Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/229

Rh time when the heads of warriors were not equal to the demand for them, some of the chiefs tattooed the faces of several slaves whom they intended to kill whenever the traders arrived who had agreed to buy the heads. But the slaves were not faithful to their masters, as they all ran away into the bushes just as the inflammation in their faces was passing away and they were getting in good condition to be marketable.

"They had the tabu in its most rigid form here," he continued; "but as you probably learned all about it in the South Sea islands I won't take your time to talk about it.

"Another curious custom of the Maoris was the muru; the word means 'plunder'—and some folks might call it robbery, which it amounted to, though it was the custom, and practically the law of the country.

"If a man's child fell into the fire and was severely or perhaps fatally burned, he was plundered of nearly everything he possessed, and the same was the case if his canoe upset while he was fishing, or any other accident happened to him. The people of the tribe assembled and gave him notice that they would be there for the muru on a particular day. He prepared a great feast for them, and after the feast they sacked his house and carried away pretty nearly everything he had. Sometimes he did not have enough left to live upon, but he had the opportunity of getting even by joining in a muru against somebody else. These performances were never opposed, and in fact a man would feel insulted if a serious accident of any kind happened to him and no notice was taken of it. The greater the robbery, the greater the honor conferred upon the victim.

"If a man killed another through malice and with deliberate intent, the act was generally considered of no consequence, or it might even be meritorious. If it was his own slave that he killed, it was considered his personal affair entirely; if the victim was of another tribe, it was a matter of tribal revenge or retaliation; and if of his own tribe he would