Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/216

202 had her head shaved with a knife of bamboo, of course without soap or any facilitating lather.

In the New Hebrides the villages are always invisible from the water. Each village as a rule consists of a set of different hamlets or collections of huts. The houses in the various islands differ greatly in architecture, but I always found them beautifully neat and clean. The dead are usually buried at the door of the hut. On Ambrym and some other islands the young unmarried men in a village always sleep in a large house specially set apart for them.

In general it may be said that all the Melanesians who have not been converted to Christianity are cannibals. It is not, however, to be supposed that human flesh is their ordinary diet. It is probable that none partake of it often, and that large numbers have only rare opportunities of doing so. They are almost invariably ashamed of cannibalism, and will generally conceal their indulgence in it or discontinue it if a white man comes to live among them.

Wars are nearly perpetual, and the non-Christian natives invariably go armed. I have been among natives whose custom it was not to lay aside their weapons eyen to eat, but keeping them in their right hand to take their food in the left. The spear, the bow and arrow, the club, and the tomahawk are all in use in the New Hebrides, but there are many fire-arms in the hands of the natives. The Tanna men have a high reputation for boldness, and even in ordinary intercourse they have a more independent bearing than most of their neighbors. Native wars are not usually very sanguinary; at least, pitched battles are few. The savage art of war consists in murdering stragglers and making forays to kill women and children, burn down villages, and lay waste plantations.

Nothing struck me more than the great intelligence of the natives of Oceania in general and of the Melanesians in particular. Within the limited sphere of their acquirements whatever they do they do thoroughly.

The Melanesians of the Solomon Islands are less known than their neighbors of the New Hebrides. The climate of the group is less favorable to white men.

The Solomon-Islanders are in general an aquatic people. Their canoes, except as New Ireland and New Britain are approached, have no outriggers. They are of graceful shape, of large size, built up of pieces, and with seams "payed" with a sort of vegetable pitch. The villages are usually near the water's edge and unconcealed by trees. The use of fire-arms is still not very common. But on some islands, notably Guadalcanar, they are expert bowmen. The Savo men make clubs covered with straw plaiting of singularly fine texture and tasteful pattern. Some of the spears are of prodigious length, and are tipped at the end with a human bone cut into a multitude of sharp and brittle points, which break off in a wound and are said to