38 ETHNOGRAPHY. 



with any great horror. By some it has been supposed that this 

 custom originated in the fury of revengeful hostility ; by others, in 

 the cravings of hunger during seasons of famine. But the natives of 

 New Holland, who are quite as ferocious as the Polynesians, and who 

 frequently suffer severely from the want of food, are not cannibals. 



There is, in the minds of most men, savage as well as civilized, a 

 certain notion of sanctity attached to the dead body of a human being, 

 a feeling of dread and repugnance at the idea of touching or dis- 

 turbing a corpse, which no effort can altogether vanquish. This 

 feeling, however, appears hardly to exist among the people of these 

 islands, as is apparent in several of their customs. It will be sufficient 

 to mention two. The Polynesians do not, usually, like many savage 

 tribes, torture their prisoners to death, nor are they wont, as a general 

 thing, to preserve any part of the body of a slain enemy as a trophy, 

 though this is sometimes done. But it is their chief object, and espe- 

 cial delight, to secure the corpse, for the purpose of practising upon it 

 every horrible disfigurement which the imagination can devise. Mr. 

 Ellis* relates several of the modes in use among them, and remarks 

 that some are too revolting to be described. No other race of savages 

 has evinced this disposition to the same extent. 



The other custom relates to the disposal of their dead. With most 

 barbarous tribes, as well as civilized nations, the natural repugnance 

 to the presence of a corpse is shown in the desire to put it away, as 

 soon as possible, "out of their sight." The Polynesians have little or 

 none of this feeling. In some islands, as Tahiti and Nukuhiva, the 

 bodies of the dead are (or were) exposed on stages near the dwellings 

 of the living ; in others, as at the Navigator and Sandwich Islands, 

 they are buried either near or in the houses of their friends, and the 

 skulls, and sometimes other bones, afterwards taken up and preserved 

 as relics. At New Zealand, the body is placed on the ground in a 

 sitting or crouching posture, and enclosed within the two halves of a 

 canoe ; this is set in the midst of their villages, which are often made 

 unapproachable to a foreigner by the scent of putrefaction. 



To a people like this, in whom the salutary awe of death is so com- 

 pletely extinct, who are naturally of a bloodthirsty disposition, and 

 whose religious belief has nothing of a moral or elevating tendency, 

 there is, evidently, no restraint but that of custom to deter them from 

 cannibalism. The practice may have commenced in some access of 



* Polynesian Researches, vol. i., chap. xi. 



