Chiefs of renown! loud echoing shrieks arise:
I turn, and view them quivering in the skies;
They call, and aid with outstretch’d arms implore:
In vain they call! those arms are stretched no more.
In the wide dungeon she devours her food,
And the flesh trembles while she churns the blood.”
It would appear that even the old cynic philosopher Diogenes was somewhat given, theoretically at least, to anthropophagy, for we read of him as saying that the flesh of man was good, and might as well be an article of food as the flesh of any of the lower animals. Whether this remarkable sage ever put his theory to the test is not known, for no such confession appears among his precepts or teachings.
Referring now to accounts far less legendary, it is safe to admit that beyond all successful dispute man’s earliest home was in Asia. History plainly points to this land as the cradle of the human family. In looking over this vast continent, among the earliest people who practiced cannibalism were the Chinese. Their mode of preparing a human body previous to eating the same was as repulsive as any of the peoples who never rose to the dignity of an organized government. Having previously boiled the parts designed to be consumed, especially the heart, they made soup of the same and partook of it with no little relish. This was called by them drinking the heart’s blood of the enemy, and favored perhaps as much of bravado as a desire to satisfy appetite.
In Shanghai, during the Taeping siege, Wilson describes an English merchant, who met his native servant carrying the heart of a rebel, and on enquiring the disposition which he proposed to make of it, replied “that he was taking it home to eat for the purpose of making him brave.”
The Battaks or Battas, a race of people at Batta, in the north of Sumatra, and an offshoot of the Malay stock, are cannibals. They are heathen, very superstitious, and in courage surpass all the other tribes of Sumatra. Anthropophagy, it is said, still exists among them; nor has the distant Dutch government on the west coast as yet succeeded in eradicating the great moral blemish ascribed to these natives. Marsden describes them as being so fond of their aged kinsfolk, that they seldom lose a chance to eat them.