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wish to resist, the taking from himself of any such property by any one who 
could and would take it. 
Again, the primitive man must have been far less sensitive to pain, and far 
less subject to fear, than the normal civilised man. I do not mean that the 
primitive Fijian was without the ordinary animal shrinking from physical pain, 
but that he cannot have been nearly as sensitive even to physical pain as is the 
more sophisticated man; nor had he the same mental pain, the same anticipation 
and fear of pain, that the civilised man has. 
Having thus dealt with some of the more important points in the character 
of the primitive Fijian, I propose next to consider how far these suffice to account 
for some of the more ‘ savage’ conditions under which these islanders when first 
seen were living. 
Cannibalism claims the first mention, in that, though the practice has been 
recorded from many other parts of the world, it is commonly supposed to have 
been carried further in Fiji than elsewhere. 
Here, however, it is at once necessary to point out that the outbreak of 
cannibalism in Fiji in the first half of the last century was not due to any 
innate and depraved taste on the part of the Fijians, and that the practice to the 
degree and after the fashion of which the story-books tell was not natural to the 
Fijian, whether of Melanesian or Polynesian stock. 
It is probable, even perhaps certain, that all the Fiji islanders occasionally ate 
human flesh before the coming of white men to the islands; but it was only after 
the arrival of the new-comers that this practice, formerly only occasional and 
hardly more than ceremonial, developed into the abominable orgies of the first 
half of the last century. The first Europeans to set foot—about 1800—and to re- 
main in the islands for any time were the so-called ‘ beachcombers.’ At first at 
least, these renegades from civilisation, to secure their own precarious positior: 
and safety, contrived to put themselves under the patronage of some one or other 
of the great native chiefs, who would be Polynesians, and assisted and egged on 
these chiefs in their then main occupation of fighting other great rival chiefs, also 
Polynesians, and raiding the less advanced Melanesians of tne surrounding dis- 
tricts. The guns and ammunition which the beachcombers, in some cases at 
least, brought with them or managed to procure, and the superior craft which 
they had imbibed from civilisation, greatly assisted them in this immoral pur- 
pose. Consequently a habit of cruelty, new to the Fijian, was implanted and 
developed, especially in the Polynesian chiefs. It became more and more a 
fashion for the greatest native warriors, thus egged on, to vie with each other in 
the number of their victims and in the reckless cruelty with which these were 
killed. Doubtless at first the victims were opponents killed in fight, sometimes 
great rival chiefs and sometimes mere /oi polloi who had been led out to fight, 
probably not very reluctantly, for their chiefs. Incidentally more and more 
people were killed; and the bodies of the slain were conveniently disposed of in 
the ovens. A taste for this food was thus developed in the chiefs—though this 
seems, for a time at least, to have been confined to the great chiefs, most of those 
of lower status, and all women, refusing to partake, at any rate till a later 
period. Before long, when the number of the killed ran short, the deficiency was 
made up by clubbing more and more even of their own people, till eventually the 
great native warrior took pride in the mere number of those he had killed and 
eaten. 
Tt seems probable that even the coming of the missionaries, who first reached 
Fiji thirty or forty years after the earliest beachcombers, and at once began 
almost heroic efforts to stop cannibalism, thereby to some extent temporarily even 
aggravated the evil. For the chiefs, in their characteristic temper of gasconade, 
killed and ate more and more unrestrainedly, in mockery of the missionaries and 
to show what fine fellows they thought themselves to be. 
To return from this digression into a somewhat distasteful subject, cannibalism 
as practised by the Fijians before the coming of white men was very different, 
and, from the Fijian point of view—if I may say so without fear of being mis- 
understood—not altogether indefensible. It must be remembered that there was, 
as it were, no killing in our sense of the word involved, merely a setting free 
from the non-essential body of the essential soul, which soul survived just as well 
without the body as with it. 
