Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Lying Bill and McHenry sailed on their schooner for the Paumotu and the Marquesas islands, Landers left for Auckland, and Count Polonsky for a flying visit to America.
So we name the islands, but the dark-skinned natives who by some mysterious fortune have been banished to them call them Paumotu, or "Island Cloud." A poet could not have conceived a better name. There lie eighty-five groups of islands, each consisting of innumerable holms.
And the voyage the wild feverish desire to make a record passage to 'Frisco and back; the earnest words of poor old white-headed Lutton, the mate, "not to carry on so at night going through the Paumotu Group"; that awful midnight crash when the DORIS ran hopelessly into the wild boil of roaring surf on Tuanake Reef; the white, despairing faces of five of his men, who, with curses in their eyes upon his folly, were swept out of sight into the awful blackness of the night.
Soon after the slavers had gone from the South Seas a story was current in Eastern Polynesia that Bully had landed armed boats' crews at Aana, in the Paumotu Archipelago, and seized a number of girls whom he sold to Chilian and Peruvian buyers.
Tahiti is not so subject to disastrous storms as are the Paumotu Islands and the waters toward China and Japan, yet every decade or two a tidal-wave sweeps the lowlands and does great injury. Though this occurs but seldom, when the barometer falls low, the hearts of the owners of property and of the people who have experienced a disaster of this kind sink.
A South Seaman, named the Stirling Castle, touched here for provisions, and introduced small-pox, and every one of my poor children contracted the disease and died; many hundreds of the natives perished as well. My husband at this time was away in one of his vessels at Fakarava Lagoon in the Paumotu Group, and I spent a very lonely and unhappy seven months before he returned.
The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be the better for a beating.
But at the time the two Peruvians were cruising through the Ellices, Bully was exploiting the Paumotu Archipelago, and arousing the anger of the French authorities, by his irregular business methods. For instance, he would "buy" pearl-shell from the traders and kick them over the side if they had the audacity to ask for payment.
Some went forth to the Paumotu Group, or Low Archipelago, to the east; others to the Austral Isles, to the south; and others, among whom was Papehia, accompanied Mr Williams on a voyage to the Hervey group. His first visit was to Aitutaki, where some native teachers were left, by whose means the natives became Christians.
Tom walked home with me, still talking, for we had now bought a ninety-ton schooner with my legacy, me captain and him supercargo, and we had taken out French naturalization papers so we might be free of the Paumotu and Tubuai groups.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking