Notes on tlie Customs of Mota, Banks Islands. 125 



7. COUVADE. 



When a child is born, neither father nor mother eat 

 things, such as fish or meat, which might make the infant 

 ill. The father does not go into sacred (rongo) places which 

 the child could not visit without risk. After the birth of 

 the first child the father does no heavy work for a month, 

 lest the child should be injured. Before the birth of a child 

 the father and mother eat as they please ; but before the 

 birth of her first child a woman must not eat fish caught by 

 hook, net, or trap. 



[A similar custom is observed in Fiji. Walter Carew, Esq., Commissioner 

 forTholo (Navitilevu Hill country), was good enough to send me the following 

 not 1 upon it: — "I have frequently observed that fathers abstained irom 

 certain articles of food from fear of affecting the child, born or unborn ; and I 

 have often joked the people about it. Once I persuaded a man to break the 

 tabu and eat some fowl. Unfortunately the child died some time afterwards, 

 and the father more than half believed me to have been the cause of its 

 death."— L. F.] 



8. Killing the Aged and the Sick. 



If people, from old age or sickness, were lingering in 

 misery, it was usual to bury them alive. Sometimes this 

 was done because the relatives were tired of the trouble of 

 waiting on the sick. Sometimes it was done at their own 

 request, to put them out of their misery. Ten years ago a 

 man at Mota buried his brother, who was in extreme weak- 

 ness from influenza, but he heaped the earth loosely over his 

 head, and went from time to time to ask him if he were yet 

 alive. 



[This custom was universal in Fiji. The aged and the sick were strangled or 

 buried alive when they became too great a burden upon their kinsfolk. 

 Frequently this euthanasia was a matter of common consent between the parties 

 concerned. Aged parents would walk to the grave dug for them by thair sons, 

 or offer their necks to the strangling cord, with even less reluctance or 

 emotion on either side than is manifested by a pauper family in England when 

 its old folks are removed to the " Union." In fact, the grave was to the Fijian 

 what the workhouse is to the poorest class at home, and thither he sent the 

 unproductive members of his family as a matter of course. Tribes who make 

 very curious artificial caves for their dead would place the sick man in the 

 vault thus made, and lower food down the shaft of the grave as long as he had 

 strength enough to reach and use it. When the food remained untouched the 

 grave was filled in. — L. F.] 



9. Infanticide. 



Infanticide of born or unborn children was common, either 

 from fear that the husband should think the child was before 

 its time, or to spite the husband in revenge for something, or 



