Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/223

Rh "While listening to this frightful detail, we felt sick almost to fainting. We left Atoi" (the chief who had killed the girl), "and again strolled toward the spot where this disgusting feast was cooking. Not a native was now near it; a hot steam kept occasionally bursting from the smothered mass, and the same dog that we had seen take the head of the girl now crept from beneath the bushes and sneaked toward the village: to add to the gloominess of the whole, a large hawk rose heavily from the very spot where the poor victim had been cut in pieces. My friend and I sat gazing in this melancholy place; it was a lowering, gusty day, and the moaning of the wind through the bushes, as it swept round the hill on which we were, seemed in unison with our feelings."

Earle goes on to relate how he, and three other compatriots whom he summoned from the beach for the purpose, with the Englishman's usual impertinent interference and intolerance of customs differing from his own, determined to frustrate Atoi's intention. They together visited the hill where the flesh was cooking, and, destroying the oven, buried the remains in the earth. They found the heart put on one side for the special delectation of their constant friend and companion, Atoi. Earle was afterward good-humoredly told by the chief that their interference had been of no avail, as they had found the grave where the flesh had been buried, and opening it, soon after he and his friends had left, had finished cooking it and eaten it all. Earle argued long, and probably loudly, with the chief upon this question. Atoi asked him what they did with their thieves and runaways in England, and he told him, "Flog them or hang them." "Then," replied the Maori, "the only difference is that we eat them after we have killed them." The same chief told him that before the introduction of potatoes the people in the interior had nothing to eat but fern-roots and kumera (another edible root); fish they never had in the rivers, so that human flesh was the only sort that they ever partook of.

Another early traveler in New Zealand, Ellis, who had admirable opportunities for arriving at the real motive for this custom, tells us that the Maoris "eat the bodies of their enemies that they might imbibe their courage"; and that they exulted greatly at the banquet upon the body of a great chief, for they thought that they would thus obtain his valiant and daring spirit.

The eastern Polynesians made war chiefly for the purpose of obtaining bodies; hence, when clearing away the brushwood from a place where they expected to engage an enemy, they cheered each other with cries of "Clear away well, that we may kill and eat, and have a good feast to-day!" Their haughtiest threat was always, "We will kill and eat you!" and to be eaten was always the greatest dread of the exiled and conquered. Dr. Turner, in his most interesting work on Samoa, tells us that in New Caledonia "it was war, war, war, incessant war," and that all the good bodies were picked out from the