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 *******;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?