3 2 Voyage of the Novara. 



tioned. This consists in exhuming the bones of all those 

 who have died during- the year elapsed since the last N.E. 

 monsoon, and have been interred in a sort of cemetery- 

 called '' CwjucupaP* They next bring these bones into a 

 hut, seat themselves in a circle around the ghastly me- 

 mentos, and shriek and howl as at the day on which the 

 relation died. Wliile this scene of lamentation is going on, 

 a lighted cigar is usually stuck into the bony mouth of the 

 grisly skull, after which the latter is consigned to the grave 

 again. The rest of the bones however are either thrown 

 into the deep sea or hid far in the forest, while at the same 

 moment, as a further evidence of sorrow, a number of cocoa- 

 palms are cut down, and their fruit scattered to the winds. 

 By such symbols they apparently wish to express their 

 overwhelming grief, their weariness of existence, and their 

 indifference to the most valued gifts of nature, so that 

 they would even deprive themselves of the most universally 

 necessary of the means of subsistence — were it not that, 

 owing to the readiness with which the sea-shore palm is pro- 

 pagated, the nuts thus scattered at random, in all the indiffer- 

 ence to sublunary considerations incidental to a paroxysm 

 of grief, speedily strike root, and after a few years lift up 

 their heads again in the forest, at once ornamental and nu- 

 tritious. 



* This place of interment is situated close to a small village on the north-east 

 side of the island, where the graves are visible in the shape of a number of round 

 stakes sunk about three or four feet into the earth, which are adorned with all sorts 

 of variegated cloths and ribbons. 



