CHARACTERS.
- Kalo Aikanaka, or Kokoa, a cannibal chief.
- Kaaokeewe, or Lotu, a lieutenant of Kokoa.
- Palua, daughter of Kokoa.
- Kaholekua, wife of Lotu.
- Napopo, brother of Kaholekua.
THE CANNIBALS OF HALEMANU.
A POPULAR LEGEND OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
I.
Although barbarous to the extent to which a brave, warm-hearted and hospitable people were capable of becoming, every social, political and religious circumstance preserved by tradition tends to show that at no period of their history did the Polynesians proper—or the Hawaiian branch of the race, at least—practise cannibalism. In their migrations from the southern coasts of Asia to their final homes in the Pacific, stopping, as they did, at various groups of islands in their voluntary or compulsory journeyings, the Polynesians must have been brought in contact with cannibal tribes; but no example ever persuaded them into the habit of eating human flesh, or of regarding the appetite for it with a feeling other than that of aversion and disgust. In offering a human sacrifice it was customary for the officiating priest to remove the left eye of the victim after the lifeless body had been deposited upon the altar, and present it to the chief, who made a semblance of eating it. Even as learned and conscientious an inquirer as Judge Fornander has suggested that this custom was possibly the relic of a cannibal propensity existing among the Polynesian people far back in the past. The assumption is quite as reasonable that the rite was either a simple exhibition of bravado, or the expression of a desire on the part of the chief to thereby more strictly identify himself with the offering in the eyes of the gods.