i8o SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



carving it and dragging it up to the village. All human heads brought 

 in are first placed on the canoe gong, at any rate by the Ac, suggesting 

 the Marquesan practice of decorating the prows of their war canoes with 

 the skulls of their enemies. When the gong is dragged up to the village 

 over wooden rollers, such as those used in launching a vessel, the blood 

 of the sacrificed animals is poured on to it, and in the old days any 

 stranger, whether friend or foe, who came to the village on the day when 

 a new drum was dragged in was killed in order that his head might adorn 

 the drum and his soul inhabit it. Indeed, until a head had come in, or 

 had been brought in for the drum, a fence was put round it which could 

 not be removed, nor could the drum be beaten until the young men had 

 been out and fetched a head to remedy the defect. This head was first 

 laid on the new drum. 



The parallel with Melanesian canoe practice is here very close. 

 Codrington writes 220 as follows : ' In the eastern Solomon Islands, if no 

 victim was met with in the first voyage of a new canoe, the chief to whom 

 the canoe belonged would privately arrange with some neighbouring chief 

 to let him have one of his men, some friendless man probably, or a 

 stranger, who would then be killed, perhaps as he went out to look at the 

 new canoe. . . . Further west also captives were kept with a view to 

 the taking of their heads when new canoes were launched.' He goes on 

 to give an example in a footnote : — ' The chief of Ravu bought his peko 

 [war canoe] ... for a large sum of money. It was brought over secretly 

 and put into a . . . canoe house, where it stood till a head should have 

 been procured. ... In the morning a single man came by ... in his 

 canoe . . . they caught and killed him, set up his head at the prow of 

 the [newly bought] canoe and paddled back to Ravu with shouting and 

 blowing conch shells.' 



Nowadays in the Ao country a mock raid takes the place of a real one, 

 but even this chastened sacrifice leads to a great success in hunting and 

 in agriculture. The Ao gong nowadays wears a necklace of basket balls 

 representing heads. Real heads were never used in this way, although 

 they were laid on the gong when first brought in. These basket-work 

 ornaments perhaps afford a parallel with the carved head which formed 

 part of the figure-head of the Melanesian canoe. The figure-head of an 

 Ao canoe is generally in the form of a buffalo or gayal head, that of the 

 Konyak tribes an elephant, buffalo or hornbill head, but Peal.^^i writing 

 in 1893, remarks that the Konyak figure-head is (as depicted in his draw- 

 ing) a crocodile, although ' there are no crocodiles in these hills,' and he 

 points out that it is a familiar decoration in Indonesia and the Pacific. 

 Although I have covered most of the ground visited by Peal in the last 

 century, I have never seen any figure-head resembling the head of a 

 crocodile, so that this tradition has apparently disappeared in the forty 

 years since he visited the Naga hills. 



It has occurred to me that the instruments used for beating the Naga 

 canoe gong may conceivably be degenerate paddles. The ordinary type 

 is more like the dumb-bell than anything, but often one end of the dumb- 



^="' The Melanesians, 297. "^ J -A. I., 22, 252. 



