tom is said to attend the revenge of blood: when the slayer has been seized by the relatives of the deceased, a family feast is proclaimed, at which the murderer is brought into the midst of them bound upon an angareyg (or sofa), and while his throat is slowly cut with a razor, the blood is caught in a bowl and handed round among the guests; every one of whom is bound to drink of it at the moment the victim breathes his last."*

When Shunghee (E Ongi), a New Zealand chief, who had been in England, where he was taken much notice of in certain high quarters, returned to New South Wales, he happened to see Inacki, another chief with whom he had had an ancient feud, in the town of Sydney. He there told his adversary, that when they got back to New Zealand he would fight him. Inacki accepted the challenge; and Shunghee accordingly assembled, on his return to New Zealand, no fewer than two thousand men to attack Inacki. The latter was prepared to receive him, and for some time the event of the battle that ensued was doubtful.

"Burckhardt's Travels in Nubia," page 356.

At

length Shunghee, who had the greatest number of muskets, and who had arranged his men in the form called in Roman tactics the cuneus or wedge, placing himself at the apex and directing those behind him to wheel round on the enemy from the right and left, or to fall back into their original position as opportunity offered, shot Inacki. On perceiving his enemy mortally wounded, the savage immediately sprung forward, scooped out the eye of the dying man with his English knife, and instantly swallowed it; and then holding his hands to his throat, into which he had afterwards plunged the knife, and from which the blood flowed copiously, drank as much of the horrid beverage as they could hold. On his return to the Bay of Islands he had about twenty captives bound hand and foot in his war-canoe, whom he intended to retain as slaves. But his daughter, hearing of his arrival, and learning at the same time that her own husband had been killed in the battle, came down to the beach to upbraid her father with being accessary to his death. To pacify her and to make her some amends for the

loss of her husband, Shunghee immediately caused the captives to be laid with their heads over the gunwale of the canoe, and with a sword, which he had received as a present in a high quarter in England, smote off the heads of sixteen of them successively in cold blood.

That cannibalism is also practised in various islands of the South Seas, where neither necessity nor the desire of revenge can be urged as a palliation of the revolting practice, cannot be doubted. Captain - a Scotchman of respectable character, who commanded one of the government vessels of New South Wales a few years since, has told me that while he was lying at the Marquesas many years ago, he had seen human viscera hung up for use in the same way as a sheep's or bullock's are frequently seen in England; and that, on inquiring on one occasion of an elderly woman what had become of a little orphan boy she seemed to be rearing, and to whom he had himself got somewhat attached, he was horrified to learn that the boy had been killed and eaten. Nay, he

D

assured me that he was once offered a human

finger himself as a peculiar delicacy.

The heart sickens at such recitals. But these recitals enable us to estimate at what a prodigious expense of human life, and at what a prodigious amount of human suffering, the islands of the South Seas, situated as some of them are at vast distances from the nearest islands, must have been originally peopled. Where one canoe, in the circumstances I have described, was fortunate enough to reach some unknown land in the vast ocean, we may conclude that many must have been lost, after scenes of bloodshed and cannibalism had been transacted on board them, at the very idea of which the imagination revolts with horror. When, however, I find so obvious, so sufficient, and so satisfactory an explanation of the origin and the general prevalence of cannibalism in the South Sea Islands, I feel inclined to be somewhat sceptical in regard to its being a religious observance-bearing a sort of symbolical resemblance, forsooth, to the doctrine of the atonement—as certain wise men of the east have supposed. But

there are missionaries, as well as philosophers, who are never satisfied with a plain and obvious reason for any thing, if they can only allege one that is either incredible or recondite.

The grand objection that is usually urged against all attempts to refer the South Sea Islanders to an Asiatic origin, is derived from the supposed uniform prevalence of the north-east and south-east trade-winds within the tropics. But the testimony of that eminent and lamented navigator, La Perouse, is decisive as to the invalidity of such an objection. "Westerly winds," says that eminent navigator, "are at least as frequent as those from the eastward, in the vicinity of the equator, in a zone of seven or eight degrees north and south; and they," i. e. the winds in the equatorial regions, "are so variable that it is very to make a voyage to the eastward than to the westward." La Perouse's Voyages, chap. 25.

little more

difficult

For my own part, the second time I crossed the line from the northward, our vessel lost the northeast trade-wind as high as the fourteenth degree of north latitude; and the last time I crossed the