38 ADVENTURES IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
“Thus began the mission to Somo Somo. What the mis- 
sionaries and their families suffered there, will never be 
fully known. Much which became dreadfully familiar to 
them by daily occurrence, could not be recorded here. All 
the horrors hinted at, rather than described, in the first part 
of this work, were constantly enacted in their most exag- 
gerated forms of cruelty and degradation in Somo Somo.... 
“On February 7, 1840, Mr. Hunt writes: ‘Last Monday 
afternoon, as soon as our class meeting was over, a report 
came that some dead men were being brought here from 
Lauthala. The report was so new and so indefinite, that 
at first we did not know what to make of it. Almost before 
we had time to think, the men were laid on the ground be- 
fore our house, and chiefs and priests and people met to 
divide them to be eaten. They brought eleven to our settle- 
ment; and it is not certain how many have been killed, but 
some say two or three hundred, others not more than thirty. 
““Their crime appears to be that of killing one man; and 
when the man who did it came to beg pardon, the chief re- 
quired this massacre to be made as a recompense. The prin- 
cipal chief was killed, and given to the great Ndengei of 
Somo Somo. I saw him after he was cut up and laid upon 
the fire to be cooked for the cannibal god of Somo Somo. 
O shame to human nature! I think there are some of the 
devils even that must be ashamed of their servants eating 
htman flesh...) . 
““The manner in which the poor wretches were treated 
was most shamefully disgusting. They did not honor them 
as much as they do pigs. When they took them away to 
be cooked, they dragged them on the ground: one had a 
rope round his neck, and the others took him by the hands 
and feet. 
“<They have been very strange with us ever since, .. 
and have threatened us, and treated us in such a way as to 
give us reason, so far as they are concerned, to expect the 
very worst. But we know, while we give ourselves to God, 
