 'negro slavery in theory was an invention of philanthropy.' Labourers were a necessity for the Spanish colonist, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... annual reports from the Secretary of the Navy and the Board of Commissioners will be exhibited to the view of Congress the execution of the laws relating to that department of the public service. The repression of piracy in the West Indian and in the Grecian seas has been effectually maintained, with scarcely any exception. During the war between the Governments of Buenos Ayres and of Brazil frequent collisions between the belligerent acts of power and the rights of neutral commerce occurred. Licentious blockades, irregularly ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... to the Garfish (q.v.) by Sydney fishermen. The word is West Indian, and is applied there to a fast-sailing schooner; also ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... naval hero before he had time to complete his work encouraged the West Indian pirates and they became more audacious than before. In the autumn of 1821 several naval vessels were sent thither by our Government. They did vigorous work, capturing and destroying a number of piratical vessels, but there were too many of them, ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... others," Dobbin continued, "as true and as kind-hearted as yourself. I'm not speaking about the West Indian heiress, Miss Osborne, but about a poor girl whom George once loved, and who was bred from her childhood to think of nobody but him. I've seen her in her poverty uncomplaining, broken-hearted, without a fault. It is of Miss Sedley ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... more likely to be associated with, or to have the same origin as, the 'Duffy' of the West Indian negroes. Among them Duffy means a ghost; and in the vocabulary of the gutter it may easily have been taken as the equivalent of soul. The transition from Duffy to Davy is by ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... work to be had on some of the West Indian islands, so mamma says," spoke Belle. "I am just crazy ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... and pleasant voices, that might have cheered the heart of the veriest misanthrope. But there are moments in one's life when the mind and spirits seem oppressed by a sort of dead dull calm, as enervating and disheartening as that which succeeds a West Indian hurricane in the month of August. At those times every thing loses its interest, and one appears to become as helpless as the ship that lies becalmed and motionless on the glassy surface of a tropical sea. I was just in one of those moments. I had consulted any thing but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... assiduously Nature's design in my formation—where the lights and shades in my character were intended. I was pretty confident my poems would meet with some applause; but at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make me forget neglect. I threw off six hundred copies, of which I had got subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... her privateers and prizes to our ports; and here, as any one could see, and as the sequel amply proved, was a fertile source of dangerous complications. Then by the treaty of alliance we guaranteed to France her West Indian possessions, binding ourselves to aid her in their defense; and a proclamation of neutrality when France was actually at war with a great naval power was an immediate and obvious limitation upon this guarantee. Hamilton argued that while France had an undoubted right to ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Albemarle, twenty-eight guns, in which he was kept, to his great annoyance, in the North Sea for the whole winter of 1781-2, and was sent in the spring to Quebec. The Albemarle then served on the West Indian station until tidings came that the preliminaries of peace had been signed, and she returned to England, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... as that," the other answered. "There'd be a lot more wrecks than there are if it weren't for the storm signals of the Weather Bureau. They can always warn ships of the coming of a big storm, one of these West Indian hurricanes, for instance. Squalls, of course, they can't foresee. Usually, that doesn't matter, because no seaworthy vessel is going to be worried by a squall. But that iron cylinder wasn't seaworthy. At least, you should have heard what the men called it who had been on board the night ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... perfect West Indian day. My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... steam hither and yon in the Caribbean Sea looking for an enemy's fleet which much of the time lay snugly on the other side of the Atlantic. Accordingly, up to June 15, the results of naval operations in West Indian waters were almost nil. Powder had been burned indeed as when, on April 27, the Spanish works at Matanzas were bombarded and silenced by the "New York," "Puritan," and "Cincinnati," of Admiral Sampson's squadron, and on May 13 the works at San Juan, Porto ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... coast of Africa, on the continent of America, she had been compelled to cede the fruits of her victories in former wars. Spain regained Minorca and Florida; France regained Senegal, Goree, and several West Indian Islands. The only quarter of the world in which Britain had lost nothing was the quarter in which her interests had been committed to the care of Hastings. In spite of the utmost exertions both of European and Asiatic enemies, the power of our country in the East had been greatly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the war was renewed. Under these circumstances Grenville determined that a small army of ten thousand men should be kept in America, under the distinct promise that it was never to serve beyond that country and the West Indian Isles, and he asked America to contribute 100,000l. a year, or about a third part of ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of the pattern be red or pink? and the columbines blue or purple? She could make a beautiful purple by steeping the sugar paper which wrapped her precious cone of West Indian "loaf sugar," and sugar-paper purple was reasonably fast. So ran the thoughts of the dear, straight-featured Puritan wife as she sorted her colors ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... corporation were already an independent state. These reports were accepted by the English authorities as correct statements of fact, for they seemed to be confirmed by the evidence of London merchants and by at least one West Indian governor, who knew the colony and had no personal interests ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... pole, and reappears in every race. We recognize it in the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, which is a Celtic legend; in the cornucopia of the Romans; in the goat Amalthea among the Greeks; in the wishing-cow and wishing-tree of the Hindoos; in the pumpkin-tree of the West Indian Ananzi stories; in the cow of the Servian legends, who spins yarn out of her ear; in the Sampo of the Finns; and in all those stories of cups, and glasses, and horns, and rings, and swords, seized by some bold spirit in the midst of a fairy revel, or earned by some kind deed ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... berry or fruit of a tree growing in great abundance in Jamaica, particularly on the northern side of that island, on hilly spots, near the coast; it is also a native of both Indies. The Pimento Tree is a West Indian species of Myrtle; it grows to the height of twenty or thirty feet; the leaves are all of a deep, shining green, and the blossom consists of numerous branches of small, white, aromatic flowers, which render its ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... encouragement, and for the spreading of good influences among others. It was such a little handful that really began our work in the West Indies, and we have now a Corps in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa, formed by men of a West Indian regiment temporarily quartered there. The same thing has happened in Sumatra by means of Dutch and ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... 267—over one-third—were British; the Dutch but 146, the Hamburgers themselves 157. A curious and suggestive comparison is afforded by the same port in 1769. From the extensive, populous, and fruitful country of France, the entrepot of the richest West Indian colony, Santo Domingo, there entered Hamburg 203 ships, of which not one was French; whereas from Great Britain there came a slightly larger total, 216, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... North, both on the imperative duty of maintaining the Union and on the slavery issue. He was an intense abolitionist. As a lad of sixteen or seventeen, he had given up sugar, at the end of the 'twenties, because in those days sugar was grown by slaves on the West Indian plantations. He would not support a slave industry, and until the slaves were freed he did ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... species C. mamillaris seems to have stood as the type, not only of the Linnaean genus Cactus, but also of Haworth's Mamillaria, and as such should retain the original generic name. Besides, Mamillaria was used as the generic name of an alga in 1809. Cactus mamillaris L. is the West Indian Mamillaria simplex Haw. ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... treaty of 1814 did not end our troubles with Great Britain. Our ships were still shut out of her West Indian ports. The fort at Astoria, near the mouth of the Columbia River, had been seized during the war and for a time was not returned as the treaty required. The authorities in Nova Scotia claimed that we no longer had a right to fish in British ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... unknown in this country. It consists of poems written and published in his native Jamaica. I was fortunate enough to run across this first volume, and I could not refrain from reproducing here one of the poems written in the West Indian Negro dialect. I have done this not only to illustrate the widest range of the poet's talent and to offer a comparison between the American and the West Indian dialects, but on account of the intrinsic worth of the poem itself. I was much tempted to ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Princeton, New Jersey. At the age of fourteen he went to sea in the merchant service, and was in command of a trading schooner at an early age. The American trading vessels of that period were supposed to be excluded by the navigation laws from commerce with the British West Indian Islands, though with the concealed or very slightly disguised assistance of the planters, they engaged in a good deal of contraband commerce. The war between France and Great Britain tended further to make the carrying trade of neutrals difficult. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being who fell in my way. West Indian negroes easily kept the lead of all other nationalities combined; negroes blacker than the obsidian cutlery of the Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair and blue eyes whose race was betrayed only by eyelids and the dead whiteness of ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... and the Madeira and claret (the only wines produced), of the best quality. Their host did the honours of his table with true West Indian hospitality, circulating the bottle after dinner with a rapidity which would soon have produced an effect upon less prudent visitors; and when Mr Berecroft refused to take any more wine, he ordered the ingredients for ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was born January 5, 1833, and entered the (p. 363) British Royal Navy as assistant-surgeon, November 10, 1855. He was employed on the home station, on particular service on the North American, West Indian, and West Coast of Africa stations, until June, 1863. While in Jamaica in April, 1858, with the permission of his commanding officer, Admiral Sir Hewston Stewart, Royal Navy, he volunteered, at imminent personal risk, his services on board the United States ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... if almost humanly intelligent as they scampered about over the sand or through the undergrowth, busy about goodness knows what. The beautiful cocoa-nut palm was plentiful, so much so that I wondered why there were no settlers to collect "copra," or dried cocoa-nut, for oil. My West Indian experience came in handy now, for I was able to climb a lofty tree in native fashion, and cut down a grand bunch of green nuts, which form one of the most refreshing and nutritious of foods, as well as a cool and delicious drink. We had no line with us, so ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... oughtn't to have any property either. People will never understand about the West Indian Estate. They'll think you're the wicked uncle out of the Babes in the Wood. (With a fresh gush of compassion) I'm ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... different in character from Virginia in the south; they consisted of democratic townships, Virginia of plantations worked by slaves. Slave labour was also the economic basis of the colonies established on various West Indian islands during the first half of the seventeenth century; and this distinction between colonies used for exploitation and colonies used for settlement has led to important constitutional variations in the empire. Only those colonies in which large white communities ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... chances and circumstances may direct it in as many different ways; and in every picture of the future there is a dim spot, which the eye of the understanding cannot penetrate. It appears, however, to be extremely probable that in the West Indian Islands the white race is destined to be subdued, and the black population to share the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... had turned aside to—-. And here he recollected just in time that Cis was in every one's eyes save his father's, his own sister, and lamely concluded "to take a draught of water," blushing under his brown skin as he spoke. Poor fellow! the Queen, even while she wished him in the farthest West Indian isle, could not help understanding that strange doubt and dread that come over the mind at the last moment before a longed-for meeting, and which had made even the bold young sailor glad to rally his hopes by this divination. Fortunately she thought only herself and one or two of the foremost ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trade to the Colonies consists of three great branches: the African— which, terminating almost wholly in the Colonies, must be put to the account of their commerce,—the West Indian, and the North American. All these are so interwoven that the attempt to separate them would tear to pieces the contexture of the whole; and, if not entirely destroy, would very much depreciate the value of all the parts. I therefore consider these ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... turning on him]. I know nothing more than I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... and some geologists think that in ages to come the coral insects which are at work on the Bahamas and those that are so busy on the Florida reefs will build up a vast country where it is now sea, and that ages and ages hence the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, and perhaps even the West Indian Islands may be a part of the main land. While this is only a theory, it should be interesting to you in making you realize that the building of the world is going on now, from day to day, as steadily as it did in the days when the bed of the Niagara ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... he has picked up a great deal of Latin since he has been helping me; knows ten times as much as he did about America and the West Indian Islands, and has picked up a host of little natural history facts, for ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... take charge of this poor remnant of what had been, three months before, a magnificent battalion. Captain Patrick Robertson, well known to Haligonians as Colonel Robertson-Ross, Adjutant-General of Canadian Militia, was to be my companion. A new colonel had just been sent to us from a West Indian regiment, who took as much interest in his new command as if he had served all his life with us, and employed his chargers and his grooms to transport any possible comforts for his men. Six months afterwards he was struck down when directing the fire ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... not yet thoroughly re-established; and while he was employed in getting his ship ready, he again became so ill as hardly to be able to keep out of bed. Yet in this state, still suffering from the fatal effect of a West Indian climate, as if it might almost be supposed, he said, to try his constitution, he was sent to the North Seas, and kept there the whole winter. The asperity with which he mentioned this so many years afterwards evinces how deeply he resented a mode of conduct equally cruel ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... danced to perfection, never getting tired, so that the officers had no lack of partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... though so large, is still little more than we voluntarily paid to extinguish slavery in our West Indian dominions; it does not much exceed the amount which a Royal Commission, some little time ago, proposed to expend in erecting fortifications and sea-works to defend our shores. It is but six per cent, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... island.) This structure no doubt has been caused by the ejected fragments and ashes being always blown, during eruptions, in greater quantity towards one side than towards the other. M. Moreau de Jonnes has made a similar observation with respect to the volcanic orifices in the West Indian Islands. ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... wheels in slanting rings, it does not set for months, Stretch'd in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon and sinks again, Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups, Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands. ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... their adversaries' discomfiture. Rejoicing over their victories, the followers of Morgan then planned a venture that should eclipse all that had gone before. This was no less than a descent upon Panama, the most powerful of the West Indian cities. For this undertaking, Morgan gathered around him an army of over two thousand desperadoes of all nationalities. A little village on the island of Hispaniola was chosen as the recruiting station; and thither flocked pirates, thieves, and adventurers from ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... do their respective systems of colonial government. Whether the devil himself possesses ingenuity in inflicting suffering, superior to that displayed by the Spanish conquerors and their immediate followers, has never been demonstrated. The gentle, unresisting natives of the West Indian Islands, whose delicate constitutions incapacitated them to bear labours their masters exacted of them, were their first victims. The descriptions penned as of the cruelties practised on these harmless creatures dispense me from the ungrateful ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Club are all good, one especially so, a retired Colonel of a West Indian regiment, of whom I stand in mortal dread. He has short shrift for any failings, even of players nearly as good as himself, whilst as for me! though he has never yet resorted to personal violence with a chair-leg, yet that would not surprise me; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his country scat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of a bishop for the christening ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... East. Living a bare fourteen days as he does, infected stegomyia died a natural death, in the old days, during the long voyage round the Horn, and thus failed to infect the Eastern Coolie, who would in turn infect these brothers of the West Indian mosquito. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... of the eighteenth century piracy was on the wane, and practically had died out by the beginning of the nineteenth, the final thrust that destroyed it being given by the American and English Navies in the North Atlantic and West Indian Seas. But by this time piracy had degenerated to mere sea-robbing, the days of gallant and ruthless sea-battles had passed, and the pirate of those decadent days was generally a Spanish-American half-breed, with no courage, a mere ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... down to the last arrived machinist or time-keeper, the five thousand Americans at work on the Isthmus seemed to me an exceptionally able, energetic lot, some of them grumbling, of course, but on the whole a mighty good lot of men. The West Indian negroes offer a greater problem, but they are doing pretty well also. I was astonished at the progress made. We spent the three days in working from dawn until long after darkness—dear Dr. Rixey being, of course, my faithful companion. Mother would see all she liked and then would go off on ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... comprises nearly 300 species, mostly Mexican, with a few Brazilian and West Indian, is called nipple cactus, and consists of globular or cylindrical succulent plants, whose surface instead of being cut up into ridges with alternate furrows, as in Melocactus, is broken up into teat-like cylindrical or angular tubercles, spirally arranged, and terminating ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... soul! And one may well say, "What imaginations those women had!" Tituba, the West Indian Aztec who appears in this social-religious explosion as the chief and original incendiary,— verily the root of all evil,—gave the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... then?' Tom, Tom, you've the manners of the West Indian skippers you consort with! No, it's not Adam Gaudylock. It is—" He hesitated, then took up a pen and wrote two words. "That's his name—but you are to keep ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... which I have made great progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... covered with herbs and flowers as far as the eye could reach—sometimes in compact masses of several miles in extent, and at other times in long straight ribbons, as regular as if they had been spread by some West Indian Le Notre. The ship seemed merely displaying her graces in the sunshine, so gentle was she moving in the water. The air was laden with perfumes, and a soft dreamy languor stole over the friends, which they were trying in vain to shake off. In one ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... island Madagascar is the home of very singular and special insectivorous beasts of the genera Centetes, Ericulus, and Echinops; while the only other member of the group to which they belong is Solenodon, which is a resident in the West Indian Islands, Cuba and Hayti. The connexion, however, between the West Indies and Madagascar must surely have been at a time when the great lemurine group was absent; for it is difficult to understand the spread of such a form as Solenodon, and at the same time the non-extension ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... glimpse into a state of society worthy of this exhibition,—men without mercy, women without modesty, the black man a slave to the white man's passions, and the white man a slave to his own. The present West Indian society in its worst forms is probably a mere dilution of the utter profligacy of those days. Greek or Roman decline produced nothing more debilitating or destructive than the ordinary life of a Surinam planter, and his one virtue of hospitality only led to more unbridled excesses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... of an article is a simple matter, but keeping the customer sold is our principal aim."—Advt. in West Indian Paper. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... about which Edward Alden inquired in your issue of July 26. and which is quoted in Stevenson's "Treasure Island," is the opening stanza of an old song or chantey of West Indian piracy, which is believed to have originated from the wreck of an English buccaneer on a cay in the Caribbean Sea known as "The Dead Man's Chest." The cay was so named from its fancied resemblance to the old sailors' sea chest which held his scanty belongings. The song or chantey was familiar ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... chair was taken by Paul Allen (1775-1826), who wrote poems, and prepared the "Travels of Lewis and Clarke" for the press, and who must not be confounded with another eccentric Bohemian, James Allen, brother to the Sheriff of Suffolk, who wrote under the inspiration of the West Indian muses—sugar, rum and lemon-juice—who "wore ruffles—and they hung in tatters about ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... for London; and, desirous of testing the best way of sustaining physical strength during long marches, and urged perhaps also by economical considerations, he resolved to make the journey on foot. His West Indian and American experience had taught him that spare diet consisted best with pedestrian efficiency, and it was accordingly his practice, during this long walk, to abstain from animal food until the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... flogged at the head of each regiment in turn, and occasionally one was shot. A frequent employment was the cutting of spruce tops to make spruce beer. This innocent beverage was reputed sovereign against scurvy; and such was the fame of its virtues that a copious supply of the West Indian molasses used in concocting it was thought indispensable to every army or garrison in the wilderness. Throughout this campaign it is repeatedly mentioned in general orders, and the soldiers are promised that they shall ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... His art is most intellectual. It commands immediate respect for its historical interest, which is based on more than mere knowledge of the story illustrated. His milieu is always right, distinctly so when he deals with the West Indian buccaneers. His sense of colour is simple and dignified. It has the typical breadth and decorative feeling that men like Jules Gurin and Maxfield Parrish developed. Pyle was not an ordinary illustrator. His interest in his ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... must be his soul, unsympathetic his nature who can see the forests and mountains of Luzon, Queen of the Eastern Isles, fade away into dim violet outlines on the fast receding horizon without some pang of longing regret. Not the Aegean, not the West Indian, not the Samoan, not any rival in manifold beauties of earth, sea and sky the Philippine Archipelago. Pity that for the Philippines no word limner of note exists. The chiefest, the almost exceptional spell of the Philippines, is situated, not in the lake or volcano, forest or plain, but in the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... The difference was especially noticeable in their speech. There was none of that heavy-tongued enunciation which characterizes even the best-educated colored people of the South. It is remarkable, after all, what an adaptable creature the Negro is. I have seen the black West Indian gentleman in London, and he is in speech and manners a perfect Englishman. I have seen natives of Haiti and Martinique in Paris, and they are more Frenchy than a Frenchman. I have no doubt that the Negro would make a good Chinaman, with exception ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... population of the City was noticed first. The British West Indies furnish 5.8 per cent of these foreign Negro immigrants, while the Danish West Indies, Cuba, and those islands not specified, together make up 3.6 per cent, a total of 9.4 per cent West Indian.[47] Table XIII (p. 59) gives a survey of this part of the population and shows its relation ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... which Mr. Laurance embarked with his family for America had been lost in mid Atlantic; and only one boat filled with a portion of the passengers and crew had been rescued by a West Indian ship bound for Liverpool. Among the published names of the few survivors that of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... like a monkey. A black, who had helped to fetch the hamper, suggested to me to give him wine instead of meat and bread, and make him drunk FOR FUN (the blacks and Hottentots copy the white man's manners TO THEM, when they get hold of a Bosjesman to practise upon); but upon this a handsome West Indian black, who had been cooking pies, fired up, and told him he was a 'nasty black rascal, and a Dutchman to boot', to insult a lady and an old man at once. If you could see the difference between one negro ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... appeared to be a most lonely and languishing place of incarceration. We inspected the cells, and observed in one of them a peculiar handle fastened against the wall. This proved to be a West Indian substitute for the treadmill. The turning of the handle can be made easy or difficult by an arrangement of screws without the cell. The affair is set for a certain number of revolutions, and a warder explained to us that where hard labour has been meted to a prisoner, he spends long, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in the West Indian waters was the purchase in 1917 of the Danish Islands just off the coast of Porto Rico. The strategic position of the islands, especially in relation to Haiti and Porto Rico, made them an object of American concern as early as 1867, when a treaty of purchase was negotiated only ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... and, floatin' up to the roof, walk down what would have been a fire trap on the East Side, and here we are at Professor Parducci's Temple of the Inner Star. A couple of West Indian hall boys, who's gag line was "Say-hib," lets us in. They was dressed in sheets and had towels twisted around their heads and smelled strongly of gin. Pretty soon Honest Dan comes out and shakes hands all around. Except for his face, you'd never know it was the same guy. His ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... civilization. They even thought of extending the system, by opening the slave trade and enlarging the boundaries of their projected empire, Mexico and Central America, Cuba and St. Domingo, with the whole West Indian group of islands, awaited the consolidation of their power, and stood ready to swell the ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... several sticks of tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells. I have often wondered since why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one and two stories, occupied chiefly by thriving mechanics, which has been laid out where Knox meant to have forests and parks. On the banks of the river, where he intended to have only one wharf for his own West Indian vessels and yacht, there are two wharves, with stores and a lime kiln. Little appertains to the mansion except the tomb and the old burial-ground, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Norse colonised[19] Greenland, Labrador, and possibly even Massachusetts, and it was on a voyage to Iceland that Jean Cabot heard of America, on whose continent he was the first modern sailor to land, and it is said that it was through him that Columbus, after he had discovered the West Indian Islands, first heard that North America had been proved to be a continent by Cabot's coasting voyage along its shore from Maine to Florida. The Vikings, too, taught us the discipline without which no ship can live through an ocean storm. Their spirit, too, when piracy ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa- nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... in the Admiralty Office, which employed him for many hours of the day at Somerset House. My mother, whose maiden name was Mary Griffith, belonged to a naval family. Her father had been lost in a West Indian hurricane at sea, and her uncle, Admiral Sir John Griffith, was the hero of the family, having been at Trafalgar and distinguished himself in cutting out expeditions. My eldest brother bore his name. The ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Frenchman, cruising about for prizes, "to manage their fight against the Spaniards, and be in a prison when they took any English." One of their prizes was a sugar caraval from Brazil; another was a West Indian worth two hundred thousand crowns, which had on board fourteen coffers of wedges of silver, eight thousand royals of eight, and six coffers of the King of Spain's treasure, besides the pillage and rich coffers of many rich passengers. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Anti-Slavery Society, as well as Pringle and other men eminent for their philanthropy and talents and noted for the deep interest they took in all that related to the elevation and welfare of the Negroes of the British West Indian colonies. The petition from the people of color of this island to the House of Commons for the removal of their civil disabilities, was entrusted to Hill, who upon the occasion of presenting it was permitted "within the bar" of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... master, had however much stronger grounds than these. His nephew and intended heir has stolen a match with the old man's pretty daughter, and this had never been forgiven. The young couple had gone out to the West Indian isles, where the early home of her husband had been, and where he held some government office, and there fell a victim to the climate. Old Mr. Gould had gone home to fetch his daughter and her child, but the former had died before he reached her, and he had only brought back the little ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Monk with a smile. "My mother was a West Indian, and I was born there.—There's my home, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... dear friend, Mrs. Mayow, was the wife of a gentleman in a high position in one of our Government offices. She was a West Indian creole, and a singularly beautiful person. Her complexion was of the clear olive-brown of a perfectly Moorish skin, with the color of a damask rose in her cheeks, and lips as red as coral. Her features were classically ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... prisoners in battle. The instances where, by a refinement of cruelty, the Indian eats his nearest relations, his wife, or an unfaithful mistress, are extremely rare. The strange custom of the Scythians and Massagetes, the Capanaguas of the Rio Ucayale, and the ancient inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, of honouring the dead by eating a part of their remains, is unknown on the banks of the Orinoco. In both continents this trait of manners belongs only to nations that hold in horror the flesh of a prisoner. The Indian of Hayti (Saint Domingo) would think himself wanting in regard ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... present period, was limited in its proportions, and composed of elements more refined though far less various. It consisted mainly of the great landed aristocracy, who had quite absorbed the nabobs of India, and had nearly appropriated the huge West Indian fortunes. Occasionally, an eminent banker or merchant invested a large portion of his accumulations in land, and in the purchase of parliamentary influence, and was in time duly admitted into the sanctuary. But those vast and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... parties who were concerned in it, either as sufferers or as agents. I was present from first to last, and watched the whole course of the mysterious storm which fell upon our devoted city in a strength like that of a West Indian hurricane, and which did seriously threaten at one time to depopulate our university, through the dark suspicions which settled upon its members, and the natural reaction of generous indignation in repelling ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... most Saturdays on the sixty-acre stretch of turf known as Indian Field, up in Van Cortlandt Park. Here there are baseball games by the hundred and football games by the score—all the known varieties of football games too, Gaelic, Soccer, Rugby and others; and coal black West Indian negroes in white flannels, with their legs buskined like the legs of comic opera brigands, play at cricket, meanwhile shouting in the broadest of British accents; and there is tennis on the tennis courts and boating ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... or bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay; or Koenigsberg by its ship canal, carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Haff to the Baltic;[417] or Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary.[418] In northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are ice-bound. Otherwise the outer ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... had received notice from his government that, in consequence of the alliance between France and the United States, a new plan of operations had been determined on. The French were to be attacked in their West Indian possessions by way of diversion from the main scene of action. Five thousand men were detached from his army to aid in the execution of this purpose, and 3,000 were sent to Florida. Clinton was also apprised that a French fleet would probably appear ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... an unknown luxury, notwithstanding there are some patches of good vegetable land in the central part. The island possesses a beautiful and safe harbor; at one time it was the haven where the pirates that infested the West Indian seas were wont to seek rest from their hazardous calling. Their names are to be seen to-day rudely carved on the sapote beams that form the lintels of the doorways of the antique shrine whose ruins crown the southernmost ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... services of Captain Riou from the date of his promotion until 1794, when we find him in command of his Majesty's ship Rose, assisting in the reduction of Martinique. He was then transferred to the Beaulieu, and remained cruising in the West Indian seas till his health became so injured by the climate that he found himself compelled to solicit his recall, and he consequently returned to England in the Theseus in the following year. Shortly after, in recognition of his distinguished services, he was appointed to the command ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... on the transport ships which had been lying for weeks in the harbors of Havana and Tampa, the Japanese news bureaus in Kingston (Jamaica) and Havana had been fully informed as to where the blow was to fall, partly by West Indian half-breed spies and partly by the obliging American press. One regiment of cavalry had already arrived at Corpus Christi from Tampa on July 30th, and the Cuban troops were expected ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... were also three of my cotemporaries,—De Morgan, who had the business after decease of our principal, and whose brother is or was the famous psychological philosopher; Domville, since Sir Charles, I believe; and Gunn, a West Indian, of whom the jest was to inquire of Walters, a very nervous man, if he liked us to have a gun in chambers: all these, and there were more, were clever men and worthy, but as the tide of life flows on I have lost ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the land of the Wild West Indian and buffalo days, so wild a country that it never lived down its reputation. Buffalo, antelope, and elk ranged in common in herds of hundreds of thousands, while in the rough shores of the river lived countless bighorns, hundreds of ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough |
