[15] Powers, op. cit. p. 112.
[16] Bartram, ‘Creek and Cherokee Indians,’ in Trans. American Ethn. Soc. iii. pt. i. 42.
[17] Hilhouse, in Jour. Roy. Geo. Soc. ii. 230. Idem, Indian Notices, p. 14. Cf. von Martins, Beiträge zur Ethnographie Amerika’s, i. 692.
[18] Smeaton, Loyal Karens of Burma, p. 144 sq.
[19] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 73 sqq.
[20] Palgrave, Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, i. 345.
[21] Institutes of Vishnu, lxvii. 31. For other instances of the precedence granted to guests, see Man, in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xii. 94, 148 (Andaman Islanders); Buchanan, North American Indians, p. 324 (Indians of Pennsylvania); Lyon, Private Journal, p. 350 (Eskimo of Igloolik); Seemann, Voyage of “Herald,” ii. 65 (Western Eskimo); Krasheninnikoff, op. cit. p. 211 (Kamchadales), Georgi, op. cit. iii. 153 sq. (Kamchadales), 183 sq. (Chukchi). Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, i. 86 (Sea Dyaks); Mariner, op. cit. ii. 154 (Tonga Islanders); New, op. cit. p. 102 (Wanika); Hanoteau and Letourneux, op. cit. ii. 45 (Kabyles); Wells Williams, op. cit. i. 540 (Chinese): Krauss, op. cit. p. 649 sq. (Southern Slavs).
Custom may require that hospitality should be shown even to an enemy. Captain Holm tells us of a Greenlander of bad character who, though he had murdered his step-father, was received, and for a long time entertained, when he paid a visit to the nearest kindred of the murdered man; and this, as it seems, was agreeable to old custom.[22] Among the Aeneze Bedouins, says Burckhardt, all means are reckoned lawful to avenge the blood of a slain relative, “provided the homicide be not killed while he is a guest in the tent of a third person, or if he has taken refuge even in the tent of his deadly foe.”[23] In Afghanistan “a man’s bitterest enemy is safe while he is under his roof.”[24] We read in the Hitopadesa:—“On even an enemy arrived at the house becoming hospitality should be bestowed; the tree does not withdraw its sheltering shadow from the wood-cutter…. The guest is everyone’s superior.”[25] The old Norsemen considered it a duty to treat a guest hospitably even though it came out that he had killed the brother of his host.[26] A mediæval knight granted safe conduct through his territories to all who required it, including those who asserted pretensions which, if established, would deprive him of his possessions.[27]
[22] Nansen, First Crossing of Greenland, ii. 305 sq.
[23] Burckhardt, Bedouins and Wahábys, p. 87. Cf. Daumas, La vie Arabe, p. 317 (Algerian Arabs).