In these internecine fights fire was very generally set to the enemy’s dwellings. “He often burnt houses,” a young man said, pointing to an older one, and the impeachment was not denied. The ahu, too, were raided and bodies burnt, which seems to be the cause of the burnt bones recorded by certain travellers; there is no reason to suppose there was cremation or sacrifice on Easter Island. It was in this sort of warfare that the last images were overthrown.

FIG. 92.
[Brit. Mus.
OBSIDIAN SPEAR-HEADS.
(Mataa.)

While legends record how many people were eaten after each affray, all living persons deny, with rather striking unanimity, not only that they themselves have ever been cannibals, but that their fathers were so. If this is correct, the custom was dying out for some reason before the advent of Christianity;[[45]] their grandfathers, the old people admit, ate human flesh, but, if there were any rites connected with it, they “did not tell.” The great-grandmother of an old man of the Miru clan was, according to his account, killed on the high central part of the island by the Ureohei and eaten. In revenge for the outrage, one of her sons, Hotu by name, killed sixty of the Ureohei. Another son, who had pacifist leanings, thought the feud ought then to be ended, but Hotu desired yet more victims, and there was a violent quarrel between the two brothers, in which the peace-maker was struck on the head with a club; for, as Hotu remarked, if they had slain his father, it would have been different, but really to eat his mother was “no good.”

Our acquaintance with the person said to have been “the last cannibal,” or rather with his remains, came about accidentally during the time when I was alone on the island. A little party of us had ridden to the top of the volcano Rano Kao; and on the southern side of the crater, that opposite Orongo, some of the natives were pointing out the legendary sites connected with the death of the first immigrant chief, Hotu-matua. Suddenly one of them vanished into a crevice in the rocks, and reappeared brandishing a thigh-bone to call attention to its large size. I dismounted, scrambled into a little grotto, or natural cave, where a skeleton was extended; the skull was missing, but the jaw-bone was present, and the rest of the bones were in regular order; the individual had either died there or been buried. Bones were in the department of the absent member of the Expedition, but it was of course essential to collect them, from the view of determining race, and the natives never resented our doing so. I therefore passed these out, packed them in grass in the luncheon-basket, and, sitting down on a rock, asked to be told the story of the cave. “That,” my attendants replied, “is Ko Tori.” He was, they said, the last man on the island who had eaten human flesh. In this hiding-place he had enjoyed his meals, and no one had ever been able to track him. There had formerly been a cooking-place, but it was now hidden by a fall of stones. He had died as a very old man at the other end of the island, apparently in the odour of sanctity; to judge by the toothless jaw if he had not deserted his sins they must long ago have deserted him. His last desire was to be buried in the place with which he had such pleasant connections, and in dutiful regard to his wishes, or because it was feared that his ghost might otherwise make itself unpleasant, some of the young men bore the corpse on stretchers along the south coast and up to the top of the mountain, depositing it here. The next thing was to get at some sort of date; chronology is naturally of a vague order, and the most effective method is, if possible, to connect events with the generation in which they happened. “Did your grandfather know him,” was asked, “or your father?” The answer was unexpected. “Porotu,” they said, pointing to one of the old men, “helped to carry him,” and silence fell on the group. My heart sank; I had then undone this last pious work and committed sacrilege. To my great relief, however, strange sounds soon made it clear that the humorous side had appealed to the escort; they were suffocating with mirth. “And now,” they said, gasping between sobs of laughter, “Ko Tori goes in a basket to England.” As I write, Ko Tori resides at the Royal College of Surgeons, and has done his bit towards elucidating the mystery of Easter Island.

Sexual morality, as known to us, was not a strong point in life on the island, but marriage was distinctly recognised, and the absolute loose liver was a person apart. Polygamy was usual, but many seem to have had only one wife. The children belonged to the father’s clan, and are often distinguished by his name being given after their own. At the same time the clan of the mother was not ignored, and a man would sometimes fight for his maternal side. If a man had sons by more than one wife, after his death each claimed the body of his father to lie on the ahu of his mother’s clan, and the corpse might thus be carried to several in turn, finally returning to its own destination. We collected a certain number of genealogical trees, the various dramatis personæ being for this purpose represented by matches or buttons. It was not a very popular line of research, the cry being apt to be raised, “Now let’s talk of something interesting”; but some two hundred names were in this way placed in their family groups, with details of clan, place of residence and colour, and some knowledge obtained with regard to many more. It is not of course enough ground on which to found any theory, but it was very useful in checking information gathered in other ways. Only in one case was it possible to get back beyond the great-grandfather of our informant, but the knowledge of family connections was often greater than would be found among Europeans. The number of childless marriages was striking.

The early story of Viriamo (fig. 83), the oldest woman living in our day, gives a picture of this primitive state of things. She belonged to the clan of Ureohei, and her family had lived for some generations, as far back as could be remembered, on the edge of the eastern volcano, not far from Raraku. The great-grandfather, who was dark, had as his only wife a white woman of the Hamea. Their son was white, and had two wives, one of the Tupahotu and one of the Ngaure. By the first, although she also was white, he had a dark son who married a white wife of his own clan, Ureohei, but of a different group. Viriamo was the second of their eight children, all of whom were white save herself and her eldest brother. Four of the girls died young in the epidemic of smallpox in 1864. Viriamo and two of her sisters were initiated as children into the bird rite.[[46]] When older she was tattooed with rings round her forehead and with the dark-blue breeches. Somewhat later, but still as a young woman, she went over to Anakena and had her ears pierced, but she never had the lobe extended, preferring to let it remain small. When asked about her marriage, she bridled as coyly as a young girl. Her first union was a matter of arrangement, the husband, who was also of the Ureohei, giving her father much food, and, if she had refused to accept the situation, she would, she said, have been beaten. There was no ceremony of any kind, no new clothes nor feasting; her father simply took her to her new home and handed her over. The house was near the two statues with the projecting noses, excavated on the south-eastern slope of Raraku (fig. 73), and, when she wanted water, rather than cross the boundary and go round to the lake by the gap, through the hostile dwellers on the western side, she used to clamber with her vessel up the boundary rift in the cliff-face. There was one white child, who died young, but her marriage was not a success, and Viriamo left the man and went off to live with one of the Miru clan at Anakena. His house already contained a wife and family, also four brothers, but they all got on quite happily together. She had five children by this man, who, like their father, were all white; four of them, however, died in infancy. This was the result of the parents having most unfortunately fallen foul of an old man, whose cloak had been taken without his consent, and who had accordingly prophesied disaster. The remaining child, a daughter, was living and unmarried when we were on the island. The last husband was the most satisfactory of the three; he was a Tupahotu living near Tongariki. She was handed over to him as a matter of family arrangement, in discharge of a debt, but she was quite amenable to the exchange, and was very fond of him. He was light in colour, but her only child by this marriage, our friend Juan, was dark, taking, as he said, “after my mam-ma.”

The women do not seem, judging by existing remains, to have had always a happy time. Dr. Keith, who examined the skulls collected by the Expedition, concludes his report on one of the female specimens as follows: “The most likely explanation is that the indent of the left temple was the cause of death, produced by the blow of a club, and that the suppuration and repair of the right side has been also produced by a former blow which failed to prove fatal. Two other skulls, also those of women, show indented fractures in the left temporal region.”

Any deficiency at marriages, in the way of social festivity, was made up at funerals. These were attended by persons from all over the island, for “when they were not fighting, they were all cousins.” In answer to the remark that “considering the population their whole time must have gone in this way,” it was cheerfully observed that “they had nothing else to do, so they all went, everybody took food and everybody ate.” The parents of one of our friends, Kapiera, lived at Anakena, but he was born on the south side of the island near Vaihu “when his mother went for a funeral.” The men who knew the tablets went also and sang, but there seems to have been little or nothing in the way of rites. The missionaries were impressed with the fact that there was no ceremony of any kind at a burial.