478 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
two plantain stems to serve as rollers. Stranger still, 
and altogether incredible, were it not vouched for by 
independent testimony of the most satisfactory char¬ 
acter, these people scrupled not to offer themselves 
to a horrible death to satisfy the demands of custom, 
or to avoid the finger of scorn. So firm was their 
belief in a future state, in which the actual condition 
of the dying person was perpetuated, that, on the 
first symptoms of old age and weakness, parents, with 
their own free consent, were buried by their children. 
A missionary was actually invited by a young man 
to attend the funeral of his mother, who herself 
walked cheerfully to the grave and was there buried. 
In Erskine’s Journal it is related that a young man 
who was ill and not able to eat was voluntarilv buried 
e/ 
alive, because, as he himself said, if he could not 
eat he should get thin and weak, and the girls would 
call him a skeleton, and laugh at him. He was buried 
by his own father; and when he asked to be strangled 
first he was scolded and told to be quiet, and be buried 
like other people, and give them no more trouble; and 
he was buried accordingly. 
The weapons of the Fijians consist of spears, slings, 
clubs, short throwing-clubs, and bows and arrows. Most 
of these are larger and heavier than those of other 
Pacific islanders, corresponding to the more warlike 
character and greater strength of the people. Their 
towns are often fortified with one or more earthen 
ramparts faced with stones, and surmounted by a fence 
of bamboo or coco-nut trunks, the whole surrounded by a 
deep moat. The houses of the coast people are oblong, 
20 to 30 feet long, well built, and with doorways 
on the two sides 4 feet wide, and only about the same 
height, but rich men and chiefs have much larger houses. 
