210 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



man would feast with him, he had ordered a young boy to be killed 

 and cooked in his honor, as the greatest delicacy obtainable, and that 

 the joint before them was the best part, the thigh. 



One is too apt to associate all sorts of ferocious qualities, cruelty, 

 deceit, brutality, and inhospitality, with the mere word cannibal, thus 

 stigmatizing with these vicious qualities whole races of people who do 

 but retain this one among other ancient habits and customs ; whereas 

 in reality cannibals are much the same as other folk whose food is of 

 a less barbarous nature. The very Caribs themselves, from the Latin- 

 ized name of whom the word is probably derived, the arch-types of 

 what cannibals should be, are described as possessing very different 

 qualities. Their tribes, the remnants of which still linger in one of 

 the West India isles, inhabited the northern part of South America 

 and many of the Antilles before the arrival of the Spaniards, who de- 

 stroyed almost the whole race. The description their conquerors give 

 of them is more like that of a nation of lotos-eaters than of a sanguinary 

 and ruthless people. " They are quiet, calm, and sedentary, and given 

 up to idleness and day-dreams," say their historians, " but are well 

 made and possess great powers of endurance." The testimony of the 

 writer must be given on the same side ; he has had the pleasure and 

 privilege of knowing many cannibals, Feejeean, New Hebridean, Solo- 

 mon-Islander, and others, and he has, on the whole, found them gentle, 

 quiet, and inoffensive when not engaged in the practice and observance 

 of the special principle that they uphold. It must be confessed, how- 

 ever, that he had not the same appreciation of their character upon the 

 one occasion when he ran the narrowest chance of ministering to'what 

 he then considered a very depraved and morbid appetite. 



Early travelers in New Zealand always express astonishment, when 

 they discover the cannibal propensities of the inhabitants, that so gen- 

 tle and pleasant-mannered a people could become upon occasion such 

 ferocious savages. Earle, who wrote a very readable, intelligent, and 

 but little known account of the Maoris very early in the present cent- 

 ury, speaks of the gentle manners and kindly ways of a New Zealand 

 chief, whom afterward he discovered to be an inveterate cannibal. He 

 relates that he visited the place where was cooking the body of a 

 young slave girl that his friend had killed for the purpose. The head 

 was severed from the body ; the four quarters, with the principal 

 bones removed, were compressed and packed into a small oven in the 

 groimd, and covered with earth. It was a case of unjustifiable canni- 

 balism. No revenge was gratified by the deed, and no excuse could 

 be made that the body was eaten to perfect their triumph. Earle says 

 that he learned that the flesh takes many hours to cook, that it is very 

 tough if not thoroughly cooked, but that it pulls in pieces, like a bit 

 of blotting-paper, if well done. He continues that the victim was a 

 handsome, pleasant-looking girl of sixteen, and one that he used fre- 

 quently to see about the pah. To quote his own words : 



