As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew,—­and it became a passion akin to the opium habit in some,—­the supply of other meat had little to do with its continuance.  In New Britain human bodies were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried on in these empty tenements of the human soul.

Although cannibalism originated in a bodily need, man soon gave it an emotional and spiritual meaning, as he has given them to all customs that have their root in his physical being.  Two forms of cannibalism seem to have existed among the first historic peoples.  One was concerned with the eating of relatives and intimates, for friendship’s sake or to gain some good quality they possessed.  Thus when babies died, the Chavante mothers, on the Uruguay, ate them to regain their souls.  Russians ate their fathers, and the Irish, if Strabo is to be credited, thought it good to eat both deceased parents.  The Lhopa of Sikkim, in Tibet, eat the bride’s mother at the wedding feast.

But Maori cannibalism, with its best exposition in the Marquesas, was due to a desire for revenge, cooking and eating being the greatest of insults.  It was an expression of jingoism, a hatred for all outside the tribe or valley, and it made the feud between valleys almost incessant.

It was in no way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and ways of each race, and here the eating of enemies was authorized by every teaching of priest and leader, by time-honored custom and the strongest dictates of nature.

White men and Chinese, in fact, all foreigners, were seldom eaten here.  There were exceptions when vengeance impelled, such at that of Honi or Jones, whom Haabunai’s grandfather ate, but as a rule they were spared and indeed cherished, as strange visitors who might teach the people useful things.  Only their own depravity brought them to the oven.

At such times, the feast was even a disagreeable rite.  It is a fact that the Marquesan disliked the flesh of a white man.  They said he was too salty.  Hundreds of years ago the Aztecs, according to Bernal Diaz, who was there, complained that “the flesh of the Spaniards failed to afford even nourishment, since it was intolerably bitter.”  This, though the Indians were dying of starvation by hundreds of thousands in the merciless siege of Mexico City.

Standards of barbarity vary.  Horrible and revolting as the very mention of cannibalism is to us, it should be remembered that it rested upon an attitude toward the foreigner and the slave that in some degree still persists everywhere in the world.  Outside the tribe, the savage recognized no kindred humanity.  Members of every clan save his own were regarded as strange and contemptible beings, outlandish and barbarous in manners and customs, not to be regarded as sharers of a common birthright.  This attitude toward the stranger did not at all prevent the cannibal from being, within his own tribe, a gentle, merry, and kindly individual.