"A hardened old offender who preferred white man to
native meat"
All of the images were covered with an inch or more of solid moss, and on one which I photographed it was necessary to scrape some of this away to bring out the features. The figures were much alike in design, and, in a general way, of a not unremote resemblance to the Buddhas of the ancient Javan temples. Eleven of them were still in their original positions; one was blocked half way in its fall by the trunk of a hau tree, and one was prostrate and overgrown with moss and creepers. A search will undoubtedly reveal others now entirely covered with earth and undergrowth, as there are several unoccupied niches still remaining.
That this shrine is of considerable age is evidenced by the fact that a hau tree, three feet in diameter, has forced apart the heavy paving stones and is growing in the middle of the court. Trees of even greater size are growing out of the ruins of a small nearby building, which might once have been the foundation of the domicile of the attendant priests. Some of the roughly squared rocks in the foundation of the shrine are approximately three by three by ten feet in dimension, and must have taken a small army of men to move and set in place.
The Marquesas are the only islands of the eastern groups of the South Pacific where cannibalism has not long since ceased. This does not mean that one is likely to be pounced on and eaten as soon as he sets foot ashore—as I must frankly admit we all feared when we first heard of the fate of the late pilots of Taio-haie—but only that under certain favourable conditions, when there is small chance of its being brought to the attention of the French authorities, this barbarity is still resorted to. The French and the missionaries have been active in suppressing cannibalism and its attendant rites, but, principally on account of certain religious significances which appear to attach to it, the practice persists in bobbing up perennially. The dead in their tribal fights are still eaten when the opportunity offers, but only one white man and a Chinaman (the two pilots were half-castes) are known to have been eaten in the last decade.
Accuse a Marquesan of being a cannibal, and he will ordinarily deny the soft impeachment much after the manner of a school girl taxed with being a flirt. Some will brazen it out, however, and of such was a hardened old offender who explained to the Lurline forecastle one night that, of the various classes of "long-pig," he preferred white man to native because the meat of the latter was saltier and of a more pronounced flavour. Chinaman he had never eaten, he said, but—and here he cast an appraising look to where our recently shipped cook was shuddering at the door of the galley—he was going to try one at his first opportunity. The terrified Si-ah would not even go ashore to do the marketing during the remainder of our stay in Taio-haie.
The practice of cannibalism undoubtedly originated in the over-populated days of the island when, in the seasons of famine, the bodies of those killed in the intertribal raids were eaten by the survivors to escape starvation. Its survival into a period when the islands produce food a thousand-fold in excess of consumption, and in the face of the active opposition of the French, can be due only to certain superstitious attributes, such as the belief that the strength of a dead foe enters into the body of him who eats the flesh.
Human flesh is eaten in the Marquesas today only when the conditions are such that the chances of detection are the slightest, and never under any circumstances with the ceremonies which attended the rites of three or four decades ago. The "long-pig"—the polite euphemism by which man-meat is designated—may be quietly cut up and distributed among a hundred families in a half dozen different villages, each of which will partake of its precious tidbit in private and strictest secrecy. Again, the body may be buried after only a small portion has been reserved for eating. Just previous to our arrival in Nukahiva a body from which only the hands were missing was washed ashore at Anaho during a heavy southwester. Investigation showed it to be that of one Teona, a resident of Hatiheu, a native who, three days previously, had, according to the story of his companions, fallen from their canoe and been drowned. The latter, after four days' confinement in a dark cell at Taio-haie—the extremest torture to which the superstitious Marquesan may be subjected—confessed that they had killed Teona during a coconut wine debauch, and after cutting off his hands and eating them, had weighted the body with stones and dropped it out to sea. They were given the extreme penalty—two weeks' confinement in the dark, to be followed by a year of weed-cutting on the village street. One died of hysteria before the first week was out, and the other, at the end of ten days, killed himself by gashing his wrist on a jagged corner of the sheet iron wall of his prison.
The Marquesan's terror of the dark is so extreme that it is not a rare thing for men, women and children to die of fright during eclipses. In view of this, there seems some ground for the contention that the French practice of confining convicted, and occasionally suspected, murderers and cannibals in windowless sheet iron cells is scarcely less barbarous than the crimes for which punishment is being meted out.
The great cannibal feast grounds of Nukahiva and Hiva-oa are not only not used at the present time, but are even so strictly tabu that no native can be found who will venture within their forbidden confines. Stevenson writes of visiting the Hatiheu "high-place" in company with a French priest and a native boy; but on the occasion of our visit we held out every conceivable inducement in an endeavour to secure native guides to the same feast-ground, and quite in vain. Not even among the converts of the Catholic fathers could be found one who held the tabu lightly enough to dare to violate it. The best we could do was to persuade several of them to accompany us to the line of the tabu, and there to await our return, while we went over the ruins with McGrath. The following description is from notes taken by Claribel on this occasion, and subsequently amplified under the direction of McGrath, who, in the fifteen years he has maintained a trading store at Hatiheu, has missed no opportunity to push enquiries amongst the older natives regarding what is unquestionably the most interesting ruin of its kind in the South Pacific:
"On the seaward side of a spur of the mountain a level space, oval in general shape, had been partly excavated, partly built up, so that there was a smooth floor about 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. In a semi-circle, with the chief's house in the centre, were the little 'feast-houses' of the court dignitaries and the special guests. Beneath the posts of each house excavations have disclosed a number of human bones which bear witness to the sacrifice which accompanied the setting of every pillar. In these little booths the guests remained during the feasts, some of which, when food was plenty or some especially great event was to be celebrated, lasted over a week. Each guest brought some contribution to the feast, and when it was over he was privileged to gather up and carry home any fragments that he liked.