I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only.When our stores ran low among the islands,I grew to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable mutton.And in at least one ocean language,a particular word denotes that a man is 'hungry for fish,'having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer satisfy,and his soul,like those of the Hebrews in the desert,begins to lust after flesh-pots.Add to this the evidences of over-population and imminent famine already adduced,and I think we see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.
It is right to look at both sides of any question;but I am far from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice.The higher Polynesian races,such as the Tahitians,Hawaiians,and Samoans,had one and all outgrown,and some of them had in part forgot,the practice,before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-sail in their waters.It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain,and among inveterate savages like the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.The Marquesans intertwined man-eating with the whole texture of their lives;long-pig was in a sense their currency and sacrament;it formed the hire of the artist,illustrated public events,and was the occasion and attraction of a feast.To-day they are paying the penalty of this bloody commixture.The civil power,in its crusade against man-eating,has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures,has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element,and one after another has placed them on the proscript list.Their art of tattooing stood by itself,the execution exquisite,the designs most beautiful and intricate;nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man;it may cost some pain in the beginning,but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run,and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women.And now it has been found needful to forbid the art.Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen).They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days;and who shall pity them?The least rigorous will say that they were justly served.
Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance:the flesh must be eaten.The chief who seized Mr.Whalon preferred to eat him;and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a vengeance.Two or three years ago,the people of a valley seized and slew a wretch who had offended them.His offence,it is to be supposed,was dire;they could not bear to leave their vengeance incomplete,and,under the eyes of the French,they did not dare to hold a public festival.The body was accordingly divided;and every man retired to his own house to consummate the rite in secret,carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish match-box.The barbarous substance of the drama and the European properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination.
Yet more striking is another incident of the very year when I was there myself,1888.In the spring,a man and woman skulked about the school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child alone.Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying manners -'You are So-and-so,son of So-and-so?'they asked;and caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods.Some instinct woke in the child's bosom,or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers.He sought to break from them;he screamed;and they,casting off the mask,seized him the more strongly and began to run.His cries were heard;his schoolmates,playing not far off,came running to the rescue;and the sinister couple fled and vanished in the woods.They were never identified;no prosecution followed;but it was currently supposed they had some grudge against the boy's father,and designed to eat him in revenge.All over the islands,as at home among our own ancestors,it will be observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an individual.A family,a class,a village,a whole valley or island,a whole race of mankind,share equally the guilt of any member.So,in the above story,the son was to pay the penalty for his father;so Mr.Whalon,the mate of an American whaler,was to bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver.I am reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group,which was told me by an eye-witness,and which I tell here again for the strangeness of the scene.Two men had awakened the animosity of the Jaluit chiefs;and it was their wives who were selected to be punished.A single native served as executioner.Early in the morning,in the face of a large concourse of spectators,he waded out upon the reef between his victims.These neither complained nor resisted;accompanied their destroyer patiently;stooped down,when they had waded deep enough,at his command;and he (laying one hand upon the shoulders of each)held them under water till they drowned.Doubtless,although my informant did not tell me so,their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.
It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high place.
