I had seen Apporo, my landlady, staggering homeward a few days earlier in a pitiful state of intoxication.  Some one had given her a glass of mixed absinthe, vermuth, and rum, and with confidence in the giver she had tossed it down.  That is the kind of joke that in other days would have been the deluding of some one into partaking of the flesh of a lover or friend.

Reasoning from our standpoint, it is easy to assume that cannibalism is a form of depravity practised by few peoples, but this error is dispelled by the researches of ethnologists, who inform us that it was one of the most ancient customs of man and began when he was close brother to the ape.  Livingstone, when he came upon it on the Dark continent, concluded that the negroes came to that horrible desire from their liking for the meat of gorillas, which so nearly approach man in appearance.  Herodatus, writing twenty-five hundred years ago, mentions the Massagetae who boiled the flesh of their old folks with that of cattle, both killed for the occasion.  Cannibalism marked the life of all peoples in days of savagery.

Plutarch says that Cataline’s associates gave proof of their loyalty to that agitator and to one another by sacrificing and eating a man.  Achilles expressed his wish that he might devour Hector.  The Kafirs ate their own children in the famine of 1857, and the Germans ate one another when starvation maddened them, long after Maryland and Massachusetts had become thriving settlements in the New World.  There is a historic instance of a party of American pioneers lost in the mountains of California in the nineteenth century, who in their last extremity of hunger ate several of the party.

To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years.  We have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the world.

Undoubtedly cannibalism began as a question of food supply.  In early times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his easiest prey.  The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family, or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food, such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen.  I saw Marquesan women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of sheer instinct and stomachic need.  When salt is not to be had, the desire for meat is most intense.  In these valleys the upper tribes, whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish, were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none of the coast tribes are guilty.