Notes on the Customs of Mota, Banks Islands. 127 



an empty, aimless life. They neither work nor fight. 

 Panoi is a dismal region — a worse, and not a better, earth, 

 and is dreaded accordingly. The ghosts are separated 

 according to the death they died, those who have been 

 shot being together ; those, also, who die of the same disease, 

 and so forth. The condition of the ghosts in Panoi is not 

 supposed to be affected by good or evil conduct during life ; 

 but some believe that the conditions of rich and poor, great 

 and insignificant, are reversed. The ghosts eat excrement, 

 particularly those who were rich in this world. In one 

 particular only was there a notion of a future reward for 

 goodness. Young men who had kept themselves chaste were 

 supposed to live under somewhat less dismal circumstances, 

 and to come out and dance on moonlight nights. Stupid, 

 harmless persons, also, were thought to be better off than the 

 rest. 



After the ghost reaches Panoi, it is weak for a time, and 

 cannot move about. The ghosts were supposed to leave 

 Panoi by night and range about their island. They are 

 greatly dreaded in the dark. Phosphorescent fungi are sup- 

 posed to be their eyes. They are heard shouting and 

 blowing whistles made of landcrabs' claws on moonlight 

 nights at the " sura," the entrance to Panoi on the mountain 

 at Mota. Some of them frequent the sea, and do mischief 

 there, as their fellows do on shore. They are supposed to be 

 malevolent towards the living. The accompanying sketch, 

 which was made by a native, represents one of the sea-fre- 

 quenting ghosts — in the language of books, " spirits of the 

 sea." To represent them as belonging to the sea, or because 

 the natives suppose they have suffered a sea change, they 

 are drawn as much like fishes as may be. These, and the land- 

 haunting ghosts, appear in travellers' and anthropologists' 

 writings as spirits of the sea, the woods, the rivers, &c; but 

 the natives call them all " tamate," which is simply " dead 

 men." So, also, what have been called " the spirits of the 

 sea and air" at Anaiteum reveal the truth through the 

 native word for them — natmas — which is neither more nor 

 less than the Mota tamate. 



There used to be in San Cristoval a canoe-house — temple, 

 according to travellers — which was full of drawings. Now 

 it is a ruin, and there is no hope of the natives doing any- 

 thing like it again. It had a series of pictures all along the 

 wall-plates and lower purlines, representing native life as 

 naturally as the drawings in an Egyptian tomb— e.g., feasts, 



