The crime of Huahine for love of Weaver of Mats; story of Tahia’s white man who was eaten; the disaster that befell Honi, the white man who used his harpoon against his friends.

During my absence in Taaoa there had been crime and scandal in my own valley. Andre Bauda met me on the beach road as I returned and told me the tale. The giant Tahitian sailor of the schooner Papeite, Huahine, was in the local jail, charged with desertion; a serious offense, to which his plea was love of a woman, and that woman Weaver of Mats, who had her four names tattooed on her right arm.

Huahine, seeing her upon the beach, had felt a flame of love that nerved him to risk hungry shark and battering surf. Carried from her even in the moment of meeting, he had resisted temptation until the schooner was sailing outside the Bay of Traitors, running before a breeze to the port of Tai-o-hae, and then he had flung himself naked into the sea and taken the straight course back to Atuona, reaching his sweetheart after a seven-hour’s struggle with current and breaker. Flag, the gendarme, found him in her hut, and brought him to the calaboose.

The following morning I attended his trial. He came before his judge elegantly dressed, for, besides a red pareu about his middle, he wore a pink silk shawl over his shoulders. Both were the gift of Weaver of Mats, as he had come to her without scrip or scrap. He needed little clothing, as his skin was very brown and his strong body magnificent.

He was an acceptable prisoner to Bauda, who had charge of the making and repair of roads and bridges, so Huahine was quickly sentenced and put to work with others who were paying their taxes by labor. Weaver of Mats moved with him to the prison, where they lived together happily, cooking their food in the garden and sleeping on mats beneath the palms.

On all the paepaes it was said that Huahine would probably be sent to Tahiti, as there are strict laws against deserting ships and against vagabondage in the Marquesas. Meantime the prisoner was happy. Many a Tahitian and white sailor gazes toward these islands as a haven from trouble, and in Huahine’s exploit I read the story of many a poor white who in the early days cast away home and friends and arduous toil to dwell here in a breadfruity harem.

“There is a tale told long ago by a man of Hanamenu to a traveler named Christian,” I said to Haabunai, the carver, while we sat rolling pandanus cigarettes in the cool of the evening. “It runs thus:

“Some thirty years ago a sailor from a trading schooner that had put into the bay for sandalwood was badly treated by his skipper, who refused him shore-leave. So, his bowels hot with anger, this sailor determined to desert his hard and unthanked toil, wed some island heiress, and live happy ever after. Therefore one evening he swam ashore, found a maid to his liking, and was hidden by her until the ship departed.

“Now Tahia was a good wife, and loved her beautiful white man; all that a wife could do she did, cooking his food, bathing his feet, rolling cigarettes for him all day long as he lay upon the mats. But her father in time became troubled, and there was grumbling among the people, for the white man would not work.

“He would not climb the palm to bring down the nuts; he lay and laughed on his paepae in the Meinui, the season of breadfruit, when all were busy; and when they brought him rusty old muskets to care for, he turned his back upon them. Sometimes he fished, going out in a canoe that Tahia paddled, and making her fix the bait on the hook, but he caught few fish.

“‘Aue te hanahana, aua ho’i te kaikai,’ said his father-in-law. ’He who will not labor, neither shall he eat.’ But the white man laughed and ate and labored not.

“A season passed and another, and there came a time of little rain. The bananas were few, and the breadfruit were not plentiful. One evening, therefore, the old men met in conference, and this was their decision: ‘Rats are becoming a nuisance, and we will abate them.’

“Next morning the father sent Tahia on an errand to another valley. Then men began to dig a large oven in the earth before Tahia’s house, where the white man lay on the mats at ease. Presently he looked and wondered and looked again. And at length he rose and came down to the oven, saying, ‘What’s up?’

“‘Plenty kaikai. Big pig come by and by,’ they said.

“So he stood waiting while they dug, and no pig came. Then he said, ‘Where is the pig?’ And at that moment the u’u crashed upon his skull, so that he fell without life and lay in the oven. Wood was piled about him, and he was baked, and there was feasting in Hanamenu.

“In the twilight Tahia came over the hills, weary and hungry, and asked for her white man. ‘He has gone to the beach,’ they said.

“He will return soon, therefore sit and eat, my daughter,” said her father, and gave her the meat wrapped in leaves. So she ate heartily, and waited for her husband. And all the feasters laughed at her, so that little by little she learned the truth. She said nothing, but went away in the darkness.

“And it is written, Haabunai, that searchers for the mei came upon her next day in the upper valley, and she was hanging from a tall palm-tree with a rope of purau about her neck.”

“That may be a true story,” said Haabunai. “Though it is the custom here to eat the eva when one is made sick by life. And very few white men were ever eaten in the islands, because they knew too much and were claimed by some woman of power.” He paused for a moment to puff his cigarette.

“Now there was a sailor whom my grandfather ate, and he was white. But there was ample cause for that, for never was a man so provoking.

“He was a harpooner on a whale-ship, a man who made much money, but he liked rum, and when his ship left he stayed behind. They sent two boats ashore and searched for him, but my grandfather sent my father with him into the hills, and after three days the captain thought he had been drowned, and sailed away without him.

“My grandfather gave him my father’s sister to wife, and like that man of whom you told, he was much loved by her, though he would do nothing but make namu enata and drink it and dance and sleep. Grandfather said that he could dance strange dances of the sailor that made them all laugh until their ribs were sore.

“This man, whose name was Honi ”

“Honi?” said I. “I do not know that word.”

“Nor I. It is not Marquesan. It was his name, that he bore on the ship.”

“Honi?” I repeated incredulously, and then light broke. “You mean Jones?”

“It may be. I do not know. Honi was his name, as my grandfather said it. And this Honi had brought from the whale-ship a gun and a harpoon. This harpoon had a head of iron and was fixed on a spear, with a long rope tied to the head, so that when it was thrust into the whale he was fastened to the boat that pursued him through the water. There was no weapon like it on the island, and it was much admired.

“Honi fought with us when our tribe, the Papuaei, went to war with the Tiu of Taaoa. He used his gun, and with it he won many battles, until he had killed so many of the enemy that they asked for peace. Honi was praised by our tribe, and a fine house was built for him near the river, in the place where eels and shrimp were best.

“In this large house he drank more than in the other smaller one. He used his gun to kill pigs and even birds. My grandfather reproved him for wasting the powder, when pigs could easily be killed with spears. But Honi would not listen, and he continued to kill until he had no more powder. Then he quarreled with my grandfather, and one day, being drunk, he tried to kill him, and then fled to the Kau-i-te-oho, the tribe of redheaded people at Hanahupe.

“Learning that Honi was no longer with us, the Tiu tribe of Taaoa declared war again, and the red-headed tribe had an alliance with them through their chief’s families intermarrying, so that Honi fought with them. His gun being without powder, he took his harpoon, and he came with the Tui and the Kau-i-te-oho to the dividing-line between the valleys where we used to fight.

“Where the precipices reared their middle points between the valleys, the tribes met and reviled one another.

“’You people with hair like cooked shrimp! Are you ready for the ovens of our valley?’ cried my grandfather’s warriors.

“’You little men, who run so fast, we have now your white warrior with us, and you shall die by the hundreds!’ yelled our enemies.”

This picture of the scene at the line was characteristic of Polynesian warfare. It is almost exactly like the meeting of armies long ago in Palestine and Syria, and before the walls of Troy. Goliath slanged David grossly, threatening to give his body to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and David retorted in kind. So, when Ulysses launched his spear at Soccus, he cried:

“Ah, wretch, no father shall they corpse compose,
Thy dying eye no tender mother close;
But hungry birds shall tear those balls away,
And hungry vultures scream around their prey.”

“For a quarter of an hour,” said Haabunai, “my grandfather’s people and the warriors of the enemy called thus to each other upon the top of the cliffs, and then Honi and the brother of my grandfather, head men of either side, advanced to battle.

“The first time Honi threw his harpoon, he hooked my great-uncle. He hooked him through the middle, and before he could be saved, a half dozen of the Tiu men pulled on the rope and dragged him over the line to be killed and eaten.

“Two more of our tribe Honi snared with this devilish spear, and it was not so much death as being pulled over to them and roasted that galled us. All day the battle raged, except when both sides stopped by agreement to eat popoi and rest, but late in the afternoon a strange thing happened.

“Honi had thrown his harpoon, and by bad aim it entered a tree. The end of the line he had about his left arm, and as he tried to pull out the spear-head from the wood, his legs became entangled in the rope, and my grandfather, who was very strong, seized the rope near the tree, dragged the white man over the line, and killed him with a rock.

“The enemy ran away then, and that night our people ate Honi. Grandfather said his flesh was so tough they had to boil it. There were no tipoti (Standard-oil cans) in those days, but our people took banana leaves and formed a big cup that would hold a couple of quarts of water, and into these they put red-hot stones, and the water boiled. Grandfather said they cut Honi into small pieces and boiled him in many of these cups. Still he was tough, but nevertheless they ate him.

“Honi was tattooed. Not like Marquesans, but like some white sailors, he had certain marks on him. Grandfather saved these marks, and wore them as a tiki, or amulet, until he died, when he gave it to me. He had preserved the skin so that it did not spoil.”

Haabunai yawned and said his mouth was parched from much talking, but when a shell of rum was set before him and he had drunk, he fetched from his house the tiki. It was as large as my hand, dark and withered, but with a magnifying glass I could see a rude cross and three letters, I H S in blue.

“Grandfather became a Christian and was no longer an enata Ttaikaia, an eater of men, but he kept the tiki always about his neck, because he thought it gave him strength,” said my guest.

I handed him back the gruesome relic, though he began advances to make it my property. For the full demijohn he would have parted with the tiki that had been his grandfather’s, but I had no fancy for it. One can buy in Paris purses of human skin for not much more than one of alligator hide.

“Honi must have been very tough,” I said.

“He must have been,” Haabunai said regretfully. “Grandfather had his teeth to the last. He would never eat a child. Like all warriors he preferred for vengeance’s sake the meat of another fighter.”

He had not yet sprung the grim jest of almost all cannibalistic narratives. I did not ask if Honi’s wife had eaten of him, as had Tahia of her white man. It is probable that she did, and that they deceived her. It was the practical joke of those days.

I had seen Apporo, my landlady, staggering homeward a few days earlier in a pitiful state of intoxication. Some one had given her a glass of mixed absinthe, vermuth, and rum, and with confidence in the giver she had tossed it down. That is the kind of joke that in other days would have been the deluding of some one into partaking of the flesh of a lover or friend.

Reasoning from our standpoint, it is easy to assume that cannibalism is a form of depravity practised by few peoples, but this error is dispelled by the researches of ethnologists, who inform us that it was one of the most ancient customs of man and began when he was close brother to the ape. Livingstone, when he came upon it on the Dark continent, concluded that the negroes came to that horrible desire from their liking for the meat of gorillas, which so nearly approach man in appearance. Herodatus, writing twenty-five hundred years ago, mentions the Massagetae who boiled the flesh of their old folks with that of cattle, both killed for the occasion. Cannibalism marked the life of all peoples in days of savagery.

Plutarch says that Cataline’s associates gave proof of their loyalty to that agitator and to one another by sacrificing and eating a man. Achilles expressed his wish that he might devour Hector. The Kafirs ate their own children in the famine of 1857, and the Germans ate one another when starvation maddened them, long after Maryland and Massachusetts had become thriving settlements in the New World. There is a historic instance of a party of American pioneers lost in the mountains of California in the nineteenth century, who in their last extremity of hunger ate several of the party.

To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years. We have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the world.

Undoubtedly cannibalism began as a question of food supply. In early times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his easiest prey. The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family, or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food, such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen. I saw Marquesan women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of sheer instinct and stomachic need. When salt is not to be had, the desire for meat is most intense. In these valleys the upper tribes, whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish, were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none of the coast tribes are guilty.

As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew, and it became a passion akin to the opium habit in some, the supply of other meat had little to do with its continuance. In New Britain human bodies were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried on in these empty tenements of the human soul.

Although cannibalism originated in a bodily need, man soon gave it an emotional and spiritual meaning, as he has given them to all customs that have their root in his physical being. Two forms of cannibalism seem to have existed among the first historic peoples. One was concerned with the eating of relatives and intimates, for friendship’s sake or to gain some good quality they possessed. Thus when babies died, the Chavante mothers, on the Uruguay, ate them to regain their souls. Russians ate their fathers, and the Irish, if Strabo is to be credited, thought it good to eat both deceased parents. The Lhopa of Sikkim, in Tibet, eat the bride’s mother at the wedding feast.

But Maori cannibalism, with its best exposition in the Marquesas, was due to a desire for revenge, cooking and eating being the greatest of insults. It was an expression of jingoism, a hatred for all outside the tribe or valley, and it made the feud between valleys almost incessant.

It was in no way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and ways of each race, and here the eating of enemies was authorized by every teaching of priest and leader, by time-honored custom and the strongest dictates of nature.

White men and Chinese, in fact, all foreigners, were seldom eaten here. There were exceptions when vengeance impelled, such at that of Honi or Jones, whom Haabunai’s grandfather ate, but as a rule they were spared and indeed cherished, as strange visitors who might teach the people useful things. Only their own depravity brought them to the oven.

At such times, the feast was even a disagreeable rite. It is a fact that the Marquesan disliked the flesh of a white man. They said he was too salty. Hundreds of years ago the Aztecs, according to Bernal Diaz, who was there, complained that “the flesh of the Spaniards failed to afford even nourishment, since it was intolerably bitter.” This, though the Indians were dying of starvation by hundreds of thousands in the merciless siege of Mexico City.

Standards of barbarity vary. Horrible and revolting as the very mention of cannibalism is to us, it should be remembered that it rested upon an attitude toward the foreigner and the slave that in some degree still persists everywhere in the world. Outside the tribe, the savage recognized no kindred humanity. Members of every clan save his own were regarded as strange and contemptible beings, outlandish and barbarous in manners and customs, not to be regarded as sharers of a common birthright. This attitude toward the stranger did not at all prevent the cannibal from being, within his own tribe, a gentle, merry, and kindly individual.

Even toward the stranger the Marquesan was never guilty of torture of any kind. Though they slew and ate, they had none of the refinements of cruelty of the Romans, not even scalping enemies as did the Scythians, Visigoths, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons. In their most bloody wars they often paused in battle to give the enemy time to eat and to rest, and there is no record of their ever ringing a valley about with armed warriors and starving to death the women and children within. Victims for the gods were struck down without warning, so that they might not suffer even the pangs of anticipation. The thumb-screw and rack of Christendom struck with horror those of my cannibal friends to whom I mentioned them.