When a ship came that way again, and inquiry was made by her captain as to the ruling prices and possible supply of heads, among other commodities, the new commercial scheme of these simple people was at once propounded to him. The chief caused a row of emblazoned slaves to be marshalled before the trader, and told that gentleman to pick out those he admired. Further, he was assured that such as he deigned to choose should be at once decapitated, their heads cured secundem artem, and delivered on board his ship with promptitude and dispatch, at the usual market rates.
The new plan was pronounced kapai (good), and gave universal satisfaction. Not only did it encourage a noble and national art, but the revenue of the kingdom was thereby largely increased. We can hardly realize, perhaps, the intense chagrin of these merry folk when they found that the missionaries discouraged their laudable efforts in this direction, not to mention that those teachers also interdicted the time-honoured custom of anthropophagy. I have often fancied I heard some ancient Maori sighing and lamenting for the good old times, the merry days when he was young!
But, possibly, it is as well that the moku and the head-curing process should be now among the number of lost and vanished arts.
[CHAPTER IV.]
MAORI MANNERS.
II.
The Maori tongue is akin to several of the South Sea dialects. The language of the distant Sandwich Islands corresponds most nearly to it. A Maori and a Hawaiian can understand one another to a great extent. It is strange that intervening groups should be inhabited by people of wholly different races, who speak in altogether different tongues.
For ordinary colloquial purposes a sufficiency of Maori is readily acquired, though those who study it deeply discover many difficulties. The alphabet contains only fourteen letters, consequently the sound of many words, expressing wholly distinct ideas, is frequently confusingly similar. The grammar is not overcharged with those bugbears of childhood—moods, tenses, and declensions. The tone and inflection of the voice are used to convey a varied meaning to the same word, in many instances. A sentence will have different significations according to the inflection used in uttering it, and to the gestures that accompany it. The idiom is singular, but rather graceful.
The written language has been constructed by the missionaries and others, as has been done with various other tongues in Polynesia and elsewhere. Bibles and sundry more books have been translated and printed in Maori. In fact, there is beginning to be quite a Maori literature, for, besides translations, there have been published several volumes of Maori legends, proverbs, songs, etc., and there are two or three journals regularly issued in the language.