SHOCKING DISCOVERY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 462, 17 June 1909, Page 3

SHOCKING DISCOVERY.

HUMAN BONES AMONG SHIP’S BAD EAST.

Newcastle, June 14,

While the barque Canterbury, from Eten, a small port on the Peruvian coast, was discharging ballast, it was discovered that it contained human skulls and many legs and other bones. The captain states that he had great difficulty in obtaining ballast at 8s gd per ton. He noticed the soil contained bones, but he thought they were animal remains, until they were examined when the ballast was discharged. It is supposed the ballast was taken from the site of an ancient Peruvian town.

[Commenting on the above the Wellington Post says ; —“Only in recent times would such a matter have attracted much notice. In Shakespeare’s day, it was a commonplace incident for a bystander at a graveside to pick up a skull and ascertain from the sexton to whom it had belonged. The like thing might have happened in Tend on without comment, even in early Victorian days. In eigh-teenth-century England the gibbeted bodies of criminals, men and women, were as familiar “object-lessons” - to school children as they are in China in our own day. And the great Dr Johnson disapproved of the weak sentiment which had begun to demand a greater regard for public decency. Truly, the change in sentiment is for the better, and the callous exhibition and desecration of human remains tolerated among civilised peoples in bygone days would now arouse righteous indignation. The feeling of the sacredness of the relics of one’s friends lies deep in human nature, and pagan literature is saturated with the sentiment. It is independent of creed —it constituted the piety of Tobit in the Hebrew romance, as it did of “Old Mortality,” immortalised by Walter Scott. It entered deep into Maori thought and religion. Yet, strange to say, it has not been inconsistent with the deliberate exposure and desecration of the bodies of criminals, enemies, and aliens. The reverent treatment of the remains of the departed does not, however, require that efforts should be made to preserve the bodies from the natural process of decay endeavours characteristic of all the old paganisms, and which has ever been pathetically futile. Possibly, it was this same pious care on the part of the old Incas that has now led to the bones of their ancestors being desecrated in a strange land. Public opinion will no doubt demand that the relics shall be decently dealt with and permitted to mingle in peace with their kindred earth, though under an alien sky.”J