726 
THE VOYAGE OE H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
tions of natives who build them for their common and exclusive use. The skulls with 
which the roof is decorated inside are mementos of successive feasts, a bone or the skull 
or some other relic of every animal feasted on being thus preserved and set up. The 
collection thus formed serves as a kind of chronicle and record of 
the flight of time, which is thus divided into feasts and intervals of 
low diet between them. The human skulls and the bunches of hair 
are equally relics of cannibal feasts, and it is possible, as suggested by 
Mr. Wilfred Powell,, that the male and female carved wooden figures 
described above as forming the door-posts of one of the club houses 
represent a man and woman eaten at the inauguration feast of the 
club house itself. If so, the absence of the mop of hair in the male 
figure may be accounted for by supposing him to be represented as 
ready for the feast with his hair already removed for suspension in a 
net. The absence of ornaments and weapons from the figures may 
be similarly explained. The fish may represent part of the banquet. 
The club houses were considered more private than the dwellings. 
The one with the images for door-posts was frequently closed, and the 
natives objected to its being entered, though sometimes it was left 
freely open. When one of the naturalists of the Expedition began 
sounding the big drums in the other club house, the guides hastily 
drew him out in terror, and made signs that the consequences 
would be serious. Human skulls are kept stuck up in the thatch 
of the houses. At D’Entrecasteaux Island, one having an ornament in the nose was 
suspended to the front of a house over the doorway by means of a stick thrust through 
holes in the squamous parts of the temporal bones. This skull the owner could not be 
induced to part with, but usually skulls were sold pretty freely, and 
were in considerable abundance about the houses, but often much 
shattered ; about a dozen only were purchased, and their characters 
have been described and figured by Professor W. Turner . 1 They are 
all distinctly dolichocephalic. As with the crania of other Melanesians 
the height of the skull is almost always greater than the breadth, 
though the hypsistenocephalic character is not so strongly marked as 
in the mountaineers of Fiji or in the Loyalty Islanders. 
The natives are very apprehensive, for when a group was being 
photographed, the old women put up two long poles transversely ■ 
between themselves and the apparatus in order to protect themselves 
from its evil influence, and they could not be persuaded to sit until Captain Thomson 
seated himself in the centre of the group, and was taken with them. 
1 Report on the Human Crania, Zool. Chall. Exp., part xxix., 1884. 
Fig. 258. — Human hair sup- 
ported in a rough haniboo 
basket from a club house, 
Admiralty Islands. A me- 
mento of a cannibal feast. 
Fig. 259. — Human hair in 
a net of string, sus- 
pended from the roof 
of a club house at the 
Admiralty Islands. 
