LONG-PIG--A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE
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 carcases 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
exceptional, 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 topsail 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 debouching
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 had been slain at home, and men
banqueting on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they 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, these 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.