(1.) A FIJIAN FEAST.
(See [page 942].)
(2.) THE FATE OF THE BOASTER.
(See [page 952].)
Even the Christianized natives have to be watched carefully lest they should be tempted by old habits, and revert to the custom which they had promised to abjure. For example, Thakombau, the King of Mbau, became a Christian, or at least pretended to do so. He was not a particularly creditable convert. Some time after he had announced himself to be a Christian, he went in his war canoe to one of the districts under his sway. He was received with the horribly barbarous ceremonial by which a very great chief is honored, conch-shell trumpets blowing before him, and the people shouting their songs of welcome. Thus accompanied, he walked through a double row of living victims—men, women, and children of all ages—suspended by their feet, and placed there to give the king his choice. The hopeful convert was pleased to accept the offering, touching with his club as he passed along those victims which seemed most to his taste.
The natives are clever enough at concealing the existence of cannibalism when they find that it shocks the white men. An European cotton-grower, who had tried unsuccessfully to introduce the culture of cotton into Fiji, found, after a tolerably long residence, that four or five human beings were killed and eaten weekly. There was plenty of food in the place, pigs were numerous, and fish, fruit, and vegetables abundant. But the people ate human bodies as often as they could get them, not from any superstitious motive, but simply because they preferred human flesh to pork.
Many of the people actually take a pride in the number of human bodies which they have eaten. One chief was looked upon with great respect on account of his feats of cannibalism, and the people gave him a title of honor. They called him the Turtle-pond, comparing his insatiable stomach to the pond in which turtles are kept; and so proud were they of his deeds, that they even gave a name of honor to the bodies brought for his consumption, calling them the “Contents of the Turtle-pond.” This man was accustomed to eat a human body himself, suffering no one to share it with him. After his family were grown up, he bethought himself of registering his unholy meals by placing a stone on the ground as soon as he had finished the body. His son showed these stones to an English clergyman, who counted them, and found that there were very nearly nine hundred.
One man gained a great name among his people by an act of peculiar atrocity. He told his wife to build an oven, to fetch firewood for heating it, and to prepare a bamboo knife. As soon as she had concluded her labors her husband killed her, and baked her in the oven which her own hands had prepared, and afterward ate her. Sometimes a man has been known to take a victim, bind him hand and foot, cut slices from his arms and legs, and eat them before his eyes. Indeed, the Fijians are so inordinately vain, that they will do anything, no matter how horrible, in order to gain a name among their people; and Dr. Pritchard, who knows them thoroughly, expresses his wonder that some chief did not eat slices from his own limbs.
Cannibalism is ingrained in the very nature of a Fijian, and extends through all classes of society. It is true that there are some persons who have never eaten flesh, but there is always a reason for it. Women, for example, are seldom permitted to eat “bakolo,” as human flesh is termed, and there are a few men who have refrained from cannibalism through superstition. Every Fijian has his special god, who is supposed to have his residence in some animal. One god, for example, lives in a rat, as we have already seen; another in a shark; and so on. The worshipper of that god never eats the animal in which his divinity resides; and as some gods are supposed to reside in human bodies, their worshippers never eat the flesh of man.