Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/185

Rh cooking the flesh of men, and the cooks were as skilled in the cannibal art as are the Parisian chefs in theirs. It was not uncommon to see twenty or thirty human bodies cooked at a time for a great feast, and the chiefs used to sacrifice their wives or their friends to gratify their tastes for this horrible article of food. When a chief demanded bakola (long pig), the customary name for human flesh, his attendants used to rush out and kill the first person they met in order to gratify his wish!

"The bakola was not eaten with the fingers like other kinds of food, but with wooden forks with long prongs, and these forks were tabu for any other purpose. Each fork had a special name, like an individual; the fork of one of the cannibal kings was named undroundo ('a dwarf carrying a burden'), and was presented in 1849 to one of the missionaries by Ra Vatu, the son of the King referred to. Ra Vatu talked freely about his father's love for human flesh, and showed to the missionary the line of stones which registered the number of bodies he had eaten. One of the native teachers who accompanied the missionary counted the stones, and found they numbered eight hundred and thirty-two! Thakombau, the last King, was a cannibal until the latter part of his life, and his father, Tanoa, continued a cannibal till the day of his death.

"Here is a story that I find in Doctor Seemann's report of his visit to Feejee:

"'A peculiar kind of taro was pointed out as having been eaten with a whole tribe of people. The story sounds strange, but as a number of natives were present when it was told, several of whom corroborated the various statements or corrected the proper names that occurred, its truth appears unimpeachable.

"'In Viti Levu, about three miles north-north-east from Namosi, there dwelt a tribe known as the Kai-na-loca, who, in days of yore, gave great offence to the ruling chief of the Namosi district, and as a punishment for their misdeeds the whole tribe was condemned to die. Every year the inmates of one house were baked and eaten, fire was set to the empty dwelling, and its foundation planted with taro. In the following year, as soon as this taro was ripe, it became the signal for the destruction of the next house and its inhabitants and the planting of a fresh field of taro. Thus house after house and family after family disappeared, until the father of the