Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/66



experience. Among the natives the " tabu," a method of exercising power by the priests, was held in absolute awe, and influenced the whole nation as nothing else did. What was declared tabu must be respected and inviolable, or death would follow. There was ¢adu at certain seasons upon different articles of food, when they could not be touched. Under its restrictions no persons of different sexes could eat together, neither of the same food, nor at the same table, nor under the same roof. A native home consisted of various houses—made of straw, thatched upon light wooden frames—and the builder must build one for himself to eat in, and one for his wife, one to sleep in, and another for his god. Days were tabu, and then silence prevailed; no man could be with woman, and if a woman ate pork, cocoa-nuts, or bananas on that day, she must die. The teaching was, that for violation of the ¢abu the gods would kill them, and their experience was, that the priests and chiefs were the divine instruments that obeyed the high behest.

It took but a short time for the foreigners, who must have been in continual intercourse with this people, to learn their religious rites, and their slavish idolatry; and the natives, if not equally swift in learning the absence of any religious ceremonies among the former, could not fail soon to perceive that the strangers not only lived free from harm, without heeding the ¢adu of their priests, or the admonitions of their gods, but that they looked only with derision upon their rites, and their slavish subjection to the priests. And as it resulted after many years of such intercourse, that the people and the chiefs perceived the useless cruelty of the ¢abu, and the insignificance of the wooden gods they had set up, and so broke up the former and destroyed the latter, it seems hardly necessary to have recourse to a special Providence

to explain the slow and gradual awakening in the heathen mind of a practical common sense.

When the American missionaries reached the islands in 1820, they found them just rising from the depths of a wild debauch, which had accompanied the funeral ceremonies of Kamehameha I. He is represented as a man of unusual activity and strength of intellect, who had taken counsel! of the possible superiority of the white race, and who had learned and taught his people much that his keen observation had acquired. Writers speak of him as above the ordinary vices of his people, and he was remembered with such fondness and tenderness as could exist in the savage breast. He was so great as a warrior, that Jarves speaks of him as_ the " Napoleon of the Pacific," and denominates him as the "good and noble savage "—a conjunction of words which seems hardly congruous. The issue of his last sickness seems to have been awaited with considerable anxiety by his whole people. When he had died, "the chiefs held a consultation. One of them spoke thus: 'This is my thought: we will eat him raw.' Kaahumanu (a daughter of the King) replied, ' Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with his successor. Our part in him—the breath—has departed; his remains will be disposed of by Liholiho (his son and successor)'"—a speech perhaps correctly reported, but which is quite unlike any other in the records. The great respect and reverence with which he was held can be partly estimated, when we read, that "a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies," an animal of considerable scarcity in the islands, and held in ancient and present estimation as the choicest article of diet. "When the sacred hog was baked, the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god."

In the volumes which have been writ