Unknown to the stupid Eskimos, and in general to all hyperborean races, anthropophagy rages with intensity among peoples comparatively civilized. The Ghonds of Hindostan, peaceful and laborious cultivators, are not exactly cannibals, but every year they immolate to their divinities a multitude of children, whom they flay and cut to pieces while alive, and whose flesh they distribute in fragments over the fields they are about to sow.
In Sumatra there exists a tribe, that of the Battas, which has not only a religion and a worship, but a kind of constitution, a literature, and a penal code. This code condemns certain classes of criminals to be eaten alive. After the sentence has been pronounced by the competent tribunal, two or three days are suffered to elapse in order to give the people time to assemble. On the appointed day the criminal is led to the place of execution, and bound to a stake. The offended party, or his nearest relation, if he has been murdered, advances and chooses the choicest morsel; the others follow in their turn, and with their own hands cut off such pieces as please their fancy. Finally, the unfortunate wretch is relieved from his sufferings by the chief, who strikes off his head. The flesh is eaten on the spot, raw or cooked, according to each man’s taste.
The natives of some of the Polynesian Islands consider that they render a service to their aged parents by slaying them, and that, by eating them, they provide the most honourable mode of sepulture. Others believe that a man, by devouring his enemy, infiltrates into his blood all the virtues with which the latter was endowed. A similar prejudice exists among certain tribes on the Amazon.
It is beyond doubt that, in a majority of cases, anthropophagy originates in scarcity of food, in the lack of cattle and game, while, in others, many cannibals are attracted by the delicious savour of human flesh, which they prefer to every other. Among the Cobens of the Uanpès, says Maury, man is considered as veritable game, and these savages declare war against the neighbouring tribes only with the object of procuring a supply of human flesh. When they have more than they require for present needs, they dry it, smoke it, and store it away as provision.
In the Viti Islands, whose natives are eulogized by Dumont-d’Urville as the most intelligent in Melanesia, great festivals are celebrated at different epochs of the year, which require a certain number of victims. Prisoners of war are the first to be immolated; then all those unfortunates who are without an asylum are hunted and collected; and if this inhuman chase should not be sufficiently productive, the purveyors eke out the supplies by adding some wretched women, who are eaten by their own relatives. Dumont-d’Urville speaks of a chief, named Tanoa, who, for a public banquet, caused thirty women to be slain, and their kin, far from murmuring or lamenting, took part in the hideous feast.
In Africa, Captain Burton saw, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a cannibal people, named the Vouabembés, who feed upon carrion, vermin, larvæ, and insects, and carry their sluggishness and brutality to such an extreme as to eat raw and putrid human flesh. Although you may see on every countenance, says this adventurous traveller,[181] the expression of chronic hunger, the poor wretches, timid, fuliginous, stunted, degraded, seem far more dangerous enemies to the dead than to the living.
Owing to the exertions of our missionaries, this horrible practice, against which our better nature instinctively rebels, is rapidly dying out in every region where their beneficial influence extends. In Polynesia and New Zealand, for instance, cannibalism is almost extinct. And if we owed no other service to the self-denying exertions of the soldiers of the Cross, this alone would entitle them to our gratitude, for the extermination of anthropophagy is the first step towards teaching man to reverence man.
