Lastly,
I Asked If They Would Still Like To Eat Man If They Got The Chance,
And They Were Not
Afraid of being punished, and there was no hesitation
in their reply of "Io" (yes), uttered with one voice like
The yelp
of a hungry wolf, and it seemed to me that their eyes sparkled. They
were certainly a very obliging lot of cannibals.
Cannibalism is, of course, practically extinct now in Fiji, but in
recent years I am told that there, have been a few odd cases far back
in the mountains. On one occasion a man told his wife to build an oven
and that he was going to cook her. This she did, and he then killed,
cooked, and ate her. Whilst in Fiji I met an Englishman who in the
seventies had tasted human meat at a native feast, he believing it
was pig, and at the time he thought it was very good. I was told
that in the old days when they wanted to know whether a body was
cooked enough they looked to see if the head was loose. If the head
fell off it was thought to be "cooked to perfection," but I will not
vouch for this story being correct.
I gave the "Buli" a box of matches, and he seemed as pleased as if it
was a purse of gold; they light all their fires here by wood friction,
Some of the pet pigs around here were very oddly marked with stripes
and spots of brown, black and white.
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