CHAPTER XI--LONG-PIG--A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing
so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue,
will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it.
And yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of
the Buddhist and the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of
creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves;
we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-house
resounds daily with screams of pain and fear. We distinguish,
indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an
animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how
precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main
element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions,
my mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his
character and the manner of his death. Many islanders live with
their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth
with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity,
enterprise, and sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am
told) rolls them into the sun to burst; he is the terror of the
shepherd. Mrs. Stevenson, senior, has seen one fleeing to the
woods with a lamb in his mouth; and I saw another come rapidly (and
erroneously) to the conclusion that the Casco was going down, and
swim through the flush water to the rail in search of an escape.
It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one
to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to
the house of his original owner. I was once, at Tautira, a pig-
master on a considerable scale; at first, in my pen, the utmost
good feeling prevailed; a little sow with a belly-ache came and
appealed to us for help in the manner of a child; and there was one
shapely black boar, whom we called Catholicus, for he was a
particular present from the Catholics of the village, and who early
displayed the marks of courage and friendliness; no other animal,
whether dog or pig, was suffered to approach him at his food, and
for human beings he showed a full measure of that toadying fondness
so common in the lower animals, and possibly their chief title to
the name. One day, on visiting my piggery, I was amazed to see
Catholicus draw back from my approach with cries of terror; and if
I was amazed at the change, I was truly embarrassed when I learnt
its reason. One of the pigs had been that morning killed;
Catholicus had seen the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling
in the shambles, and from that time his confidence and his delight
in life were ended. We still reserved him a long while, but he
could not endure the sight of any two-legged creature, nor could
we, under the circumstances, encounter his eye without confusion.
I have assisted besides, by the ear, at the act of butchery itself;
the victim's cries of pain I think I could have borne, but the
execution was mismanaged, and his expression of terror was
contagious: that small heart moved to the same tune with ours.
Upon such 'dread foundations' the life of the European reposes, and
yet the European is among the less cruel of races. The
paraphernalia of murder, the preparatory brutalities of his
existence, are all hid away; an extreme sensibility reigns upon the
surface; and ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what
they daily expect of their butchers. Some will be even crying out
upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of this paragraph. And
so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel; apart from this
custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to
cut a man's flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to
oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite
were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at
last. In island circles of refinement it was doubtless thought bad
taste to expatiate on what was ugly in the practice.
Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the
Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the
lively haunt of its exercise, there by scanty but significant
survivals. Hawaii is the most doubtful. We find cannibalism
chronicled in Hawaii, only in the history of a single war, where it
seems to have been thought exception, as in the case of mountain
outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus. In Tahiti, a single
circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive. In historic
times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of the
victim were formally offered to the chief: a delicacy to the
leading guest. All Melanesia appears tainted. In Micronesia, in
the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a
tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone
I long looked and asked in vain. I was told tales indeed of men
who had been eaten in a famine; but these were nothing to my
purpose, for the same thing is done under the same stress by all
kindreds and generations of men. At last, in some manuscript notes
of Dr. Turner's, which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on
one damning evidence: on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for
theft was to be killed and eaten. How shall we account for the
universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of
such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such
different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that
they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food?
I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on
vegetables only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew
to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open
another tin of miserable mutton. And in at least one ocean
language, a particular word denotes that a man is 'hungry for
fish,' having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer
satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert,
begins to lust after flesh-pots. Add to this the evidences of
over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we
see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.
It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far
from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice. The
higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and
Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part
forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-
sail in their waters. It lingered only in some low islands where
life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like
the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans. The Marquesans intertwined
man-eating with the whole texture of their lives; long-pig was in a
sense their currency and sacrament; it formed the hire of the
artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and
attraction of a feast. To-day they are paying the penalty of this
bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-
eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and
pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal
element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript
list. Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution
exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more
handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the
beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run,
and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European
practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found
needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous
(and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face
empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall
pity them? The least rigorous will say that they were justly
served.
Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance: the flesh must
be eaten. The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him;
and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a
vengeance. Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized
and slew a wretch who had offended them. His offence, it is to be
supposed, was dire; they could not bear to leave their vengeance
incomplete, and, under the eyes of the French, they did not dare to
hold a public festival. The body was accordingly divided; and
every man retired to his own house to consummate the rite in
secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish
match-box. The barbarous substance of the drama and the European
properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination.
Yet more striking is another incident of the very year when I was
there myself, 1888. In the spring, a man and woman skulked about
the school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child
alone. Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying
manners--'You are So-and-so, son of So-and-so?' they asked; and
caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods. Some instinct woke
in the child's bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of
his deceivers. He sought to break from them; he screamed; and
they, casting off the mask, seized him the more strongly and began
to run. His cries were heard; his schoolmates, playing not far
off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple fled and
vanished in the woods. They were never identified; no prosecution
followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge
against the boy's father, and designed to eat him in revenge. All
over the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be
observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an
individual. A family, a class, a village, a whole valley or
island, a whole race of mankind, share equally the guilt of any
member. So, in the above story, the son was to pay the penalty for
his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an American whaler, was to
bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver. I am
reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group, which was
told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the
strangeness of the scene. Two men had awakened the animosity of
the Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be
punished. A single native served as executioner. Early in the
morning, in the face of a large concourse of spectators, he waded
out upon the reef between his victims. These neither complained
nor resisted; accompanied their destroyer patiently; stooped down,
when they had waded deep enough, at his command; and he (laying one
hand upon the shoulders of each) held them under water till they
drowned. Doubtless, although my informant did not tell me so,
their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.
It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high
place.
The day was sultry and clouded. Drenching tropical showers
succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine. The green pathway of the
road wound steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide
a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand,
and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the
abstract of their virtues. Presently the road, mounting, showed us
the vale of Hatiheu, on a larger scale; and the priest, with
occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and
told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war
in the old days: one on the north-east, one along the beach, one
behind upon the mountain. With a survivor of this latter clan
Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been
to the sea's edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish.
Each in its own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered.
One step without the boundaries was to affront death. If famine
came, the men must out to the woods to gather chestnuts and small
fruits; even as to this day, if the parents are backward in their
weekly doles, school must be broken up and the scholars sent
foraging. But in the old days, when there was trouble in one clan,
there would be activity in all its neighbours; the woods would be
laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables for himself
might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes. Nor was the
pointed occasion needful. A dozen different natural signs and
social junctures called this people to the war-path and the
cannibal hunt. Let one of chiefly rank have finished his
tattooing, the wife of one be near upon her time, two of the
debauching streams have deviated nearer on the beach of Hatiheu, a
certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain ominous formation
of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly the arms
were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay their
fratricidal ambuscades. It appears besides that occasionally,
perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house,
where he lay for a stated period like a person dead. When he came
forth it was to run for three days through the territory of the
clan, naked and starving, and to sleep at night alone in the high
place. It was now the turn of the others to keep the house, for to
encounter the priest upon his rounds was death. On the eve of the
fourth day the time of the running was over; the priest returned to
his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the morning the number of
the victims was announced. I have this tale of the priest on one
authority--I think a good one,--but I set it down with diffidence.
The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I almost
think I must have heard them oftener referred to. Upon one point
there seems to be no question: that the feast was sometimes
furnished from within the clan. In times of scarcity, all who were
not protected by their family connections--in the Highland
expression, all the commons of the clan--had cause to tremble. It
was vain to resist, it was useless to flee. They were begirt upon
all hands by cannibals; and the oven was ready to smoke for them
abroad in the country of their foes, or at home in the valley of
their fathers.
At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his
left into the twilight of the forest. We were now on one of the
ancient native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and
clambering, it seemed, at random over boulders and dead trees; but
the lad wound in and out and up and down without a check, for these
paths are to the natives as marked as the king's highway is to us;
insomuch that, in the days of the man-hunt, it was their labour
rather to block and deface than to improve them. In the crypt of
the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold; overhead, upon the
leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only here and
there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall,
and make a spot upon my mackintosh. Presently the huge trunk of a
banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an
ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm,
announced that we had reached the paepae tapu.
Paepae signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is
built on; and even such a paepae--a paepae hae--may be called a
paepae tapu in a lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the
haunt of spirits; but the public high place, such as I was now
treading, was a thing on a great scale. As far as my eyes could
pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was
all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in
front, a crumbling parapet contained the main arena; and the
pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells
and small enclosures. No trace remained of any superstructure, and
the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to seize. I visited
another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it was easy to
follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of honour
for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single
joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights
richly carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously
tended. No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach
upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones
were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil.
On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to
watch and cleanse it. No other foot of man was suffered to draw
near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to
sleep--perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but, in the time of
the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each
had his appointed seat. There were places for the chiefs, the
drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The drums--
perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high--
continuously throbbed in time. In time the singers kept up their
long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers,
tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and
gesticulated--their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like
butterflies. The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is
extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost
every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more unanimously
must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more
wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld
them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan,
rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of
the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a
complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes
of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead
women. All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the
women and the commons; and, for those who were privileged to eat of
it, there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-
pig. It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came
from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy
with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we
call emphatically human--denying the honour of that name to those
who lack them. In such feasts--particularly where the victim has
been slain at home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade
with whom they had played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they
had shared--the whole body of these sentiments is outraged. To
consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, the
fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their
guns, and open fire in passing, on a cannibal island.
And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under the
high, dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the
one hand, in his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan
schoolboy on the other, the whole business appeared infinitely
distant, and fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of
history. The bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He
smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feasters and
their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of the
old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and gone since
this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the place
with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge.
In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still
living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within
the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped
victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of
some repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests
maintained their jocular attitude: rallying the cannibals as upon
an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say,
to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we
shame a child from stealing sugar. We may here recognise the
temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.
