Cannibalism in Fiji

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 16, 1882

Cannibalism in Fiji.

THERE are people in the world who are still skeptical in regard to the great benefit of the work of the missionaries among the heathen. Let them read the following, and then tell by what other means so great changes could be wrought in so short a time. It is from "At Home in Fiji," by Charlotte Gordon Cumming:—

"It was only people who had been killed that were considered good for food. Those who died a natural death were never eaten—invariably buried. But it certainly is a wonder that the isles were not altogether depopulated, owing to the number who were killed. Thus in Namena, in the year 1851, fifty bodies were cooked for one feast. And when the men of Bau were at war with Verata they carried off 260 bodies, seventeen of which were piled on a canoe and sent to Rewa, where they were received with wild joy, dragged about the town, and subjected to every species of indignity ere they finally reached the ovens. Then, too, just think of the number of lives sacrificed in a country where infanticide was a recognized institution, and where widows were strangled as a matter of course! Why, on one occasion, when there had been a horrible massacre of Namena people at Viwa, and upward of 100 fishermen had been murdered, and their bodies carried as bokola to the ovens at Bau, no less than eighty women were strangled to do honor to the dead, and corpses lay in every direction about the mission station! It is just thirty years since the Rev. John Watsford, writing from here, described how twenty-eight victims had been seized in one day while fishing. They were brought here alive, and only stunned when put into the ovens. Some of the miserable creatures attempted to escape from the scorching bed of red-hot stones, but only to be driven back and buried in that living tomb, whence they were taken a few hours later to feast their barbarous captors. He adds that more human beings were eaten on this little isle of Bau than anywhere else in Fiji. It is very hard, indeed, to realize that the peaceful village on which I am now looking has really been the scene of such horrors as these, and that many of the gentle, kindly people around me have actually taken part in them."