New Caledonia Quotes

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In the Pacific Ocean, the main wave of extinction began in about 1500 BC, when Polynesian farmers settled the Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia. They killed
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
When I set out to write a book about beetles and New Caledonia, I knew nothing about either of them. While this might have put some people off, it felt (to me) a very good place to begin.
Rachel Joyce (Miss Benson's Beetle)
Among the swirling daffodils the old labrador lay out in the teeth of the gale. Her head was raised, her ears were pricked; alertly she snuffed the air; she watched the world turn, the new season approach. Looking at her Janet thought in sharp sorrow, “I will never see this again,” for now the labrador could scarcely walk; her hind legs were emaciated and she had to be helped in and out and up and down the stairs. Yet she was crouched there, unafraid, welcoming with dignity of whatever was to come, among the reckless, gaudy flowers whose time was even briefer. “Fair daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon.” Fair labrador. Sometimes Janet thought that life’s sole purpose was to teach one how to die. As in most spheres, so in this, animals did better than people
Elspeth Barker (O Caledonia)
In the 1990s, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the next—a feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.
Jennifer Ackerman (The Genius of Birds)
These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas. One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly: "The earth does not want new continents, but new men.
Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)
But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
No sooner did the plan let them off at New Caledonia, than Barby found another friend. He was a Kanaka taxi driver, over six feet tall and muscled like a blacksmith, with sooty skin and hair turned yellow from many applications of lime, a standard native treatment for lice. He chewed betel incessantly, which Barby thought was fascinating, since it turned his tongue and lips the color of a ripe tomato. His name, he said in wonderfully bad English, was Henri. He pronounced it 'On-ree.
John Blaine (The Phantom Shark (Rick Brant Science-Adventure Stories, #6))
As they left the pier and walked into the park, Chahda looked around appreciatively. "Nice place, this. Capital of New Caledonia. Big island, has 8,548 square mile, also has 53,245 peoples. Eleven thousand in Noumea. That is what says the Worrold Alm-in-ack." Rick and Scotty laughed. It was like old times to hear Chahda quoting from The World Almanac. A Bombay beggar boy, he had educated himself with only the Almanac for his textbook, and he had laboriously memorized everything in it.
John Blaine (The Phantom Shark (Rick Brant Science-Adventure Stories, #6))
Until as recently as 1994, the Crested Gecko had not been seen in New Caledonia since 1967 and was believed to have become extinct.
Robbie Hamper (Crested Geckos in Captivity)
One index of this complexity was actually recognized by both Forster and d’Urville, though neither of them understood it at the time. This was the extraordinary proliferation of languages in Melanesia. It had been the similarity of languages across the islands of Polynesia that had first led to the idea of a single Polynesian “nation,” but no such unity exists in the islands to the west. Even today on New Caledonia—an island roughly the size of New Jersey—between thirty and forty languages are spoken. One hundred and ten languages have been recorded in the islands of Vanuatu. And in New Guinea, which is famous for being the most linguistically diverse place on earth, there are more than 950 languages belonging to a still unknown number of language families. To a linguist, what such extreme diversity indicates is depth of time. Languages are always changing—splitting and morphing and turning into new languages—and the more time they have in which to do this, the more languages there are. Consider the changes that have occurred in English just since Chaucer’s day, and then imagine what might happen if this process were to continue for, say, forty thousand years.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Incredible maybe, but also, as it happens, true. Banks had stumbled upon one of the most remarkable facts about the peopling of the Pacific, which is that all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Philippines, as well as almost all the languages of Indonesia and the Solomon Islands and some of the languages of Malaysia, New Guinea, Madagascar, and Taiwan, belong to a single language family known as Austronesian. Today there are believed to be more than a thousand languages in the Austronesian family, with more than three hundred million speakers worldwide, making it one of the largest language families on the planet.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Humans will eat whatever they find and will do whatever it takes to make their environment more habitable; the biologist Tim Flannery famously describes the species—our species—as “Future Eaters.” It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that the Lapita peoples ate not only the birds but the turtles, lizards, mollusks, fish, and even the large land crocodile of New Caledonia, thereby irrevocably altering every one of the environments they encountered. One can look at these facts from one of two points of view.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Nestled in the tropics of the Coral Sea, New Caledonia was a French territory and where Julie and Marc had just sold the sailboat that took them 15,000 miles around the world. Of course, recouping their initial investment had been part of the plan. All said and done, their 15-month exploration of the globe, from the gondola-rich waterways of Venice to the tribal shores of Polynesia, had cost between $18,000 and $19,000. Less than rent and baguettes in Paris.
Timothy Ferriss (The 4 Hour Workweek, Expanded And Updated: Expanded And Updated, With Over 100 New Pages Of Cutting Edge Content)
No matter. What was done was done, and it could not be undone. A new approach was needed.
Peter Wacht (The Protector's Victory (The Tales of Caledonia #7))
A restatement of the primary evidence may therefore be helpful in understanding what the experience of having the Roman Empire on the doorstep may have meant for the early Caledonians. Firstly, no matter how it is framed, this was no mere interlude in Scottish history. The Roman Iron Age in Scotland spanned over 300 years of many recorded episodes of interaction, mostly violent, with one of the world's most powerful and expansionist empires. A third of a millenium that saw the presence of one of the highest concentrations of Roman military personnel - it has been estimated that at the height of occupation, at least one in eight Roman soldiers was serving in North Britain. The building of two great walls, the larger of which was maintained for a 300-year period and both with offensive and defensive characteristics of a magnitude not shared by any other Roman fronteir of its size. Unlike other zones of interaction, there is little evidence of regular trade and no manifestation of any meaningful civic development.
John H. Reid (The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland)
When first contacted by Europeans, the peoples of New Guinea, northern Australia, and most of the islands of Melanesia such as the Solomon Islands, the New He­ brides, and New Caledonia practiced some degree of warfare cannibalism.
Marvin Harris (Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture)