Our discomfiture is best covered by attention to business. Two more cases of larceny are heard and disposed of, and now two ancient dames, clad in borrowed plumes, consisting of calico petticoat and pinafore, are led before the table. Grey-headed and toothless, dim as to sight and shapeless as to features, they look singularly out of place in a court of law. Time was (and not so very long ago) when women so decrepit as these would have had to make way for a more vigorous generation by the simple and expeditious means of being buried alive, but now they no longer fear the consequences of their eccentricities. One of these old women is the prosecutrix, and the charge is assault. We ask which is the prosecutrix, and immediately one holds out and brandishes a hand from which one of the fingers has been almost severed by a bite. She has altogether the most lugubrious expression that features such as hers can assume, but with the bitten finger now permanently hung out like a signboard, words of complaint are superfluous. The other has a truculent and forbidding expression. She snaps out her answers as if she had bitten off the ends like the prosecutrix’ finger, and shuts her mouth like a steel trap. The quarrel which led to their appearance in court might have taken place in Seven Dials. Defendant said something disparaging about prosecutrix’ daughter. Prosecutrix retaliated by damaging references to defendant’s son, and left the house hurriedly to enjoy the luxury of having had last word. Defendant followed and searched the village for her, with the avowed intention of skinning her alive. They met at last, and having each called the other “a-roasted-corpse-fit-for-the-oven,” they fell to with the result to the prosecutrix’ finger already described. The mountain dialect used in evidence is almost unintelligible to us, so that our admonition, couched in the Bauan, has to be translated (with additions) by our native colleague. But our eloquence was all wasted. Defendant utterly declines to express contrition. Our last resource must be employed, and we inform her that if she does not complete the task imposed on her as a fine she will be sent to Suva jail, there to be confined with the Indian women. This awful threat has its effect; and the dread powers of our court having thus been vindicated, the crier proclaims its adjournment for three months. The spectators troop out to spend the rest of the day in gossiping about the delinquents and their cases. The men who have been sentenced are already at work weeding round the court-house, subjects for the breathless interest and pity of the bevy of girls who have just emerged from court and are exchanging whispered comments upon the alteration in a good-looking man when his hair is cut off. None are left in the court-house but ourselves, the chiefs, and the older men. The table is removed, and the room cleared of the paraphernalia of civilisation. Enter two men bearing a large carved wooden bowl, a bucket of water, and a root of yangona, which is presented to us ceremoniously, and handed back to some young men at the bottom of the room to chew. Meanwhile conversation becomes general, witchcraft is discussed in all its branches, and compassion is expressed for the poor sceptical white man; sulukas (cigarettes rolled in banana leaves) are lighted; the chewed masses of yangona root are thrown into the bowl, mixed with water, kneaded, strained, and handed to each person according to his rank to drink; tongues are loosened, and it is time to draw the meeting to a close. The sun is fast dipping into the western sea when the last of our guests leave us, and we have a long moonlight ride before us. There is but just time to pack up our traps and have a hasty meal before we are left in darkness, but the moon will rise in an hour, so we may start in safety in pursuit of the train of police and convicts who are carrying the baggage.
THE LAST OF THE CANNIBAL CHIEFS.
When Swift wrote his “Modest Proposal,” and argued with logical seriousness that the want and over-population in Ireland should be remedied by the simple expedient of eating babies, the satire was not likely to be lost upon a people who regarded cannibalism with such horror and loathing as do the European nations. The horror must of course be instinctive, because we find it existing in the lowest grades of society; but the instinct is confined to civilised man. The word cannibal is associated in our minds with scenes of the most debased savagery that the imagination can picture; of men in habits and appearance a little lower than the brute; of orgies the result of the most degrading religious superstition. It is not until one has lived on terms of friendship with cannibals that one realises that the practice is not incompatible with an intelligence and moral qualities which command respect. And after all, if one can for a moment lay aside the instinctive horror which the idea calls up, and dispassionately consider the nature of cannibalism, our repugnance to it seems less logically grounded. It is true that it must generally entail murder, but that is certainly not the reason for our loathing of it. It is something deeper than this; and the distinction we draw between the flesh of men and of animals is at first sight a little curious. One can imagine the inhabitants of another planet, whose physical necessities did not force them to eat flesh,—to take life in order to live,—regarding us with much the same kind of abhorrence with which we look on cannibals. Most of our natural instincts are based upon natural laws, which, when broken, are sure to visit the breaker with their penalties. The eating of unripe fruit, of putrid meat, or poisonous matter, are some of these. But no penalty in the shape of disease seems to be attached to cannibalism.
What, then, are the motives that lead men, apart from the pressure of famine, to practise cannibalism? Among certain African tribes, and lately in Hayti, it has been the outcome of a debased religious superstition, or that extraordinary instinct common to all races which leads men to connect the highest religious enthusiasm with the most horrible orgies that their diseased imagination can conceive. The feeling that leads members of sects to bind themselves together by the celebration of some unspeakable rite perhaps led to the accusations laid against the Christians of the second century and the Hungarian Jews of the nineteenth. But in the South Seas, although the motive has been falsely attributed to a craving for animal food, it was generally the last act of triumph over a fallen enemy. Thus Homer makes Achilles, triumphing over the dying Hector, wish he could make mince-meat of his body and devour it. Triumph could go no further than to slay and then to assimilate the body of your foe; and the belief that, by thus making him a part of you, you acquired his courage in battle, is said to have led a chief of old Fiji to actually consume himself the entire body of the man he had killed, by daily roasting what remained of it to prevent decomposition.
This is not a very promising introduction to a paper intended to show that some cannibals at least may be very respectable members of society. But it must be clearly understood that the eccentricity which seems so revolting to us is not incompatible with a strong sense of duty, great kindness of heart, and warm domestic affection.
Out of the many cannibals and ex-cannibals I have known, I will choose the most striking figure as the subject of this sketch. I first met the Buli of Nandrau in the autumn of 1886, when I took over the Resident Commissionership of part of the mountain district of Fiji. His history had been an eventful one, and while he had displayed those qualities that would most win the admiration of Fijians, to us he could not be otherwise than a remarkable character. Far away, in the wild and rugged country in which the great rivers Rewa and Singatoka take their rise, he was born to be chief of a fierce and aggressive tribe of mountaineers. Constantly engaged in petty intertribal wars, while still a young man he had led them from victory to victory, until they had fought their way into perhaps the most picturesque valley in all picturesque Fiji. Here, perched above the rushing Singatoka, and overshadowed by two tremendous precipices which allowed the sun to shine upon them for barely three hours a-day, they built their village, and here they became a name and a terror to all the surrounding tribes. A few miles lower down the river stood the almost impregnable rock-fortress of the Vatusila tribe, and these became the stanch allies of Nandrau. Together they broke up the powerful Noikoro, exacted tribute from them, and made the river theirs as far as Korolevu; together they blotted out the Naloto, who held the passes to the northern coast, killing in one day more than four hundred of them, and driving the remnant as outcasts into the plain. Long after the white men had made their influence felt throughout Fiji,—long after the chief of Bau was courted as King of Fiji,—these two tribes, secure in their mountain fastnesses, lived their own life, and none, whether Fijian or white man, dared pass over their borders.
But their time was come. The despised white man, whom they had first known in the humble guise of a shipwrecked sailor or an escaped convict, was soon to overrun the whole Pacific, and before him the most dreaded of the Fijian gods and chiefs, the most honoured of their traditions, were to pass away and be forgotten.
In the year 1867 a Wesleyan missionary named Baker, against the advice of all the most experienced of the European settlers and the native chiefs, announced his intention of exploring the mountain districts alone. He said that he would take the Bible through Vitilevu. What good to the missionary cause he hoped for from his hazardous journey it is difficult to imagine. The harm that would certainly result to his fellow-missionaries if he were killed, and the loss of life that must ensue, must have been apparent to him and to every one else. But in spite of every warning, he persisted in his foolhardy enterprise, and he paid for it with his life and with the lives of several hundred others. He ascended the river Rewa with a small party of native teachers, but when he passed into the mountain district a whale’s tooth followed him: for the power of the whale’s tooth is this—that he who accepts it cannot refuse the request it carries with it, whether it be for a mere gift, or for an alliance, or for a human life. So he went on, while tribe after tribe refused to accept the fatal piece of ivory; but none the less surely did it follow him. At length one night, while he slept in a village of the Vatusila, the whale’s tooth passed on before him to the rock fortress of Nambutautau, and their chief, Nawawambalavu, took it. When, next morning, Baker resumed his march, this chief met him in the road, and together they crossed the Singatoka river. As they climbed the steep cliff which leads to Nambutautau, it is recorded in a popular song of that time that the chief warned him ironically of his impending fate. “We want none of your Christianity, Mr Baker. I think that to-day you and I shall be clubbed.” Suddenly, at a spot where the path lies between high reeds, on the edge of a precipice, an attack was made upon them, and they were all struck down except two native teachers who crawled into the thickest of the reeds and made their way, the one to Rewa and the other to Bau, hiding during the day-time and travelling under cover of the darkness. Baker’s body was flung over the precipice, and the great wooden drum boomed out its death-beat to the villages far down the valley. That night the stone-ovens were heated for their work, and the feast was portioned out to the various allies. But the most honourable portion—the head—was sent to Nandrau, the subject of my sketch. At first he refused it, disapproving of the murder, which his foresight warned him would bring trouble upon them. But as his refusal threatened to sever the alliance, he afterwards accepted it. It is recorded that the feet, from which the long boots had not been removed, were sent to Mongondro, whose chief, a melancholy, gentle-mannered old man, was much disappointed at finding the skin of white men so tough.