"Tahiti" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which are driven into the ground, and the top of which is covered with pieces of native cloth. The construction of these altars is identical with that observed by Turner in Tanna, and only differs in its inferior finish from the altars formerly erected in Tahiti and the adjacent islands. The offerings, consisting of the choicest articles of food, are left exposed to wind and weather, and firmly believed by the mass of Fijians to be consumed by the spirits ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... have obtained from Tahiti, and other islands of the South Seas, this fecula, known by the name of Tahiti arrowroot, probably the produce of Tacca pinnatifida. It is generally spherical, but also often ovoid, elliptic, or rounded, with a prolongation in the form of a neck, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Tahitian or Madagascar brethren; and of the twenty, fourteen were in India. During the last three years fifteen have been added in India, and one has died. In the Leeward Islands several of the Tahaa students have been ordained as pastors in Tahiti and the out-stations; the Directors have recommended the ordination of others, as TAUGA, the Evangelist in charge of the churches in Manua; ELIKANA, the Evangelist of the Lagoon Islands; and ISAIA, the well-known Evangelist of Rarotonga; and five have been ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... in the more humid districts, taking the place of the lemon, and one variety—the Tahiti—has proved itself to be a heavy and regular bearer. The West Indian lime, from which the lime juice of commerce is made, is very easily grown, particularly in the more tropical parts, where it is often met with growing in an entirely uncultivated condition, and bearing ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... with sufficient absinthe in ballast to last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports. But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as drunkenness is ordinarily understood—no ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... now speaking of the destruction of infants, I would observe, that this crime is common in other heathen countries. It was quite common, until lately, in the island of Tahiti, and other places in the South Pacific Ocean. When the missionaries of the London Missionary Society went there, many years ago, they found the females in a very degraded situation. Mr. Nott, one of ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... forenoon in the Mission House, lunched at the German Consulate, went on board the SPERBER (German war ship) in the afternoon, called on my lawyer on my way out to American Consulate, and talked till dinner time with Adams, whom I am supplying with introductions and information for Tahiti and the Marquesas. Fanny arrived a wreck, and had to lie down. The moon rose, one day past full, and we dined in the verandah, a good dinner on the whole; talk with Lafarge about art and the lovely dreams of art students. Remark by Adams, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are speaking of; and when you see the monstrous piles of sawdust which encumber the mill ports, the vast quantities of waste stuff they burn, and the huge rafts of timber which are towed down to the mills, as well as the ships which lie there to load for South America, Tahiti, Australia, and California, you will not longer wonder that they talk ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Canoe-men who could voyage to solitary little Easter Island in the wide void towards America, or to Cape York in the distant west, were not likely to find insuperable difficulties in running before the north-east winds to New Zealand from Rarotonga, Savaii or Tahiti. The discovery in the new land of the jade or greenstone—far above rubies in the eyes of men of the Stone Age—would at once give the country all the attractiveness that a ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... which would startle the Government officer. For Tahiti[11] (as we now call it) was many thousands of miles away in the heart of the South Pacific Ocean. Indeed it had only been discovered by Captain Cook twenty-eight years earlier in 1768. The Duff was a small sailing-ship such as one of our American ocean liners ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... of the corals is most interesting. Small as are these tiny workmen, each and every one does his bit and, speck by speck, adds his minute contribution to the growing mass of coral until entire islands are surrounded by extensive reefs. Tahiti, for example, is surrounded by a barrier reef which is really an immense wall. The large barrier reef on the northeast coast of Australia extends in a continuous line for 1,000 miles, and varies from 10 to 90 miles in breadth. Some reefs are mere fringes which simply skirt the coast ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... covered only the one transatlantic line from New York to Southampton, calling at Plymouth and Cherbourg; lines to the north coast of South America—to Venezuela; to Mexico; to Havana; to Jamaica; and on the Pacific, from San Francisco to Tahiti. ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... slept badly. For a fortnight on the boat that brought him from Tahiti to San Francisco he had been thinking of the story he had to tell, and for three days on the train he had repeated to himself the words in which he meant to tell it. But in a few hours now he would be in Chicago, and doubts assailed him. His conscience, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... came out, the owners of the Maid of Judah wouldn't have anything to do with me after spoiling the beauty of their curly-headed pet skipper, and so I was stranded for a bit. But I soon got a berth as mate on a brig called the Tawera, trading between Tahiti, Valparaiso, and Sydney. Used to write to the girl (whose mother had died meantime) and was putting by money. Then ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... Tiare Tahiti Retrospect The Great Lover Heaven Doubts There's Wisdom in Women He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence) One Day Waikiki Hauntings Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... work in Tahiti, in the South Sea Islands, who is said to be a whole Bible society in himself, expending twenty dollars a month out of a salary of twenty-five dollars, for Bibles to distribute ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can be definitely identified with the war. The last six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence in Cambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were devoted—for we must not say wasted—to breaking up the cliche of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... occur, and then only to the advantage of government. There are varieties in honor, as in any other human interest: so are there many moral degrees in warfare. Thus, the very individual who admires the occupation of Algiers, or that of Tahiti, or the attack on Canton, together with the long train of Indian events which have dyed the peninsulas of the East in the blood of their people, sees an alarming enormity in the knocking down of the ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the native peoples of Oceania, the Polynesians are perhaps the most interesting. In physical appearance they are tall, well-formed, dark of complexion, and black-haired. In the northern island groups—Tonga, Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and others—which are colonized by European and American peoples, the natives have gradually acquired western civilization. The number of natives has decreased, however, and only about one-third of the population of fifty ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... of the Equator, and midway between the Hawaiian Islands and fair, green Tahiti, is the largest and most important of the many equatorial isolated lagoon islands which, from 10 deg. N. to 10 deg. S., are dispersed over 40 deg. of longitude. The original native name of this island has long been lost, and by that given to it by Captain Cook one hundred and twenty ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... and asked Bill what he would advise me to do. Looking round the deck to make sure that we were not overheard, he lowered his voice and said, "There are two or three ways that we might escape, Ralph, but none o' them's easy. If the captain would only sail for some o' the islands near Tahiti, we might run away there well enough, because the natives are all Christians; an' we find that wherever the savages take up with Christianity they always give over their bloody ways, and are safe to be trusted. I never cared for Christianity myself," ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... and the children are. Plant we, then, here at Paea, a garden of excellent fruits; Plant we bananas and kava and taro, the king of roots; Let the pigs in Paea be tapu {1l} and no man fish for a year; And of all the meat in Tahiti gather we threefold here. So shall the fame of our plenty fill the island, and so, At last, on the tongue of rumour, go where we wish it to go. Then shall the pigs of Taiarapu raise their snouts in the air; But we sit quiet and wait, as the fowler sits by the snare, And ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... far from the ring of corals resting on a corresponding ridge of rocks, the lagoons, on the contrary, now occupy the place which was once the highest land. He pointed out that some lagoons, as for instance that of Vanikoro, contain an island in the middle; while other islands, such as Tahiti, are surrounded by a margin of smooth water separated from the ocean by a coral reef. Now if we suppose that Tahiti were to sink slowly it would gradually approximate to the condition of Vanikoro; and if Vanikoro gradually sank, the central island would disappear, while ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... doesn't want to eat of the Lotus just once in his life has become too civilised: the iron of the Gradgrind era of universal competition and payment by results has entered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a course of Egypt and Tahiti. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... heartily. But while he laughed he secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built a house in his life, and his notions concerning house building were hazy. While he laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for materials, of the materials themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of landing the materials and of building the house. It would come to four thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safety—four thousand French dollars were equivalent ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Byron himself hardly sailed beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy, and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... from the Sandwich Islands, where I have been living; I spent a few years, too, in New Zealand and Tahiti, and so have seen many wonderful things on the land and sea; but a Lord Mayor going to be sworn in to his duties, attended by thirteen elephants and a London crowd, would be a novelty to me. I thought, too, that certain little boys and girls in the Sandwich Islands and the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... of 1816-17. The following year, wearying of the military profession, he sold his commission in the Sixtieth Rifles, and retired to private life, but subsequently went to Australia, in the capacity of superintendent of a convict station at Cathure; and in 1837, at the age of seventy-one, removed to Tahiti. From this point he made many voyages, to the East Indies, to China, and to different parts of South America. In 1842, in consequence of having taken sides with the Protestant missionaries against the Roman Catholic propaganda, he was forcibly removed from Tahiti to France, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... English rule. And if there are no openings there we'll go on to the Bismarck Archipelago. I'll wager the Admiraltys are not yet civilized.' All preparations were made, things packed on board, and a new crew of Marquesans and Tahitians shipped. We were just ready to start to Tahiti, where a lot of repairs and refitting for the Miele were necessary, when poor Dad came down ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... Grass now, even if the means had been to hand. The Gambiers, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas were swallowed up. Tahiti, dwellingplace of beautiful if syphilitic women, disappeared under a green blanket, as did the Cook Islands, Samoa and the Fijis. The Grass jumped southward to a foothold in New Zealand and northward into Micronesia. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... deck to make sure that we were not overheard, he lowered his voice and said, "There are two or three ways that we might escape, Ralph, but none o' them's easy. If the captain would only sail for some o' the islands near Tahiti we might run away there well enough, because the natives are all Christians; an' we find that wherever the savages take up with Christianity they always give over their bloody ways, and are safe to be trusted. I never cared for ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the large canes are sold 'as a fruit' he means that the canes are used for eating, or rather sucking like a sugar-stick. The varieties of sugar-cane are numerous, and the names vary much in different districts. According to Balfour, the Otaheite (Tahiti) cane is 'probably Saccharum violaceum'. The ordinary Indian kinds belong to the species Saccharum officinarum. The Otaheite cane was introduced into the West Indies about 1794, and came to India from the Mauritius. It is more ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... native teachers from Tahiti, in the early stage of the mission, when such stones were given up to them, had them taken off to the beach and broken into fragments, and so stamp out at once the heathenism with which they were associated. Hardly a single relic of the kind can be ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... possibly sixty-seven, thousand dollars between you and your associates. If you fail, and you are perilously like to fail, you will be sure to have a man or two of your companions shot, maybe yourself obliged to pistol certain people, and in the end fetch up at Tahiti, prisoner in a ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... be in a dangerous condition which would infect any person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into quarantine until, with the recovery of their health and strength, the imaginary danger has passed away. Thus, in Tahiti a woman after childbirth was secluded for a fortnight or three weeks in a temporary hut erected on sacred ground; during the time of her seclusion she was debarred from touching provisions, and had to be fed by another. Further, if any one else touched the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... threshold once had been, I saw, through the open door-way, a lonely girl, sewing at a lonely window. A pale-cheeked girl, and fly-specked window, with wasps about the mended upper panes. I spoke. She shyly started, like some Tahiti girl, secreted for a sacrifice, first catching sight, through palms, of Captain Cook. Recovering, she bade me enter; with her apron brushed off a stool; then silently resumed her own. With thanks I took the stool; but now, for a space, I, too, was mute. This, then, is the fairy-mountain ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... greeted one another had they met on this remote point of the Pacific coast, the one coming overland (so to speak) from Quebec and the Atlantic, and the other all the way by sea from Falmouth via the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii.] ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... barrels of flour and pine boards to Rio and back with coffee and hides for Salem," he continued; "then out to Gibraltar and Brazil with wine and on in ballast for Calcutta. Tahiti and Morea, the Sandwich Islands and the Feejees. Sandalwood and tortoise shell and beche de mer; sea horses' teeth, and saltpeter for the Chinese Government. I don't want to hear about your bills of exchange and kegs of Spanish dollars and solid cargoes of tea run ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... adventurous traveller, having resolved on putting a girdle round about the world, took her passage for China in the Dutch barque Lootpuit, Captain Van Wyk Jurianse. On the 26th of April, her eyes were gladdened with a view of the "island-Eden" of the Southern seas, Tahiti, the largest and most beautiful of the Society group. From the days of Bougainville, its discoverer, down to those of "the Earl and the Doctor," who recently visited it, Tahiti has moved the admiration of voyagers by the charms of its scenery. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... and our Basque mountaineers were not less foreign to the Parisian drawing-room than was Aziyade or the little Rahahu. One claimed to have a knowledge of Brittany, or of the Pyrenees, because one had visited Dinard or Biarritz; while in reality neither Tahiti nor the Isle of Paques could have remained ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... well as his imperious temper and contracted views, to the service of the Tories. One other man held a prominent place in Peel's Cabinet, and proved a tower of strength in it—Lord Aberdeen, who was Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and who did much to maintain the peace of Europe when the Tahiti incident and the Spanish marriages threatened embroilment. Lord Aberdeen, from 1841 to 1846, guided the foreign policy of England with ability and discretion, and, as a matter of fact, steered the nation through diplomatic quarrels which, if Lord Palmerston ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... property, the risk they ran of losing their lives, and the seeming hopelessness of introducing Christianity among such a people. After an absence of between two and three years, several of them, having wished to make a fresh attempt to carry out the work, sailed from Sydney for Tahiti, but stopped at the neighbouring island of Kimeo, where the king was residing, as Tahiti was still in a state of rebellion. They taught the people as before, and now some began to listen to them gladly. They still seemed to have considered the king ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... Provence, at Martinique, in the Marquesas and Tahiti. He had parted with the Impressionists and sought for a new aesthetik of art; to achieve this he broke away not only from tradition, even the tradition of the Impressionists, but from Europe and its civilisation. To this half-savage temperament devoured by the nostalgia of the tropics ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... during the same period. The voyages which supplied the occasion and the material for the work were three in number, viz. one of seven months (June 1888 to January 1889) in the yacht 'Casco' from San Francisco to the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti, and thence northward to Hawaii; a second (June to December 1889) in the trading schooner 'Equator,' from Honolulu, the Hawaiian capital, where the author had stayed in the intervening five months, to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regarded in the same way, as we see in the Bible where Saul's melancholy is said to be an evil spirit sent from God. A furious madman was supposed to have been carried off by a demon, and in Persia the insane were said to be God's fools. In Tahiti they were called Eatooa, that is, possessed by a divine spirit; and in the Sandwich Isles they were worshipped as men into whom a divinity had entered. In German the plica polonica is called Alpzopf, or hobgoblin's tail. All nations ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli |
