Northern Melanesia. Material culture of the North Melanesians.
In the last lecture I concluded my account of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the natives of Central Melanesia. To-day we pass to what may be called Northern Melanesia, by which is to be understood the great archipelago lying to the north-east of New Guinea. It comprises the two large islands of New Britain and New Ireland, now called New Pomerania and New Mecklenburg, with the much smaller Duke of York Island lying between them, and the chain of New Hanover and the Admiralty Islands stretching away westward from the north-western extremity of New Ireland. The whole of the archipelago, together with the adjoining island of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, is now under German rule. The people belong to the same stock and speak the same language as the natives of Central and Southern Melanesia, and their level of culture is approximately the same. They live in settled villages and subsist chiefly by the cultivation of the ground, raising crops of taro, yams, bananas, sugar-cane, and so forth. Most of the agricultural labour is performed by the women, who plant, weed the ground, and carry the produce to the villages. The ground is, or rather used to be, dug by sharp-pointed sticks. The men hunt cassowaries, wallabies, and wild pigs, and they catch fish by both nets and traps. Women and children take part in the fishing and many of them become very expert in spearing fish. Among the few domestic animals which they keep are pigs, dogs, and fowls. The villages are generally situated in the midst of a dense forest; but on the coast the natives build their houses not far from the beach as a precaution against the attacks of the forest tribes, of whom they stand greatly in fear. A New Britain village generally consists of a number of small communities or families, each of which dwells in a separate enclosure. The houses are very small and badly built, oblong in shape and very low. Between the separate hamlets which together compose a village lie stretches of virgin forest, through which run irregular and often muddy foot-tracks, scooped out here and there into mud-holes where the pigs love to wallow during the heat of the tropical day. As the people of any one district used generally to be at war with their neighbours, it was necessary that they should live together for the sake of mutual protection.[627]
Commercial habits of the North Melanesians. Their backwardness in other respects.
Nevertheless, in spite of their limited intercourse with surrounding villages, the natives of the New Britain or the Bismarck Archipelago were essentially a trading people. They made extensive use of shell money and fully recognised the value of any imported articles as mediums of exchange or currency. Markets were held on certain days at fixed places, where the forest people brought their yams, taro, bananas and so forth and exchanged them for fish, tobacco, and other articles with the natives of the coast. They also went on long trading expeditions to procure canoes, cuscus teeth, pigs, slaves, and so forth, which on their return they generally sold at a considerable profit. The shell which they used as money is the Nassa immersa or Nassa calosa, found on the north coast of New Britain. The shells were perforated and threaded on strips of cane, which were then joined together in coils of fifty to two hundred fathoms.[628] The rights of private property were fully recognised. All lands belonged to certain families, and husband and wife had each the exclusive right to his or her goods and chattels. But while in certain directions the people had made some progress, in others they remained very backward. Pottery and the metals were unknown; no metal or specimen of metal-work has been found in the archipelago; on the other hand the natives made much use of stone implements, especially adzes and clubs. In war they never used bows and arrows.[629] They had no system of government, unless that name may be given to the power wielded by the secret societies and by chiefs, who exercised a certain degree of influence principally by reason of the reputation which they enjoyed as sorcerers and magicians. They were not elected nor did they necessarily inherit their office; they simply claimed to possess magical powers, and if they succeeded in convincing the people of the justice of their claim, their authority was recognised. Wealth also contributed to establish their position in the esteem of the public.[630]
The Rev. George Brown on the Melanesians.
With regard to the religious ideas and customs of the natives we are not fully informed, but so far as these have been described they appear to agree closely with those of their kinsfolk in Central Melanesia. The first European to settle in the archipelago was the veteran missionary, the Rev. George Brown, D.D., who resided in the islands from 1875 to 1880 and has revisited them on several occasions since; he reduced the language to writing for the first time,[631] and is one of our best authorities on the people. In what follows I shall make use of his valuable testimony along with that of more recent observers.
North Melanesian theory of the soul. Fear of ghosts, especially the ghosts of persons who have been killed and eaten.
The natives of the archipelago believe that every person is animated by a soul, which survives his death and may afterwards influence the survivors for good or evil. Their word for soul is nio or niono, meaning a shadow. The root is nio, which by the addition of personal suffixes becomes niong "my soul or shadow," niom "your soul or shadow," niono "his soul or shadow." They think that the soul is like the man himself, and that it always stays inside of his body, except when it goes out on a ramble during sleep or a faint. A man who is very sleepy may say, "My soul wants to go away." They believe, however, that it departs for ever at death; hence when a man is sick, his friends will offer prayers to prevent its departure. There is only one kind of soul, but it can appear in many shapes and enter into animals, such as rats, lizards, birds, and so on. It can hear, see, and speak, and present itself in the form of a wraith or apparition to people at the moment of or soon after death. On being asked why he thought that the soul does not perish with the body, a native said, "Because it is different; it is not of the same nature at all." They believe that the souls of the dead occasionally visit the living and are seen by them, and that they haunt houses and burial-places. They are very much afraid of the ghosts and do all they can to drive or frighten them away. Above all, being cannibals, they stand in great fear of the ghosts of the people whom they have killed and eaten. The man who is cutting up a human body takes care to tie a bandage over his mouth and nose during the operation of carving in order to prevent the enraged soul of the victim from entering into his body by these apertures; and for a similar reason the doors of the houses are shut while the cannibal feast is going on inside. And to keep the victim's ghost quiet while his body is being devoured, a cut from a joint is very considerately placed on a tree outside of the house, so that he may eat of his own flesh and be satisfied. At the conclusion of the banquet, the people shout, brandish spears, beat the bushes, blow horns, beat drums, and make all kinds of noises for the purpose of chasing the ghost or ghosts of the murdered and eaten men away from the village. But while they send away the souls, they keep the skulls and jawbones of the victims; as many as thirty-five jawbones have been seen hanging in a single house in New Ireland. As for the skulls, they are, or rather were placed on the branch of a dead tree and so preserved on the beach or near the house of the man who had taken them.[632]
Offerings to the souls of the dead.
With regard to the death of their friends they deem it very important to obtain the bodies and bury them. They offer food to the souls of their departed kinsfolk for a long time after death, until all the funeral feasts are over; but they do not hold annual festivals in honour of dead ancestors. The food offered to the dead is laid every day on a small platform in a tree; but the natives draw a distinction between offerings to the soul of a man who died a natural death and offerings to the soul of a man who was killed in a fight; for whereas they place the former on a living tree, they deposit the latter on a dead tree. Moreover, they lay money, weapons, and property, often indeed the whole wealth of the family, near the corpse of their friend, in order that the soul of the deceased may carry off the souls of these valuables to the spirit land. But when the body is carried away to be buried, most of the property is removed by its owners for their own use. However, the relations will sometimes detach a few shells from the coils of shell money and a few beads from a necklace and drop them in a fire for the behoof of the ghost. But when the deceased was a chief or other person of importance, some of his property would be buried with him. And before burial his body would be propped up on a special chair in front of his house, adorned with necklaces, wreaths of flowers and feathers, and gaudy with war-paint. In one hand would be placed a large cooked yam, and in the other a spear, while a club would be put on his shoulder. The yam was to stay the pangs of hunger on his long journey, and the weapons were to enable him to fight the foes who might resist his entrance into the spirit land. In the Duke of York Island the corpse was usually disposed of by being sunk in a deep part of the lagoon; but sometimes it was buried in the house and a fire kept burning on the spot.[633]