Word: polynesian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Benign Paternalism. Long ago the seeds were planted. Once, Hawaii was an island paradise of flowers and trees, of tawny Polynesian women and warrior chiefs, jungle fastnesses and snow-capped mountains. In 1778 Captain Cook discovered the islands, and was followed by lusty traders and, in the 18203, by the New England missionaries with their modest Mother Hubbards and their Protestant churches and teachers...
...Better to Advance." Lying 250 miles east of the African mainland, larger than France and Belgium combined, Madagascar had a highly developed form of law and government before the Europeans ever got a foothold there. Its people are not African, being predominantly of Malayo-Polynesian stock. Nor are its plants and animal life. Madagascar is the home of the wide-eyed lemur, of some 800 known varieties of butterflies, nearly 300 kinds of birds, half of which are found nowhere else. It is also the home of the once proud Merina tribe, which conquered the island...
Down the Garonne. As soon as they were out of the hospital, the two men built an outrigger canoe, sailed it from Honolulu to the French Riviera in 250 days. In France De Bisschop drifted down the Garonne River on a Polynesian raft and out into the Atlantic, where, off the Canary Islands, his unwieldy craft was rammed and sunk by a Spanish fishing boat...
...Heyerdahl's course, De Bisschop pushed off from Tahiti on a similar raft, traveled 5,000 miles, only to have the raft break up under him in a tremendous gale 840 miles from the coast of Chile. Besides the adventure of it, De Bisschop hoped to prove that Polynesian seafarers had colonized all the Pacific from Indonesia to South America. Last April he left Peru aboard a new raft bound for Tahiti, but wind, wave and current carried him far north until last week he and his crew faced the reef at Rakahanga...
Salted Caves. Norway's Heyerdahl got on famously with the native leaders, who claimed descent from the last surviving "long-eared" statue builder-the rest had been slaughtered, they said, by "short-eared" Polynesian invaders centuries ago. Easter Island's Mayor Pedro Atan demonstrated how the statues might have been raised on their platforms by having a crew of eleven men gradually pry up a fallen idol with poles, and then insert rocks under it until it could be lifted to its feet. It took 18 days. Convinced that the mayor possessed a secret handed down through...