“Roast that Atua king who is about to die by my spear;” and so on ad infinitum.
These war parties afford excellent opportunities of studying the dress and ornaments of the Samoans. It is thought a point of honor with them, as with the American Indians, to go into action in the fullest dress and decorated with every ornament that can be procured, so that the headdress and general accoutrements of a chief when engaged in war are sure to be the best examples that can be seen.
The proceedings that take place after a battle are well described by Mr. Pritchard. “After a fight, the heads of the slain warriors are paraded in presence of the assembled chiefs and people, when the heroes are individually thanked, and their general prowess and daring publicly acknowledged. The excitement of the successful warrior is intense, as he passes before the chiefs with his bleeding trophy, capering in the most fantastic evolutions, with blackened face and oiled body, throwing his club high in the air, and catching it behind his back or between his legs; sometimes himself carrying his dead enemy’s head, sometimes dancing round a comrade who carries it for him, all the while shouting in his loudest voice, ‘Ou te mau tangata! Ou te mau tangata!’ (‘I have my man, I have my man!’)”
To a young Samoan this is the realization of his highest ambition, to be thus publicly thanked by the chief for slaying an enemy in mortal combat, as he careers before his comrades with the reeking head of his foe in one hand, and his club in the other.
“Then, again, when the war is over, and he returns to his village, to hear his companions rehearse the exploit, and the girls pronounce him ‘toa’ i. e. brave; then it is you see in their very perfection the complacent dignity and latent pride that lurk within that brown-skinned islander. As he assumes an air of unconscious disregard of the praises his deeds evoke, you see the sublime and the ludicrous neatly blending, when he turns to the girls, and mildly exclaims, ‘Funa mai si rului!’ (‘Woman, hand me a cigar.’) This modest little order is at once pretty and pert, dignified and careless, when it falls from the lips of a hero or a beau. And proud is the girl who hands it to him; she has but one ambition then, to become his wife, even with the certainty of being cast off in less than a month for another.
“After the heads have been paraded before the chiefs, they are piled up in the malae, or open space in the centre of the town, the head of the greatest chief slain being placed uppermost. If among the visitors there are any relatives of the slain, they claim the heads and bury them, or send them back to the comrades of the deceased. The unclaimed heads are buried together in the malae. Any bodies that may be recognized are also buried by their friends, while those who have no relations among the visitors are left to rot and make food for the dogs.
“The relations are careful to bury the bodies they identify, lest their spirits should haunt them or wander about the field of battle, disconsolate and mournful, lamenting the fate which left their bodies to rot or to be eaten by the dogs. I have often heard the natives say, ‘Hear that spirit moaning, I am cold! I am cold!’ when a stormy night has thrown its darkness and poured its torrents of rain and gusts of wind over the battle-field. It was vain to tell them that the noise they heard was merely the creaking boughs or the pelting rain; to them it was nothing else than the spirit of the unburied dead enemy.”
The feelings of vanity are so acute in a Samoan warrior that he will do almost anything to procure applause at these meetings after a battle. One man who had failed to kill an enemy was greatly annoyed with himself at having missed the public applause which he had hoped to gain, and hit upon another mode of obtaining a sort of celebrity. He cut off the great toes of a dead enemy whose head had already been taken, and with these toes in his mouth paraded before the chiefs as if he had taken a head. Finding that this novel act excited admiration, he became so excited that he ate the toes, even without cooking them, in the presence of all the people.
Such an act as this might induce the reader to suppose that the Samoans, like many Polynesians, are cannibals. In the ordinary sense of the word, they are not so. After a battle they will sometimes cook and eat a human body, but this is done as an act of disgrace, and not as a gratification of the appetite. In one instance, a young woman whose father had been killed in battle obtained a scalp that had belonged to the enemy. She first burned it to ashes, then beat it to powder, and scattered the dust on the fire over which she cooked her provisions.
After a decisive battle, the chiefs of the beaten side come humbly before their victorious antagonists, carrying firewood, stones and pieces of bamboo. They lay their burdens before the principal chief, and prostrate themselves on the ground, lying there in silence. Should, as is generally the case, the victors be willing to accept the submission, the prostrate chiefs are told to rise and return home; but if they should not be satisfied, the men are clubbed where they lie, while the people whom they represent suffer all the horrors of savage warfare.