EATERS OF HUMAN FLESH

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 184, 14 November 1910, Page 7

EATERS OF HUMAN FLESH

EXPERIENCES AMONG SOUTH PACII'IC CANNIBALS. We had been coming o': to the Marquesas all night, and when at daybreak tne scarped and buttressed summit ot the unmistakable Cape Maretens began taking shape iu the dissolving mist there was something definite to go by. We went in neatly and expeditiously, dropping anchor a quarter of a mile oft the rickety wharf. The firing of our little signal cannon might have been the setting oil' of a mine under the whole village, so electric was its effect. Dark figures sprang up from nowhere and darted hither and thither, and, following the appearance of a corpulent figure in pyjamas at the door of what seemec, to be the official residence, the tricoloi of France went jerking up to a wobbly flagpole. Down the front street soon came toiling a ponderous figure in brass helmet and white uniform, followed by a trailing sword and half-a-dozen natives carrying oars on their shoulders. Two other "foreigners—also white-clad and sun-helmeted—joined the procession. The boat was quickly alongside, and the official-looking man came puffing up the ladder, which had been hastily lowered to assist him. He w?.s Brigadier Boullirad, he announced between gasps in broken English, and the , other men following him over the rail were respectively Herr Cramer, a German trader, and Mr. McGrath,,.an American trader.

FUGITIVE CANNIBALISM. The Marquesas arc the .only islands of the eastern groups of tlie South Pacific where cannibalism has not long since ceased. This does not mean that one is likely to be pounced upon and eaten a» soon' as he sets foot ashore, but only that under certain favourable conditions, when there is small chance of its being brought to the attention of the Government, this barbarity is still resorted to. But never under any circumstances with the ceremony which attended the rites of two or three decades ago. The ''long pig" may be cut up quietly and distributed among a hundred families in half a dozen different villages, or the mutilated body may be buried after only a small portion has been reserved for eatJust previous to our arrival in Nukahiva a body from which only the hands were missing, was washed ashore at Anaho during a heavy south-wester. Investigation showed it to be that of one Toona, a resident of Hatiheu, a native who, three days previously, had, according to the story of his companions, fallen from their 'canoes and been drowned. The latter, after four days' confinement in a dark cell at Taio-Hale —the extremest torture to which a Marquesas can be subjected—confessed that.they had killed Toona during a coeoanut wine debauch, and after cutting off his hands for distribution in tiny portions at a tribal feast had weighted the body with stones ana dropped it out at sea. CANNIBALISM AS A RELIGIOUS

BITE. Cannibalism, which has always been practised in the Solomons, owes its persistence not to any particular predilection of the native to human flesh, but to the fact that it is looked on as a religious or tribal rite. Human sacrifice has been; and still is, the most, salient and ineradicable feature of their votive and propitiary ceremonies, and the erection of a temple, the birth 01 a son to the wife of a chief, the launchin" cf a new head hunting canoe, 01 one of a dozen other things, may require the taking of a life and the subsequent eating of the victim's, flesh. The sacrifice is not always—in fact, is not usually—a white man, but if a trader or missionary is within, striking distance when a victim is required, the prophets and priests are more than likely to receive word from the spirits that only the flesh of a foreigner will answer the dread purpose of the ceremony. I made the round of the Solomons, and picked up some scientific travellers and missionaries, but now and then baggaga came on board whose owners we're "missing, and only a few corrugated iron sheets and a mission house remained to tell the story. An ornithologist, whom we put ashore at an out-of-the-way part of Bougain ville on the outward trip, boarded the steamer on her return to say that the natives were treating him famously, that his collection was progressing beyond his most sanguine expectations, and that he considered the bush tracks of the Solomons safer than the Strand or Piccadilly. About two weeks latei the favourite wife of ?.' bush chief died, and before I left Australia the gunboat Clio brought to Sydney in a very small box all of the young scientist's bones that the marines'could identify for shipment to his family in England. _ Considerable missionary capital was, for a time, made out of the widely disseminated boast of a number of Solomon chiefs that they did not eat human flesh, until it finally leaked out that they were notorious traffickers in the commodity which they claimed to have abjured, trading the "dead from whatever cause to other natives, but like the man who makes the sausage or the tamales, and knows what is in them, not eating. The millennium of a plain pig, chicken, and vegetable diet, is still a ]o:'jr way off in the Solomon Island Lewis Pi. Freeman, in the New York Tribune.