White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

Reasoning from our standpoint, it is easy to assume that cannibalism is a form of depravity practised by few peoples, but this error is dispelled by the researches of ethnologists, who inform us that it was one of the most ancient customs of man and began when he was close brother to the ape. Livingstone, when he came upon it on the Dark continent, concluded that the negroes came to that horrible desire from their liking for the meat of gorillas, which so nearly approach man in appearance. Herodatus, writing twenty-five hundred years ago, mentions the Massagetae who boiled the flesh of their old folks with that of cattle, both killed for the occasion. Cannibalism marked the life of all peoples in days of savagery.

Plutarch says that Cataline's associates gave proof of their loyalty to that agitator and to one another by sacrificing and eating a man. Achilles expressed his wish that he might devour Hector. The Kafirs ate their own children in the famine of 1857, and the Germans ate one another when starvation maddened them, long after Maryland and Massachusetts had become thriving settlements in the New World. There is a historic instance of a party of American pioneers lost in the mountains of California in the nineteenth century, who in their last extremity of hunger ate several of the party.

To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years. We have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the world.

Undoubtedly cannibalism began as a question of food supply. In early times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his easiest prey. The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family, or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food, such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen. I saw Marquesan women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of sheer instinct and stomachic need. When salt is not to be had, the desire for meat is most intense. In these valleys the upper tribes, whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish, were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none of the coast tribes are guilty.

As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew,—and it became a passion akin to the opium habit in some,—the supply of other meat had little to do with its continuance. In New Britain human bodies were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried on in these empty tenements of the human soul.

Although cannibalism originated in a bodily need, man soon gave it an emotional and spiritual meaning, as he has given them to all customs that have their root in his physical being. Two forms of cannibalism seem to have existed among the first historic peoples. One was concerned with the eating of relatives and intimates, for friendship's sake or to gain some good quality they possessed. Thus when babies died, the Chavante mothers, on the Uruguay, ate them to regain their souls. Russians ate their fathers, and the Irish, if Strabo is to be credited, thought it good to eat both deceased parents. The Lhopa of Sikkim, in Tibet, eat the bride's mother at the wedding feast.

But Maori cannibalism, with its best exposition in the Marquesas, was due to a desire for revenge, cooking and eating being the greatest of insults. It was an expression of jingoism, a hatred for all outside the tribe or valley, and it made the feud between valleys almost incessant.

It was in no way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and ways of each race, and here the eating of enemies was authorized by every teaching of priest and leader, by time-honored custom and the strongest dictates of nature.

White men and Chinese, in fact, all foreigners, were seldom eaten here. There were exceptions when vengeance impelled, such at that of Honi or Jones, whom Haabunai's grandfather ate, but as a rule they were spared and indeed cherished, as strange visitors who might teach the people useful things. Only their own depravity brought them to the oven.