Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/541

Rh, and so great was his influence that the chief of Rewa would always roast and eat any man who incurred Connel's displeasure. Indeed, if native accounts are to be trusted, Connel was himself a cannibal. All travelers in the Pacific will agree that the most vicious savage is not the native, but the degenerate white who has violated his birthright to civilization.

When na-Ulivou of Mbau died, he was succeeded by his brother Tanoa (kava bowl), who reigned for twenty-three troubled years, and died a cannibal and a heathen in 1852.

Soon after Tanoa's accession, a powerful faction in Mbau decided to make war upon Rewa. This Tanoa was desirous of preventing, for he was Vasu (nephew) to Rewa, his mother having been a chieftainess of this place. This gave him the right to seize and appropriate to his own use almost anything he desired from Rewa, where he was treated with a respect bordering upon religious adoration; for whenever he visited his mother's district the people would salute him with clapping of hands and shouting "Hail good is the coming hither of our noble lord nephew."

Naturally he was well disposed toward Rewa and he treacherously aided them while ostensibly prosecuting the war. This enraged the Mbau chiefs and they drove him into exile, where he remained five years, but finally in 1837 with the aid of his son Seru (afterwards called Thakombau) he reconquered his native village, and in a fiendish orgy dismembered his captives, roasting and eating their tongues, arms and legs while they still lived.

Beneath every post of his house in Mbau a slave was buried when his new canoes were launched they were rolled into the water over the bodies of living victims who, after being crushed, were roasted and eaten, and when the canoe took to the water men were slain upon its deck so that it might be baptized in blood. When he sailed, he ran down all in his path, often capturing the victims for his cannibal feasts, for it was the rule in Fiji that all who were upset or wrecked were regarded as sacrifices to the gods. Indeed, the gods of Fiji were themselves cannibal ghosts of dead chiefs and fed upon the spirits of those who were sacrificed.

Wilkes gives a description of the coming of Tanoa to a conference held upon the U. S. S. Vincennes in August, 1840;

The canoe of Tanoa, the king of Mbau, was discovered rounding the southern point of the island of Ovalau; it presented a magnificent appearance with its immense sail of white mats; the pennants streaming from its yard denoting it as belonging to some great chief. It was a fit accompaniment to the magnificent scenery around, and advanced rapidly and gracefully along; it was a single canoe, one hundred feet in length, with an outrigger of large size ornamented with two thousand five hundred of the Cypræa ovula shells; its velocity was almost inconceivable, and every one was struck with the adroitness with which it was managed and landed upon the beach.