[32] “A Yachting Cruise in the South Seas:” London, 1875 (p. 133).
The tambu-house of the village of Sapuna in Santa Anna, which is shown in the accompanying [plate], is higher, broader, and more massive in structure than the other buildings which I have visited in the adjacent islands. As in other tambu-houses, the forms of the shark and of the human figure are given to parts of the posts; and in the hollow cavities of wooden representations of the shark on the sides of the interior of the building are enclosed the entire bodies of departed chiefs and the skulls of ordinary men. The carved central post, which is seen in the accompanying [engraving], affords a superior specimen of native workmanship. It was originally brought, as I was informed by one of the natives of Santa Anna, from Guadalcanar. The walls of this building are made more rain-proof by long slabs, measuring 36 by 6 by 2 inches, which are cut out from the dense matted growth of fibres and rootlets that invests the base of the bole of the cocoa-nut palm.
The principal tambu-house in the village of Ete-ete, on the west side of Ugi, is between 60 and 70 feet in length, from 25 to 30 feet broad, and 11 or 12 feet in height. Here also the sculptured posts represent the body of a shark with its head uppermost and supporting in the gape of its mouth the figure of a man, on whose head rests the ridge-pole of the roof. The front of the building is decorated with red and black bands, some straight, some wavy, and others of the chevron pattern. Mr. Brenchley in his account of the “Cruise of the ‘Curacoa’” gives a sketch of this tambu-house, which he visited in 1865 (p. 258). Forming the frontispiece of his work is a chromo-lithograph showing the two sides of an ornamental tie-beam from the roof of a “public hall” at Ugi, which he presented to the Maidstone Museum. It represents on one side sharks, bonitos, and sea-birds supposed to be frigate-birds, and on the other side four canoes with sharks attacking the crew of one of them, which is bottom upwards.
Tambu-House in the Island of Santa Anna.
(Preparations for a Feast.)
[To face page 70.
The deification of the shark appears to arise from the superstitious dread which this fish inspires. Its good-will may be obtained by leaving offerings of food on the rocks before undertaking a long journey in a canoe. The natives of the neighbouring island of Ulaua, or Ulawa, propitiate the shark with offerings of their own shell-money and of porpoise teeth, which they prize even more than money; and, if a sacred shark has attempted to seize a man who has been able to finally escape from its jaws, they are so much afraid that they will throw him back into the sea to be devoured.[33] We learn from Mr. Ellis[34] and from Messrs. Tyerman and Bennet,[35] that in the Society Islands sharks were deified, that temples were erected for their worship in which the fisherman propitiated the favour of the shark-god, and that almost every family had its particular shark as its tutelary deity to which it bowed and made oblations.
[33] “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” by the Rev. R. H. Codrington, M.A. “Journal of the Anthropological Institute.” Vol. x.