The cult of the frigate-bird is characteristic of Melanesia, and apparently also extends to the Pelew Islands. Dr. Codrington (The Melanesians, 1891, p. 145) informs us that at Florida in the Solomon Group they pray as follows to “Daula, a tindalo generally known and connected with the frigate-bird tindalo is the ghost or spirit of a man endowed with mana, that is superhuman power or influence]: ‘Do thou draw the canoe, that it may reach the land; speed my canoe, grandfather, that I may quickly reach the shore whither I am bound,’ etc. Daula is invoked to aid in fishing ... after a good catch he is praised.” On p. 180 we read, “The sacred character of the frigate-bird is certain; the figure of it, however conventional, is the most common ornament employed in the Solomon Islands, and is even cut upon the hands of the Bugotu people; the oath by its name of daula is solemn and binding in Florida; where Daula is a tindalo, many and powerful to aid at sea are the ghosts which abide in these birds.” Who Daula was, when he was a living man, has “passed far away from any historical remembrance” (p. 126).
In his interesting little book on The Evolution of Decorative Art, Mr. H. Balfour gives illustrations of conventional representations of the frigate-bird in the Solomon Islands (Figs. 11, 26). In Figs. 26, 27, 25, he shows a gradation between a “bird-like canoe charm,” through a “human-headed bird canoe-charm,” to a “canoe fetich,” the latter having a very prognathous human head.[159] The mergence of a frigate-bird’s into a human head may be due, as Mr. Balfour suggests, to one design acting upon the other, or it may be the artistic expression of the cult described by Dr. Codrington.
The canoes of the Solomon Islands often have as a figure-head the carved representation of the upper part of a man who holds in his hands another human head.[160] The human figure is possibly an image of the tindalo in Daula. (Dr. Codrington states that a tindalo is always the spirit of a real deceased man.[160]) The carvings of birds on the bow of a canoe are practically invocations to the sacred and powerful frigate-bird.
The face or head carried in the hands of the human figure-heads (“canoe god,” “charm,” or “fetich”) “represents that taken when the canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for its inauguration.” Dr. Codrington (loc. cit., p. 296) alludes to other adjuncts to the bow of canoes which give protection and success.
3. Religion.
The opening remarks in the section dealing with sympathetic magic were largely borrowed from Dr. Frazer, and I again have recourse to that author for the following sketch of the incipient religion of primitive folk.
The savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged.
The conception of gods as supernatural beings entirely distinct from and superior to man, and wielding powers to which he possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history.