The Earl of Pembroke, in his light, gossipy book entitled, “South Sea Bubbles,” describes a visit which he paid to one of the old sacrificial maraes, or inclosures, in the island of Raiatea.
“Strange places they were,” he says; “built of enormous slabs of rock or coral, arranged in an oblong shape, and the space inside them filled with shingle and coral, so as to form a platform about eight feet high. I think the largest was about fifty yards long; we scrambled up on to it by help of a tree, and stood on the spot stained with so much blood shed in the name of religion. What horrible stories those stones could tell if they could speak!...
“What made the human sacrifices of the Society Islands so strangely ghastly and horrible, was the fact that the wretched victim was always chosen from one of certain families, set apart for that special purpose for generation after generation for ever. How this caste originated I do not know. Many of these families used to put to sea secretly in canoes, preferring an almost certain death by drowning or starvation to the terribly uncertain fate that was always hanging over their heads.
“When a man came to the priests to beg some heavenly, or rather infernal, favour, they would tell him, either from whim, malice, or some reason best known to themselves, that the god required a human sacrifice, and naming the victim, present the supplicant with the death-warrant in the shape of a sacred stone. He hides this carefully somewhere about him, and collecting a few friends, seeks out the doomed man. At last they find him sitting lazily under a tree or mending his canoe, and squatting down round him begin talking about the weather, fishing, or what not. Suddenly a hand is opened—the death stone discovered to his horrified view. He starts up terror-stricken, and tries to escape—one short, furious struggle and he is knocked down, secured, and carried off to the merciless priests. Ugh! it is an ugly picture.”[56]
CHAPTER XIII.
THE FIJI ISLANDERS.
The annexation of the Fiji Islands to the British empire lends to the practices and beliefs of their inhabitants a peculiar interest, though to a great extent these have been abandoned since the establishment of Christianity.
Their creed is undiluted polytheism; their pantheon is full of all kinds of gods, differing in rank and power, and very widely represented on earth by some animate or inanimate object. Each Fijian has a god of his own, under whose care he supposes himself to be placed. They do not seem to have any religious teaching; but they have a priesthood, and that priesthood has, of course, its traditional formulas of worship. But nothing like regular worship, as Christians understand the phrase, is accepted or observed, and the Fijian religion is really a superstition, because its sole inspiring motive is fear. This motive the priests carefully develope, making it the basis of their claims and the source of their influence.