Any white man’s stories of cannibal revels should be checked with care. The primitive is a shy bird, and he knows that cannibalism has been blacklisted. Therefore he works cautiously. Old-timers in the New Hebrides say casually, “Oh, yes, it is going on.” But I have never found one who has actually seen it.
When Bill Tully was running our yaws campaign in a remote part of Malekula, guards appeared around his house one day and forbade his going out. Through the chinks he could see a glow of fire, hear drumming and fierce cries. Bill knew, as if he had seen it, that they were cooking long pig. The patients who came to him next day were especially quiet and subdued.
One afternoon, on Atchin, Malakai came back from an inspection across the island and said that work had been delayed by a ceremony. The messenger of a chief on Malekula had come with a gift for a chief on Atchin. It had come carefully rolled in pandanus leaves. Maybe the chief was less secretive than he would have been before a European, for he allowed Malakai to look on while he opened the package. It contained a human hand.
What Malakai saw was part of an old courtesy-custom. When a chief makes a kill he sends some part of the body, like a hand or foot, to a chief bound to him by kin or friendship. Within a certain period the recipient is supposed to return the gift in kind. There is a delicate code: If the meat of a common native is sent to A, then in due time A sends to B flesh of a similar social status. If the cut is from a chief, then chief-meat is expected in return. In old days when white men were easy game the exchange was often in white-man’s flesh. But nowadays bagging Europeans is a dangerous sport, so the meat of a “clothed man” takes the place of this delicacy. A “clothed man” means any native who has been educated to European dress.
This pernicious round-robin, I was told, had got on the nerves of some chiefs, who had learned to prefer peace and pig. But when the pandanus-wrapped package came they knew what was expected of them.
Man-eating is far from an everyday amusement in the New Hebrides, but in 1923 even white men were not entirely safe. Ewan Corlette, a planter on Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, sent his native wife to the neighboring island of Santo to visit at the home of his friend, Klapcott, who had a trading store, and a native family. Later the place was found a shambles, a welter of blood. Klapcott had always kept a rifle handy, but evidence proved that, when he turned to take down some goods, one of his native customers had brained him with a hatchet. Evidence also showed how the women and children had run, trying to escape, before the savages finished them.
Traders didn’t like to tell cannibal yarns because it “gave the place a black eye.” They were something like the San Franciscans who saved face by calling their earthquake a fire. The face-savers along the beach were inclined to scoff at tales of white men having taken photographs of man-eating revels, although some such pictures, I am told, have been shown to the public.
The Negroid folk, if they ever talk about man-eating, will tell you that it has a religious significance. The merrier, slightly Polynesian people to the north and east are more candid. One of their chiefs, who had probably finished a quart of bad French wine, said simply, “Me like im long pig too much.” He just liked what he liked. His people had a record for cruelty. In the bad old days their trained garroters went on long hunts, stole upon sleeping islands and strangled the sleepers, quietly, with a looped vine. They were reputed to have kept their prizes in pens to fatten them. Island peoples with a higher mental capacity than their neighbors have often been the bloodiest cannibals and tormentors. Witness Fiji, witness the New Zealand Maoris. Cruelty seems to be the brat of young imagination. The ape-man bashes his enemy with a club; he can think of nothing cleverer. His more gifted neighbor becomes a virtuoso in the art of giving pain. Yet superior peoples like the Samoans and Cook Islanders have not been notorious man-eaters; whereas the flat-headed Goaribaris are still at it. In spite of this paradox, I have found some of my most enlightened native friends among grandsons of cannibals.
Meanwhile anthropologists debate the subject: Do men eat men to satisfy an animal hunger, or has cannibalism a religious significance? Scholars who associate the Christian Church’s sacramental bread and wine with the ancient custom of devouring a sacrificial hero will appreciate the remark of one big black convert. It was Communion Sunday, and when the wine cup was passed to him he drained it and shouted lustily, “Fill um up anudder time, Master. Me like im dis fellow Jesus too much!”
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