Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so
surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so
harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it. And yet we
ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and
the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites,
passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed on babes, though not our
own; and the slaughter-house resounds daily with screams of pain and
fear. We distinguish, indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to
eat the dog, an animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy,
shows how precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main
element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions, my
mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his
character and the manner of his death. Many islanders live with their
pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal
freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and
sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the
sun to burst; he is the terror of the shepherd. Mrs. Stevenson, senior,
has seen one fleeing to the woods with a lamb in his mouth; and I saw
another come rapidly (and erroneously) to the conclusion that the _Casco_
was going down, and swim through the flush water to the rail in search of
an escape. It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have
known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return
to the house of his original owner. I was once, at Tautira, a pig-master
on a considerable scale; at first, in my pen, the utmost good feeling
prevailed; a little sow with a belly-ache came and appealed to us for
help in the manner of a child; and there was one shapely black boar, whom
we called Catholicus, for he was a particular present from the Catholics
of the village, and who early displayed the marks of courage and
friendliness; no other animal, whether dog or pig, was suffered to
approach him at his food, and for human beings he showed a full measure
of that toadying fondness so common in the lower animals, and possibly
their chief title to the name. One day, on visiting my piggery, I was
amazed to see Catholicus draw back from my approach with cries of terror;
and if I was amazed at the change, I was truly embarrassed when I learnt
its reason. One of the pigs had been that morning killed; Catholicus had
seen the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling in the shambles, and
from that time his confidence and his delight in life were ended. We
still reserved him a long while, but he could not endure the sight of any
two-legged creature, nor could we, under the circumstances, encounter his
eye without confusion. I have assisted besides, by the ear, at the act
of butchery itself; the victim’s cries of pain I think I could have
borne, but the execution was mismanaged, and his expression of terror was
contagious: that small heart moved to the same tune with ours. Upon such
‘dread foundations’ the life of the European reposes, and yet the
European is among the less cruel of races. The paraphernalia of murder,
the preparatory brutalities of his existence, are all hid away; an
extreme sensibility reigns upon the surface; and ladies will faint at the
recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers. Some
will be even crying out upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of
this paragraph. And so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel;
apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly
speaking, to cut a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than
to oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite
were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at last.
In island circles of refinement it was doubtless thought bad taste to
expatiate on what was ugly in the practice.
Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas
to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the lively haunt of
its exercise, there by scanty but significant survivals. Hawaii is the
most doubtful. We find cannibalism chronicled in Hawaii, only in the
history of a single war, where it seems to have been thought exception,
as in the case of mountain outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus.
In Tahiti, a single circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive.
In historic times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of
the victim were formally offered to the chief: a delicacy to the leading
guest. All Melanesia appears tainted. In Micronesia, in the Marshalls,
with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist, I could
find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone I long looked and
asked in vain. I was told tales indeed of men who had been eaten in a
famine; but these were nothing to my purpose, for the same thing is done
under the same stress by all kindreds and generations of men. At last,
in some manuscript notes of Dr. Turner’s, which I was allowed to consult
at Malua, I came on one damning evidence: on the island of Onoatoa the
punishment for theft was to be killed and eaten. How shall we account
for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people
of such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such
different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that they
lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I can
never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables
only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew to weary for the
recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable
mutton. And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes
that a man is ‘hungry for fish,’ having reached that stage when
vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews
in the desert, begins to lust after flesh-pots. Add to this the
evidences of over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I
think we see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.
It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far from
making the apology of this worse than bestial vice. The higher
Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one
and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice,
before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-sail in their waters. It
lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain,
and among inveterate savages like the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.
The Marquesans intertwined man-eating with the whole texture of their
lives; long-pig was in a sense their currency and sacrament; it formed
the hire of the artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion
and attraction of a feast. To-day they are paying the penalty of this
bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-eating,
has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures,
has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one
after another has placed them on the proscript list. Their art of
tattooing stood by itself, the execution exquisite, the designs most
beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man;
it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so
painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the
ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has
been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were
numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now
face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity
them? The least rigorous will say that they were justly served.
Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance: the flesh must be
eaten. The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him; and he
thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a vengeance.
Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized and slew a wretch
who had offended them. His offence, it is to be supposed, was dire; they
could not bear to leave their vengeance incomplete, and, under the eyes
of the French, they did not dare to hold a public festival. The body was
accordingly divided; and every man retired to his own house to consummate
the rite in secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a
Swedish match-box. The barbarous substance of the drama and the European
properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination. Yet
more striking is another incident of the very year when I was there
myself, 1888. In the spring, a man and woman skulked about the
school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child alone. Him
they approached with honeyed words and carneying manners—‘You are
So-and-so, son of So-and-so?’ they asked; and caressed and beguiled him
deeper in the woods. Some instinct woke in the child’s bosom, or some
look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers. He sought to break
from them; he screamed; and they, casting off the mask, seized him the
more strongly and began to run. His cries were heard; his schoolmates,
playing not far off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple
fled and vanished in the woods. They were never identified; no
prosecution followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge
against the boy’s father, and designed to eat him in revenge. All over
the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be observed that
the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an individual. A family,
a class, a village, a whole valley or island, a whole race of mankind,
share equally the guilt of any member. So, in the above story, the son
was to pay the penalty for his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an
American whaler, was to bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian
slaver. I am reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group,
which was told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the
strangeness of the scene. Two men had awakened the animosity of the
Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be punished.
A single native served as executioner. Early in the morning, in the face
of a large concourse of spectators, he waded out upon the reef between
his victims. These neither complained nor resisted; accompanied their
destroyer patiently; stooped down, when they had waded deep enough, at
his command; and he (laying one hand upon the shoulders of each) held
them under water till they drowned. Doubtless, although my informant did
not tell me so, their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.
It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high place.
The day was sultry and clouded. Drenching tropical showers succeeded
bursts of sweltering sunshine. The green pathway of the road wound
steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide a little ahead of
us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand, and named the trees for
me, and read aloud from his notes the abstract of their virtues.
Presently the road, mounting, showed us the vale of Hatiheu, on a larger
scale; and the priest, with occasional reference to our guide, pointed
out the boundaries and told me the names of the larger tribes that lived
at perpetual war in the old days: one on the north-east, one along the
beach, one behind upon the mountain. With a survivor of this latter clan
Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been to the
sea’s edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish. Each in its
own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered. One step without
the boundaries was to affront death. If famine came, the men must out to
the woods to gather chestnuts and small fruits; even as to this day, if
the parents are backward in their weekly doles, school must be broken up
and the scholars sent foraging. But in the old days, when there was
trouble in one clan, there would be activity in all its neighbours; the
woods would be laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables
for himself might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes. Nor was
the pointed occasion needful. A dozen different natural signs and social
junctures called this people to the war-path and the cannibal hunt. Let
one of chiefly rank have finished his tattooing, the wife of one be near
upon her time, two of the debauching streams have deviated nearer on the
beach of Hatiheu, a certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain
ominous formation of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly
the arms were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay
their fratricidal ambuscades. It appears besides that occasionally,
perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house, where he
lay for a stated period like a person dead. When he came forth it was to
run for three days through the territory of the clan, naked and starving,
and to sleep at night alone in the high place. It was now the turn of
the others to keep the house, for to encounter the priest upon his rounds
was death. On the eve of the fourth day the time of the running was
over; the priest returned to his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the
morning the number of the victims was announced. I have this tale of the
priest on one authority—I think a good one,—but I set it down with
diffidence. The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I
almost think I must have heard them oftener referred to. Upon one point
there seems to be no question: that the feast was sometimes furnished
from within the clan. In times of scarcity, all who were not protected
by their family connections—in the Highland expression, all the commons
of the clan—had cause to tremble. It was vain to resist, it was useless
to flee. They were begirt upon all hands by cannibals; and the oven was
ready to smoke for them abroad in the country of their foes, or at home
in the valley of their fathers.
At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his left
into the twilight of the forest. We were now on one of the ancient
native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and clambering, it seemed,
at random over boulders and dead trees; but the lad wound in and out and
up and down without a check, for these paths are to the natives as marked
as the king’s highway is to us; insomuch that, in the days of the
man-hunt, it was their labour rather to block and deface than to improve
them. In the crypt of the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold;
overhead, upon the leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but
only here and there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop
would fall, and make a spot upon my mackintosh. Presently the huge trunk
of a banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an
ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm, announced
that we had reached the _paepae tapu_.
_Paepae_ signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is built
on; and even such a paepae—a paepae hae—may be called a paepae tapu in a
lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the haunt of spirits; but
the public high place, such as I was now treading, was a thing on a great
scale. As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the
floor of the forest was all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the
slope of the hill; in front, a crumbling parapet contained the main
arena; and the pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with
several wells and small enclosures. No trace remained of any
superstructure, and the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to
seize. I visited another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it
was easy to follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of
honour for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single
joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights richly
carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously tended. No tree
except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no
dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set, and I
am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay
encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other foot
of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his
running, came there to sleep—perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but,
in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body,
and each had his appointed seat. There were places for the chiefs, the
drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The drums—perhaps
twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high—continuously throbbed in
time. In time the singers kept up their long-drawn, lugubrious,
ululating song; in time, too, the dancers, tricked out in singular
finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and gesticulated—their plumed fingers
fluttering in the air like butterflies. The sense of time, in all these
ocean races, is extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that
almost every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more
unanimously must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the
more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld
them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed
with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo;
the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost
European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men’s beards and
girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of island food
was meanwhile spread for the women and the commons; and, for those who
were privileged to eat of it, there were carried up to the dead-house the
baskets of long-pig. It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the
people came from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs
heavy with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we
call emphatically human—denying the honour of that name to those who lack
them. In such feasts—particularly where the victim has been slain at
home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they had
played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared—the whole
body of these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to
understand, if not to excuse, the fervours of self-righteous old
ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, on a
cannibal island.
And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under the high,
dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the one hand, in
his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan schoolboy on the other,
the whole business appeared infinitely distant, and fallen in the cold
perspective and dry light of history. The bearing of the priest,
perhaps, affected me. He smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of
these feasters and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave
of one of the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and
gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the
place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge.
In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still living and
latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within the bounds of
possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic
attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the
natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jocular attitude:
rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than
horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by
good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may
here recognise the temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.