Also, as a preliminary, we attended a feast, where one Taiara Tamarii, the son of an Hawaiian sailor who deserted from a whaleship, commemorated the death of his Marquesan mother by roasting fourteen whole hogs and inviting in the village.So we came along, welcomed by a native herald, a young girl, who stood on a great rock and chanted the information that the banquet was made perfect by our presence--which information she extended impartially to every arrival.Scarcely were we seated, however, when she changed her tune, while the company manifested intense excitement.
Her cries became eager and piercing.From a distance came answering cries, in men's voices, which blended into a wild, barbaric chant that sounded incredibly savage, smacking of blood and war.Then, through vistas of tropical foliage appeared a procession of savages, naked save for gaudy loin-cloths.They advanced slowly, uttering deep guttural cries of triumph and exaltation.Slung from young saplings carried on their shoulders were mysterious objects of considerable weight, hidden from view by wrappings of green leaves.
Nothing but pigs, innocently fat and roasted to a turn, were inside those wrappings, but the men were carrying them into camp in imitation of old times when they carried in "long-pig." Now long-pig is not pig.Long-pig is the Polynesian euphemi** for human flesh; and these descendants of man-eaters, a king's son at their head, brought in the pigs to table as of old their grandfathers had brought in their slain enemies.Every now and then the procession halted in order that the bearers should have every advantage in uttering particularly ferocious shouts of victory, of contempt for their enemies, and of gustatory desire.So Melville, two generations ago, witnessed the bodies of slain Happar warriors, wrapped in palm-leaves, carried to banquet at the Ti.At another time, at the Ti, he "observed a curiously carved vessel of wood,"and on looking into it his eyes "fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there."Cannibalism has often been regarded as a fairy story by ultracivilized men who dislike, perhaps, the notion that their own savage forebears have somewhere in the past been addicted to similar practices.Captain Cook was rather sceptical upon the subject, until, one day, in a harbour of New Zealand, he deliberately tested the matter.A native happened to have brought on board, for sale, a nice, sun-dried head.At Cook's orders strips of the flesh were cut away and handed to the native, who greedily devoured them.To say the least, Captain Cook was a rather thorough-going empiricist.At any rate, by that act he supplied one ascertained fact of which science had been badly in need.Little did he dream of the existence of a certain group of islands, thousands of miles away, where in subsequent days there would arise a curious suit at law, when an old chief of Maui would be charged with defamation of character because he persisted in asserting that his body was the living repository of Captain Cook's great toe.It is said that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the old chief was not the tomb of the navigator's great toe, and that the suit was dismissed.
I suppose I shall not have the chance in these degenerate days to see any long-pig eaten, but at least I am already the possessor of a duly certified Marquesan calabash, oblong in shape, curiously carved, over a century old, from which has been drunk the blood of two shipmasters.One of those captains was a mean man.He sold a decrepit whale-boat, as good as new what of the fresh white paint, to a Marquesan chief.But no sooner had the captain sailed away than the whale-boat dropped to pieces.It was his fortune, some time afterwards, to be wrecked, of all places, on that particular island.The Marquesan chief was ignorant of rebates and discounts;but he had a primitive sense of equity and an equally primitive conception of the economy of nature, and he balanced the account by eating the man who had cheated him.
We started in the cool dawn for Typee, astride ferocious little stallions that pawed and screamed and bit and fought one another quite oblivious of the fragile humans on their backs and of the slippery boulders, loose rocks, and yawning gorges.The way led up an ancient road through a jungle of hau trees.On every side were the vestiges of a one-time dense population.Wherever the eye could penetrate the thick growth, glimpses were caught of stone walls and of stone foundations, six to eight feet in height, built solidly throughout, and many yards in width and depth.They formed great stone platforms, upon which, at one time, there had been houses.
But the houses and the people were gone, and huge trees sank their roots through the platforms and towered over the under-running jungle.These foundations are called pae-paes--the pi-pis of Melville, who spelled phonetically.