A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 787 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17.

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 787 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17.
What may, if any thing possibly can, lessen, in some small degree, the horror of this practice is, that the unhappy victims have not the most distant intimation of their fate.  Those who are fixed upon to fall, are set upon with clubs wherever they happen to be, and, after being dispatched, are brought dead to the place, where the remainder of the rites are completed.  The reader will here call to his remembrance the skulls of the captives that had been sacrificed at the death of some great chief, and which were fixed on the rails round the top of the morai at Kakooa.  We got a farther piece of intelligence upon this subject at the village of Kowrowa; where, on our enquiring into the use of a small piece of ground, inclosed with a stone-fence, we were told that it was an Here-eere, or burying-ground of a chief; and there, added our informer, pointing to one of the corners, lie the tangata and waheene taboo, or the man and woman who were sacrificed at his funeral.

To this class of their customs may also be referred that of knocking out their fore-teeth.  Scarce any of the lower people, and very few of the chiefs, were seen, who had not lost one or more of them; and we always understood that this voluntary punishment, like the cutting off the joints of the finger at the Friendly Islands, was not inflicted on themselves from the violence of grief on the death of their friends, but was designed as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Eatooa, to avert any danger or mischief to which they might be exposed.

We were able to learn but little of their notions with regard to a future state.  Whenever we asked them whither the dead were gone? we were always answered, that the breath, which they appeared to consider as the soul, or immortal part, was gone to the Eatooa; and, on pushing our enquiries farther, they seemed to describe some particular place, where they imagined the abode of the deceased to be; but we could not perceive that they thought, in this state, either rewards or punishments awaited them.

Having promised the reader an explanation of what was meant by the word taboo, I shall, in this place, lay before him the particular instances that fell under our observation of its application and effects.  On our enquiring into the reasons of the interdiction of all intercourse between us and the natives, the day preceding the arrival of Terreeoboo, we were told that the bay was tabooed.  The same restriction took place, at our request, the day we interred the bones of Captain Cook.  In these two instances the natives paid the most implicit and scrupulous obedience, but whether on any religious principle, or merely in deference to the civil authority of their chiefs, I cannot determine.  When the ground near our observatories, and the place where our masts lay, were tabooed, by sticking small wands round them, this operated in a manner not less efficacious.  But though this mode of consecration was performed

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A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.