,-35^-' 
 
 
 I 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 Microsoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/canniballandadveOOjohnrich 
 
MEN OF ESPIRITU SANTO 
 
CANNIBAL -LAND 
 
 Adventures with a Camera 
 in the Kew Hebrides 
 
 BY : : 
 
 MARTIN JOHNSON 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 
 THE author's photographs 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 Q[^i)e 3atben(tlie $res(£( Camtittlige 
 
 1922 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1 92 1, BY ASIA PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY MARTIN JOHNSON 
 
 0^. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 f^WuMiA 
 
 CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHl^SETTS 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Prologue 3 
 
 I. Introducing Nagapate 6 
 
 II. Sydney and New Caledonia 23 
 
 III. The Threshold of Cannibal-Land 39 
 
 IV. Nagapate comes to call 49 
 
 V. In Nagapate's Kingdom 71 
 
 VI. The Big Numbers see themselves on 
 
 THE Screen 94 
 
 VII. The Noble Savage 100 
 
 VIII. Good-bye to Nagapate 116 
 
 IX. The Monkey People 123 
 
 X. The Dance of the Painted Savages 138 
 
 XL TOMMAN AND THE HeAD-CuRING ArT 152 
 
 XII. The White Man in the South Seas 161 
 XIII. EspiRiTu Santo and a Cannibal Feast 175 
 

ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Men of Espiritu Santo Frontispiece 
 
 The Watcher of Tanemarou Bay 14 
 
 Nagapate 18 
 
 A Beach Scene 24 
 
 Looking Seaward 36 
 
 Dance of Tethlong's Men 46 
 
 A Call from Nagapate 62 
 
 The Safe Beach Trail, Tanemarou Bay 68 
 
 Looking over Nagapate's Kingdom from the 
 
 Highest Peak in Northern Malekula 74 
 
 Women of the Big Numbers 78 
 
 Rambi 84 
 
 Atree and Nagapate 88 
 
 Hunting for the Magic 98 
 
 A Cannibal and a Kodak 98 
 
 Nagapate among the Devil-Devils 110 
 
 One of the Monkey Men 128 
 
 wo-bang-an-ar 134 
 
 Southwest Bay 138 
 
viii ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Woman and Child of the Long-Heads, Tom- 
 man 142 
 
 The Painted Dancers of Southwest Bay 148 
 
 The Old Head-Curer I54 
 
 A Club-House in Tomman with Mummied 
 Heads and Bodies I53 
 
 Tomman Women, showing Gap in Teeth 162 
 
 Dwarfs OF EspiRiTu Santo 182 
 
 The Cannibal Dance 188 
 
CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 Twelve years ago, from the deck of the Snark, I had 
 my first gHmpse of the New Hebrides. 
 
 I was standing my trick at the wheel. Jack Lon- 
 don and his wife, Charmian, were beside me. It was 
 just dawn. Slowly, out of the morning mists, an is- 
 land took shape. The little ship rose and sank on the 
 Pacific swell. The salt breeze ruffled my hair. I 
 played my trick calmly and in silence, but my heart 
 beat fast at the sight of that bit of land coming up 
 like magic out of the gray water. 
 
 For I knew that of all the groups in the South 
 Seas, the New Hebrides were held to be the wildest. 
 They were inhabited by the fiercest of cannibals. 
 On many of the islands, white men had scarcely 
 trod. Vast, unknown areas remained to be explored. 
 I thrilled at the thought of facing danger in the 
 haunts of savage men, 
 
 I was young then. But my longing for adventure 
 in primitive lands has never left me. News of a wild 
 
4 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 country, of unvisited tribes, still thrills me and 
 makes me restless to be off in some old South Seas 
 schooner, seeing life as it was lived in Europe in the 
 Stone Age and is still lived in out-of-the-way cor- 
 ners of the earth that civilization has overlooked. 
 
 I have been luckier than most men. For my life- 
 work has made my youthful dreams come true. 
 
 On my first voyage, in the Snark, I met with a 
 couple of pioneer motion-picture men, who were 
 packing up the South Seas in films to take back to 
 Europe and America. They inspired in me the idea 
 of making a picture-record of the primitive, fast-dy- 
 ing black and brown peoples that linger in remote 
 spots. Into my boyish love of adventure there crept 
 a purpose that has kept me wandering and will keep 
 me wandering until I die. 
 
 Two years ago, I again found myself in the New 
 Hebrides at dawn. London had taken the last long 
 voyage alone; and the little Snark, so white and 
 pretty when we had sailed it south, hung sluggishly 
 at anchor in Api, black and stained, and wet and 
 slimy under the bare feet of a crew of blacks. My 
 boat now was a twenty-eight-foot open whaleboat, 
 with a jury rig of jib and mainsail; my crew of five, 
 squatting in the waist, looking silently at us or cast- 
 
PROLOGUE 5 
 
 ing glances, sometimes down at the water, some- 
 times with sudden jerks of the head upward at the 
 little mast, like monkeys under a coconut tree, were 
 naked savages from Vao; and my companion, seated 
 on the thwart beside me, was my wife, Osa. We 
 were nearing the cannibal island of Malekula. 
 
 But to start the story of our adventures in Male- 
 kula at the beginning, I must go back and describe 
 the reconnoitering trip we took fourteen months 
 earlier. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 
 
 OsA and I were nearing the end of a long cruise 
 through the South Seas. We had come in contact 
 with many wild peoples, but none of them were 
 quite wild enough. I had made motion-pictures of 
 cannibals in the Solomons. They were bona-fide can- 
 nibals, fierce and naked. But somehow, I never 
 quite felt that they were the real thing : they so ob- 
 viously respected the English Government officers 
 and native police boys who accompanied and pro- 
 tected us. I wanted to get among savages who were 
 unspoiled — to make photographs showing them in 
 their own villages, engaged in their ordinary pur- 
 suits. I felt sure, from what I had seen and heard 
 and read, that the pictures I wanted were waiting to 
 be taken in the New Hebrides and nowhere else. 
 
 Savagery has been pretty well eliminated from the 
 South Seas. The Solomon Islander is well on the 
 road to becoming a respectable citizen of the British 
 Empire. Most of the Fiji Islanders have left off can- 
 nibalism and have settled down and turned Method- 
 ist. If you except New Guinea and Borneo, the 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 7 
 
 New Hebrides are probably the only islands in the 
 Pacific where there are natives who live as they did 
 before the white man's coming. 
 
 The savages of the New Hebrides probably owe 
 their immunity from civilization to an accident of 
 government. For many years the ownership of the 
 islands was disputed. Both British and French laid 
 claim to them. Neither would relinquish hold; so 
 finally, they arranged to administer the islands 
 jointly until a settlement should be made. That set- 
 tlement has been pending for years. Meanwhile, 
 both governments have been marking time. Each 
 party is slow to take action for fear of infringing on 
 the rights — or of working for the benefit — of the 
 other. Each maintains but a small armed force. The 
 entire protection of the group consists of about sixty 
 or seventy police boys, backed up by the gunboats 
 which make occasional tours of the group. It is easy 
 to understand that this is not an adequate civilizing 
 force for a part of the world where civilizing is gener- 
 ally done at the point of a rifle, and that the savages 
 of the more inaccessible parts of the group are as 
 unsubdued as they were in the days of the early 
 explorers. 
 
 I had heard that there were parts of the island of 
 
8 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 Malekula, the second largest island of the group, 
 that no white man had ever trod, so I decided that 
 Malekula was the island I wanted to visit. "The 
 Pacific Islands Pilot," which I had among my books, 
 gave a solemn warning against the people of Male- 
 kula that served only to whet my interest: 
 
 "Although an appearance of friendly confidence 
 will often tend to allay their natural feeling of dis- 
 trust, strangers would do well to maintain a constant 
 watchfulness and use every precaution against being 
 taken by surprise." So said the "Pilot." ". . . They 
 are a wild, savage race and have the reputation of be- 
 ing treacherous. . . . Cannibalism is still occasion- 
 ally practiced. Nearly all are armed with Snyders. 
 The bushmen live entirely among the hills in small 
 villages and are seldom seen. Being practically se- 
 cure from punishment, they have not the same rea- 
 sons for good behavior that the salt-water men 
 have, and should, therefore, be always treated with 
 caution." 
 
 A recruiter who had been for years in the New 
 Hebrides enlisting blacks for service in the Solomons 
 described Malekula to me in detail. It was a large 
 island, as my map showed me, shaped roughly like 
 an hour-glass, about sixty miles long and about ten 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 9 
 
 miles across in the middle and thirty-five or so at 
 the ends. He said that there were supposed to be 
 about forty thousand savages on the island, most of 
 them hidden away in the bush. The northern part of 
 the island was shared between the Big Numbers and 
 the Small Numbers people, who took their names 
 from the nambas, the garment — if it could be called 
 a garment — worn by the men. In the case of the 
 Small Numbers, said my informant, it was a twisted 
 leaf. In the case of the Big Numbers, it was a bunch 
 of dried pandanus fiber. The recruiter said that 
 the central part of the island was supposed to be 
 inhabited by a race of nomads, though he himself 
 had never seen any one who had come in contact 
 with them. In the southern region lived a long- 
 headed people, with skulls curiously deformed by 
 binding in infancy. 
 
 Of all these peoples the Big Numbers were said to 
 be the fiercest. Both British and French had under- 
 taken "armed administrations" in their territory, 
 in an attempt to pacify them, but had succeeded 
 only in sacrificing a man for every savage .they 
 had killed. No white man had ever established 
 himself upon the territory of the Big Numbers and 
 none had ever crossed it. I decided to attempt 
 
10 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the crossing myself and to record the feat with my 
 cameras. 
 
 Every one to whom I mentioned this project ad- 
 vised me against it. I was warned that experienced 
 recruiters of labor for the white man's sugar and 
 rubber plantations, who knew the islands and the 
 natives well, never landed upon the beach unless 
 they had a second, "covering" boat with an armed 
 crew to protect them against treachery, and that the 
 most daring trader planned to stop there only for a 
 day — though perforce he often stayed for all eter- 
 nity. But I had the courage born of ignorance, and 
 ventured boldly, taking it for granted that the tales 
 told of the savages were wildly exaggerated. Trad- 
 ers, missionaries, and Government officials all joined 
 in solemn warning against the undertaking, but 
 as none of them had ever seen a cannibal in ac- 
 tion, I did not take their advice seriously. When 
 they found that I was determined in my course, they 
 gave me all the assistance in their power. 
 
 My recruiter friend suggested that I make my 
 headquarters on Vao, a small island about a mile oflF 
 the northeastern coast of Malekula, where a mission 
 station was maintained by the French fathers. He 
 said that between the mission and the British gun- 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 11 
 
 boat, which stopped there regularly, the natives of 
 Vao had become fairly peaceable, we would be safe 
 there, and at the same time would be in easy reach 
 of Malekula. 
 
 Osa and I lost no time in getting to Vao, where 
 Father Prin, an aged priest, welcomed us cordially, 
 and set aside for us one of the three rooms in his little 
 stone house. Father Prin had kind, beautiful eyes 
 and a venerable beard. He looked like a saint, in his 
 black cassock, and when we had a chance to look 
 about at the degenerate creatures among whom he 
 lived, we thought that he must, indeed, be one. He 
 had spent twenty-nine years in the South Seas. Dur- 
 ing the greater part of that time he had worked 
 among the four hundred savages of Vao. The net re- 
 sult of his activities was a clearing, in which were 
 a stone church and the stone parsonage and the 
 thatched huts of seventeen converts. The converts 
 themselves did not count for much, even in Father 
 Prin's eyes. He had learned that the task of bring- 
 ing the New Hebridean native out of savagery was 
 well-nigh hopeless. He knew that, once he had left 
 his little flock, it would imdoubtedly lapse into 
 heathenism. The faith and perseverance he showed 
 was a marvel to me. I shall always respect him and 
 
12 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the other missionaries who work araong the natives 
 of Vao and Malekula for the grit they show in a los- 
 ing fight. I have never seen a native Christian on 
 either of the islands — and I 've never met any one 
 who has seen one ! 
 
 When he learned that we were bent on visiting 
 Malekula, Father Prin added his word of warning to 
 the many that I had received. Though he could 
 speak many native languages, his English was lim- 
 ited to heche-de-mer, the pidgin English of the South 
 Seas. In this grotesque tongue, which consorted so 
 strangely with his venerable appearance, he told us 
 that we would never trust ourselves among the na- 
 tives if we had any real understanding of their cru- 
 elty. He said he was convinced that cannibalism was 
 practiced right on Vao, though the natives, for fear 
 of the British gunboat, were careful not to be dis- 
 covered. He cited hair-raising incidents of poison- 
 ings and mutilations. He told us to look around 
 among the savages of Vao. We would discover very 
 few if any old folk, for the natives had the cruel cus- 
 tom of burying the aged alive. He had done every- 
 thing he could to eradicate this custom, but to no 
 end. He told us of one old woman whom he had ex- 
 humed three times, but who had finally, in spite of 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 13 
 
 his efforts, met a cruel death by suffocation. Once, 
 he had succeeded in rescuing an old man from death 
 by the simple expedient of carrying him off and put- 
 ting him into a hut next to his own house, where he 
 could feed him and look after him. A few days after 
 the old man had been installed, a body of natives 
 came to the clearing and asked permission to ex- 
 amine him. They looked at his teeth to see if he 
 had grown valuable tusks; they fingered his rough, 
 withered skin; they felt his skinny limbs; they lifted 
 his frail, helpless carcass in their arms; and finally 
 they burst into yells of laughter. They said the 
 missionary had been fooled — there was not a 
 thing about the old man worth saving! We could 
 not look for mercy or consideration from such men 
 as these, said Father Prin. But despite his warn- 
 ing, Osa and I sailed away to visit the grim island. 
 With the assistance of Father Prin, we secured 
 a twenty-eight-foot whaleboat that belonged to a 
 trader who made his headquarters on Vao, but was 
 now absent on a recruiting trip, leaving his "store" 
 in charge of his native wife. With the aid of five Vao 
 boys, recommended by Father Prin as being prob- 
 ably trustworthy, we hoisted a small jib and a 
 mainsail, scarcely larger, and were off. 
 
14 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 At the last moment. Father Prin's grave face 
 awoke misgivings in me and I tried to dissuade Osa 
 from accompanying me. Father Prin sensed the 
 drift of our conversation and made his final plea. 
 
 "Better you stop along Vao," he urged. "Bush 
 too bad." His eyes were anxious. But Osa was not 
 to be dissuaded. "If you go, I'm going, too," she 
 said, turning to me, and that was final. 
 
 We landed at a point on the Vao side of Malekula, 
 where there were one or two salt-water villages, 
 whose inhabitants had learned to respect gunboats. 
 We picked up three boys to serve as guides and car- 
 riers and then sailed on to Tanemarou Bay, in the 
 Big Numbers territory. The shores along which we 
 traveled were rocky. Occasionally we saw a group 
 of natives on the beach, but they disappeared as we 
 approached. These were no salt-water savages, but 
 fierce bushmen. Their appearance was not reassur- 
 ing; but when we reached Tanemarou Bay, we 
 boldly went ashore. We were greeted by a solitary 
 savage who stepped out of the darkness of the jungle 
 into the glaring brightness of the beach. He was a 
 frightful object to behold, black and dirty, with 
 heavy, lumpy muscles, and an outstanding shock of 
 greasy hair. Except for a clout of dried pandanus 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 15 
 
 fiber, a gorget of pig's teeth, and the pigtails that 
 dangled from his ear-lobes, he was entirely naked. 
 As he approached, we saw that his dull, shifty eyes 
 were liquid; his hairy, deeply seamed face was con- 
 torted frightfully; and his hands were pressed tight 
 against his stomach. Osa shrank close to me. But the 
 first words of the native, uttered in almost unintelli- 
 gible beche-de-mer, were pacific enough. "My word! 
 Master! Belly belong me walk about too much!" 
 
 The nervous tension that Osa and I had both felt 
 snapped, and we burst out laughing. I saw a chance 
 to make a friend, so I fished out a handful of cascara 
 tablets and carefully explained to the native the ex- 
 act properties of the medicine. I made it perfectly 
 clear — so I thought — that part of the tablets were 
 to be taken at dawn and part at sunset. He listened 
 with painful attention, but the moment I stopped 
 speaking he lifted the whole handful of pills to his 
 slobbering lips and downed them at a gulp ! 
 
 By this time we were surrounded by a group of 
 savages, each as terrible-looking as our first visitor. 
 As they made no effort to molest us, however, we 
 gained confidence. I set up a camera and ground out 
 several hundred feet of film. They had never seen a 
 motion-picture camera before, but, as is often the 
 
16 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 way with savages, after a first casual inspection, they 
 showed a real, or pretended, indifference to what 
 they could not understand. 
 
 Through the talented sufferer who knew beche-de- 
 mer, I learned that the chief of the tribe, Nagapate, 
 was a short distance away in the bush, and on the 
 spur of the moment, never thinking of danger, I 
 made up my mind to see him. Guided by a small 
 boy,'^Osa and I plunged into the dark jungle, fol- 
 lowed by our three carriers with my photographic 
 apparatus. We slid and stumbled along a trail made 
 treacherous by miry streams and slimy creepers and 
 up sharp slopes covered with tough canes. At last 
 we found ourselves in a clearing about three thousand 
 feet above the sea. 
 
 From where we stood we could see, like a little dot 
 upon the blue of the ocean, our whaleboat hanging 
 offshore. The scene was calm and beautiful. The 
 brown-green slopes were silent, except for the sharp 
 metallic calls of birds. But we knew that there were 
 men hidden in the wild, by the faint, thin wisps of 
 smoke that we could see here and there above the 
 trees. Each marked a savage camp-fire. "That's 
 where they're cooking the 'long pig,'" I said joc- 
 ularly, pointing the smoke wisps out to Osa. But 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 17 
 
 a moment later my remark did not seem so funny. 
 I heard a sound and turned and saw standing in 
 the trail four armed savages, with their guns aimed 
 at us. 
 
 "Let's get out of this," I said to Osa; but when we 
 attempted to go down the trail, the savages inter- 
 cepted us with threatening gestures. Suddenly there 
 burst into view the most frightful, yet finest type of 
 savage I have ever seen. We knew without being 
 told that this was Nagapate himself. His every ges- 
 ture was chiefly. 
 
 He was enormously tall, and his powerful muscles 
 rippled under his skin, glossy in the sunlight. He was 
 very black; his features were large; his expression 
 showed strong will and the cunning and brutal 
 power of a predatory animal. A fringe of straight 
 outstanding matted hair completely encircled his 
 face; his skin, though glossy and healthy-looking, 
 was creased and thick, and between his brows were 
 two extraordinarily deep furrows. On his fingers 
 were four gold rings that could only have come from 
 the hands of his victims. 
 
 I thought I might win this savage to friendliness, 
 so I got out some trade-stuflF I had brought with me 
 and presented it to him. He scarcely glanced at it. 
 
18 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 He folded his arms on his breast and stared at us 
 speculatively. I looked around. From among the 
 tall grasses of the clearing, there peered black and 
 cruel faces, all watching us in silence. There were 
 easily a hundred savages there. For the present there 
 was no escape possible. I decided that my only 
 course was to pretend a cool indifference, so I got out 
 my cameras and worked as rapidly as possible, talk- 
 ing to the savages and to Osa as if I were completely 
 ax ease. 
 
 I soon saw, however, that we must get away if we 
 were not to be caught by darkness. I made a last 
 show of assurance by shaking hands in farewell with 
 Nagapate. Osa followed my example; but instead of 
 releasing her, the savage chief held her firmly with 
 one hand and ran the other over her body. He felt 
 her cheeks and her hair and pinched and prodded her 
 speculatively 
 
 She was pale with fright. I would have shot the 
 savage on the spot, but I knew that such a fool- 
 hardy act would mean instant death to both of us. I 
 clenched my hands, forced to my lips what I hoped 
 would pass for an amused grin, and stood pat. After 
 a moment that seemed to both Osa and me an hour 
 long, Nagapate released Osa and grunted an order at 
 
NAGAPATE 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 19 
 
 the savages who surrounded us. They disappeared 
 into the bush. This was our opportunity. I ordered 
 the three carriers to pick up the apparatus, and we 
 started for the trail. 
 
 We had gone only a few steps when we were 
 seized from behind. We had no chance to struggle. 
 
 In the minutes that followed, I suffered the most 
 terrible mental torture I have ever experienced. I 
 saw only one slim chance for us. Osa and I each car- 
 ried two revolvers in our breeches' pockets; so far, 
 the savages had not discovered them, and I hoped 
 there might come some opportunity to use them. 
 Every ghastly tale I had ever heard came crowding 
 into my memory; and as I looked at the ring of black, 
 merciless faces, and saw my wife sagging, half- 
 swooning, in the arms of her cannibal captors, my 
 heart almost stopped its beating. 
 
 At this moment a miracle happened. 
 
 Into the bay far below us steamed the Euphros- 
 yne, the British patrol-boat. It came to anchor and 
 a ship's boat was lowered. The savages were star- 
 tled. From lip to lip an English word was passed, 
 " Man-o'-war — Man-o'-war — Man-o'-war." With 
 an assumption of satisfaction and confidence that I 
 did not feel, I tried to make it clear to them that this 
 
20 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 ship had come to protect us, though I knew that at 
 any moment it might up anchor and steam away 
 again. Nagapate grunted an order, my carriers 
 picked up their loads, and we were permitted to 
 start down the trail. Once out of sight we began to 
 run. The cane-grass cut our faces, we slipped on the 
 steep path, but still we ran. 
 
 Halfway down, we came to an open place from 
 which we could see the bay. To our consternation, 
 the patrol -boat was putting out to sea! We knew 
 that the savages, too, had witnessed its departure; 
 for at once, from hill to hill, sounded the vibrant roar 
 of the conch-shell boo-boos — a message to the sav- 
 ages on the beach to intercept us. 
 
 The sun was near setting. We hurried forward; 
 Soon we found that we had lost the trail. Darkness 
 came down, and we struggled through the jungle in 
 a nightmare of fear. Thorns tore our clothing and 
 our flesh. We slipped and fell a hundred times. 
 Every jungle sound filled us with terror. 
 
 But at last, after what seemed hours, we reached 
 the beach. We stole toward the water, hopeful of es- 
 caping notice, but the savages caught sight of us. 
 Fortunately our Vao boys, who had been lying off in 
 the whaleboat, sighted us, too, and poled rapidly in 
 
INTRODUCING NAGAPATE 21 
 
 to our assistance. We splashed into the surf and the 
 boys dragged us into the boat, where we lay, ex- 
 hausted and weak with fear. 
 
 It took us three days to get back to Vao, but that 
 nightmare story of storm and terror does not belong 
 here. Suffice it to say that we at last got back safely 
 and with my film unharmed. 
 
 On my return to Vao, one of the native boatmen 
 presented me with a letter, which had been left for 
 me at Tanemarou Bay, by the commander of the 
 patrol-boat, who had been assured by our boys that 
 we were in the immediate vicinity of the beach and 
 were about to return to the boat. 
 
 Matanavot, 10th Noverriber, 1917 
 
 Dear Sir: 
 
 I have been endeavoring to find you with a view 
 to warning you against carrying out what I under- 
 stand to be your intentions. I am told that you have 
 decided to penetrate into the interior of this island 
 with a view to coming in contact with the people 
 known as the "Big Numbers." Such a proceeding 
 cannot but be attended with great risk to yourself 
 and all those who accompany you. The whole inte- 
 rior of this island of Malekula is, and has been for a 
 considerable time, in a very disturbed condition, and 
 
22 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 it has been necessary in consequence to make two 
 armed demonstrations in the "Big Numbers" coun- 
 try during the last three years. For these reasons, 
 on the part of the Joint Administration of this 
 group, I request that you will not proceed further 
 with this idea, and hereby formally warn you against 
 such persistence, for the consequences of which the 
 Administration cannot hold itself responsible. 
 Yours faithfully 
 
 (Signed) M. King 
 
 H.B.M. Resident Commissioner for the New Hebrides 
 
 In any case I trust you will not take your wife into 
 the danger zone with you. 
 
 M. K. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 
 
 OsA and I were sure, after our first adventure in 
 Malekula, that we had had enough of cannibals to 
 last us for the rest of our natural lives. But when we 
 reached Sydney, on our way home, and had our films 
 developed, we began to weaken. Our pictures were 
 so good that we almost forgot the risk we had taken 
 to get them. The few feet I had managed to grind 
 out on Malekula were no "staged" pictures of sav- 
 age life. They were so real and convincing that Osa 
 declared her knees went wobbly every time she saw 
 them. 
 
 Before many months, Nagapate was scowling out 
 of the screen at audiences in New York and Paris and 
 London, and villagers who would never go a hun- 
 dred miles from home were meeting him face to face 
 in the Malekula jungle. The public wanted more — 
 and so did we. Early in 1919, about a year after our 
 first adventure in the Malekula bush, we were again 
 in Sydney, preparing for a second visit to the land of 
 the Big Numbers — the trip out of which this book 
 has grown. 
 
24 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 As we sailed into Sydney harbor on the S.S. Ven- 
 tura, we met, saihng out, the Pacifique, the httle 
 steamer of the Messageries Maritimes that had 
 taken us to the New Hebrides on our former visit. 
 That meant we should have four weeks to wait be- 
 fore embarking on our journey to Malekula. We 
 were impatient to be off, but we knew that the four 
 weeks would pass quickly enough, for many things 
 remained to be done before we should be ready for 
 a long sojourn in the jungle. 
 
 We took up our abode with the Higginses, in their 
 house on Darling Point Road overlooking the har- 
 bor. Ernie Higgins had handled my films for me on 
 my previous trip, and I had found him to be the best 
 laboratory man I had ever met with, so I was glad 
 to be again associated with him. 
 
 The house was an old-fashioned brick house of 
 about twelve or fourteen rooms, g I fitted up one of 
 the second-story rooms to serve as a workroom. I 
 had electricity brought in and set up my Pathescope 
 projector, so that I could see the pictures I happened 
 to be working on. Having this projector meant that 
 the work of cutting and assembling films would be 
 cut in two. I put up my rewinds, and soon had 
 everything in apple-pie order. 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 25 
 
 From the window of my workroom, I could look 
 over Sydney harbor. Osa and I never tired of watch- 
 ing the ships going in and out. We would consult 
 the sailing lists in the newspapers, and try to identify 
 the vessels that we saw below us. There were steam- 
 ers from China and Japan and the Straits Settle- 
 ments; little vessels from the various South Seas 
 groups; big, full-rigged ships from America; steam- 
 ers from Africa and Europe; little schooners from 
 the islands; coastal boats to and from New Zealand 
 and Tasmania, and almost every day big ships came 
 in with returned soldiers. In the course of a week we 
 saw boats of every description flying the flags of al- 
 most every nation on the globe. 
 
 Osa put in long days in the harbor, fishing from 
 Mr. Higgins's little one-man dinghy, that was nearly 
 swamped a dozen times a day in the wash from the 
 ferry-boats, while I worked like a slave at my motion- 
 picture apparatus. The public thinks that a wander- 
 ing camera-man's difficulties begin with putting a 
 roll of film in the camera and end with taking it out. 
 If I were telling the true story of this trip, I should 
 start with my grilling weeks of preparation in New 
 York. But my troubles in Sydney will perhaps give 
 sufficient idea of the unromantic back-of-the-scenes 
 
26 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 in the life of a motion-picture explorer. I had trou- 
 bles by the score. My cameras acted up. They 
 scratched the film; they buckled. When I had reme- 
 died these and a dozen other ailments, I found that 
 my pictures were not steady when they were pro- 
 jected. The fault we at last located in Mr. Higgins's 
 printer. We repaired the printer. Then we found 
 that the developer produced a granulated effect on 
 the film. It took us two weeks to get the proper 
 developer. But our troubles were not over. Great 
 spots came out on the pictures — grease in the de- 
 veloping tanks. And the racks were so full of old 
 chemicals that they spoiled the film that hung over 
 them. I had new racks and new tanks made. They 
 were not made according to specifications. I had 
 them remade twice and then took them apart and 
 did the work myself. 
 
 After I thought that my troubles were over, I 
 found that my Pathescope projector, which had 
 been made for standard film, had several parts lack- 
 ing. This was most serious, for it spoiled a plan that 
 I had had in the back of my head ever since I had 
 first seen my Malekula pictures. I wanted to show 
 them to Nagapate and his men. It was an event that 
 I had looked forward to ever since I had decided to 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 27 
 
 revisit the island. It would be almost comparable to 
 setting up a movie show in the Garden of Eden. 
 Luckily, I was able to have the missing parts made 
 in Sydney, and my apparatus was at last in order. 
 
 Then I had to collect as much information as I 
 could about the New Hebrides and their inhabitants, 
 so I trotted around morning after morning, to inter- 
 view traders and steamship officials and mission- 
 aries. Another task, in which Osa helped me, was to 
 ransack the second-hand clothing stores for old hats 
 and coats and vests to serve as presents for the na- 
 tives. Other trade-stuffs, such as tobacco, mirrors, 
 knives, hatchets, and bright-colored calico, I 
 planned to get in Vila, the principal port and capi- 
 tal of the New Hebrides. 
 
 The four weeks had gone by like a flash, but the 
 Pacifique had not yet put in an appearance. She 
 came limping into harbor at the end of another week. 
 She had been delayed by engine trouble and by 
 quarantines; for the influenza was raging through 
 the South Seas. It was announced that she would 
 sail in five days, but the sailing date was postponed 
 several times, and it was the 18th of June before we 
 finally lifted anchor. 
 
 It seemed good to get out of the flu-infested city. 
 
28 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 where theaters and schools and churches were closed, 
 every one was forced to wear a mask, and the popu- 
 lation was in a blue funk. We both loved Sydney 
 and its hospitable people, but we were not sorry to 
 see the pretty harbor, with its green slopes dotted 
 with red-tiled roofs, fade into the distance. 
 
 Osa and I have often said that we like the Pa- 
 cifique better than any ship we have ever traveled on. 
 It is a little steamer — only one thousand nine hun- 
 dred tons. We do not have bunks to sleep in, but 
 comfortable beds. Morning coffee is served from 
 five to eleven o'clock. It is an informal meal. Every 
 one comes up for it in pajamas. Breakfast is at half- 
 past eleven. Dinner is ready at half-past six and 
 lasts until half -past eight. It is a leisurely meal, of 
 course after course, with red wine flowing plentifully. 
 After dinner, the French oflScers play on the piano 
 and sing. 
 
 Most of the officers were strangers to us on this 
 voyage, for our old friends were all down with the 
 flu in Sydney. The doctor and the wireless operator 
 were both missing, and the captain, Eric de Cata- 
 lano, assumed their duties. He was a good wireless 
 operator, for we got news from New Zealand each 
 night and were in communication with Noumea long 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 29 
 
 before we sighted New Caledonia. How efficient he 
 was as a doctor, I cannot say. But he had a big med- 
 icine chest and made his round each day among the 
 sick, and though many of the passengers came down 
 with influenza, none of them died. He was a hand- 
 some man, quiet and inteUigent, and a fine photog- 
 rapher. He had several cameras and a well-fitted 
 dark room and an enlarging apparatus aboard, and 
 had made some of the best island pictures I had ever 
 seen. He seemed to be a man of many talents, for 
 the chief engineer told me that he had an electri- 
 cian's papers and could run the engines as well as he 
 himself could. 
 
 We were a polyglot crowd aboard. We had fifteen 
 first-class and five second-class passengers, French, 
 Australian, English, Scotch, and Irish, and one Dane, 
 with Osa and myself to represent America. In the 
 steerage were twenty-five Japanese, and up forward 
 there was a Senegalese negro being taken to the 
 French convict settlement at Noumea. Our officers 
 were all French — few could speak English. Our 
 deck crew was composed of liberes — ex-convicts 
 from Noumea. The cargo-handlers were native New 
 Caledonians with a sprinkling of Loyalty Islanders. 
 The firemen were Arabs, the dish-washers in the gal- 
 
30 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 ley. New Hebrideans. The bath steward was a Fiji 
 Islander, the cabin steward a Hindu, the second- 
 class cabin steward hailed from the Molucca Islands, 
 and our table steward was a native of French Indo- 
 China. 
 
 Three days out from Sydney we passed Middle- 
 ton Reef, a coral atoll, about five miles long and two 
 across, with the ocean breaking in foam on its reef 
 and the water of its lagoon as quiet as a millpond. 
 The atoll is barely above water, and many ships 
 have gone aground there. We sailed so close that I 
 could have thrown a stone ashore, and saw the hull 
 of a big schooner on the reef. 
 
 As we stood by the rail looking at her, one of our 
 fellow-passengers, a trader who knew the islands 
 well, came up to us and told us her story. 
 
 "She went ashore three years ago, in a big wind," 
 he said. "All hands stuck to the ship until she broke 
 in two. Then they managed to reach land — cap- 
 tain and crew and the captain's wife and two chil- 
 dren. They had some fresh water and a little food. 
 They rationed the water carefully, and there was 
 rain. But the food soon gave out. For days they had 
 nothing. The crew went crazy with hunger, and 
 killed one of the children and ate it. For two days, 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 31 
 
 the mother held the other child in her arms. Then 
 she threw it into the sea so that they could not eat it. 
 Then three of the men took one of the ship's boats. 
 They could not manage it in the rough sea, but by a 
 lucky chance they were washed up on the beach. 
 They were still alive, but the captain's wife had lost 
 her mind." 
 
 We reached Noumea on the morning of June 23d. 
 The pilot met us outside the reef, in accordance with 
 regulations, but he refused to come on board when he 
 found that we had several passengers down with the 
 influenza, so we towed him in. We were not allowed 
 to land, but were placed in quarantine off a small 
 island about two miles from Noumea, between the 
 leper settlement and He Nou, the convict island. We 
 were avoided as though we had leprosy. Each day 
 a launch came with fresh meat and fresh vegetables, 
 the French engineer and black crew all masked and 
 plainly anxious not to linger in our vicinity any 
 longer than necessary, and each day the doctor came 
 and took our temperatures. 
 
 We passed our time in fishing from the deck. We 
 had excellent luck and our catches made fine eating. 
 Osa, of course, caught more fish than any one else, 
 principally because she was up at sunrise and did not 
 
32 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 quit until it was time to go to bed. I relieved the 
 monotony in the evenings by showing my pictures. 
 I set up the Pathescope in the saloon, and each night 
 I gave a performance. My audience was most criti- 
 cal. Every one on board knew the New Hebrides 
 and Noumea well, and many of the passengers were 
 familiar with the Solomons and other groups in 
 which I had taken pictures. But my projector 
 worked finely; I had as good a show as could be 
 seen in any motion-picture house, and every one was 
 satisfied. 
 
 We had been surprised, as we steamed into the 
 harbor, to see the Euphrosyne lying at anchor there. 
 The sight of her had made us realize that we were in- 
 deed nearing the Big Numbers territory. Strangely 
 enough, the thought aroused no fear in us — only 
 excitement and eagerness to get to work, and resent- 
 ment against the delay that kept us inactive in Nou- 
 mea harbor. 
 
 Not until four days had passed was our quaran- 
 tine lifted. On the evening of June 27th, the launch 
 brought word that peace had been signed, and that, 
 if no more cases of flu had developed, we would be 
 allowed to land on the following day and take part 
 in the peace celebration. 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 33 
 
 New Caledonia does not much resemble the other 
 islands of the South Pacific. It has a white popula- 
 tion of twenty thousand — about two thirds as 
 great as the native population. Its capital, Noumea, 
 is an industrial city of fifteen thousand white inhabi- 
 tants — the Chicago of the South Seas. In and 
 around it are nickel-smelters, meat-canneries, sugar- 
 works, tobacco and coconut-oil and soap factories. 
 New Caledonia is rich in minerals. It has large de- 
 posits of coal and kaolin, chrome and cobalt, lead 
 and antimony, mercury, cinnabar, silver, gold and 
 copper and gypsum and marble. In neighboring is- 
 lands are rich guano beds. Agriculture has not yet 
 been crowded off the island by industry. The 
 mountain slopes make good grazing grounds and the 
 fertile valleys are admirably fitted for the produc- 
 tion of coffee, cotton, maize, tobacco, copra, rubber, 
 and cereals. Yet there is little of South Seas ro- 
 mance about the islands. And Noumea is one of the 
 ugliest, most depressing little towns on the face of 
 the earth. 
 
 We docked there early on the morning of Satur- 
 day, the 28 th of June. The wharf was packed with 
 people, but none of them would come on board. We 
 might have been a plague ship. As we went ashore. 
 
34 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 we looked for signs of the peace celebration. A few 
 half-hearted firecrackers and some flags hanging 
 limp in the heat were all. The real celebration, we 
 were told, would take place on Monday. 
 
 In the evening, we were invited to attend one of 
 those terrible home-talent performances that I had 
 thought were a product only of Kansas, but, I now 
 learned, were as deadly in the South Seas as in the 
 Middle West. A round little Frenchman read a pa- 
 per in rapid French that we could not understand, 
 but the expression of polite interest on the faces of 
 the audience told us that it must be like the Fourth- 
 of-July orations in our home town. Then came a 
 duet, by a man and woman who could not sing. An- 
 other paper. Then an orchestra of three men and 
 four girls arranged themselves with much scraping 
 of chairs on the funny little stage and wheezed a few 
 ancient tunes. 
 
 On Sunday night we went to the Peace Ball in the 
 town hall. Most of Noumea's fifteen thousand in- 
 habitants were there, so dancing was next to impos- 
 sible. It was like a Mack Sennet comedy ball. An- 
 cient finery had been hauled out for the occasion, 
 and, though most of the men appeared in full dress, 
 scarcely one had evening clothes that really fitted. 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 35 
 
 Under the too loose and too tight coats, however, 
 there were warm and hospitable hearts, and we 
 were treated royally. After the ball, we were enter- 
 tained at supper by the governor and his suite. 
 
 Governor Joulia was a little, bald-headed man of 
 about fifty years of age, always smiling, always po- 
 lite, and always dressed in the most brilliant of bril- 
 liant uniforms, covered with decorations that he had 
 won during campaigns in Senegal, Algeria and India. 
 His wife was a pretty, plump woman of about thirty 
 — she and Osa took to each other at once. They 
 spoke no English, and our French is awful, but we 
 struck out like drowning persons, and managed to 
 understand each other after a fashion. 
 
 On Monday, the "real celebration" of the peace 
 consisted in closing the stores and sleeping most of 
 the day. In the afternoon, the governor and his 
 wife came to the ship for us and took us to their 
 beautiful summer place, about five miles from the 
 city. A great park, with deer feeding under the trees, 
 fine gardens, tennis courts, well-tended walks — and 
 the work all done by numbered convicts. 
 
 There are convicts everywhere in and about Nou- 
 mea — convicts and liberes. Their presence makes 
 the ugly little town seem even more unprepossessing 
 
36 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 than it is. The pleasantest spot anywhere around is 
 lie Nou, the convict island that I have often heard 
 called a hell on earth. On this green little island 
 are about five hundred convicts — all old men, for 
 France has not deported any of her criminals to New 
 Caledonia since 1897. They are all "lifers." Indeed, 
 I was told of one old man who is in for two hundred 
 years; he has tried to escape many times, and, accord- 
 ing to a rule of the settlement, ten years are added 
 to a man's sentence for each attempt at escape. 
 
 We visited lie Nou in company with Governor 
 Joulia and Madame Joulia; the Mayor of Noumea; 
 the manager of the big nickel mines; the Governor of 
 the prison settlement, and a lot of aides-de-some- 
 thing. We saw the old prisoners, in big straw hats 
 and burlap clothing, each with his number stamped 
 on his back, all busy doing nothing. We were taken 
 through the cells where, in former times, convicts 
 slept on bare boards, with their feet through leg- 
 irons. We were locked in dark dungeons, and, for 
 the benefit of my camera, the guillotine was brought 
 out and, with a banana stalk to take the place of a 
 man, the beheading ceremony was gone through 
 with. We were taken in carriages over the green 
 hills to the hospitals and to the insane asylum, where 
 
SYDNEY AND NEW CALEDONIA 37 
 
 we saw poor old crazy men, with vacant eyes, star- 
 ing at the ceihngs. Here we met the king of the 
 world, who received us with great pomp from behind 
 the bars of a strong iron cage, and a pitiful old inven- 
 tor, who showed us a perpetual-motion machine which 
 he had just perfected. It was made from stale bread. 
 
 Yet lie Nou is better than Noumea, with its ugly 
 streets full of broken old liberes. While most of the 
 convicts were sent out for life, some were sent for five 
 years. At the end of that time, they were freed from 
 lie Nou and permitted to live in New Caledonia on 
 parole, and if they had committed no fresh offense, 
 at the end of another five years they were given their 
 ticket back to France. Any one sentenced to a longer 
 term than five years, however, never saw France 
 again. He regained his freedom, but was destined to 
 lifelong exile. Some of the liberes have found em- 
 ployment and have become responsible citizens of 
 New Caledonia, but many of them drift through the 
 streets of Noumea, broken old men who sleep wher- 
 ever they can find a corner to crawl into and pick 
 their food from the gutters. 
 
 I was glad, while in Noumea, to renew my ac- 
 quaintance with Commissioner King of the New 
 Hebrides, who had come to New Caledonia to have 
 
38 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the Euphrosyne repaired. I talked over with him 
 my proposed expedition to Malekula, and received 
 much valuable advice. He could not give me the 
 armed escort I had hoped to secure from him, for 
 he had no police boys to spare. He promised, how- 
 ever, to pick us up at Vao, in about a month's time, 
 and take us for a cruise through the group in the Eu- 
 phrosyne. I wanted him, and the New Caledonian 
 ojQScials as well, to see some of my work, so I decided 
 to show my iSlms in the Grand Cinema, the leading 
 motion-picture house of Noumea. I gave the pro- 
 prietor the films free of charge, under condition that 
 I got fifty seats blocked off in the center of the house. 
 We invited fifty guests, and the remainder of the 
 house was packed with French citizens of Noumea, 
 Chinese and Japanese coolies and native New Cale- 
 donians. I showed the five reels called "Cannibals 
 of the South Seas." Then I showed my four reels of 
 Malekula film, and ended up with a one-reel subject, 
 Noumea. We were given an ovation, and both Osa 
 and I had to make speeches — understood by 
 few of those present. The French have a passion for 
 speeches whether they can understand them or not. 
 The next morning, we found ourselves celebrities as 
 we walked through the streets of Noumea. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 We left New Caledonia at midnight on July 3d, and 
 steamed over a calm sea to Vila. 
 
 Vila is the commercial center as well as th^ capi- 
 tal of the New Hebrides and its harbor is one of the 
 finest in the South Seas. On our right, as we steamed 
 in, was the island of Irriki, a mountain peak rising 
 out of the sea, on the highest point of which Mr. 
 King has built his house. Vila is a typical South 
 Seas town — a rambling mixture of tropical and Eu- 
 ropean architecture and no architecture at all. Its 
 public buildings, French and British, its churches, 
 and the well-kept British settlement, with the pa- 
 rade grounds and barracks for the native police, 
 make it more imposing than the run of the pioneer 
 villages of Melanesia, but it seemed strange to us 
 that it should be the metropolis for the white people 
 of thirty islands. We spent a day in Vila looking up 
 old acquaintances and laying in supplies. Among 
 the acquaintances we found good old Father Prin 
 who had been retired from active duty on Vao and 
 had come to Vila to spend his declining days. He 
 
40 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 was glad to see us, but shook his head when he heard 
 that we were again going to try our luck among the 
 Big Numbers. 
 
 "Big Numbers plenty bad," he warned us in 
 beche-de-mer. And Osa and I replied in the same 
 tongue, "Me no fright." 
 
 I bought nearly a thousand dollars' worth of food 
 and trade-stuffs from the four trading stores of Vila, 
 but could not get a schooner or any native boys to 
 take us on our trip around Malekula. So I decided 
 to go on to the island of Espiritu Santo, two hun- 
 dred miles to the north. We stopped at Api, to leave 
 mail and supplies and to take on copra. In the har- 
 bor there, we again saw the old Snark at anchor. It 
 was a black and shabby ship, manned by a black 
 crew and used for recruiting labor for work in the 
 white man's sugar and copra plantations. 
 
 We found Segond Channel, ofiF Southeastern 
 Santo, filled with cutters and schooners, every one 
 of which had white men aboard, who had been wait- 
 ing a couple of weeks for the news and supplies 
 brought by the Pacifique. In no time at all, I made 
 arrangements for three schooners with big crews to 
 accompany me on my visit to the tribe of the Big 
 Numbers. Mr. Thomas, of Hog Harbor, promised 
 
THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND 41 
 
 he would send his boat to Vao in a week with as 
 many boys as he could spare. Mr. Perrole, an ex- 
 perienced French recruiter, also agreed to charter 
 a schooner and bring boys. We obtained a third 
 schooner from a young Frenchman, Paul Mazouyer, 
 one of the most picturesque dare-devils I have ever 
 met. A giant in size and strength, boiling with en- 
 ergy, always singing, sometimes dancing with his 
 boys, he did not understand the meaning of fear. He 
 was a match for three white men, and he took 
 chances on the beach that no other recruiter would 
 dream of taking. I asked him once in beche-de-mer — 
 the only language in which we could converse — if 
 the savages did not sometimes make him a little 
 anxious. 
 
 "Ah," he said, shifting his huge frame and stretch- 
 ing his arms, " my word ! Suppose fifty men he come, 
 me no fright!" 
 
 I believed him. He was a two-fisted adventurer of 
 the old type, with the courage of unbeaten youth. 
 He knew, as every white man in the New Hebrides 
 knows, that he might expect short shrift once the 
 natives got him in their power, but he trusted to 
 fate and took reckless chances. 
 
 The captain of the Pacifique agreed to take us to 
 
42 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 Vao, although it was fifty miles off his course. We 
 dropped anchor off the island just at daylight and 
 were surrounded almost immediately by canoes 
 filled with naked savages. The Pacifique was a mar- 
 vel to the natives. She was* one of the smallest 
 steamers I had ever been aboard, but they had never 
 in all their lives seen so large a vessel. The imposing 
 size of the ship and the impressive quantity of my 
 baggage — sixty-five trunks, crates and boxes — 
 gave me a great deal of importance in their eyes. As 
 we stood on the beach watching the unloading of the 
 ship's boat, they crowded about, regarding us with 
 furtive curiosity. From time to time they opened 
 their huge, slobbering mouths in loud guffaws, 
 though there was apparently no cause for laughter. 
 When my things were all unloaded, the captain 
 and officers shook hands with us and put off for the 
 ship. In twenty minutes the Pacifique was steam- 
 ing away. Before she gained speed, a big American 
 flag was hoisted between the masts, and the engi- 
 neer tooted encouragement to us. As she grew small 
 in the distance, the flag at the stern of the vessel was 
 dipped three times. We sat on the beach among our 
 boxes and watched her until she was just a cloud of 
 smoke on the horizon. We felt very lonely and very 
 
THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND 43 
 
 much shut off from our kind there, surrounded by a 
 crowd of jabbering, naked savages, who stared at us 
 with all the curiosity shown by people back home 
 toward the wild man in a sideshow. 
 
 With a show of cheerfulness, we set about making 
 ourselves comfortable for the weeks to come. The 
 huts of the seventeen converts were deserted, and 
 rapidly going to pieces: the former occupants had 
 forsaken the lonely clearing for the crowded vil- 
 lages. But the little stone house in which Father 
 Prin had lived was still standing, though one corner 
 of the roof had fallen in. A proffer of tobacco se- 
 cured me many willing black hands to repair the 
 roof and thatch it with palm leaves. Other natives 
 brought up our trunks and boxes. They cut big 
 poles and lashed the boxes to them with vines, and, 
 ten to twenty natives to a box, they carried the lug- 
 gage from the beach in no time. By noon we had 
 everything stored away safe from the weather. We 
 spent the afternoon in unpacking the things needed 
 for immediate use, and soon Osa and I had our little 
 three-room dwelling shipshape. 
 
 We had learned a lesson from our first trip, with 
 the result that, on this second expedition, we had 
 brought with us every possible comfort and even 
 
44 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 some luxuries — from air-cushions and mattresses 
 to hams, bacons, and cheeses specially prepared for 
 us in Sydney. With a clear-flamed Primus stove and 
 Osa to operate it, we were fairly certain of good food. 
 Having promulgated the law of the New Hebrides 
 and Solomons, that every native coming upon the 
 clearing must leave his gun behind him and cover 
 his nakedness with calico, we settled down for a long 
 stay. 
 
 Vao is a very small island, no more than two miles 
 in diameter, lying several miles oflF the northeast 
 shore of Malekula. It is rimmed on the Malekula 
 side by a broad, beautiful beach. Three small vil- 
 lages are hidden in the low, scrub jungle, but the 
 only signs of habitation are three canoe houses that 
 jut out from the fringe of bushes and hundreds of 
 canoes drawn up in a careful line upon the beach. 
 
 About four hundred savages live in the three vil- 
 lages of Vao. Their huts — mere shelters, not high 
 enough to permit a man to stand erect — contain 
 nothing but a few bits of wood to feed the smolder- 
 ing fires. Pigs wander freely in and out. Oftentimes 
 these animals seem to be better favored than the 
 human inmates, who are a poor lot, many of them 
 aflSicted with dreadful sores and weak eyes. 
 
THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND 45 
 
 Many of the inhabitants of Vao are refugees from 
 the big island of Malekula, who were vanquished in 
 battle and literally driven off the earth by their ene- 
 mies. Soon after our arrival, a powerful savage 
 named Tethlong, one of the Small Numbers people, 
 arrived on Vao with twenty of his men. All the re- 
 maining men of his tribe had been killed and the 
 women and children had been taken captive. The 
 natives of Vao received the newcomers as a welcome 
 addition to their fighting force, and Tethlong set 
 about to insure his position among his new neigh- 
 bors. He invited the entire population to a feast, 
 and at once sent his men to neighboring islands to 
 buy up pigs and chickens for the occasion. The 
 devil-devils — great, hollowed logs, carved roughly 
 to represent human faces, which are erected every- 
 where in the New Hebrides to guard against evil 
 spirits — were consulted to find a propitious time 
 for the feasting, and on the appointed day the cele- 
 bration began with much shouting and singing and 
 dancing and beating of tom-toms. It lasted for sev- 
 eral days. Before it was over, seven hundred and 
 twenty pigs had been slaughtered. The island had 
 never before seen such a feast. As a result of his 
 political strategy, Tethlong became the Big Chief 
 
46 CANNIBAL-LAND . 
 
 of Vao, taking precedence over the chiefs already ' 
 there. 
 
 I got some fine pictures of Tethlong's feast, but 
 they were the only pictures I took for some days. 
 For one thing, 1 was too busy for camera work; for 
 the job of checking over our supplies and fortifying 
 our place against a heavy rain kept us busy. For an- 
 other, I was anxious to keep our savage neighbors 
 at a distance, so long as we were alone. 
 
 Though they got over their curiosity concerning 
 us and our effects within a few days, about half a 
 dozen loafers continued to appear every morning 
 and beg for tobacco. They were too lazy to work, 
 and their constant presence annoyed us. They were 
 in the way, and, besides, they grew cheekier day by 
 day. The limit was reached one evening when Osa 
 was playing her ukulele. Several natives wandered 
 over from the village to listen. It was pretty music 
 — I liked it a lot — and Osa was flattered when 
 some of the boys came to talk to us about it. But it 
 soon developed that they were demanding tobacco 
 as compensation for listening ! 
 
 We managed to get hold of a fairly trustworthy 
 boy — Arree by name — to help with the house- 
 work. He claimed to have gone to the Catholic mis- 
 
THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND 47 
 
 sion school at Vila, and, strange to say, he did not 
 approve of the ways of his own people, though he 
 was never absent from one of their festivals. He al- 
 ways told us the local gossip. It was from him that 
 we learned what had happened to the mission boy 
 who had worked for us on our former visit. He had 
 aroused the ill-will of a neighbor and two weeks be- 
 fore our arrival had died from poison placed in his 
 lap4ap, a pudding made of coconuts and fish. 
 
 Osa could write volumes regarding the difficulties 
 of training her scrubby native recruit to the duties of 
 housework. He spoke good beche-de-mer, but beche- 
 de-mer is a language capable of various interpreta- 
 tions. Osa spoke it better than I, but even she could 
 not make simple orders clear to our muddle-brained 
 black slavey. One morning, she told Arree to heat an 
 iron for her. She waited for a long time to get it, and 
 then went after it. She found Arree crouched before 
 the fire, gravely watching the iron boiling in a pot. 
 
 Arree murdered the King's English in a way that 
 must have made old Webster turn over in his grave. 
 He never said "No." His negative was always "No 
 more," and his affirmative was an emphatic "Yes- 
 yes." When I called for warm water in the morning, 
 he would reply, blandly, "Hot water, he cold fel- 
 
48 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 low," and I would have to wait until, in his leisured 
 way, Arree built the fire and heated the water. He 
 had a sore leg, which I healed with a few applications 
 of ointment. A few days later, he came to me with 
 one eye swollen nearly shut, and my medicine kit in 
 his hand. "Me gottem sore leg along eye-eye," he 
 informed me. Sometimes he achieved triumphs. I 
 asked him once to tell another native to bring me the 
 saw from Osa. In order to air his knowledge of Eng- 
 lish, Arree said: "You go along Mary (woman) 
 belong Master catchem one fellow something he 
 brother belong ackus (axe), puUem he come, pushem 
 he go." And then he translated the command, for 
 his admiring, wide-eyed brother, into the native 
 dialect. 
 
 Osa and I often caught ourselves falling into this 
 queer English even when there were no natives 
 around. It gets into the blood like baby-talk. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 
 
 Long before our reenforcements were due to arrive, 
 we began to feel uneasy on Vao. I found our neigh- 
 bors far too friendly with the unregenerate Malekula 
 bushmen to be entirely trustworthy. The bush peo- 
 ple had no canoes. But when they wanted to visit 
 Vao, they would sing out from the shore, and the 
 Vao men would go after them and bring them over, 
 fifteen or twenty of them at a time. The Malekula 
 men never came near our clearing, but the knowl- 
 edge that they were on the island made us uncom- 
 fortable. We were sure that they came to partici- 
 pate in savage orgies, for often after a group of them 
 arrived, the sound of the tom-tom and of savage 
 chanting drifted through the jungle from the native 
 villages, and our little clearing seemed haunted by 
 shadows that assumed menacing shapes. Finally, 
 there occurred an incident that changed what had 
 been merely nervous apprehension to vivid fear. 
 
 We had been a week on the island. The schooners 
 we were awaiting had not yet arrived. We could ex- 
 pect them, now, any day, but things do not run by 
 
50 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 clockwork in the South Seas, so we knew that an- 
 other week might pass before we should see them. 
 It had been hot and rainy and steamy and disagree- 
 able ever since our arrival, but to-night was clear, 
 with a refreshing breeze. After our tinned dinner, 
 Osa and I went down to the beach. The moon was 
 full. The waves lazily washed up on the soft sand, 
 white in the moonlight, and the fronds of the palm- 
 trees along the shore whispered and rattled above 
 our heads. Osa, in a romantic mood, was strumming 
 very softly on the ukulele. All at once, we heard 
 the whish-whish of canoe paddles coming around a 
 rocky point. We moved back into the shelter of some 
 bushes and watched. 
 
 Presently ten natives landed on the beach and 
 drew their canoe up after them. From it they took 
 two objects wrapped in leaves, one elongated and 
 heavy — it took several men to handle it — the 
 other small and round. Soon the men, with their 
 burdens, disappeared down a dark pathway leading 
 to the village. 
 
 For several minutes we did not dare to move. 
 Then we hurried back to the house and got our re- 
 volvers and sat for a long time feeling very much 
 alone, afraid to go to bed and afraid to go out in the 
 
p NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 51 
 
 open. After a while a weird chanting and the beat- 
 ing of tom-toms began in the village near by. The 
 noise kept us awake all night. 
 
 Next morning, Arree came up with his story of the 
 night's revels. The packages, he said, had really 
 contained the body and head of a man. The head 
 had been impaled on a stick in the village square, 
 and the natives had danced wildly around it. Then 
 the body was spitted on a long pole and roasted over 
 a great fire. The savages continued to dance and 
 sing until the horrible meal was ready. The rest of 
 the night was spent in feasting. Such orgies as this, 
 Arree said, were fairly frequent. The natives often 
 purchased slain enemies from the bush savages of 
 Malekula, to eat as they would eat so many pigs. 
 
 Two days after this incident, Paul Mazouyer 
 dropped anchor off Vao. We were glad to see him, 
 and told him so in emphatic beche'de-mer, the only 
 common language at our disposal. We promptly put 
 my apparatus aboard his little schooner, or cutter, 
 as the craft was called in those waters, and set sail 
 for the country of the Big Numbers. A hundred 
 naked savages watched us in silence from the beach. 
 The two other schooners had gone on ahead to meet 
 us in Big Numbers Bay, known locally as Tanema- 
 
52 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 rou. They were all recruiting schooners with ex- 
 perienced crews, armed with regulation rifles, as 
 permitted and indeed insisted upon by the Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Recruiting labor for the rubber and sugar planta- 
 tions of white settlers is a regular business in the 
 New Hebrides and a dangerous one. A recruiter 
 chooses his island and anchors in the offing. He then 
 sets adrift a charge of dynamite, which is detonated 
 as a signal to the natives. The roar of the explosion 
 rolls through the valleys and echoes against the 
 hills. On the day following, the savages come down 
 to the beach to trade. Two boats then put off from 
 the schooner. In the first is the white man with an 
 imarmed crew, for the savages are not beyond rush- 
 ing the boat for the sake of a gun. In the second, 
 hovering a short distance away, is an armed crew, 
 who cover the savages with their guns while their 
 master parleys with the chiefs for recruits. At the 
 first hostile move on the part of the natives, the boys 
 in the covering boat open fire. 
 
 Despite such extreme precautions, tragedies hap- 
 pen. A friend of Paul Mazouyer's had been killed at 
 Malua, whither we were now bound. Paul told us 
 the story. There were only a few savages on the 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 53 
 
 beach at the time; but one of them promised to go 
 into the bush to recruit if his people were given half 
 a case of tobacco. The recruiter foolishly sent his 
 covering boat back to the cutter for the tobacco, and 
 the savages sat down on the beach to wait. While 
 they were waiting, another savage came out of the 
 jungle. He walked slowly down the beach with his 
 hands behind him and waded out into the water un- 
 til he could get behind the white man. Then he sud- 
 denly placed the muzzle of a gun against the white 
 man's back and pulled the trigger. 
 
 .\ French gunboat was sent from Noumea to 
 avenge the murder, and a month after the tragedy 
 Paul led an expedition into the bush which razed a 
 village and killed a number of savages. 
 
 In conclusion, Paul told us an incident that he 
 thought was uproariously funny. The victor had 
 brought the bodies of four of the natives down to the 
 sea. Among the members of the expedition were a 
 dozen "civilized" blacks of a tribe hostile to the Big 
 Numbers. These twelve boys looked thoughtfully 
 at the four dead bodies and then approached the 
 commander with a spokesman at their head. 
 
 "Master," he said with great earnestness, "me 
 lookum some fellow man he die finish. He stop along 
 
54 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 sand. He plenty good kai-kai! Me think more bet- 
 ter you no put him along ground. Altogether boy he 
 speak — He eat him!" 
 
 We reached the bay where these events had taken 
 place on the first night after our departure from Vao. 
 We coasted along so close to the shore that we could 
 plainly see groups of natives who watched us, talk- 
 ing and gesticulating among themselves, and some- 
 times followed us for some distance along the beach, 
 curious to see where we would land. We rounded 
 the northern point of the island and bucked into a 
 stiff head wind and a strong current. We made little 
 progress until the tide turned. Then we went along 
 at a good rate. 
 
 We anchored in Malua Bay, a stone's throw from 
 shore, on a line with a great ravine that cleft the 
 mountains and separated the territory of the Small 
 Numbers tribes, which lies directly across from Vao, 
 from that of the Big Numbers, which occupies the 
 northwest corner of the island. 
 
 That was a night typical of the South Seas. I 
 shall never forget it. The moon was visible for only 
 a few seconds at a time, when it dodged from behind 
 thick, drifting clouds and drenched everything with 
 a light almost as bright as day. Our black crew hud- 
 
 ! 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 55 
 
 died in the bow of the boat. We sat with our guns 
 beside us. On the shore we could clearly make out 
 the forms of savages squatting around their camp- 
 fire. From the distance we could hear the deep tones 
 of the conch-shell boo-boos. The sea rolled upon the 
 beach with a heavy, sleepy purring. In the dark 
 blue waters below us we could see sharks moving 
 about, leaving trails of phosphorus. By the light of 
 a greasy, smoky lantern that went out every few 
 moments, struggling against a ground swell that 
 threatened to capsize my typewriter, I entered the 
 day's events in my diary. As I wrote, the savages 
 began a weird dance, their grotesque forms silhouet- 
 ted against the sky. The sound of their chanting 
 brought me what Osa calls the "South Sea feel- 
 ing." I don't know how to describe it. But it is the 
 thing that makes me always want to go back. 
 
 The next morning we went ashore in two boats, 
 Paul, Osa, and myself in one, with one boy to pull, 
 and four armed boys in another boat to cover us. 
 There were only half a dozen savages in sight, so we 
 landed on the beach and even walked up to the small 
 river that emptied into the bay, but we kept our 
 guns handy and the covering boat was watching 
 closely. We knew that if it came to a rush, we could 
 
56 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 beat the savages to the boat and that they were too 
 poor shots to waste valuable ammunition in shoot- 
 ing from the edge of the jungle. It is the custom of 
 the men of Malekula to approach near enough to 
 place the muzzle against their enemy. Otherwise, 
 they seldom risk a shot. 
 
 We had not been ashore long when we saw a cou- 
 ple of natives emerge from the bush and walk toward 
 us. We hurried to the boat. Other savages appeared 
 in small groups, so we shoved ofiP. We bobbed along 
 the shore all afternoon, while Paul tried to get re- 
 cruits. About fifty armed savages wandered up and 
 down, coaxing us in closer; but on account of Osa, 
 I would not risk landing, though Paul, who feared 
 nothing, wanted to put in to shore. He knew that 
 almost any savage in that region would kill him, if 
 chance offered, in revenge for the part he had played 
 in the punitive expedition, but this was his favorite 
 recruiting ground and he was not to be scared away 
 from it. He had the contempt for natives that has 
 resulted fatally for many a white man. 
 
 At sundown we returned to the cutter. We could 
 hear the savages shouting as they went back into the 
 hills. The broiling sun had left us hot and sticky, 
 and when Paul suggested a swim we all agreed to it, 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 57 
 
 sharks or no sharks. The boys kept a sharp lookout 
 for the flashes of phosphorus that would mean ap- 
 proaching danger, but we finished our swim without 
 adventure. Nevertheless, that night we put out 
 hooks and caught two sharks, one four feet long, the 
 other six — which ended our swimming along these 
 shores. 
 
 Paul's little boat was close quarters for the three 
 of us. He made his bed alongside the engines, be- 
 low, and Osa and I slept in the scuppers, one on each 
 side of the hatch. 
 
 At about eleven o'clock, it began to rain and blow. 
 We dragged our anchor and had to put down an- 
 other and then a kedge anchor in addition. The 
 craft twisted and turned and plunged, until Osa 
 swore we went right over and up again. I padded 
 Osa with old sail to protect her from bruises and we 
 held on to the hatch with both hands to keep from 
 being thrown into the sea. Almost all our supplies 
 were drenched; for we robbed everything else of tar- 
 paulin or canvas coverings to keep my apparatus 
 dry. Shivering and wretched, we crouched on deck 
 waiting for daylight. Morning was never so slow in 
 coming; but with the first light, the rain ceased, the 
 sea became smooth, and the wn came up broiling 
 
58 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 hot, sucking up the moisture until from stem to bow 
 we looked like a spout of a boiling tea-kettle. 
 
 There was fever in the air. We ate quinine as if it 
 had been candy, in an effort to stave off the sickness 
 that, always inconvenient, would now prove espe- 
 cially so. 
 
 About noon we made out two vessels sailing up to 
 us, and as they came alongside we found that one 
 was sailed by Perrole and the other by a young man, 
 half Samoan and half English, whom Mr. Thomas 
 had sent with ten boys. His name was Stephens. 
 We now had twenty-six armed and experienced na- 
 tives, four white men and Osa. With this force I 
 was ready to undertake almost anything; so after a 
 hasty conference we decided to go on to Tanemarou, 
 the bay from which we had first entered Nagapate's 
 territory. Without the aid of the Government, I 
 saw that it would be impossible to carry out my 
 original intention of entering the island at the north- 
 ern end and traversing it straight through to the 
 southern. So I proposed the alternative plan of sail- 
 ing completely around the island, landing at differ- 
 ent points from which I could strike inland to visit 
 the tribes. In many ways, this latter plan proved to 
 be the better of the two for my purpose. I doubt. 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 59 
 
 now, if a Government escort would have been to my 
 advantage; for any Government expedition would 
 have been regarded as a punitive raid and as such 
 would have encountered the most determined resist- 
 ance. Even at the time, I felt that the peaceable na- 
 ture of my expedition would put me on good terms 
 with the savages. Cruel as they were, they were 
 childlike, too, and the fact that we were coming to 
 them in a friendly spirit with presents for which, ap- 
 parently, we were asking nothing in return, would, 
 I felt sure, disarm their hostility. I had discovered 
 that most of the recent murders of white men had 
 been committed by the savages in a spirit of revenge. 
 Recruiters who had carried off their kinsfolk; trad- 
 ers who had cheated them; members of punitive ex- 
 peditions, or the occasional Simon Legree who had 
 earned the hatred of the blacks by cruelty — such 
 were the victims of savage gun or knife. 
 
 It was with a feeling of confidence that I sailed 
 into Tanemarou Bay. Here, sweeping around us, 
 was the broad beach across which we had run for our 
 lives almost two years before. In fine yellow sand it 
 spread away from the water's edge for about a hun- 
 dred yards to the dark fringe of jungle. Against the 
 high black volcanic rocks that guarded the entrance 
 
60 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 to the bay, a heavy surf beat and roared, but on the 
 sands the land-locked waters lapped gently, shini" 
 mering with many colors. The dark hills rose about 
 the jungle in green slopes mottled with brown and 
 streaked here and there with tiny wisps of smoke. 
 
 I suddenly thought that the peaceful aspect of 
 those hills was exactly what must have struck the 
 men aboard the gunboat Euphrosyne when its op- 
 portune appearance had given Osa and me the 
 chance for our lives. The memory of that horri- 
 ble adventure made me momentarily uneasy. Os 
 squeezed my arm, and I knew that her thoughts, too, 
 had gone back to the evening when, in the gathering 
 darkness, we had slipped from the edge of the jun- 
 gle, tattered, bleeding, and terrified, and rushed into 
 the water pursued by the yelling savages. 
 
 Paul was not troubled by any forebodings. He at 
 once suggested that we go ashore. So Osa and I fol- 
 lowed him into the boat and we pulled for the beach, 
 followed by the small boats from the other cutters. 
 As we landed, about twenty armed savages suddenly 
 appeared and came walking boldly toward us. Ex- 
 cept for belts of rough bark and clouts of pandanus 
 fiber, they were naked. The flatness of their noses 
 was accentuated by plugs driven through the car- 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 61 
 
 tilage dividing the nostrils. Shaggy, outstanding 
 manes of hair completely encircled their faces, 
 which were deeply seamed and wore a perpetual 
 scowl. 
 
 I began to doubt once more whether I could ful- 
 fill the object of my expedition after all. There was 
 no man living who had witnessed the cannibalistic 
 rites of these wild men. Many had made the at- 
 tempt and had paid a gruesome penalty. But as the 
 band drew nearer, my feeling changed. In a sense, 
 they were my people. They had encircled the globe 
 with me and in the comfortable surroundings of 
 great theaters had stood naked and terrible before 
 thousands of civilized people. I had made their faces 
 familiar in all parts of the world. With something 
 like emotion I watched them as they approached. 
 Suddenly the figure at their head stood out like a 
 "fade-in." 
 
 It was Nagapate. 
 
 Osa and I forgot that this savage had once wanted 
 to eat us. We forgot what had happened at our first 
 violent meeting. We looked at each other and smiled 
 and then, both actuated by the same unaccountable 
 impulse, we rushed forward and grabbed his hand. 
 
 Now Nagapate did not know the meaning of a 
 
62 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 handshake, but he seemed to understand instantly 
 that we were glad to see him. His heavy face, gashed 
 so deeply with wrinkles that his scowl seemed unal- 
 terable, broke into a delighted grin. He recovered 
 his dignity in a moment, however, and stood to one 
 side with his arms folded on his massive chest, 
 watching closely every move we made. The strong 
 guard we had brought with us must have impressed 
 him; but he did not seem at all apprehensive, for he 
 could tell by our conduct that we were friendly. We 
 were anxious to get some pictures. However, since 
 fresh relays of savages continued to come down from 
 the jungle, we decided to wait until we had with us 
 all the boys from the other boats before taking any 
 further chances. 
 
 We decided to return to the cutter, and as we were 
 about to embark an extraordinary thing happened. 
 Nagapate came up to Osa and made signs to show 
 that he would like to go aboard with us. Now hun- 
 dreds of his own people had been grabbed from his 
 beach in times gone by and "blackbirded" away to 
 slavery. He was accustomed, and with cause, to 
 think the white man as merciless as we thought him 
 to be. Yet of his own free will, without a glimmer of 
 fear, Nagapate put himself completely in our power. 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 63 
 
 An hour later, while we ate our dinner of tinned 
 beef, Nagapate, with two of his men, squatted on 
 the deck at our feet and ate hard-tack and white 
 trade-salmon. Afterwards I brought out pictures 
 I had made on my first visit. The savages gave 
 yells of excitement when they saw Nagapate's face 
 caught on paper. When I produced a large colored 
 poster of the chief and presented it to him, he was 
 speechless. The three savages, looking at this mys- 
 terious likeness, were almost ready to kow-tow to us, 
 as they did to their devil-devils in the bush. 
 
 But the crowning touch of all came when we had 
 grown a little tired of our guests, and Osa brought 
 out her ukulele and commenced to sing. To our sur- 
 prise Nagapate joined in, chanting a weird melody, 
 which his men took up. After a few bars, they were 
 made shy by the sound of their own voices. Nagapate 
 stopped his song and vainly tried once more to look 
 dignified. In fact, that old man-eater showed every 
 manifestation of a young and awkward boy's self- 
 consciousness! 
 
 We bridged over the awkward situation with more 
 salmon and about ten o'clock sent him ashore happy, 
 with his bare arms full of knives and calico and to- 
 bacco. We judged by his farewell that we would be 
 
64 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 
 welcome any time we cared to drop in on him for 
 dinner and that we had a fair prospect of not being 
 served up as the main course. In any case, on the 
 strength of his visit, I determined to chance a visit 
 to his village on the following day, though I realized 
 that the visit, in many ways significant, did not give 
 the least assurance of continued friendliness. These 
 savages are as willful and as uncertain in their 
 moods as children. When they are sulky, they are 
 as likely to murder treacherously whoever arouses 
 their ill-will as a small boy is to throw a stone. There 
 is no one to control or guide them. They are physi- 
 cally powerful, they are passionate, and they pos- ■ 
 sess deadly weapons. We could be no more certain ■ 
 that our lives would be safe with them than a man 
 with a silk hat can be sure of his headgear among 
 three hundred schoolboys fighting with snowballs. 
 
 We were awakened at daybreak by a shout from 
 the shore. A score of natives stood on the beach, 
 calling and gesticulating. I went ashore, accompa- 
 nied by Paul Mazouyer, and found that they had 
 presents from their chief, Nagapate — yams and co- 
 conuts and wild fruits. But the presents were not 
 for me. In their almost unintelligible beche-de-mer, 
 the natives explained that the fruits were for " Mary " 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 65 
 
 — their beche-de-mer word for woman. I could 
 scarcely believe my ears. In all my experience 
 among the blacks of the South Seas, I had never 
 known a savage to pay any attention to a woman, ex- 
 cept to beat her or to growl at her. The women of 
 the islands are slaves, valued at so many pigs. They 
 do all the work that is done in the native villages and 
 get scoldings and kicks for thanks. I went doubt- 
 fully back to the schooner and brought Osa ashore. 
 The natives greeted her with grunts of satisfaction 
 and laid their offering at her feet. 
 
 My respect for Nagapate increased. I saw that he 
 was a diplomat. Hahad observed that this little per- 
 son in overalls, who had approached him so fear- 
 lessly, was treated with the utmost deference by the 
 crews of the schooners and by the white men. He 
 had come to the conclusion that she was the real 
 boss of the expedition. And he was very nearly 
 right! 
 
 Perrole and Stephens joined us, and we remained 
 on the beach all morning. Osa and I took pictures 
 of the natives squatting about us and watched for 
 Nagapate himself to put in an appearance. I was 
 eager to invite him to his first "movie." He had 
 been overcome with awe at sight of a photograph of 
 
66 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 himself. What would he say to motion-pictures that 
 showed him talking, with threatening gestures, and 
 scowling as on that memorable day two years be- 
 fore? 
 
 Every now and then a new delegation of natives 
 arrived on the beach. In spite of the law that prohib- 
 its the sale of firearms to the natives, they all car- 
 ried rifles. I examined some of the guns. They were 
 old, but not too old to do damage, and every native 
 had a supply of cartridges. I found later that spears 
 and bows and arrows are almost out of use among 
 the Big Numbers. Nine men out of ten own guns. 
 Where do they get them? No native will tell, for 
 telling would mean no more rifles and no more car- 
 tridges. The white people of the islands know, but 
 they keep their information to themselves. I know, 
 too, but I am not doing any talking either, for I want 
 to go back to the New Hebrides some day. 
 
 Our own boys remained close by us all the morn- 
 ing and we kept sharp watch for any sign of treach- 
 ery. By noon, the savages had lost their suspicion of 
 us. They stacked their rifles against rocks and trees 
 and moved about, talking to each other in their 
 strange, grunting speech. We, too, moved about 
 more freely. And I tried to gain the confidence of the 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 67 
 
 natives by talking to them. My attempts to learn 
 their language with beche-de-mer as a medium 
 brought great guffaws. But in spite of the friendli- 
 ness of our visitors, we were never quite at ease. 
 Their appearance was against them. Their ugly 
 faces — eyes with scarcely any pupils, flat noses 
 made twice their normal size by the wooden plugs 
 thrust through the cartilage dividing the nostrils, 
 great mouths with thick, loose lips — their stealthy 
 way of walking, their coarse, rapid, guttural speech, 
 which sounded angry even when they spoke to one 
 another, the quick gestures with which they filled in 
 the gaps in their limited language — none of these 
 things tended to make us feel at home. 
 
 I kept wondering how some of Osa's sheltered 
 young friends back home would act, if they were to 
 be set down, as she was, on a sandy beach, miles from 
 civilization, and surrounded with fierce cannibals — 
 hideous and worse than naked; for they worship sex, 
 and what clothing they wear calls attention to their 
 sex rather than conceals it. I watched her admir- 
 ingly as she went about taking snapshots as imcon- 
 cernedly as if the savages had been Boy Scouts on an 
 outing. And I thought, as I have thought many 
 many times in the nine years we have gone about to- 
 
68 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 gether, how lucky I was. Osa has all the qualities 
 that go to make an ideal traveling companion for an 
 explorer — pluck, endurance, cheerfulness under dis- 
 comfort. In an emergency, I would trust her far 
 sooner than I would trust most men. 
 
 During the afternoon, several fresh groups of na- 
 tives came out of the jungle to stare at us, and to- 
 ward sunset a number of savages descended a trail 
 that sloped down to the beach about half a mile from 
 where we were sitting and brought us a message from 
 the great chief. It was couched as follows: "Naga- 
 pate, he big fellow master belong Big Numbers. He, 
 he wantem you, you two fellow, you come along 
 lookem house belong him, you lookem piccaninny 
 belong him, you lookem Mary belong him. He 
 makem big fellow sing-sing. More good you, you 
 two fellow come. He no makem bad, he makem good 
 altogether." And it meant that His Highness, Chief 
 Nagapate, would like to have us visit him in his vil- 
 lage, and that he guaranteed our safety* 
 
 I accepted the invitation with alacrity. The mes- 
 sengers hurried off, and Osa and I followed, curious to 
 see where the trail left the beach. We had not gone 
 far, before Paul shouted for us to stop. We halted 
 and saw, a quarter of a mile down the beach, a group 
 
I 
 
NAGAPATE COMES TO CALL 69 
 
 of about a hundred armed natives. Some Big Num- 
 bers people came up to us and warned us, with ges- 
 tures, to go no farther, so we sat down on the sand 
 and awaited developments. The newcomers squat- 
 ted on the beach and stared in our direction. In 
 about fifteen minutes, a second group of natives ap- 
 peared from a trail still farther down the beach, and 
 the first group sprang to their feet and melted into 
 the bush with incredible rapidity. 
 
 What did it all mean? Paul, well versed in island 
 lore, had the answer. The beach was used jointly by 
 four tribes, three belonging to the Big Numbers and 
 one to the Small Numbers people. All of these tribes 
 are more or less hostile, but they have agreed be- 
 tween them that the beach is neutral ground, for 
 they realize that if fighting is permitted there, it will 
 never be safe for any of them to come out into the 
 open to trade or fish. Sometimes the beach armistice 
 is violated, and for weeks there is severe fighting 
 along the sand; in the end, however, the matter is al- 
 ways settled by an exchange of wild pigs and the 
 beach is again safe for all comers. But the armistice 
 never extends back into the bush. In the jungle and 
 the tall cane-grass, it is always open season for man- 
 killing. 
 
70 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 We returned to the schooner early that eveninj 
 in order to make ready for our trip into the interior. 
 I packed all my photographic apparatus carefully in 
 canvas and rubber cases, and I bundled up several 
 tarpaulins to protect us and our cameras in case of 
 sudden rain. We put up enough supplies to last 
 seven or eight days, and a good equipment of trade- 
 stuffs. As we packed, the monotonous chanting of 
 some twenty of Nagapate's men, who had remained 
 on the beach to escort us to the village, drifted 
 across the water. Occasionally we caught a glimpse 
 of them, grotesque black shapes against the light 
 from their camp-fire. 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 
 
 Next morning, before daybreak, we were on the 
 beach. The embers of the camp-fire remained, but 
 our escort had vanished. I was filled with misgiv- 
 ings. Did Nagapate plan treachery? We were thirty- 
 one — twenty-six trustworthy native boys, four 
 white men, and Osa. We were all well equipped 
 with repeating rifles and automatic pistols. In open 
 fight, we could have stood off a thousand savages. 
 But I knew that the men of Malekula, though they 
 are notoriously bad shots, could pick us off one 
 by one, if they wished, as we went through the 
 jungle. 
 
 I suppose that we all felt a little doubtful about 
 taking the plunge into the jungle, but we all — with 
 the exception of our native boys, who were plainly 
 in a blue funk — kept our doubts to ourselves. The 
 boys were so frightened that they rebelled against 
 carrying anything except their guns. To inspire 
 them with confidence, each of us took a piece of lug- 
 gage, and then we divided among them what was 
 left and persuaded them to take the trail. 
 
72 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 It was dawn on the beach, but it was still night in 
 the jungle. The trail was a dark tunnel with walls 
 and roof of underbrush and trees and tangled vines. 
 We stumbled along blindly at first. Presently our 
 eyes became used to the dark and we walked with 
 more ease. Stems and thorns caught at our clothes 
 as we passed. We slipped on wet, slimy roots and 
 stumbled over them in the dim light. Only where 
 the jungle was intersected by one of the numerous 
 streams — swift but shallow and never too wide for 
 leaping — that water the island, did the light suc- 
 ceed in struggling weakly through the tangle. 
 
 The New Hebridean jungle is different from that 
 of India or Africa. The severe hurricanes that sweep 
 over the islands each year have stunted growth. 
 There are no forest giants. Trees send their branches 
 out rather than up, forming a dense mass of vegeta- 
 tion that is further bound together by vines, so that 
 it is almost impossible to penetrate the jungle save by 
 beaten trails or along the courses of streams. 
 
 The sun was well up when we came out on the 
 first of a series of plateaus that formed a giant stair- 
 way up the mountain. They were separated from 
 one another by five hundred to a thousand yards of 
 scrub trees and tangled bush. It was not easy going. 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 73 
 
 The ascents were steep, and the trail was wet and 
 sHppery. 
 
 We kept watch for treacherous natives. Once we 
 were startled by blood-curdling cries that came from 
 the direction in which we were going. Our boys said 
 the men of Malekula were hunting wild pigs. We 
 went on in silence. Our hearts jumped every time a 
 twig cracked. There was a set expression on Osa's 
 face. I knew she was frightened, but I knew, too, 
 that no amount of money would have persuaded her 
 to turn back. 
 
 By noon we had reached what seemed to be the 
 highest point of northern Malekula, and looked back 
 over valley after valley of dense jungle, and plateau 
 after plateau covered with cane-grass. Here and 
 there a coconut tree stood out alone. Smoke, curl- 
 ing out of the hillsides, indicated the sites of native 
 villages. Perhaps, at that very moment, gruesome 
 feasts of human flesh were being prepared. In the 
 bay, very small and very far off, were three black 
 dots — our boats. 
 
 We heard a sound behind us and quickly turned. 
 There were some twenty men, sent by the "big fel- 
 low master belong Big Numbers." They took our 
 apparatus and indicated that we were to follow them. 
 
74 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 We were dead tired; still there seemed nothing to do 
 but to push on. 
 
 We were not sorry, after about a mile, to approach 
 a village. First we came upon scattered groves of co- 
 conut and banana trees. Our trail became wider and 
 harder and we passed weed-grown patches of yams 
 and taro, protected against the wild pigs by rude 
 walls of bamboo. Finally we came out upon a clear- 
 ing around which clustered a few wretched shelters 
 thatched roughly with leaves. In the center of the 
 clearing stood upright hollow logs — the drums used 
 to send messages from village to village and to fur- 
 nish music for the native dances. The natives called 
 them boo-boos — the name given to conch-shells 
 and all other sound-making instruments. On the 
 hard ground of the clearing sat some thirty savages^ 
 all well armed. They had apparently been watching 
 for us, but they did not greet us. We spoke to them, 
 but, beyond a few grunts, they made no reply. 
 There were no women and children in sight. That 
 was a bad sign; for the women and children are sent 
 away only when there is trouble in the air. Perrole, 
 Stephens, and Mazouyer drew nearer to Osa and me. 
 Their faces were grave. Our boys edged close to us. 
 None of us spoke. 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 75 
 
 After a short rest, our guides indicated that we 
 were to take the trail again. We pushed on over a 
 muddy path, bordered by coconut and banana trees, 
 and in about fifteen minutes we came out upon an- 
 other clearing, much larger than the first, with many 
 more huts surrounding it and with more and bigger 
 boo-boos in the center. Here again were savages 
 awaiting us — about two hundred of them, each with 
 a gun. We were led to a big boo-boo that had been 
 overturned by the wind and were told to sit down. 
 We obeyed like obedient school-children. 
 
 One of the natives beat out on a boo-boo an irregu- 
 lar boom-boom-boom that roared through the clear- 
 ing and was echoed back from the hills. It sounded 
 like a code. We felt that it might be a summons to 
 the executioner. Osa huddled close to me. A still- 
 ness fell over the assembly. 
 
 Suddenly, at the far side of the clearing, a huge sav- 
 age appeared. It was Nagapate. He stood for a mo- 
 ment, looking over the audience; then he walked 
 slowly and majestically into the center of the clear- 
 ing. He roared a few words to his men. Then he 
 turned to us. A native came running up — the lazi- 
 est black stepped lively when Nagapate commanded 
 — with a block of wood for a throne. The chief sat 
 
76 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 down near us, and we stepped forward and shook 
 hands with him. He had grown used to this form of 
 greeting and responded with graciousness. 
 
 It had been a wonderful entrance. But then Na- 
 gapate had an instinct for the dramatic. Through- 
 out our stay in his village, I noticed, he never made 
 a move that was not staged. He let it be known by 
 his every act that he was no common chief, who had 
 won his position through skill in killing pigs or men. 
 Nagapate was a king and a descendant of kings. 
 His was the only tribe I had come across during my 
 travels among the blacks of the South Pacific that 
 had an hereditary ruler. 
 
 After he had greeted us, he uttered a sharp com- 
 mand and a native stepped up with a big bamboo 
 water-bottle. Nagapate drank from it, and then the 
 native offered it, tilted at the proper angle, to each 
 of us in turn. It was not pleasant to drink from the 
 mouthpiece at which Nagapate's great lips had j 
 sucked. But we gathered that the bottle was the * 
 South Sea equivalent of a pipe of peace; so we drank 
 gladly. I then presented to Nagapate a royal gift 
 of knives, calico, and tobacco, and I told one of the 
 boys to give two sticks of tobacco to each native. 
 
 The natives smoked their tobacco Cthose that did 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 77 
 
 not eat it) at once and greedily. It seemed to break 
 the ice a bit; so I got out my cameras. For three 
 hours, I made pictures. But I did not get any "ac- 
 tion." I wanted a picture of a man coming out of his 
 house; for the doors of the huts are so low that the 
 people have to come out on all fours. I persuaded 
 a native to go into his hut and come out again. 
 He did so. But his companions laughed and jeered 
 at him, and after that every one had stage fright. 
 
 As the afternoon wore on, scores of women and 
 children appeared. I have never seen human beings 
 more wretched than those women. At first sight 
 they looked like walking haystacks. They wore 
 dresses of purple dyed grasses, consisting of a bushy 
 skirt that hung from the waist to the knees, a sort of 
 widow's veil that was thrown over the head and face 
 so as to leave a tiny peep-hole for the wearer to look 
 through, and a long train that hung down the back 
 nearly to the ground. A more cumbersome and in- 
 sanitary dress was never devised. It was heavy. It 
 was hot. Worst of all, it was dirty. Every one of 
 the dresses was matted with filth. I did not see a 
 single pig — and there were dozens of them rooting 
 about inside and outside the houses — that was so 
 dirty as the women of that village. I afterward found 
 
78 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 that for women to wash was strictly taboo. From 
 birth to death water never touched their skins ! 
 
 I got my cameras ready, but the women hid in the 
 houses and would not come out to be photographed. 
 Not until Nagapate commanded them to come into 
 the clearing did they creep whimpering in terror 
 from the low doors. 
 
 We had heard from the natives at our headquar- 
 ters on the island of Vao that Nagapate had a hun- 
 dred wives, but there were only ten of them, and 
 they were as wretched as any of the other women. 
 Osa presented them each with a string of beads and 
 a small glass jar of cheap candy. They did not even 
 look at their gifts. They wanted only to get the or- 
 deal over and to escape. During all our stay in the 
 village the poor, browbeaten wretches never got up 
 enough courage to look at us. Their lords and mas- 
 ters felt our skins and our hair and our clothes, ex- 
 amining us with embarrassing freedom. But when- 
 ever we came upon a woman, she squatted down and 
 hid her face behind her grass veil. 
 
 Since the women and children had appeared, we 
 gained confidence and walked about the village, in- 
 specting the houses. As we approached, the children, 
 scrawny little wretches, big-bellied from malnutri- 
 
 1 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 79 
 
 tion and many of them covered with sores, scurried 
 off into the bush Hke frightened rabbits. The houses 
 were wretched huts made of poles with a covering of 
 leaves and grass, or, occasionally, of woven bamboo. 
 Inside were the embers of fires — nothing more. A 
 hard, worn place on the ground in one corner showed 
 where the owner slept. Nagapate's house stood off by 
 itself. It was larger than the rest and more com- 
 pactly made. But it was as bare as any of the others. 
 Toward sunset we built a fire and cooked our sup- 
 per. The natives gathered around and watched us in 
 astonishment. They themselves made no such elab- 
 orate preparation for eating. Once in a while a man 
 would kindle a fire and throw a few yams among the 
 coals. When the yams were burned black on one 
 side, he would turn them with a stick and burn them 
 on the other. Then they were ready for eating — the 
 outside burned crisp and the inside raw. One eve- 
 ning some of the men brought in some little pigs, 
 broke their legs, so that they could not escape, and 
 threw them, squealing, into a corner of a hut. The 
 next day there was meat to eat. Like the yams, it 
 was only half -cooked. The natives tore it with their 
 teeth as if they had been animals, and they seemed 
 especially to relish the crisp, burned portions. Each 
 
I 
 
 80 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 man was his own cook. Even Nagapate made his 
 own fire and cooked his own food, for it was taboo 
 for him to eat anything prepared by an inferior or 
 cooked over a fire made by an inferior. He conven- 
 iently considered us his superiors and ate greedily 
 everything we gave him. He never shared the salmon 
 and rice he got from us either with his cronies or 
 with his wives. In fact, we never saw a woman eat- 
 ing, and the children seemed to live on sugar-cane 
 and on clay that they dug up with their skinny little 
 fingers. 
 
 Our first day as Nagapate's guests drew to an end. 
 Just before dark a native came and motioned to us to 
 follow him. He led us to a new house and indicated 
 that we were to make ourselves at home there. We 
 were tired out after our long march; so we turned 
 in without delay. We spread our blankets on the 
 ground and lay, fully dressed, on top of them. The 
 camp soon became quiet, but we could not sleep. So 
 far, everything had gone well, but still we did not 
 feel quite safe. Our boys seemed to share our appre- 
 hension. They crowded around the hut, as close to 
 us as they could get. Some of them slipped under 
 the grass walls and lay half inside the hut. 
 
 We slept little and were up before dawn, stiff from 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 81 
 
 lying on the hard ground. We asked for water, and 
 a native brought it in a bamboo bottle. There was 
 about a pint of water for each of the five of us. The 
 savage that brought it looked on astonished as we 
 washed our hands and faces. It is not taboo for the 
 Big Numbers men to bathe — but they rarely use 
 their privilege, and they could not understand our 
 reckless waste of water, which was carried by the 
 women from a spring half a mile away. 
 
 After a breakfast of tinned beef, we set to work. 
 But if it had been hard to get good pictures the day 
 before, it was now almost impossible. The women 
 had all left the village to get the day's supply of 
 water, fruits, and firewood. The men squatted in the 
 center of the clearing, guns in hand. They were ap- 
 parently waiting for something — for what? 
 
 We were uneasy. It may seem to the reader, in 
 view of the fact that we escaped with whole skins, 
 that we were absurdly uneasy. But I should like to 
 see the man who could remain calm when surrounded 
 as we were by savages, ugly and powerful, whose 
 only pleasure was murder, and who, we were con- 
 vinced, were eaters of human flesh. All day long our 
 hosts squatted about the giant boo-boos, staring at 
 us or at the groimd or at the jungle or, sometimes. 
 
82 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 it seemed, at nothing at all. Now and then a single 
 savage would come out of the jungle and join the 
 group, and immediately one of the squatters would 
 get up and go into the bush, taking the trail by 
 which the newcomer had arrived. Even Paul was 
 troubled, and confided to me, when the others were 
 not about, "Me no hke." 
 
 The coming and going and interminable squat- 
 ting and staring got on the nerves of all of us. To- 
 ward evening, we received an explanation of it from 
 Atree, Nagapate's "private secretary." Atree had 
 been " blackbirded " away from the island about 
 twelve years previous to our arrival, in the days 
 when natives were still carried off by force for ser- 
 vitude on the plantations of Queensland; and, by 
 some miracle, when the all-white Australia law had 
 gone into effect and the blacks had been "repatri- 
 ated," he had made his way back to his own island. 
 He had managed, during his sojourn abroad, to pick 
 up a little beche-de-mer; so he acted as go-between 
 and interpreter in all our dealings with Nagapate. 
 He told us that a fight with a neighboring village was 
 brewing. There had been a dispute over some pigs, 
 in which somebody had got hurt. The relatives of 
 the victim were preparing to attack our hosts. The 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 83 
 
 men who had come and gone from the clearing were 
 the lookouts who guarded the village against sur- 
 prise. 
 
 A fight! My first thought was, "What a picture 
 I'll get!" But Osa, at my elbow, said miserably, "I 
 wish we were back in the boat," and my conscience 
 began to hurt. To reassure her I told her that our 
 force was a match for half a dozen native villages. 
 
 Before sunset there was great activity in the clear- 
 ing. Men kept coming and going, and there was 
 much grunted consultation in the shadow of the 
 boo-boos. All that night an armed guard stood 
 watch. 
 
 At sunrise, Nagapate came and asked if we would 
 shoot off our guns to frighten the enemy. I did not 
 like the idea. I thought it might be a ruse to get us 
 to empty our guns and to give the natives a chance 
 to rush on us before we could reload. However, 
 since we did not wish to seem suspicious, we granted 
 the request. But we fired in rotation, instead of in a 
 volley, so that there would always be some among us 
 with ready rifles. And I found that I was not the 
 only one who had thought of the danger of empty 
 cartridge-chambers: I have never seen such snappy 
 reloading as that of our black boys! 
 
84 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 After the volley, I gave Nagapate my rifle to 
 shoot. He unloaded her as fast as he could pull the 
 trigger, and begged for more, like an eager small 
 boy. I was sorry to refuse him, but I did not care to 
 waste many cartridges, so I explained through Atree 
 that the gun had to cool off, and Nagapate, to my 
 relief, seemed satisfied with the explanation. 
 
 After the shooting was over, everybody seemed to 
 take courage. The natives moved about more freely. 
 Only about a third remained armed and ready for 
 summons. They were apparently satisfied that their 
 enemies, convinced that they were well supplied 
 with ammunition, would be afraid to start hostili- I 
 ties. We ourselves were more at ease, and I went up 
 to some of the soldiers and examined their fighting 
 equipment. 'Their guns were, as usual, old and rusty, | 
 but they all had cartridges, which they carried in 
 leather cartridge cases slung over their shoulders. I 
 was surprised to find that none had clubs. Instead, 
 they had big knives, some of them three feet long, 
 for hand-to-hand fighting. Paul told me that such 
 knives had become the most sought-for articles of 
 trade. There was no Government ban on them as on 
 rifles and cartridges. 
 
 On the afternoon of our fourth day in the village, 
 
 il 
 
RAMBI 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 85 
 
 Nagapate brought up a man we had not seen before. 
 He was nearly as large as Nagapate himself, and had, 
 like Nagapate, an air of commanding dignity. 
 
 "Rambi! Rambi!" growled Nagapate, pointing 
 to his companion. Then the chief went through a 
 rapid pantomime, in which he seemed to kill off a 
 whole army of enemies. We gathered that Rambi 
 was minister of war, as indeed he was; but Osa 
 dubbed him chief of police. We learned from Paul 
 that the tribe was ruled by a sort of triumvirate, 
 with Nagapate in supreme command and Rambi 
 and a third chief named Velle-Velle, who acted as a 
 primitive prime minister, next in authority. 
 
 Rambi was a Godsend. He enjoyed being photo- 
 graphed, although he did not have the slightest idea 
 of what the operation meant. He forgot his dignity 
 and capered like a monkey in front of my camera and 
 actually succeeded in injecting a little enthusiasm 
 into the rest of the natives, who still suffered from 
 stage fright. 
 
 I gave presents of tobacco for every picture I 
 made. I must have paid out several dollars' worth 
 of tobacco each day. Ten years earlier, when I was 
 on the Snark with Jack London, trade tobacco made 
 from the stalks and refuse from the Virginia tobacco 
 
86 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 factories had cost less than a cent a stick. The su] 
 ply I had with me in Malekula had cost almost four 
 cents a stick. Thus the high cost of living makes it- 
 self felt even in the South Seas. Tinned foods, cai 
 tridges, gasoline, mirrors, knives, and calico also have* 
 increased in price enormously since the war. An ex- 
 plorer must expect his expenses to be just about four 
 hundred per cent higher than they were ten years 
 ago. And the trader is in a bad way. For the na- 
 tives learned how to value trade-stuffs years ago and 
 they insist on buying at the old rate. Increased 
 costs and greater diflSculty of transportation mean 
 nothing to them. 
 
 On the next day, we went, with an escort of se^ 
 eral of Nagapate's men, to another Big Numbers 
 village about four miles away. That trip was typi- 
 cal of the many downs that are mingled with the ups 
 in a motion-picture man's existence. The four miles 
 were the hardest four miles I ever walked. The trail 
 lay along the side of a hill, following a deep valley. 
 It was seldom used, and it slanted toward the valley 
 in an alarming way. It was slimy with mud and de- 
 cayed vegetation, and in many places a slip would 
 have meant a slide of several hundred feet down a 
 steep hill. Both Osa and I had on spiked boots. 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 87 
 
 but they soon became clogged with mud and offered 
 less grip than ordinary shoes. We crept along at a 
 snail's pace, testing every foothold. Though we left 
 Nagapate's village at dawn, we did not reach our des- 
 tination until after ten o'clock. It was a poor and 
 uninteresting village of about thirty houses. Most 
 of the men were off on a pig hunt, and all the women 
 were out collecting firewood and fruits and vege- 
 tables. About noon, it began to drizzle. By three 
 o'clock, it had settled down to a good downpour. 
 The women straggled in one by one and retreated 
 into their houses. The men returned in a sullen hu- 
 mor, with a few skinny pigs. According to custom, 
 they broke one hind leg and one front leg of each an- 
 imal to prevent its escape and threw the wretched lit- 
 tle creatures in a squalling, moaning heap. Those on 
 the bottom probably suffocated before morning. 
 
 We could not think of retracing our steps over the 
 treacherous trail in that downpour; so we persuaded 
 a native and his wife and two sore-faced children to 
 give up their hut to us. Since we had no blankets, we 
 lay on the hard ground and made the best of a bad 
 bargain. 
 
 Next morning, the rain had ceased. But the cane- 
 grass was as wet as a sponge. We had not gone a 
 
88 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 hundred yards toward Nagapate's village before we 
 were soaked through. The trail was more slippery 
 than ever. About every quarter of a mile we had to 
 stop and rest. The sun came out boiling hot and 
 sucked up the moisture, which rose like steam all 
 about us. We were five hours in this natural Turk- 
 ish bath. When we reached our destination, we 
 threw ourselves down and fell asleep in sheer ex- 
 haustion. We had not secured a single foot of film, 
 and we felt miserably that we stood a very good 
 chance of contracting fever, which so far we had 
 luckily escaped. 
 
 Late that afternoon, I missed Osa. I had some- 
 thing of a hunt for her, but I finally found her in the 
 shade at the edge of the clearing, playing with a little 
 naked piccaninny. Atree and Nagapate squatted 
 near by, watching her with grave, intent faces. 
 
 Nagapate was Osa's constant companion. The 
 great chief had taken a fancy to the white "Mary." 
 Every day he sent her gifts, and his yams and fruits 
 and coconuts pleased her more than if they had been 
 expensive presents of civilization. They seemed to 
 her an assurance of jhis good-will. But the rest of 
 us were a bit uneasy. We had what I now believe to 
 be the absurd suspicion that all these gifts were to- 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 89 
 
 kens of savage wooing — that perhaps Nagapate 
 was planning to massacre us, if the occasion offered, 
 and keep Osa to share his wretched hut. The strain 
 of constant watching, constant suspicion, was tell- 
 ing on our nerves. We fancied that the novelty of 
 our presence was wearing off. Like children, the sav- 
 ages soon weary of a diversion. We were becoming 
 familiar - — dangerously familiar — to them, and our 
 gifts and even the magic taught me by the great 
 Houdini, had begun to pall. We began to feel that it 
 was time for us to go. 
 
 Osa and I talked it over as we walked about the 
 village the following afternoon. We strayed farther 
 than usual and suddenly found ourselves near what 
 seemed to be a deserted hut. We walked around it 
 and found, on the far side, a well-beaten path that 
 led to a tiny door. Without thinking, I crawled 
 through the doorway, and Osa followed me. It was 
 several seconds before our eyes became accustomed 
 to the dim light. Suddenly Osa gasped and clutched 
 my arm. 
 
 All about us, piled in baskets, were dried human 
 
 / heads. A ghastly frieze of them grinned about the 
 
 eaves. Skulls hung from the rafters, heaps of picked 
 
 human bones lay in the corners. One glance was 
 
90 CANNIBAL-LAND ^ 
 
 enough for us. We crawled out of the hut and lost 
 no time in getting back to the center of the village. 
 Luckily none of the savages had seen us. 
 
 We gathered Paul Mazouyer and Perrole and Ste- 
 phens about us and told them of our adventure, and 
 it did not take the conference long to decide to re- 
 tiu-n to the beach on the following day. The other 
 white men told us that if we had been seen in or near 
 the head-house, the chances were that we should all 
 have been murdered, for such houses were sacred 
 and taboo to all, save the men of the village. 
 
 That evening a great fire was started in the clear- 
 ing. Until late in the night the ordinarily lazy sav- 
 ages piled on great logs that four men were re- 
 quired to carry. Nothing was cooked over the fire. 
 It was not needed for warmth, for the night was sti- 
 fling hot. We asked Arree the reason for the illumi- 
 nation. He replied that he did not know. We decided 
 that there must be some sinister purpose in it and lay 
 sleepless, on guard the night through. 
 
 At dawn we were up. We did our packing in a hurry, 
 and then we sent one of the natives for Nagapate. 
 The chief came across the clearing, slowly and delib- 
 erately, as always. With him was a tottering old man, 
 the oldest native I ever saw in the New Hebrides. 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 91 
 
 As Osa and I went up to greet Nagapate, the old 
 man began to jabber excitedly. He came over to 
 me and felt my arms and legs with both his skinny 
 hands. He pinched me and poked me in the ribs and 
 stomach. All the time he kept up a running fire of 
 excited comment, addressed to Nagapate. To our 
 relief, he finally stopped talking for want of breath. 
 Nagapate spoke a few sharp words and the old man 
 / backed away. 
 
 Osa's face went white. And indeed, there could be 
 no doubt about the meaning of the old native's pan- 
 tomime. I almost doubted the advisability of telling 
 Nagapate of our departure. If he liked, he could pre- 
 vent us from ever reaching the sea, from which we 
 were separated by so many miles of jungle. But I 
 decided to take a chance. I had, by this time, rather 
 more than a smattering of the language of Nagapate's 
 tribe. I always make it a practice, when among new 
 tribes, to learn four words — "Yes," "no," "good," 
 and "bad." The language spoken by Nagapate and 
 his followers was so primitive and contained so many 
 repetitions that I had been able to progress beyond 
 these four fundamental words and so, with the aid of 
 gestures, I succeeded in telling Nagapate that our 
 provisions had run out and that we had to return to 
 
92 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 our boats. To my surprise Nagapate not only as- 
 sented to our departure, but volunteered to accom- 
 pany us to the beach. 
 
 I invited the entire village to come to the beac 
 for motion-pictures and tobacco, after sunset, on the 
 following evening. Motion-pictures meant nothing 
 to them; but tobacco they understood. So they 
 agreed to come. We left like honored guests, with 
 an escort of twenty-five savages. Nagapate himself 
 walked (as a result of my maneuvering) safe between 
 Osa and myself. 
 
 It had taken twelve hours to climb up to Nag 
 pate's village. The return journey required only 
 three. It was a pleasant morning's walk. The sun 
 was shining bright and beautiful, many-colored 
 birds fluttered about us. 
 
 When we arrived at the beach, we invited Naga- 
 pate and his boon companions, Atree and Rambi, to 
 come on board the schooner. There we feasted them 
 on hard-tack and white salmon. When bedtime 
 came, the great chief indicated that it was his pleas- 
 ure to sleep on board. I was heartily astonished and 
 a little ashamed. After all our suspicions, Nagapate 
 was again voluntarily putting himself into our 
 hands, with the touching confidence of a little child. 
 
 M 
 
IN NAGAPATE'S KINGDOM 93 
 
 Our royal guest and his men bunked in the engine- 
 room. I happened to wake about midnight and took 
 a peep at them. There they were, flat on their backs 
 on the hard, greasy floor, sleeping like logs. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BIG NUMBERS SEE THEMSELVES ON THE 
 SCREEN 
 
 Early on the morning of the show, we got the whale- 
 boats to work and took all my projection machinery 
 ashore. Soon I had everything set up, ready for the 
 show. But when I tried out the projector to see if it 
 was shipshape, I found that my generator was out of 
 order. Work as I would, I could not get a light. I was 
 blue and discouraged. I had been looking forward to 
 this show for two years, and now, apparently, it was 
 not going to come off. Imagine going back several 
 hundred thousand years and showing men of the 
 Stone Age motion-pictures of themselves. That is 
 what I had planned to do. For the men of Malekula 
 are in the stage of development reached by our own 
 ancestors long before the dawn of written history. 
 Through my pictures of them, I had carried New 
 York audiences back into the Stone Age. Now I 
 wanted to transport the savages into 1919 — and 
 my generator would not work. 
 
 The projector was worked by man-power. Two 
 men on each side turned the handles attached to the 
 
BIG NUMBERS ON THE SCREEN 95 
 
 machinery that should produce the magic Hght; but 
 though my boys ground patiently all afternoon, not 
 a glimmer showed. Finally, I gave up and motioned 
 them to stop. They misunderstood me and, think- 
 ing that I wanted them to turn faster, went to work 
 with redoubled energy. The miracle happened — 
 the light flashed on. In my excitement, I forgot my 
 supper. 
 
 The beach was already crowded with savages. I 
 had thought they might be curious about my ma- 
 chinery. But they scarcely looked at it. They just 
 squatted on the sands with their guns clutched tight 
 in their hands. No women and only three or four 
 children accompanied them. In spite of my promise 
 of tobacco, they had not quite trusted my invitation 
 and they were on the lookout for foul play. By dark 
 they were restless. They had received no tobacco. 
 They did not understand all this preparation that 
 culminated in nothing. They wanted action. 
 
 I saw that the show must begin at once; so I 
 tested everything once more. Since I had no idea 
 how the pictures would be received, I stationed armed 
 guards at each side of the screen and around the pro- 
 jector, at points from which they could cover the au- 
 dience. Then I tried to persuade my visitors to sit in 
 
96 - CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 front of the projector, where they would get a good 
 view of the screen. They were now thoroughly sus- 
 picious and would not stay where I put them. They 
 wanted to keep an eye on me. They were so uneasy 
 that I expected to see them disappear into the bush 
 at any moment. But Osa saved the situation. She 
 took Nagapate by the arm and made him sit down \ 
 beside her. The rest of the savages gathered about 
 them. Then the show began. f 
 
 First, a great bright square flashed on the screen. 
 Then came a hundred feet of titles. The attention 
 of the natives was divided between the strange let- 
 ters and the rays of white light that passed above 
 their heads. They looked forward and up and back 
 toward me, jabbering all the time. Then slowly, out 
 of nothing, a familiar form took shape on the screen. 
 It was Osa, standing with bent head. The savages 
 were silent with amazement. Here was Osa sitting 
 at Nagapate's side — and there she was on the 
 screen. The picture-Osa raised her head and winked 
 at them. Pandemonium broke loose. " Osa — Osa 
 — Osa — Osa," shouted the savages. They roared 
 with laughter and screamed like rowdy children. 
 
 I had been afraid that my guests would be fright- 
 ened and bolt at the first demonstration of my 
 
 i 
 
BIG NUMBERS ON THE SCREEN 97 
 
 "magic," but they had been reassured by the famil- 
 iar sight of Osa. Now they were ready for anything. 
 I showed them a picture of Osa and me as we left the 
 Astor Hotel in New York. Then I showed them 
 the crazy thousands that had crowded New York 
 streets on Armistice Day. I followed this picture 
 with glimpses of Chicago, San Francisco, Los An- 
 geles, Honolulu, Tokyo, and Sydney. Nagapate told 
 me afterward that he had not known there were so 
 many white people in all the world and asked me if 
 the island I came from was much larger than Male- 
 kula. I showed in quick succession, steamers, racing 
 automobiles, airplanes, elephants, ostriches, giraffes. 
 The savages were silent; they could not comprehend 
 these things. So I brought them nearer home, with 
 pictures taken on Vao, Santo, and other islands of 
 the New Hebrides. 
 
 Now it was time for the great scene. I instructed 
 Paul in turning the crank of the projector and put 
 Stephens and Perrole in charge of the radium flares. 
 I myself took my stand behind my camera, which 
 was trained on the audience. A hundred feet of 
 titles — then Nagapate's face appeared suddenly on 
 the screen. A great roar of " Nagapate " went up. At 
 that instant the radium lights flashed on, and I, at 
 

 
 98 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 my camera, ground out the picture of the cannibals 
 at the "movies." True, about two thirds of the au- 
 dience, terrified by the flares, made precipitately for 
 the bush. But Nagapate and the savages around 
 him sat pat and registered fear and amazement for 
 my camera. In about two minutes the flares burned i 
 out. Then we coaxed back to their places the sav- ' 
 ages that had fled. I started the reel all over and ran 
 it to the end amid an uproar that made it impossible J 
 for me to make myself heard when I wanted to speak 
 to Osa. Practically every savage pictured on the 
 screen was in the audience. In two years they had 
 not changed at all, except, as Osa said, for additional 
 layers of dirt. As each man appeared, they called 
 out his name and laughed and shouted with joy. 
 Among the figures that came and went on the screen 
 was that of a man who had been dead a year. The 
 natives were awe-struck. My magic could bring 
 back the dead! 
 
 Midway in the performance I turned the projec- 
 tion handle over to Mazouyer and joined the audi- 
 ence. Osa was crying with excitement. And there 
 was a lump in my own throat. We had looked for- 
 ward a long time to this. 
 
 When the show was over, a great shout went up. 
 
HUNTING FOR THE MAGIC 
 
 A CANNIBAL AND A KODAK 
 
BIG NUMBERS ON THE SCREEN 99 
 
 The savages gathered into groups and discussed the 
 performance, for all the world as people do "back 
 home." Then they crowded about us, demanding 
 their pay for looking at my pictures ! As I gave them 
 their sticks of tobacco, each grunted out the same 
 phrase — whether it meant "Fine," or "Thank you," 
 or just " Good-bye," I do not know. 
 
 While we packed our apparatus, the natives cut 
 bamboo and made rude torches. When all were 
 ready, they lighted their torches at the fire that 
 burned on the beach, and then they set oflF in single 
 file up the trail. We said good-bye to Perrole and 
 Stephens, who were to sail for Santo that night, and 
 prepared to go aboard Paul's cutter. He had diffi- 
 culty in getting his engine started, and while he 
 worked with it, Osa and I sat on the beach, watching 
 the torches of the Big Numbers people as they filed 
 up hill and down dale the long eight miles to their 
 village. The night was so dark that we could not see 
 anything except the string of lights that wound 
 through the black like a fiery serpent. The head dis- 
 appeared over the top of the hill. Half an hour later, 
 the tail wriggled out of sight. Then the engine 
 kicked off. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE NOBLE SAVAGE 
 
 The morning after our motion-picture show on the 
 beach at Malekula found us anchored off Vao. We 
 got our luggage ashore as quickly as possible and then 
 turned in to make up for lost sleep. We had slept 
 little during our eight days in the village of Naga- 
 pate. We had been in such constant fear of treach- 
 ery that the thud of a falling coconut or the sound of 
 a branch crackling in the jungle would set our nerves 
 atingle and keep us awake for hours. Now we felt 
 safe. We knew that the four hundred savages of Vao, 
 though at heart as fierce and as cruel as any of the 
 Malekula tribes, lived in wholesome fear of the Brit- 
 ish gunboat; so we slept well and long. ■ 
 
 The next morning we said good-bye to Paul Ma- 
 zouyer and he chugged away to Santo in the little 
 schooner that for two weeks had been our home. 
 Osa and I were alone on Vao. We turned back to 
 our bungalow to make things comfortable, for we 
 did not know how many days it would be before Mr. 
 King, who had promised to call for us, would appear. 
 
 As we walked slowly up from the beach, we heard 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 101 
 
 a shout. We turned and saw a savage running to- 
 ward us. He was a man of about forty; yet he was 
 Httle larger than a child and as naked as when he was 
 born. From his almost unintelligible beche-de-mery 
 we gathered that he wanted to be our servant. We 
 could scarcely believe our ears. Here was a man who 
 wanted to work! We wondered how he came to 
 have a desire so contrary to Vao nature, until we 
 discovered, after a little further conversation in 
 beche-de-mery that he was half-witted ! Since we were 
 in need of native help, we decided not to let his men- 
 tal deficiencies stand in his way and we hired him on 
 the spot. Then came the first hitch. We could not 
 find out his name. Over and over, we asked him, 
 "What name belong you?" but with no result. He 
 shook his head uncomprehendingly. Finally, Osa 
 pointed to the tracks he had left in the sand. They 
 led down to the shore and vanished at the water's edge. 
 "His name is Friday," she said triumphantly. And 
 so we called him. 
 
 From that moment, Friday was a member of our 
 household. We gave him a singlet and a lava-lavay or 
 loin-cloth, of red calico, and from somewhere he dug 
 up an ancient derby hat. Some mornings he pre- 
 sented himself dressed in nothing but the hat. He 
 
102 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 was always on hand bright and early, begging for 
 work, but, unfortunately, there was nothing that he 
 could do. We tried him at washing clothes, and they 
 appeared on the line dirtier than they had been be- 
 . fore he touched them. We tried him at carrying 
 water, but he brought us liquid mud, with sticks and 
 leaves floating on the top. The only thing he was i 
 good for was digging bait and paddling the canoe 
 gently to keep it from drifting while Osa fished. i 
 
 That was, indeed, a service of some value; for Osa 
 was an indefatigable fisherwoman. Every day, she 
 went out and brought back from ten to thirty one- I 
 and two-pound fish, and one day she caught two 
 great fish that must have weighed ten pounds each. 
 It took the combined efforts of Friday and herself to 
 land them. 
 
 I am convinced that, for bright color and strange 
 markings, there are no fish in the world like those of 
 Vao. Osa called them Impossible Fish. There were 
 seldom two of the same color or shape in her day's 
 catch. They were orange and red and green and sil- 
 ver, and sometimes varicolored. But the most no- 
 ticeable were little blue fish about the size of sardines 
 which went in schools of thousands through the still 
 sea, coloring it with streaks of the most brilliant 
 
 I 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 103 
 
 shimmering blue you can imagine. In addition to 
 the Impossible Fish, there were many octopi, which 
 measured about three feet from tentacle to tentacle, 
 and there were shellfish by the thousand. On the 
 opposite side of the island from that on which we 
 lived, oysters grew on the roots of mangrove trees 
 at the water's edge, and at low tide we used to walk 
 along and pick them off as if they had been fruit. 
 
 We worked hard for the first week or so after our 
 return to Vao, for we had about a hundred and fifty 
 plates and nearly two hundred kodak films to de- 
 velop. Previous to this trip, I had been forced to de- 
 velop motion-picture films, as well as kodak films and 
 plates, as I went along. Like most photographers, I 
 had depended upon a formalin solution to harden the 
 gelatin films and keep them from melting in the heat. 
 Though such a solution aids in the preservation of 
 the film, it interferes considerably with the quality 
 of the picture, which often is harsh in outline as a re- 
 sult of the thickening of the film, and it is not a guar- 
 antee against mildew or against the "fogging" of 
 negatives. Before starting for the New Hebrides, 
 however, I had worked out a method of treating 
 films that did not affect the quality of the picture, 
 and yet made it possible to develop films successfully 
 
104 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 at a temperature much higher than 65°. Still better, 
 it permitted me to seal my film after exposure and 
 await a favorable opportunity for developing. Only 
 lately I have developed in a New York workshop 
 films that were exposed nineteen months ago in the 
 New Hebrides and that were carried about for sev- 
 eral months under the blaze of a tropical sun. They^B 
 are among the best pictures I have ever taken. 
 
 Any one who has tried motion-picture photog- 
 raphy in the tropics will realize what it means to be 
 freed from the burden of developing all films on the 
 spot. To work from three o'clock until sunrise, after a 
 day of hard work in enervating heat, is usually sheer 
 agony. Many a time I have gone through with the 
 experience only to see the entire result of my work 
 ruined by an accident. I have hung up a film to dry 
 (in the humid atmosphere of the tropics drying often 
 requires forty-eight hours instead of half as many 
 minutes) and found it covered with tiny insects or bits f 
 of sand or pollen blown against it by the wind and 
 embedded deep in the gelatin. I have covered it with 
 mosquito-net in an eflfort to avoid a repetition of the 
 tragedy and the mosquito-net has shut off the air and 
 caused the gelatin to melt. I have had films mildew and 
 thicken and cloud and spot, in spite of every eflfort 
 
 I 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 105 
 
 to care for them. On this trip, though even so simple 
 an operation as the changing of motion-picture film 
 and the seaHng of negatives was an arduous task 
 when it had to be performed in cramped quarters, it 
 was a great relief to be able to seal up my film and 
 forget it after exposure. The plates that I used in 
 my small camera had to be promptly attended to, 
 however, for to have treated them as I treated the 
 motion-picture film would have meant adding con- 
 siderably to the bulk and weight of the equipment 
 we were forced to carry about with us. 
 
 We worked at the developing several hours a day, 
 and between times we explored the island, learning 
 what we could of native life. Arree, the boy who 
 acted as our maid-of -all-work, supplied me with na- 
 tive words until I had a fairly respectable vocabu- 
 lary, but, when I tried to use it, I made the interest- 
 ing discovery that the old men and the young men 
 spoke different tongues. Language changes rapidly 
 among savage tribes. No one troubles to get the 
 correct pronunciation of a word. The younger gen- 
 eration adopt abbreviations or new words at will and 
 incorporate into their speech strange corruptions of 
 English or French words learned from the whites. 
 Some of the words I learned from Arree were abso- 
 
106 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 lutely unintelligible to many of the older men. I 
 found, too, that the language varied considerably 
 from village to village, and though many of the Vao 
 men were refugees from Malekula, it was very differ- 
 ent from that of any of the tribes on the big island. I 
 once estimated the number of languages spoken in 
 the South Seas at four hundred. I am now convinced 
 that as many as that are used by the black races 
 alone. 
 
 As we poked about Vao, we decided that the is- 
 land would be a good place in which to maroon the 
 people who have the romantic illusion that savages 
 lead a beautiful life. We had long ago lost that illu- 
 sion, but even for us Vao had some surprises. One 
 day, I made a picture of an old, blind man, so feeble 
 that he could scarcely walk. He was one of the few 
 really old savages about, and I gathered that he must 
 have been a powerful chief in his day, or otherwise he 
 would not have escaped the ordinary penalty of age 
 — being buried alive. But on the day after I had 
 taken his picture, when I went to his hut to speak to 
 him, I was informed that "he stop along ground" 
 and I was shown a small hut, in which was a freshly 
 dug grave. My notice of the old man had drawn him 
 into the limelight. The chiefs had held a conference 
 
 I 
 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 107 
 
 and decided that he was a nuisance. A grave was 
 dug for him, he was put into it, a flat stone was 
 placed over his face so that he could breathe (!), and 
 the hole was filled with earth. Now a devil-devil 
 man was squatting near the grave to be on hand in 
 case the old man asked for something. There was 
 no conscious cruelty in the act, simply a relentless 
 logic. The old man had outlived his usefulness. He 
 was no good to himself or to the community. There- 
 fore, he might as well "stop along ground." 
 
 Only a few days later, as we approached a village, 
 we heard, at intervals, the long-drawn-out wail of 
 a woman in pain. In the clearing we discovered a 
 group of men laughing and jeering at something that 
 was lying on the ground. That something was a 
 writhing, screaming young girl. The cause of her 
 agony was apparent. In the flesh back of her knee, 
 two great holes had been burned. I could have put 
 both hands in either of them. 
 
 "One fellow man, him name belong Nowdi, he 
 ketchem plenty coconuts, he ketchem plenty pigs, he 
 ketchem plenty Mary," said Arree, and he went on 
 to explain that the "Mary" on the ground was the 
 newest wife of Nowdi, whom he pointed out to us 
 among the amused spectators. The savage had paid 
 
108 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 twenty pigs for her — a good price for a wife in the 
 New Hebrides — but he had made a bad bargain ; 
 for the girl did not Hke him. Four times she ran 
 away from him and was caught and brought back. 
 The last time, nearly six months had elapsed before 
 she was found, hiding in the jungle of the mainland. 
 The day before we saw the girl, the men of the vil- 
 lage had gathered in judgment. A stone was heated 
 white-hot. Then four men held the girl while a fifth 
 placed the stone in the hollow of her knee, drew her 
 leg back until the heel touched the thigh, and bound 
 it there. For an hour they watched her anguish as 
 the stone slowly burned into her flesh. Then they 
 turned her loose. Thenceforth she would always 
 have to hobble, like an old woman, with the aid of a 
 stick. She would never run away again. 
 
 We turned aside, half sick. It was hard for me to 
 keep my hands off the brutes that stood laughing 
 around the girl. Only the knowledge that to touch 
 them would be suicide for me and death or worse for 
 Osa held me back. But as we returned to the bunga- 
 low, I gradually cooled down. I realized that it was 
 not quite fair to judge these savages — still in the 
 stage of development passed by our own ancestors 
 hundreds of thousands of years ago — according to 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 109 
 
 the standards of civilized society. And I remem- 
 bered how beastly even men of my own kind some- 
 times are when they are released from the restraints 
 of civilization. 
 
 The next morning, after our morning swim, Osa 
 and I sat on the beach and watched the commut- 
 ers set ofiF for Malekula. In some fifty canoes, 
 "manned" by women, the entire female population 
 went to the big island every day to gather firewood 
 and fruit and vegetables. For the small island of 
 Vao could not support its four hundred inhabitants, 
 and the native women had accordingly made their 
 gardens on the big island. This morning, as usual, 
 the women were accompanied by an armed guard; 
 for although the bush natives of Malekula were sup- 
 posed to be friendly, the Vao men did not take any 
 chances when it came to a question of losing their 
 women. Late in the evening the canoes came back 
 again. The women had worked all day, many of 
 them with children strapped to their backs; the men 
 had lounged on the beach, doing nothing. But it was 
 the women who paddled the canoes home. There 
 was a stiff sea and it took nearly three hours to pad- 
 dle across the mile-wide channel. But the men never 
 lifted a finger to help. When the boats were safely 
 
110 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 beached, the women shouldered their big bundles of 
 vegetables and firewood and trudged wearily toward 
 their villages, the men bringing up the rear, with 
 nothing to carry except their precious guns. Among 
 the poor female slaves — they were little more — 
 we saw five who hobbled along with the aid of sticks. 
 They were women who had tried to run away. 
 
 A few days later, Arree asked us if we should like 
 to attend a feast that was being held to celebrate 
 the completion of a devil-devil, one of the crude, 
 carved logs that are the only visible signs of religion 
 among the savages. We did not see why that should 
 be an event worth celebrating, for there were already 
 some hundreds of devil-devils on the island, but we 
 were glad to'have the opportunity of witnessing one 
 of the feasts of which Arree had so often told us. 
 
 Feasting was about the only amusement of the 
 natives of Vao. A birth or a death, the building of a 
 house or a canoe, or the installation of a chief — 
 any event in the least out of the ordinary furnished 
 an excuse for an orgy of pig meat — usually "long. " 
 The one we attended was typical. First the new 
 devil-devil was carried into the clearing and, with 
 scant ceremony, set up among the others. Then 
 some of the men brought out about a hundred pigs 
 
 m 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 111 
 
 and tied them to posts. Others piled hundreds of 
 yams in the center of the clearing, and still others 
 threw chickens, their legs tied together, in a squawk- 
 ing heap. When all was ready, the yams were di- 
 vided among the older men, each of whom then un- 
 tied a pig from a post and presented it solemnly to 
 his neighbor, receiving in return another pig of about 
 the same size. The savages broke one front and one 
 hind leg of their pigs and threw the squealing little 
 beasts on the ground beside the yams. Then they ex- 
 changed chickens and promptly broke the legs and 
 wings of their fowls. I shall never forget the terrible 
 crunching of bones and the screaming of the tor- 
 tured pigs and chickens. When the exchange was 
 completed, the men took their pigs to the center of 
 the clearing, beat them over the head with sticks un- 
 til they were nearly dead and threw them down to 
 squeal and jerk their lives away. 
 
 When the exchange of food was completed, the 
 men built little fires all around the clearing to cook 
 the feast. Most of them were chiefs. It is a general 
 rule throughout the region that no chief may eat 
 food prepared by an inferior, or cooked over a fire 
 built by an inferior. The rather doubtful honor of 
 being his own cook is, indeed, practically the only 
 
112 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 mark that distinguishes a chief. As a rule a chief has 
 no real authority. He cannot command the least im- 
 portant boy in his village. Only his wives are at his 
 beck and call — and they are forbidden by custom to 
 cook for him! 
 
 Chieftainship is an empty honor on Vao. If the 
 biggest chief on the island should start off on a hunt- 
 ing trip and forget his knife, he would know better 
 than to ask the poorest boy in the party to go back 
 for it, for he would know in advance that the answer 
 would be most emphatic Vao equivalent for "go 
 chase yourself!" Yet a chieftaincy is sufficiently 
 flattering to the vanity of the incumbent to be worth 
 many pigs. The pig is more important in the New 
 Hebrides than anywhere else in the world. A man's 
 wealth is reckoned in pigs, and a woman's beauty is 
 rated according to the number of pigs she will bring. 
 The greatest chiefs on Vao are those who have killed 
 the most pigs. Even in that remote region there is 
 political corruption, for some men are not above 
 buying pigs in secret to add to their "bag" and their 
 prestige. Tethlong, who, during our stay on the is- 
 land, was the most important chief on Vao, bought 
 five hundred porkers to be slaughtered for the feast 
 that made him chief. All the natives knew he had 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 113 
 
 bought the pigs; but they hailed him solemnly, nev- 
 ertheless, as the great pig-killer. 
 
 Tethlong had as fine a collection of pigs' tusks as 
 I have ever seen. These fierce-looking bits of ivory 
 did not come oflf the wild pigs, however, but were 
 carefully cultivated on the snouts of domesticated 
 pigs. It is the custom throughout the New Hebrides 
 to take young pigs and gouge out two upper teeth, 
 so as to make room for the lower canine teeth to de- 
 velop into tusks. The most valuable tusks are those 
 that have grown up and curled around so as to form 
 two complete circles. These, however, are very rare. 
 The New Hebridean native considers himself well off 
 if he has a single circlet to wear as a bracelet or nose 
 ring and he takes pride in a collection of ordinary, 
 crescent-shaped tusks. 
 
 Pigs' tusks are the New Hebridean equivalent of 
 money. For even among savages, there are rich and 
 poor. The man of wealth is the one who has the 
 largest number of pigs and wives and coconut trees 
 and canoes, acquired by judicious swapping or by 
 purchase, with pigs' tusks, rare, orange-colored cow- 
 ries, and stones of strange shape or coloring as cur- 
 rency. Most natives keep such treasures in "bokus 
 belong bell " — a Western-made box with a bell that 
 
114 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 rings whenever the lid is lifted. But this burglar- 
 alarm is utterly superfluous, for natives uncontami- 
 nated by civilization never steal. 
 
 Osa refused to watch the process of preparing the 
 pigs and fowls for broiling. It was not a pretty 
 sight. But it was speedily over. While the cooking 
 was in progress, the dancing began. A group of men 
 in the center of the clearing went through the mo- 
 tions of killing pigs and birds and men. Each tried 
 to get across the footlights the idea that he was a 
 great, strong man. And though the pantomime was 
 crude, it was effective. The barbaric swing of the 
 dancers, in time to the strange rhythm beaten out 
 on the boo-boos — the hollowed logs that serve as 
 drums — got into my blood, and I understood how 
 the dances sometimes ended in an almost drunken 
 frenzy. 
 
 When the first group of dancers were tired, the 
 older men gathered in the center of the clearing and 
 palavered excitedly. Then they retired to their fires 
 and waited. So did we. But nothing happened save 
 another dance. This was different in detail from the 
 first. I never saw a native do exactly the same dance 
 twice, though in essentials each is monotonously 
 similar to the last. When the second dance was over. 
 
THE NOBLE SAVAGE 115 
 
 there was more palavering and then more dancing 
 — and so on interminably. Osa and I grew sleepy 
 and went back to the bmigalow. But the tom-toms 
 somided until dawn. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 GOOD-BYE TO NAGAPATE 
 The Euphrosyne, with the British Commissioner 
 aboard, was about two weeks overdue and we were 
 growing impatient to be ofif. It was not the Euphros- 
 yne, however, but the queerest vessel I have ever 
 seen, that anchored oflF Vao, one night at midnight. 
 She was about the size of a large schooner and nearly 
 as wide in the beam as she was long. She had 
 auxiliary sails, schooner-rigged. Her engine burned 
 wood. And her name — as we discovered later — 
 was Amour. Queer as she was, she was a Godsend 
 to us, marooned on Vao. We went out in a canoe 
 and found, to our surprise, that the commander and 
 owner was Captain Moran, whom we had met in the 
 Solomons two years before. We asked him where he 
 was bound for. He said that he had no particular 
 destination; he was out to get copra wherever he 
 could get it. I proposed that he turn over his ship to 
 us at a daily rental, so that we could continue our 
 search for signs of cannibalism among the tribes of 
 Malekula. He assented readily. Osa and I were de- 
 lighted, for we knew that there was n't a better skip- 
 
GOOD-BYE TO NAGAPATE 117 
 
 per than Captain Moran in the South Seas. Both he 
 and his brother, who acted as engineer, were born in 
 the islands and had spent their Hves in wandering 
 from one group to another. They knew the treach- 
 erous channels as well as any whites in those waters, 
 and they knew the natives, too, from long experience 
 as traders. 
 
 The next morning, while the crew of the schooner 
 were cutting wood for fuel, we packed our supplies 
 on board the Amour. When all was ready, we pulled 
 up anchor, set the sails, and started the engine. Af- 
 ter a few grunts, the propeller began to turn, and we 
 were on our way. 
 
 Her ungainly shape served to make the Amour 
 seaworthy, but it did not conduce to speed. We 
 wheezed along at a rate of three knots an hour. 
 Though we left Vao at dawn, it was nearly dark 
 when we again reached Tanemarou Bay, the "sea- 
 port" of the Big Numbers territory. There was no 
 one on the beach, but we discharged a stick of dyna- 
 mite and rolled ourselves in our blankets, sure that 
 there would be plenty of natives on hand to greet us 
 next morning. 
 
 We slept soundly, in spite of the pigs that roamed 
 the deck, and were awakened at daylight by cries. 
 
118 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 About a hundred savages had gathered on the beach. 
 We lost no time in landing, but to our disappoint- 
 ment, Nagapate had not come down to greet us. 
 Only Velle-Velle, the prime minister, was on hand, 
 and he was in a difficult mood. He gave me to under- 
 stand that I had slighted him, on my previous visit, 
 in my distribution of presents. I soon averted his 
 displeasure with plenty of tobacco and the strangest 
 and most wonderful plaything he had ever had — a 
 football. It was a sight for sore eyes to see that dig- 
 nified old savage, who ordinarily was as pompous 
 as any Western prime minister, kicking his football 
 about the beach. 
 
 At about ten o'clock, 1 took a few boys and went 
 inland to get some pictures. Osa wanted to accom- 
 pany me, but I set my foot down on it. I knew there 
 was no danger for myself, but I felt that Nagapate's 
 interest in her made it unsafe for her to venture. I 
 went to the top of a hill a few miles back, where I 
 made some fine pictures of the surrounding country, 
 and was lucky enough to get a group of savages com- 
 ing over the ridge of another hill about half a mile 
 away. My guides became panicky when they saw 
 the newcomers, and insisted that we return to the 
 beach at once, but I held firm until the last savage 
 
 I 
 
GOOD-BYE TO NAGAPATE 119 
 
 on the opposite hill had been lost to sight in the jun- 
 gle. Then with enough iSlm to justify my morning's 
 climb, I returned to the beach. 
 
 On the following morning, Nagapate made his ap- 
 pearance, and told me, through Atree, that he had 
 brought his wives to see Osa. I sent the boat to the 
 schooner for her, but when she appeared, Nagapate 
 said that his wives could not come to the beach and 
 that Osa, accordingly, must go inland as far as the 
 first river to meet them. I did not like the idea, but 
 decided that no possible harm could come to her if 
 the armed crew of the Amour and Captain Moran 
 and I accompanied her. It turned out that my dis- 
 trust of Nagapate was again unjustified. We found 
 the wives waiting at the designated spot with sugar- 
 cane and yams and a nice, new Big Numbers dress 
 for Osa. They had not come to the beach because 
 the newest wife was not permitted to look at the sea 
 for a certain time after marriage — which seemed to 
 me to carry the taboo on water a bit too far. 
 
 Osa was pleased to add the Big Numbers dress to 
 her collection of strange things from Melanesia. 
 And indeed it was quite a gift. For in spite of their 
 apparent simplicity, the making and dyeing of the 
 pandanus garments is a complicated process. Since 
 
120 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the grass will not take the dye if it is the least green, 
 it has to be dried and washed and dried again. When 
 
 . it is thoroughly bleached, it is dyed deep purple. 
 
 ? After Osa in turn had presented the wives with 
 salmon and sea-biscuits (which I afterward saw Na- 
 gapate and his men devouring) and strings of bright- 
 colored beads, Nagapate agreed to get his men to 
 dance for me, if I would come to his village. I did 
 not relish the idea of the long trip into the hills, but 
 I wanted the picture. Osa returned to the schooner, 
 and Captain Moran and I, with five boys, went in- 
 land. We made the village in four hours. When we 
 arrived, I was ready to drop with exhaustion, and 
 lay down on the ground for half an hour to recover. 
 Savages squatted about me and watched me while I 
 rested, then crowded about me while I got my cam- 
 eras ready for action. Nagapate sent out for the men 
 to come to the clearing, and they straggled in, sullen 
 and cranky. They did not want to dance, but Naga- 
 pate's word was law. At his command, a few men 
 went to the great boo-boos and beat out a weird 
 rhythm that seemed to me to express the very es- 
 sence of cannibalism. At first the savages danced in 
 a half-hearted fashion, but gradually they warmed 
 up. Soon they were doing a barbaric dance better 
 
GOOD-BYE TO NAGAPATE 121 
 
 than any I had ever seen. They marched quickly 
 and in perfect time around the boo-boos. Then 
 they stopped suddenly, with a great shout, stood 
 for a moment marking time with their feet, marched 
 on again and stopped again, and so on, the march 
 becoming faster and faster and the shouting wilder 
 and more continuous, until at last the dancers had 
 to stop from sheer exhaustion. 
 
 I got a fine picture, well worth the long trip up the 
 mountains, but it was very late before we got started 
 beachward, accompanied by Nagapate and a num- 
 ber of his men. We went down the slippery trail as 
 fast as we could go. I should have been afraid, in my 
 first days in the islands, that the boys might fall 
 with my cameras if we went at such a rate, but by 
 now I had found that they were as sure-footed as 
 mountain sheep. They carried my heavy equipment 
 as if it had been bags of feathers and handled it much 
 more carefully than I should have been able to. 
 
 In spite of our haste, it grew dark before we 
 reached the beach. The boys cut dead bamboo for 
 torches and in the uncertain light they gave, we 
 stumbled along. When we were within about a quar- 
 ter of a mile from the sea, we fired a volley to let Osa 
 know that we were coming. To our surprise, when 
 
122 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 we came out on the beach, we were greeted by Osa 
 and Engineer Moran and the remainder of the crew 
 of the Amour, all armed to the teeth. Osa was cry- 
 ing. It was the first time I had ever known her to 
 sort to tears in the face of danger. But when she 
 learned that we were all there and safe, and that the 
 volley had been a signal of our approach and not an 
 indication that we had been attacked, her tears 
 dried and she scolded me roundly for having fright- 
 ened her. 
 
 I went to the boat and got a crate of biscuits and a 
 small bag of rice and took them back to Nagapate 
 for a feast for him and his men. Then I said good- 
 bye. I believe that the old cannibal was really sorry 
 to see us go — and not only for the sake of the pres- 
 ents we had given him. Some day I am going back 
 to see him once more. 
 
 )sa j 
 ew j 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE MONKEY PEOPLE 
 
 At daylight we pulled anchor and set the sails and 
 started the engine. With the wind to help us, we 
 made go<?d progress. In three hours we had reached 
 our next anchorage, a small bay said to be the last 
 frequented by the Big Numbers people. We were in 
 the territory of the largest tribe on the west side of 
 Malekula. Moran told me that no white man had 
 ever penetrated the bush and that the people were 
 very shy and wild. We landed, but saw no signs of 
 savages. We thought we had the beach to ourselves, 
 and I set about making pictures of a beautiful little 
 river, all overhung with ferns and palms, that ran 
 into the sea at one side of the bay. As I worked, one 
 of the boys ran up to me and told me in very fright- 
 ened heche-de-mer that he had seen "plenty big fel- 
 low man along bush," and we beat a hasty retreat 
 from the river, with its beautiful vegetation, well 
 fitted for concealing savages. 
 
 I was very anxious to secure some photographs of 
 the savages, and all the more so because they were 
 said to be so difficult of approach, so I walked along 
 
I 
 
 124 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the beach until I came to a trail leading into the in 
 terior. It was easy to locate the trail, for it was like 
 a tunnel leading into the dark jungle. At its mouth, 
 I set up my camera, attached a telephoto lens, bun- 
 dled up a handful of tobacco in a piece of calico, 
 placed my bait at the entrance of the trail, and 
 waited. A half -hour passed, but nothing happened. 
 Then, quick as a wink, a savage darted out, seized 
 the bundle and disappeared before I had time to 
 take hold of the crank of my camera. My trap had 
 worked too well. Now I was determined to get re- 
 sults, so I had our armed crew withdraw to the edge 
 of the beach and asked Captain Moran and Osa to 
 set their guns against a rock so that the savages 
 could see that we were not armed. I knew that, in 
 case of emergency, we could use the pistols in our 
 pockets. Then I sat down on my camera case and 
 waited. At noon we sent one of the boys back to the 
 boat for some tinned lunch. We ate with our eyes on 
 the trail. It was two o'clock before four savages, 
 with guns gripped tight in their hands, came cau- 
 tiously out of the jungle, ready to run at the first 
 alarm. I advanced slowly, so as not to frighten them, 
 holding out a handful of tobacco and clay pipes. 
 They timidly took my presents, and I tried to make 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 125 
 
 them understand, by friendly gestures and soft 
 words, which they did not comprehend, that we 
 could not harm them. To make a long story short, I 
 worked all afternoon to gain their confidence — and 
 it was work wasted, for I could get no action from 
 them. They simply stood like hitching-posts and let 
 me take pictures all around them. At sundown we 
 went back to the ship, with nothing to show for our 
 day's effort. 
 
 Next morning, we set sail betimes. It did not take 
 us long to reach Lambumba Bay, on the narrow isth- 
 mus that connects northern and southern Malekula. 
 I had been anxious to visit this region, for I had 
 heard conflicting tales concerning it. Some said that 
 it was inhabited by nomad tribes; others said that 
 the nomads were a myth — that the region was un- 
 inhabited. I wanted to see for myself. So I in- 
 structed Captain Moran to find a good anchorage, 
 where the ship would be sheltered in case a westerly 
 wind should spring up. I wanted him to feel safe in 
 leaving the Amour in charge of a couple of blacks, 
 for I needed him and his brother and the majority of 
 the crew to accompany us into the interior. We 
 found a small cove at the mouth of a stream and with 
 the kedge anchor we drew the Amour in until the 
 
126 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 branches of the trees hung over the decks. At high 
 tide we pulled the bow of the schooner up into ttie 
 sand. At low tide she was almost high and dry, and 
 she was safe from any ordinary blow. Since this was 
 not the hurricane season, no great storm was to be 
 expected. In the evening, Osa made up the lunch- 
 bags for the following day, and early next morning, 
 we struck inland along a well-beaten trail. We fol 
 lowed this trail all day, but we saw no signs of natives 
 Next day we took a second trail, which crossed the 
 first. Again we met no one. But we found baskets 
 hanging from a banian and the embers of a fire, still 
 alive under a blanket of ashes. 
 
 Though we were accomplishing nothing, we were 
 having a very enjoyable time, for this was the most 
 beautiful part of Malekula we had seen. The trails 
 were well-beaten and for the most part followed 
 small streams that cut an opening in the dense jun- 
 gle to let the breeze through. Here, as elsewhere, we 
 were surrounded by gay tropical birds, and in the 
 trees hung lovely orchids. Osa kept the boys busy 
 climbing after the flowers. They were plainly amazed 
 at the whim of this white "Mary," who filled gaso- 
 line tins with useless flowers, but they obeyed her 
 willingly enough, and she, with arms full of the deli- 
 
 :| 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 127 
 
 cate blossoms, declared that she was willing to spend 
 a month looking for the savages. 
 
 We discovered them, however, sooner than that. 
 On the third morning we took a new trail. We were 
 walking along very slowly. I was in the lead. I 
 turned a sharp corner around a big banian — and all 
 but collided with a savage. The savage was as as- 
 tonished as I, but he got his wits back more quickly 
 than I did mine, and flitted off into the jungle as 
 quietly as a butterfly. When the others came, I 
 could scarcely make them believe that I had seen 
 him; for he left no trail in the underbrush, and they 
 had not heard a sound. In the hope of surprising 
 other natives, we agreed to stay close together and 
 to make as little noise as possible. In about half an 
 hour four natives appeared on the brow of a low hill, 
 directly in front of us. They, too, turned at the sight 
 of us and ran off. 
 
 We followed along the trail by which they had dis- 
 appeared. In about fifteen minutes we stopped to 
 rest near a great banian. Now the banian, which is 
 characteristic of this section of Malekula, begins as 
 a parasite seedling that takes root in a palm or some 
 other tree. This seedling grows and sends out 
 branches, which drop ropelike tendrils to the ground. 
 
128 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 The tendrils take root and gradually thicken into 
 trunks. The new trunks send out other branches, 
 which in turn drop their tendrils, and so on, indefi- 
 nitely. The banian near which we had stopped was 
 some twenty feet in diameter. Its many trunks grew 
 close together and it was covered with a crown of 
 great heart-shaped leaves. Since conditions seemed 
 favorable for a picture, I got a camera ready and 
 turned to the tree to study the lights and shadows 
 before I adjusted the shutters. As I grew accuis- 
 tomed to the light, I saw dimly, peering from behin< 
 the tendrils, four intent black faces. We had caught 
 up with the men we had surprised on the trail. 
 
 I spent an hour in trying to coax them into th< 
 open. I held out toward them the things most cov- 
 eted by the natives of the New Hebrides — tobacco, 
 salt, a knife, a piece of red calico. But they did nol 
 stir. I made an attractive heap of presents on th< 
 ground and we all stood back, hoping that the shy 
 savages would pick up courage to come out and ex-j 
 amine them. But they refused to be tempted. At] 
 last I lost patience and ordered the boys to surround] 
 the banian. When I was sure that we had the natives 
 cornered, I went under the tree and hunted around 
 among its many trunks for my captives. There was 
 
ONE OF THE MONKEY MEN 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 129 
 
 not a sign of them. But in the center of the banian 
 was an opening in which hung long ladders fashioned 
 from the tendrils. The savages had escaped over the 
 tops of the trees. We did not get another glimpse of 
 them that day, but when we returned to the Amour, 
 we saw footprints in the sand of the beach. And the 
 two boys we had left in charge said that a number of 
 savages had inspected the vessel from a distance, 
 disappearing into the jungle just before our arrival. 
 
 I was convinced by this time that we had really 
 discovered the nomads, but I began to despair of 
 ever getting a close-up of them. Early next morn- 
 ing, however, as we were eating breakfast, a native 
 who might have been twin brother to those of the 
 banian marched boldly down the beach and up to 
 the side of the ship. In bad heche-de-mer he asked us 
 who we were and where we came from and what we 
 wanted. We learned that he had been "black- 
 birded " off to Queensland long before and had made 
 his way back home after a year's absence. He knew 
 all about the white men and their ways, he told us, 
 and proved it by asking for tobacco. 
 
 I gladly got out some tobacco and gave it to him. 
 Then he informed us that he had no pipe and I made 
 him happy with a clay pipe and a box of matches. 
 
130 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 I invited him to come on board, but lie refused; 
 one "blackbirding" experience had been enough for 
 him. He squatted on the sand, within talking dis- 
 tance, and told us what a great man he was. He was 
 the only one of his tribe who knew " talk belong white 
 man." He was a famous fighter. The enemies of his 
 people ran when they saw him. He had killed many 
 men and many pigs. He recited his virtues over and 
 over, utterly ignoring my questions about his people. 
 But finally I succeeded in extracting from him an 
 agreement to guide us to the headquarters of his 
 tribe. 
 
 When we stood on the shore, ready to go, Nella — 
 for that was the name of our visitor — looked Osa 
 over from head to foot. She wore her usual jungle 
 costume of khaki breeches and high boots. When he 
 had completed his inspection, he turned to me and 
 said wisely, "Me savvy. He Mary belong you." 
 Then, adding in a business-like tone, "Me think 
 more better you bringem altogether tobacco," he 
 turned and led the way into the jungle. 
 
 He took us along one of the trails that we had fol- 
 lowed in vain during the preceding days. But pres- 
 ently he turned ofiF into another trail that we had not 
 noticed. The entrance was masked with cane-grass. 
 

 THE MONKEY PEOPLE 131 
 
 After about ten feet, however, the path was clean 
 and well-beaten. When we had passed through the 
 cane, Nella returned and carefully straightened out 
 the stalks that we had trampled down. 
 
 When we had traversed a mile or so of trail, Nella 
 called a halt and disappeared into the depths of a 
 banian. Soon he returned, followed by three young 
 savages and an old man, who was nearer to a 
 monkey than any human being I have ever seen 
 before or since — bright eyes peering out from a 
 shock of woolly hair; an enormous mouth disclos- 
 ing teeth as white and perfect as those of a dental 
 advertisement; skin creased with deep wrinkles; an 
 alert, nervous, monkey -like expression; quick, siye, 
 monkey-like movements. He approached us care- 
 fully, ready to turn and run at the slightest alarm. 
 I endeavored to shake hands with him, but he jerked 
 his hand away. The friendly greeting had no mean- 
 ing for him. My presents, however, talked to him. 
 Reassured by them and the voluble Nella, who was 
 greatly enjoying his position as master of ceremo- 
 nies, the savages squatted near us. 
 
 I began digging after information, but informa- 
 tion was hard to get. Nella preferred asking ques- 
 tions to answering them. All that I could learn from 
 

 132 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 him was that there were many savages in the vicin 
 ity and that we would see them all in due time. 
 
 The conversation became one-sided. The five 
 savages sat and discussed us in their own language 
 of growls and ape-like chattering. They tried to ex- 
 amine the rifles carried by our boys, but the boys 
 were afraid to let their guns out of their hands. Osa, 
 more confident, explained to the savages the work- 
 ing of her repeater. Then they focused their atten 
 lion on her. They felt her boots and grunted admir- 
 ingly. They fingered her blond hair and carefully 
 touched her skin, giving strange little whistles o 
 awe. Osa was used to such attentions from savages 
 and took them as a matter of course. 
 
 In spite of their grotesque appearance, there wasdl 
 little that was terrifying about our new acquain- 
 tances. They seemed not at all warlike. Only two of 
 the five carried weapons, the one a bow and arrow, 
 the other a club. I was interested to observe that the 
 old man, who apparently was a chief, wore the Big 
 Numbers costume — a great clout of pandanus fiber 
 — while the others were still more lightly clothed 
 according to the style in vogue among the Sm 
 Numbers. I tried to find out the reason for the vari- 
 ation. But Nella was not interested in my questions. 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 133 
 
 Finally, I realized that there was no use in trying to 
 get information in a hurry. Time means nothing to 
 savages. We examined the banian from which our 
 visitors had come. Like the tree we had seen on the 
 previous day, it had a hole in the center, in which 
 hung a ladder for hasty exits. Empty baskets, hung 
 from the branches, showed that the place was much 
 frequented. 
 
 After a while about twenty natives came along 
 the trail. They joined the five natives already with 
 us, and the examination of us and our belongings be- 
 gan all over. Osa went among the newcomers with 
 her kodak, taking snapshots, and I set up my mov- 
 ing-picture camera on a tripod, selected a place 
 where the light was good, and tried to get the sav- 
 ages in front of my lens. They would not move; so I 
 pointed my camera at them and began to turn the 
 crank. Like lightning, they sprang to their feet and 
 ran to the banian. They scampered up the tendrils 
 like monkeys, and by the time I could follow them 
 with the camera, I could see only their bright eyes 
 here and there peering from the crevices. 
 
 Through Nella we coaxed them back, and down 
 they came, as quickly as they had gone up, while I 
 ground out one of the best pictures I ever got. Osa 
 
134 CANNIBAL-LAND I 
 
 at once dubbed them the "monkey people." And in- 
 deed they were nearer monkeys than men. They had 
 enormous flat feet, with the great toe separated from 
 the other toes and turned in. They could grasp a 
 branch with their feet as easily as I could with my 
 hands. For speed and sureness and grace in climbing, 
 they outdid any other men I had ever seen. 
 
 When luncheon-time came, we spread out our 
 meal of cold broiled wood-pigeon, tinned asparagus, 
 and sea-biscuit and began to eat. After watching us 
 for a few moments, two or three savages went and 
 fetched some small almond-like nuts, which they 
 shared with their companions. They seemed more 
 like monkeys than ever as they squatted there, bus- 
 ily cracking the nuts with stones and picking out the 
 meats with their skinny fingers. 
 
 By dint of many presents, I won the confidence of 
 the chief and, before the afternoon was over, I was 
 calling him by his first and only name, which was, as 
 near as I can spell it phonetically, Wo-bang-an-ar. 
 He was a strange crony. He was covered with layer 
 after layer of dirt. No one who has not been among 
 savage tribes can image a human being so filthy. His 
 hair had never been combed or cut; it was matted 
 with dirt and grease. His eyes were protruding and 
 
WO-BANG-AN-AR 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 135 
 
 bloodshot and they were never still. His glance 
 darted from one to another of us and back again. 
 But, like Nagapate, he proved to be a real chief, and 
 his people jumped whenever he gave a command. 
 He ordered them to do whatever I asked, and I made 
 pictures all the afternoon. 
 
 That night we slept in the banian, and next day 
 Nella led us through the jungle to a clearing some 
 five miles distant. There we found about a hundred 
 men, women, and children. All of them, save Wo- 
 banganar, who had his food supplied to him by his 
 subjects, looked thin and drawn. Some of the men 
 wore the Big Numbers costume, some that of the 
 Small Numbers. The women wore the usual Small 
 Numbers dress of a few leaves. A few men carried 
 old rifles, but they had only about half a dozen car- 
 tridges among them; a few others had bows and ar- 
 rows or clubs, but the majority were unarmed. This 
 seemed strange, in the light of our experience among 
 the tribes of northern Malekula, but even stranger 
 was the fact that these people had no houses or 
 huts — no dwellings of any kind. They lived in the 
 banians. Sometimes they put a few leaves over the 
 protruding roots as a shelter from rain. Occasion- 
 ally, they built against the great central trunk of the 
 
136 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 tree a rough lean-to of sticks and leaves. Beyond 
 that they made no attempt at constructing houses. 
 
 During the three days we spent among them, I 
 picked up fragments of their history, which runs 
 somewhat as follows: 
 
 Years ago, before the white men came to Male«^| 
 kula, there were many more people on the island 
 than there are to-day. In the north and in the south 
 there were great tribes, who were fierce and warlike. 
 They fell upon the people who dwelt in the isthmus, 
 and destroyed their villages. Again and again this 
 happened. The tribes that lived in the isthmus 
 grew smaller and smaller. Their men were killed and 
 their women were carried off. Finally the few that 
 were left no longer dared to build villages; for a vil- 
 lage served merely to advertise their whereabouts to 
 their enemies. They became nomads, living in trees. 
 They even ceased the cultivation of gardens and de- 
 pended for their food on wild fruits and nuts, the 
 roots of trees, and an occasional bit of fish. Their 
 number was augmented from time to time by refu- 
 gees from the Big Numbers tribes on the north and 
 from the Small Numbers on the south — a fact that 
 explained the variation in dress we had noticed. 
 They were unarmed, because their best means of de- 
 
THE MONKEY PEOPLE 137 
 
 fense was flight. They could not stand against their 
 wariike neighbors, but they could elude them by 
 climbing trees and losing themselves in the dark, im- 
 penetrable jungles. 
 
1 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 
 
 After three days among the nomads, we decided 
 that there was no cannibaHsm among a people so 
 mild and spiritless, and so we packed our belongings 
 and set off for the Amour. We thought we had half 
 a day's journey ahead of us, but to our surprise we 
 reached the ship in less than two hours. Nella, to b< 
 on the safe side, had led us to the headquarters of 
 the tribe by a circuitous route. 
 
 It was high tide when we reached the beach; so we 
 took the opportunity of getting the Amour off th( 
 sand. A good breeze took us rapidly down the coast,] 
 At nightfall we started the engine and by midnightj 
 we had anchored in Southwest Bay. 
 
 The next morning, at daybreak, we were sur- 
 rounded by natives in canoes, with fruit and yams^ 
 and fish for sale. Since the fish were old and smelly,! 
 we decided to catch some fresh ones by the dynamite' 
 method in use throughout the South Seas wherever 
 there are white men to employ their "magic"! We 
 lowered the two whaleboats. I set my camera in one 
 and lashed the other alongside to steady my boat 
 
SOUTHWEST BAY 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 139 
 
 which bobbed about a good bit as it was, but not 
 enough to spoil the picture. I next set the natives to 
 hunting for a school of fish. In a few moments they 
 signaled that they had found one. We approached 
 slowly and quietly and threw the dynamite. It ex- 
 ploded with a roar and sent a spout of water several 
 feet into the air. After the water had quieted, the 
 fish began to appear. Soon some three hundred mul- 
 lets, killed from the concussion, were floating on the 
 surface and the natives jumped overboard and be- 
 gan to gather the fish into their canoes. Suddenly 
 one of the blacks yelled in terror. He scrambled into 
 his canoe and his companions did likewise. I saw the 
 dark edge of a shark's fin coining through the water. 
 He was an enormous shark and in his wake came a 
 dozen others. They made the water boil as they 
 gobbled down our catch. Captain Moran seized his 
 gun and put a bullet through the nose of one of the 
 largest of them. The shark leaped ten feet out of the 
 water, and in huge jumps made for the open sea, 
 lashing the water into foam with his tail every time 
 he touched the surface. I got some fine pictures. 
 
 Before the sun was up, we were well on our way, 
 with an escort of a dozen canoes. The river was 
 broad and beautiful. On one side was a sandy beach. 
 
140 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 On the other was jungle, clear to the water's edge. 
 After we had paddled for about two miles, we came 
 unexpectedly into a lagoon about three miles long 
 and two wide, and dotted with tiny, jungled islands. 
 As we were making pictures of the lovely scene, sev- 
 eral natives came out in canoes and invited us to 
 land. They were the first of the long-headed people 
 that we had seen. Their heads were about half as 
 long again as they should have been and sloped off 
 to a rounded point. We landed and visited several 
 villages, each consisting of no more than three or 
 four tumble-down huts. There were a few wretched, 
 naked women, a half-dozen skinny children, and sev- 
 eral half-starved pigs about. Some of the women 
 had strapped to their backs babies who wore the 
 strange baskets that mould their heads into the 
 fashionable shape. One of these baskets is put on 
 the head of each child when it is about three days 
 old. First a cloth woven from human hair is fitted 
 over the head. This is soaked with coconut oil to 
 soften the skull. Then, after a few days, the basket is 
 put on, and the soft skull immediately takes on the 
 elongated shape desired. The basket is woven of co- 
 conut fiber in such a manner that the strands can be 
 tightened day after day, until the bones are too hard 
 
 i 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 141 
 
 to be further compressed. When the child is a year 
 old, the basket is taken ofiF. 
 
 In time gone by, the lagoon tribes, like the "mon- 
 key people," had suffered much from wars. The few 
 survivors had lost interest in life. They no longer re- 
 paired their houses. Their devil-devils were falling 
 into decay. The clearings, instead of being beaten 
 hard, as is usually the case, were overgrown with 
 grass; for dances and ceremonies were rare among 
 these sadly disheartened folk. 
 
 Inside the houses were gruesome ornaments. Hu- 
 man heads, dried and smoked, hung from the rafters 
 or leered from the ends of the poles on which they 
 were impaled. In some houses there were mummified 
 bodies, with pigs' tusks in the place of feet. Some- 
 how, in the general atmosphere of decay, these 
 things seemed pitiful rather than terrifying. 
 
 When we returned to the beach, a little after dark, 
 the boys told us that scores of natives, well armed 
 and painted in war-colors, had spent a day on the 
 beach on the opposite side of the bay. As soon as it 
 was daylight, we embarked in the whaleboat to look 
 for them. For about five miles, we ran along the 
 coast without seeing a trace of a human being. The 
 jungle came down to the water's edge and dangled its 
 
142 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 vines in the water. But at last we came to a long, 
 sandy beach well packed down by bare feet. A num- 
 ber of baskets hung from the trees at the edge of the 
 jungle. We headed the boat for the shore, but just 
 before she ran her nose into the sand, some twenty 
 savages emerged without warning from the bush. 
 One glance, and our boys frantically put out to sea 
 again. We were thankful enough for their presence 
 of mind, for the natives were a terrifying sight. 
 Their faces and heads were striped with white lime; 
 their black bodies were dotted with spots of red, 
 yellow, blue, and white, and their bushy hair bris- 
 tled with feathers. They all carried guns. How 
 many of them had bullets was another question 
 — but we did not care to experiment to find the 
 answer. 
 
 When we were about fifty feet from shore, I called 
 a halt and tried to get into communication with the 
 natives. I had small success. They kept saying 
 something over and over, but what it was, I could 
 not understand. The tide carried us up the coast and 
 the men followed at the water's edge. Finally, real- 
 izing that we did not trust them, they went back to 
 the jungle and leaned their guns against a tree. 
 Then they came down to the water-line again, and 
 
WOMAN AND CHILD OF THE LONG-HEADS, TOMMAN 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 143 
 
 we rowed inshore until the bow of our boat was an- 
 chored in the sand. 
 
 The savages waded out to us. Our boys held their 
 guns ready for action; for the visitors were certainly 
 a nasty-looking lot. They were as naked as when 
 they were born, and they had great, slobbery mouths 
 that seemed to bespeak many a cannibal feast. They 
 begged for tobacco and I gave each of them a stick 
 and a clay pipe. Then one of them, who spoke a lit- 
 tle heche-de-mer, told us that a big feast was tak- 
 ing place at a village about three miles inland. He 
 and his companions were waiting for the boo-boos 
 to announce that it was time for them to put in an 
 appearance. 
 
 I decided, and Captain Moran and his brother 
 agreed with me, that there would be no danger in at- 
 tending the ceremony. From what I could extract 
 from the natives, I gathered that there would not be 
 more than a hundred and fifty persons present. Our 
 black boys seemed willing to make the trip — a good 
 sign, for they were quick to scent danger and deter- 
 mined in avoiding it, so we landed. 
 
 Experience had taught me that the possession of 
 a rifle does not necessarily make a native dangerous, 
 and, sure enough, when I examined the guns leaning 
 
144 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 against the tree, I found that only four of the guns 
 had cartridges. The rest were all too old and rusty 
 to shoot. 
 
 Twenty savages led us inland over a good trail. 
 Before we had walked half an hour, we could hear 
 the boom of the boo-boos. I have never been able to 
 get used to that sound. Often as I have heard it, it 
 sends a chill down my spine. After an hour, it began 
 to get on my nerves. By that time we had reached 
 the foot of a steep hill, and our escort told us that 
 they could go no farther until they were summoned. 
 We went on alone, the sound of the boo-boos grow- 
 ing louder and more terrifying with each step. Osa 
 began to wonder about the advisability of bursting 
 on the natives unannounced. She hinted vaguely 
 that it might be wise to return to the boat. But we 
 kept on. 
 
 It was a hard climb. We had to stop several times 
 to rest. The revolvers that Osa and I carried in our 
 hip pockets seemed heavy as lead. At last, however, 
 we made the top of the hill, and found ourselves at 
 the edge of a clearing about a quarter of a mile 
 in diameter. In the center, around a collection of 
 huge boo-boos and devil-devils, were a thousand 
 naked savages. That was my first estimate. A little 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 145 
 
 later I divided the number in two, but even at that, 
 there were more savages than I had ever before seen 
 at one time. And they were the fiercest-looking lot 
 I had ever laid my eyes on. White lead, calcimine, red 
 paint, and common bluing are among the most val- 
 ued trade articles in this region, and the savages had 
 invested heavily in them, and besides had added to 
 their make-up boxes yellow ocher and coral lime and 
 ghastly purple ashes. Every single one had a gun or 
 a bow and arrows, and looked as if he would use it at 
 very slight provocation. 
 
 As we appeared, the boom of the boo-boos ceased. 
 The savages who had been dancing stopped. Every 
 eye was turned on us. After a moment's silence, all 
 the natives began to talk. Then a number separated 
 themselves from the mob, and, led by an old man 
 who was smeared with yellow ocher from the crown 
 of his head to the soles of his feet, approached us. 
 
 The old man spoke to us severely in beche-de-mer, 
 asking our business. 
 
 "We walk about, no more," I explained humbly. 
 "We bringem presents for big fellow master belong 
 village." 
 
 The haughty old man then informed us that, 
 though he himseK was the biggest chief of all, there 
 
146 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 were many other chiefs present, and that I mu 
 make presents to all of them. He was not at all po- 
 lite about it. He said "must " and he meant " must." 
 I took one glance at the hundreds of fierce, painted 
 faces in the clearing, and then I had one of the boys 
 bring me the big ditty-bag. Then and there I dis- 
 tributed about twenty-five dollars' worth of trade- 
 stuflF — the most I had ever given at one time. 
 
 The uproar was fairly deafening — I was thor- 
 oughly alarmed. The voices of the savages were 
 angry. Men ran from group to group, apparently 
 giving commands. Moran put his two hands in his 
 pockets where he kept his revolvers and I told Osa 
 to do likewise. Our boys huddled close around us. 
 No need to tell them to keep their guns ready. 
 
 The bag was soon empty, and there was nothing 
 further to do but await developments. To retreat 
 would be more dangerous than to stay. In order to 
 keep Osa from guessing how scared I was, I got out 
 my moving-picture camera. I wish I could have 
 photographed what happened then; for the entire 
 mob broke and ran for cover. I wondered if they had 
 ever seen a machine-gun. I could n't explain their 
 fright on any other grounds. Only old Yellow Ocher 
 stood his ground. He was scared, but game, and 
 
 I 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 147 
 
 asked me excitedly what I was up to. I explained 
 the camera to him and opened it up and showed him 
 the film and the wheels. He shouted to the otlier na- 
 tives to come back, and they returned to the clear- 
 ing, muttering and casting sullen glances in our di- 
 rection. The old man was angry. We had nearly 
 broken up the show. He gave us to understand that 
 he washed his hands of us. 
 
 He then turned his attention to the ceremony. In 
 a few moments a dozen savages took their places at 
 the boo-boos and a few men started a half-hearted 
 chant. A score of young savages began to dance, but 
 without much spirit. It was half an hour before they 
 warmed up, but at the end of that time the chant 
 was loud and punctuated with blood-thirsty yells, 
 and a hundred men were dancing in the clearing. I 
 call the performance "dancing," but it was simply a 
 march, round and round, quickening gradually to a 
 run punctuated by leaps and yells. Soon women and 
 children came out of the jungle. That was a good 
 sign. For the time being, we were in no danger. 
 
 The dance ended abruptly with a mighty yell. 
 The men at the boo-boos changed their rhythm and 
 the twenty savages we had met on the beach burst 
 from the jungle into the clearing and began to dance. 
 
148 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 There was a rough symbolism in their dance. But 
 we could not decipher the meaning of the panto- 
 mime. They picked up a bunch of leaves here and de- 
 posited them there. Then they charged a little bun- 
 dle of sticks and iSnally gathered them up and carried 
 them off. When they were tired out, they withdrew 
 to the side-lines, and another group, all painted 
 alike, in an even fiercer pattern than that of the first 
 group, made a similar dramatic entrance and danced 
 themselves into exhaustion. They were followed by 
 other groups. By the time three hours had passed, 
 there were fully a thousand savages in the clearing. 
 It was a wonderful sight. My "movie" sense 
 completely overcame my fears, and I ground out 
 roll after roll of film. When the afternoon was well 
 advanced, a hundred savages began to march to 
 slow time around the devil-devils. Others joined in. 
 They increased their pace. Soon more than half the 
 natives were in a great circle, running and leaping 
 and shouting around the clearing. Those who were 
 left formed little circles of their own, the younger 
 men dancing and the older ones watching with un- 
 friendly eyes the actions of the rival groups. Even 
 the women and children were hopping up and down 
 and shouting. Occasionally a detachment of natives 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 149 
 
 came toward us. At times we were completely sur- 
 rounded, though we tried our best by moving back- 
 ward to prevent the savages from getting in our rear. 
 As the dance grew wilder, however, the savages 
 lost all interest in us. Soon every one of them was 
 dancing in the clearing. I shall never forget that 
 dance — a thousand naked, painted savages, run- 
 ning and leaping in perfect time to the strange beat- 
 beat-beat of the boo-boos and the wild, monotonous 
 chant punctuated with brutal yells. The contagion 
 spread to the women and children and they hopped 
 up and down like jumping-jacks and chanted with 
 the men. I turned the crank of my camera like mad. 
 The sun sank behind the trees and Osa and Moran 
 urged me to return to the beach, but I was crazy 
 with excitement over the picture I was getting and I 
 insisted on staying: I lighted a number of radium 
 flares. The savages muttered a bit, but they were 
 worked up to too high a pitch to stop the dance, and, 
 when they found that the flares did no harm, they 
 rather liked them. Old Yellow Ocher, seeing that the 
 bluish-white light added to the spectacular effect, 
 asked me for some more flares. I gave him my last 
 two, and he put them among the devil-devils and 
 lighted them. He could not have done me a greater 
 
150 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 service. The light from the flares made it possible 
 to get a picture such as I never could have secured 
 in the waning daylight. 
 
 The savages were sweating and panting with their 
 exertions, but now they danced faster than ever. 
 They seemed to have lost their senses. They leaped 
 and shouted like madmen. Osa swallowed her pride 
 and begged me to put up my camera, and at last I 
 reluctantly consented. As I packed my equipment, 
 I found two hundred sticks of tobacco that had 
 escaped my notice. Without thinking of conse- 
 quences, I put them on the edge of the clearing and 
 motioned to Yellow Ocher to come and get them. 
 But some of the young bucks saw them first. They 
 leaped toward them. The first dozen got them. The 
 next hundred fought for them. The dance ended in 
 uproar. 
 
 For the first time in our island experiences, Osa 
 was frightened. She took to her heels and ran as she 
 had never run before. The boys grabbed up my cam- 
 eras and followed her. Captain Moran stood by me. 
 He urged me to run, but I felt that, if we did so, we 
 should have the whole pack on us. Old Yellow Ocher 
 and some of the other chiefs came up to us and yelled 
 something that we could not imderstand and did 
 
 1 
 
DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES 151 
 
 not attempt to answer. There was no chance for ex- 
 planations in that uproar. We edged toward the 
 trail. The chiefs pressed after us, yelling louder than 
 ever. Their men were at their heels. Luckily some 
 of the natives began to fight among themselves and 
 diverted the attention of the majority from us. Only 
 a small group followed us to the edge of the hill. 
 When we reached the trail, Moran said we had bet- 
 ter cut and run, and we made the steep descent in 
 record time. 
 
 Our boys were a hundred yards ahead of us. Osa, 
 with nothing to carry, was far in the lead. When I 
 caught up with her, she was crying, not with fear, 
 but with anger. When she got her breath back, she 
 told me what she thought of me for exposing us all 
 to danger for the sake of a few feet of film. I took 
 the scolding meekly, for I knew she was right. But 
 I kept wishing that we had been twelve white men 
 instead of three. Then I could have seen the dance 
 through to the end. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 TOMMAN AND THE HEAD-CURING ART 
 
 We were safe on board the Amour, but we could still 
 hear the boo-boos marking the time for the wild 
 dance back in the hills. I awoke several times dur- 
 ing the night. The boom-boom still floated across 
 the water. I was glad that we had taken to our heels 
 when we did, though I still regretted the picture I 
 might have got if we could have stayed. At dawn, 
 there was silence. The dance was over. 
 
 A trader who put in at Southwest Bay late in the 
 morning told us of a man who had been brutally 
 murdered at the very village we had visited. It was 
 his belief that we had escaped only because the mem- 
 ory of the punitive expedition that had avenged the 
 murder was still fresh in the minds of the natives. 
 Even that memory might have failed to protect us, 
 he told us, if the natives had really been in the heat 
 of the dance. And he and Captain Moran swapped 
 yarns about savage orgies until Osa became angry 
 with me all over again for having stayed so long on 
 the hill to witness the dance. 
 
 After a day's rest, we continued on our journey in 
 
THE HEAD-CURING ART 153 
 
 search of cannibals. Our next stop was Tomman, an 
 island about half a mile off the southernmost tip of 
 Malekula. Since we found the shore lined with ca- 
 noes, we expected to be surrounded as usual, as soon 
 as we had dropped anchor, by natives anxious to 
 trade. To our surprise, there was not a sign of life. 
 We waited until it was dark and then gave up ex- 
 pecting visitors, for the savages of the New Hebrides 
 rarely show themselves outside their huts after dark 
 for fear of spirits. Early next morning, however, we 
 were awakened by hoarse shouts, and found the 
 Amour surrounded by native craft. We then dis- 
 covered that we had arrived inopportunely in the 
 midst of a dance. Dances in the New Hebrides are 
 not merely social affairs. They all have some cere- 
 monial significance and accordingly are not to be 
 lightly interrupted. 
 
 Captain Moran assured us that, since the natives 
 of this island, like those of Vao, were sufficiently ac- 
 quainted with the Government gunboat to be on 
 their good behavior where white men were con- 
 cerned, it would be safe to go ashore. We launched a 
 whaleboat and set out for the beach, escorted by 
 about a hundred savages, who came to meet us in 
 canoes. These natives, like some of those we had 
 
154 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 met with in the region around Southwest Bay, had 
 curiously shaped heads. Their craniums were al- 
 most twice as long as the normal cranium and 
 sloped to a point at the crown. The children, since 
 their hair was not yet thick enough to conceal the 
 conformation, seemed like gnomes with high brows 
 and heads too big for their bodies. 
 
 When we reached shore, we beached the whale- 
 boat at a favorable spot and, leaving it in charge of a 
 couple of the crew, followed a well-beaten trail that 
 led from the beach to a village near by. At the edge 
 of a clearing surrounded by ramshackle huts, we 
 stopped to reconnoiter. 
 
 I have never seen a more eerie spectacle. In the 
 center of the clearing, before a devil-devil, an old 
 man was dancing. Very slowly he lifted one foot and 
 very slowly put it down; then he lifted the other foot 
 and put it down, chanting all the while in a hoarse 
 whisper. At the farther side of the clearing, a group 
 of old savages were squatting near a smoldering fire, 
 intently watching one of their number, the oldest 
 and most wizened of them all, as he held in the 
 smoke a human head, impaled on a stick. Near by, 
 on stakes set in the ground, were other heads. 
 
 The natives who had accompanied us up the trail 
 
THE HEAD-CURING ART 155 
 
 shouted something and the men about the fire looked 
 up. They seemed not at all concerned over our sud- 
 den appearance and made no attempt to conceal the 
 heads. As for the old dancer, he did not so much as 
 glance our way. 
 
 We went over to the men crouched about the fire 
 and spoke to them. They paid scant attention to 
 Moran and me, but they forsook their heads to look 
 at Osa. She was always a source of wonder and as- 
 tonishment to the natives, most of whom had never 
 before seen a white woman. These old men went 
 through the usual routine of staring at her and cau- 
 tiously touching her hands and hair, to see if they 
 were as soft as they appeared to be. 
 
 I discovered that the old head-curer knew beche-de* 
 mer and could tell me something of the complicated 
 process of his trade. The head was first soaked in a 
 chemical mixture that hardened the skin and, to a 
 certain extent, at least, made it fireproof. Next, the 
 curer held it over a fire, turning and turning it in the 
 smoke until the fat was rendered out and the remain- 
 ing tissue was thoroughly dried. After the head had 
 been smeared with clay to keep it from burning, it 
 was again baked for some hours. This process con- 
 sumed about a week of constant work. The dried 
 
156 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 head was then hung up for a time in a basket of pan- 
 danus fiber, made in the shape of a circular native 
 hut with a thatched roof, and finally it was exhib- 
 ited in the owner's hut or in a ceremonial house; 
 but for a year it had to be taken out at intervals and 
 smoked again in order to preserve it. 
 
 The old head-curer was an artist, with an artist's 
 pride in his work. He told me that he was the only 
 one left among his people who really understood the 
 complicated process of drying heads. The young 
 men were forsaking the ways of their fathers. Of the 
 old men, he was the most skilled. All the important 
 heads were brought to him for curing, and he was 
 employed to dry the bodies of great chiefs, smearing 
 the joints with clay to keep the members from falling 
 apart, turning each rigid corpse in the smoke of a 
 smoldering fire until it was a shriveled mummy, 
 painting the shrunken limbs in gay colors, and sub- 
 stituting pigs' tusks for the feet. The old man told 
 me that heads nowadays are not what they were in 
 olden times. He said what I found hard to believe 
 — that the craniums of his ancestors were twice as 
 long as those of present-day islanders. 
 
 Specimens of the head-curer's art were displayed 
 in every hut in the village. The people of Tomman 
 
THE HEAD-CURING ART 157 
 
 are not head-hunters in the strict sense of the word. 
 They do not go on head-raids as do the men of 
 Borneo. But if they kill an enemy, they take his head 
 and hang it up at home to frighten off the evil spir- 
 its. The heads of enemies are roughly covered with 
 clay and hastily and carelessly cured, but those of 
 relatives are more scientifically treated, for they are 
 to be cherished in the family portrait gallery. While 
 the natives of Tomman do not produce works of art 
 comparable to the heads treated by the Maoris of 
 New Zealand, the results of their handiwork show a 
 certain dignity and beauty. One forgets that the 
 heads were once those of living men, for they are 
 dehumanized and like sculptures. Each household 
 boasted a few mummies and a number of heads, and, 
 to our surprise, the people willingly showed us their 
 treasures and allowed us to photograph them. In 
 northern Malekula, as we had learned, it is as much 
 as a white man's life is worth to try to see the inte- 
 rior of a head-hut, and demands for heads — or 
 skulls, rather, for the natives of the northern part of 
 the island do not go in for head-curing — are usually 
 met with sullen, resentful silence. Here, the natives 
 not only brought out heads and bodies for us to 
 photograph, but in exchange for a supply of tobacco 
 
158 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 permitted me to make a flashlight picture of a big 
 ceremonial hut containing about fifty heads and 
 fifteen mummified bodies. 
 
 This hut seemed to be a club for the men of the 
 village. Almost every village of the New Hebrides 
 boasts some sort of a club-house, which is strictly 
 taboo for women and children. Here, the devil-dev- 
 ils are made and, it is rumored, certain mysterious 
 rites are performed. Be that as it may, club-life in 
 the New Hebrides seemed to me to be as stupid and 
 meaningless as it usually is in the West. Instead of 
 lounging in plush-covered armchairs and smoking 
 Havana cigars, the men of the New Hebrides lay on 
 the ground and smoked Virginia cuttings in clay 
 pipes. Each man had his favorite resting-place — a 
 hollow worn into the ground by his own body. He 
 was content to lie there for hours on end, almost mo- 
 tionless, saying scarcely a word; but the women and 
 children outside thought that he was engaged in the 
 strange and wonderful rites of his "lodge"! 
 
 Toward evening the women of the village ap- 
 peared with loads of firewood and fruits and vege- 
 tables. On top of nearly every load was perched a 
 child or a young baby, its head fitted snugly with a 
 basket to make the skull grow in the way in which; 
 
THE HEAD-CURING ART 159 
 
 according to Tomman ideals of beauty, it should go. 
 The women of Tomman we found a trifle more inde- 
 pendent than those of other islands of the New Heb- 
 rides. Of course, their upper front teeth were missing 
 — knocked out by their husbands as part of the mar- 
 riage ceremony. The gap was the Tomman sub- 
 stitute for a wedding-ring. But on Tomman, as 
 elsewhere in the New Hebrides, wives are slaves. 
 Since a good wife is expensive, costing from twenty 
 to forty pigs, and the supply is limited, most of the 
 available women are cornered by the rich. A young 
 man with little property is lucky if he can afford one 
 wife. He looks forward to the day when he will in- 
 herit his father's women. Then he will have perhaps 
 a dozen willing hands to work for him. He will give 
 a great feast and, if he kills enough pigs, he will be 
 made a chief. 
 
 When we went back to the ship at sunset, the old 
 man was still doing his solitary dance in front of the 
 devil-devil. In the morning, when we returned to 
 the village, he was already at it, one foot up, one foot 
 down. When we left Tomman, four days after our 
 arrival, he was still going strong. I tried to discover 
 the reason for the performance, but the natives either 
 could not or would not tell me. 
 
 L 
 
160 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 Although Tomman was an interesting spot, we 
 did not remain there long. I was looking for canni- 
 bals, and experience had taught me that head- 
 hunters were rarely cannibals or cannibals head- 
 hunters. So, since our time in the islands was 
 growing short, we decided to move on. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 We chugged away from Tomman and for a week we 
 cruised along the southern end of Malekula. In this 
 region, the mountains come down to the sea. Be- 
 yond them Hes dangerous territory. It was not safe 
 for us to cross them with the force we had; so we had 
 to be content with inspecting the coast. There we 
 found only deserted villages and a few scattered huts 
 inhabited by old men left to die alone. 
 
 Finally we rounded the end of the island and 
 steamed up the eastern coast. One evening we came 
 to anchor in Port Sandwich — a lovely, land-locked 
 bay. Since it was very late, we deferred explorations 
 until the following morning and turned in almost as 
 soon as we had anchored, so as to be ready for work 
 betimes. 
 
 At about three o'clock, Osa and I, who slept on 
 deck, were rudely awakened by being thrown into 
 the scuppers. We pulled ourselves to our feet and 
 held tight to the rail. The ship rolled and trembled 
 violently. Though there seemed to be no wind, the 
 
162 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 water boiled around us and the trees on shore swayed 
 and groaned in the still air. 
 
 Captain Moran and his brother came rushing from 
 their cabins. The black crew tumbled out of the 
 hold, yelling with terror. There was a sound of 
 breaking crockery .'' A big wave washed over the deck 
 and carried overboard everything that was loose. 
 The water bubbled up from below as if from a giant 
 caldron and iishes leaped high into the air. After 
 what seemed to be half an hour, but was in reality 
 a few minutes, the disturbance subsided. We had 
 been through an earthquake. 
 
 The volcanic forces that brought the New Heb- 
 rides into being are still actively at work. Small 
 shocks are almost a daily occurrence in the islands. 
 But this had been no ordinary earthquake. The 
 next morning, when we went ashore, we found that 
 half the native huts of the little settlement near the 
 mouth of the bay had collapsed like card houses. 
 The devil-devils and boo-boos stood at drunken an- 
 gles — some of them had fallen to the ground — and, 
 in the village clearings and other level places, the 
 ground looked like a piece of wet paper that had been 
 stretched until it was full of wrinkles and jagged 
 tears. Streaks of red clay marked the courses of 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 163 
 
 landslides down the sides of the mountains. The 
 old men of the settlement said that the earthquake 
 was the worst they had ever experienced. And when 
 we returned to Vao, we found that two sides of our 
 own bungalow had caved in as a result of the shock. 
 
 A visit ta the volcano Lopevi gave us further 
 proof of the uncertain foundation on which the is- 
 lands rest. 
 
 On the morning after the earthquake, Mr. King, 
 the British Commissioner, appeared in the Eu- 
 phrosyne, on his way to Vao to fetch us for a visit at 
 Vila. We told him regretfully that we had no time for 
 visiting, and then he proposed a jaunt to Lopevi, a 
 great volcano about thirty miles from Malekula. We 
 were glad of the opportunity to see the volcano, 
 which was reputed to be one of the most beautiful in 
 the world. So we said good-bye to Captain Moran, 
 who departed at once to continue his interrupted 
 trading, and we transferred our belongings to the 
 j^^Euphrosyne, where we reveled in the unaccustomed 
 luxury of good beds and good service by attentive 
 servants. 
 
 We left Port Sandwich at daybreak, and in a few 
 ^hours we saw Lopevi, a perfect cone, rising abruptly 
 [out of the water to a height of nearly six thousand 
 
164 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 feet. When we came within range, I got my camera 
 ready. A fine fringe of thunder-clouds encircled the 
 island about halfway down, but the top was free. 
 The light was perfect. I was grinding happily away, 
 when a miracle happened. Lopevi sent up a cloud of 
 smoke. Then she growled ominously, and shot out 
 great tongues of lapping flame. More smoke, and 
 she subsided into calm again. I had secured a fine 
 picture and congratulated myself on having arrived 
 just in the nick of time. Suddenly, as we discussed 
 the event, Lopevi became active again. And after 
 that there was an eruption every twenty minutes 
 from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. 
 We steamed all around the island, stopping at favor- 
 able points to wait for a good "shot." At four o'clock, 
 we sailed for Api, where we were to harbor for the 
 night. And from the time we turned our backs on 
 Lopevi, there was not another eruption. Her cone 
 was in sight for an hour that night, and next morn- 
 ing, from Ringdove Bay where we were anchored, 
 she was plainly visible. But she did not emit a single 
 whiff of smoke. Osa called her our trained volcano. 
 We remained on Api for four days. Since Mr. 
 King was due back at Vila, he had to leave on the 
 morning after our arrival; so we took up our quar- 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 165 
 
 ters with Mr. Mitchell, the English manager of one 
 of the largest coconut plantations on the island. 
 
 In more civilized regions one might hesitate be- 
 fore descending, bag and baggage, upon an un- 
 known host, to wait for a very uncertain steamer; 
 but in the islands of the South Seas one is almost al- 
 ways sure of a welcome. The traders and planters 
 lead lonely lives. They have just three things to 
 look forward to — the monthly visit of the Pacifique, 
 a trip once a year to Sydney or New Caledonia, and 
 dinner. For the Englishman in exile, dinner is the 
 greatest event of the day. He rises at daybreak and, 
 after a hasty cup of coffee, goes out on the planta- 
 tion to see that work is duly under way. He break- 
 fasts at eleven and then sleeps for a couple of hours, 
 through the heat of the day. His day's work is over 
 at six; then he has a bath and a whiskey-and-soda — 
 and dinner. Another drink, a little quiet reading, 
 then off with the dinner clothes and to bed. 
 
 Yes, I said dinner clothes. For dinner clothes are 
 as much de rigueur in Ringdove Bay as they are on 
 Piccadilly. I, who have a rowdy fondness for free- 
 and-easy dress and am only too glad when I can es- 
 cape from the world of dinner coats and white ties, 
 suggested, on the second evening of our stay at Api, 
 
166 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 that, since Mrs. Johnson was used to informal attire, 
 we could dispense, if Mr. Mitchell desired, with the 
 ceremony of dressing. 
 
 "But, my dear Johnson," said Mitchell, "I dress 
 for dinner when I am here alone." 
 
 That ended the matter. I knew that I was up 
 against an article of the British creed and might as 
 well conform. 
 
 When I first went out to the South Seas, I was 
 disposed to regard the punctiliousness in dress of the 
 isolated Britisher as more or less of an affectation. 
 But now I realize that a dinner coat is a symbol. It 
 is a man's declaration to himself and the world that 
 he has a firm grasp on his self-respect. A French- 
 man in the islands can go barefooted and half- 
 clothed, can live a life ungoverned by routine, rising 
 at will, going to bed at will, working at will, can 
 throw off every convention, and still maintain his 
 dignity. With the Anglo-Saxon it is different. The 
 Englishman must hold fast to an ordered existence 
 or, in nine cases out of ten, the islands will "get" 
 him. 
 
 It is customary to waste a lot of pity on the trader 
 and the planter in remote places — lonely outposts 
 of civilization, but, from my observation, they do not 
 
 I 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 167 
 
 need pity. The man who stays in the islands is fitted 
 for the Hfe there; if he is n't, he does n't stay, and, if 
 he does stay, he can retire, after fifteen or twenty 
 years, with a tidy fortune. 
 
 Of course the road to fortune is a long and hard 
 one. The average planter starts out with a little 
 capital — say five hundred dollars. He purchases a 
 plot of land. The price he pays depends upon the 
 locality in which he buys. In regions where the na- 
 tives are still fairly unsophisticated, he may get his 
 land for almost nothing. Even where the natives 
 are most astute, he can buy a square mile for what 
 he would pay for an acre back home. His next step 
 is to get his land cleared. To that end, he buys a 
 whaleboat and goes out to recruit natives to act as 
 laborers. He needs five or six blacks. They will 
 build his house and clear his land and plant his coco- 
 nuts. Since it takes seven years for the coconuts to 
 mature, sweet potatoes and cotton must be planted 
 between the rows of trees. The sweet potatoes, with 
 a little rice, will furnish all the food required by the 
 blacks. The cotton, if the planter is diligent and 
 lucky, will pay current expenses until the coconuts 
 begin bearing. 
 
 Though his small capital of five hundred dollars 
 
168 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 may be eaten up early in the game, the settler need 
 not despair. The big trading companies that do busi- 
 ness in the islands will see him through if he shows 
 any signs of being made of the right stuff. They will 
 give him credit for food and supplies and they will 
 provide him with knives, calico, and tobacco, which 
 he can barter with the blacks for the sandalwood and 
 copra that will help balance his account with the 
 companies. And after the first trying seven years, 
 his troubles are about over — if he can get labor 
 enough to keep his plantation going. 
 
 Even in the remote islands of the New Hebrides, 
 the labor problem has reared its head. The em- 
 ployer, in civilized regions, has a slight advantage re- 
 sulting from the fact that men must work to live. In 
 the New Hebrides, indeed all throughout Melanesia, 
 the black man can live very comfortably, according 
 to his own standards, on what nature provides. Only 
 a minimum of effort is required to secure food and 
 clothing and shelter, and most of that effort is put 
 forth by the female slaves he calls his wives. Even 
 the experienced recruiter finds it hard to get the 
 Melanesian to exchange his life of ease for a life of 
 toil. And the inexperienced recruiter finds it very 
 hard. The days when natives could be picked up on 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 169 
 
 any beach are past. The blacks in the more acces- 
 sible regions know what recruiting means — two 
 years of hard labor, from which there is no escape 
 and from which a man may or may not return home. 
 So the recruiter must look for hands in the interior, 
 where knowledge of the white man and his ways 
 has not penetrated. Even here, the inexperienced 
 recruiter is at a disadvantage. For the experienced 
 recruiter has invariably preceded him. 
 
 Each year, the number of available recruits is 
 growing fewer, for the native population is dwin- 
 dling rapidly. As a result, the cost of labor is high. In 
 the Solomons, one may secure a native for a three 
 years' term at five or six pounds a year in the case of 
 inexperienced workmen, or at nine pounds a year in 
 the case of natives who have already served for three 
 years. In the New Hebrides, planter bids against 
 planter, and the native benefits, receiving from 
 twelve to fifteen pounds a year for his work. The 
 planters complain of the high cost of labor. But the 
 big planters, the capitalists of the South Seas, who 
 have their chains of copra groves, with a white su- 
 perintendent in charge of each one, certainly do not 
 suffer. I remember being on one big Melanesian 
 plantation on the day when natives were paid for 
 
170 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 two years' work all in a lump. About four thou- 
 sand dollars was distributed among the workers. I 
 watched them spend it in the company store. A 
 great simple black, clad in a nose-stick and a yard of 
 calico, would come in and after an hour of happy 
 shopping would go off blissfully with little or no 
 money and a collection of cheap mirrors and beads 
 and other worthless gew-gaws all in a shiny new 
 "bokkus b'long bell." By night, about three thou- 
 sand dollars had been taken in by the company store- 
 keeper. I was reminded of a rather grimly humorous 
 story of a day's receipts that totaled only $1800 after 
 a $2000 pay-day. When the report reached the main 
 office in Sydney, a curt note was sent to the planta- 
 tion store-keeper asking what had become of the 
 other $200! 
 
 There are certainly two sides to the labor question 
 in the New Hebrides. Yet the whole development of 
 the islands hangs upon cheap and efficient labor. 
 Where it is to come from is a question. The recruit- 
 ing of Orientals for service in British possessions in 
 the South Seas is forbidden. Even if it were per- 
 mitted, it would not solve the problem, for the coolie 
 of China or Japan or India is not adapted to the 
 grilling labor of clearing bush. 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 171 
 
 Mr. Mitchell discussed the labor problem as long 
 and as bitterly as any employer back home. The 
 natives of Api, while friendly and mild, were en- 
 tirely averse to toil. He had to import hands from 
 other islands. Only occasionally could he persuade 
 the Api people to do a few days' work in order to 
 secure some object "belong white man." 
 
 Often they coveted curious things. One morning, 
 during our stay, a delegation of natives appeared 
 and said they had come for " big-f ellow-bokkus 
 (box)." A servant, summoned by Mitchell, brought 
 out a wooden coffin, one of the men counted out 
 some money, and the natives shouldered their " bok- 
 kus" and went away, 
 
 Mitchell laughed as he watched them depart. 
 That coffin had a history. About six weeks pre- 
 viously, a delegation of natives had appeared, with 
 a black who had seen service on a New Zealand 
 plantation acting as spokesman. He informed Mitch- 
 ell that their old chief was dying and that they had 
 decided to pay him the honor of burying him in 
 "bokkus belong white man." They asked Mitchell 
 if he would provide such a "bokkus" and for how 
 much. Mitchell had a Chinese carpenter and a little 
 supply of timber; so he very gladly consented to 
 
172 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 
 have a coffin made. He figured the cost at ten 
 pounds. That appeared to the delegation to be ex- 
 cessive, and they went oflF to the hills. The next day, 
 however, they reappeared and requested that he 
 make a coffin half the size for half the money. Mitch- 
 ell protested that a coffin half the size originally 
 figured upon would not be long enough to hold the 
 chief. And they replied that they would cut his 
 arms and legs oflf to make him fit in. At that, Mitch- 
 ell, with an eye to labor supply, said that, if they 
 must have a coffin, they must have a proper coffin. 
 He would order the carpenter to make one large 
 enough to hold the chief without mutilation, and he 
 would charge them only five pounds for it, though 
 that meant a loss to him. The carpenter went to 
 work. Most of the village came down to supervise 
 the job, and every few hours, until the coffin was 
 finished, a messenger reported on the chief's condi- 
 tion. When the "bokkus" was at last done, they 
 carried it up the trail with great rejoicing. But the 
 next day they brought it back. The old chief was up 
 and about, and they had no use for it. They laid it 
 down at Mitchell's feet and demanded their money 
 back. Mitchell protested that he had no use for the 
 coffin, either, but they were firm. And he, remember- 
 
WHITE MAN IN THE SOUTH SEAS 173 
 
 ing how diflScult it is to get hands in the copra-cutting 
 season, meekly returned the five pounds, and put 
 the coffin in his storehouse. Now, a month later, the 
 old chief had died, and the natives had come for the 
 coffin. We could hear them chanting as they went 
 up the trail. 
 
 The next day we set sail on the Pacifique, which 
 had arrived during the night with letters and papers 
 a month old, and we were dropped at Port Sand- 
 wich, which was sparsely populated with sullen and 
 subdued savages, to await whatever trader might 
 happen along to take us back to Vao. We had used 
 all our films and were thoroughly tired of Port Sand- 
 wich when a trader finally put in an appearance. His 
 boat was a twenty-four-foot launch, barely large 
 enough to contain us and our equipment. When we 
 hoisted our dinghy aboard, its bow and stern pro- 
 truded several feet beyond the sides of the launch. 
 Next morning, with some misgivings, we set out on 
 the fifty-five-mile journey that would complete our 
 round of Malekula and bring us back to Vao. 
 
 We got "home" about four in the afternoon, tired 
 and half -cooked from the broiling sun that had beat 
 down upon us all day. We received a royal welcome. 
 A great crowd of natives met us at the beach, and 
 
174 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 each seized a box or package and carried it at 
 top speed up to the bungalow. In half an hour 
 everything was in the house. It had been a long 
 time since our Vao neighbors had had any of our 
 tobacco! 
 
 1 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ESPmiTU SANTO AND A CANNIBAL FEAST 
 
 For two days we developed films and plates. On 
 the third, we attended what might be called the New 
 Year's celebration of Vao. Fires are made among 
 the islanders by the primitive method by rubbing 
 two sticks together. Though the operation takes 
 only a minute, the savages are too lazy to light a fire 
 every time they need one, so once a year, in the larg- 
 est house of the village, they make a big fire, which 
 is kept burning to furnish embers from which all the 
 other fires may be lighted. At the end of the year, 
 the fire is put out with great solemnity, and a new 
 one is lighted. The ceremony lasts all day and all 
 night. It is called "killing the Mankki." 
 
 On the morning of the festivities, bush natives be- 
 gan to arrive before daylight. The young boys of 
 Vao served as ferrymen. A group of men would come 
 down to the beach at Malekula and shout across the 
 water, and the Vao boys would put out in their 
 funny little crooked canoes — for wood is so scarce 
 that even bent trees are made to do duty as dugouts 
 — and bring back a load of passengers. Natives 
 
176 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 came from other islands near by. By night, there 
 were more than a thousand people on the islands. 
 
 From early in the morning, there was dancing and 
 pig-killing in the clearings of the three villages. The 
 different tribes did not mingle together. One group 
 would come out of the bush into the clearing, dance 
 its dance, kill a score or so of pigs, and then retire 
 into the bush again. 
 
 It was bad weather for photography. It rained all 
 day — a fine, drizzling rain. But I worked hard, hop- 
 ing to secure some good film, for the dances were un- 
 usually interesting. One especially good dance was a 
 snake dance, in which the natives brandished small 
 snakes tied to coconut leaves. They are deadly afraid 
 of snakes. They have a saying that holds good pretty 
 much the world over, to the effect that snakes with 
 blunt tails are always poisonous and those with 
 long, pointed tails are harmless. I noted that the 
 snakes used for the dance were very small and of a 
 long-tailed variety. At the end of the dance each 
 man killed his snake and fed it to a pig. Then each 
 man killed a pig. 
 
 The slaughter of pigs was enormous. I am sure 
 some five hundred must have been killed during the 
 day — far more than could be eaten. As each pig 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 177 
 
 was killed, his tusks were removed and placed upon 
 platforms that had been erected to hold them. Pigs' 
 tusks are always carefully preserved. They orna- 
 ment the houses. They form necklaces for the devil- 
 devils. They are placed in the crotches of trees. 
 
 I was convinced, as the day wore on, that pork 
 was not the only meat on the bill of fare. It seemed 
 to me that I was at last hot on the trail of cannibal- 
 ism; the men from Malekula had brought with them 
 strange packages wrapped in leaves, which, I sus- 
 pected, contained human flesh. The action of the 
 blacks confirmed my suspicion, for they guarded 
 their packages carefully, and would not let me come 
 near with my cameras. 
 
 They were threatening in their attitude all day. 
 Even my tobacco did not thaw them out. The Vao 
 people tolerated me, in return for a case of tobacco, 
 but their eyes were far from friendly, and the old 
 men muttered evilly every time they looked our 
 way. 
 
 By dark things were getting lively. The mob of 
 savages surged back and forth from one village to 
 another, shouting and singing. I made a great dis- 
 covery for thirsty America — that people can actu- 
 ally get drunk on imagination. The natives had no 
 
178 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 intoxicating liquor. Their only drink was water, and 
 yet they lurched drunkenly when they walked, and 
 sang as only drunken men and women sing. 
 
 I did not see the fire put out and the new one 
 built. As it grew later, the mob became wilder, I 
 began to think of the long, dark trail to the bunga- 
 low, where we would be absolutely at the mercy of 
 lurking savages, and decided that discretion was the 
 better part of valor. So Osa and I went home. We 
 slept with our guns handy — and we did not sleep 
 much at that, for the boo-boos sounded all night and 
 the shouting and singing sometimes surged very 
 near. 
 
 We spent the next few days in visits to the north- 
 ern coast of Malekula, but we did not dare venture 
 inland, for the attitude of the natives was at once 
 suspicious and threatening. We talked the matter 
 over and decided that we had seen about enough of 
 Malekula and Vao and might as well pursue our in- 
 vestigations elsewhere. Espiritu Santo was some forty 
 miles away. In the southern portion there was re- 
 ported to be a race of dwarfs, and cannibalism was 
 said to be general there, as on Malekula. We had al- 
 most despaired of getting actual proof that man ate 
 man in the New Hebrides. We ourselves had seen 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 179 
 
 enough to be convinced that "long pig" was on 
 many a bill of fare, but we could not prove anything; 
 for, since the Government metes out severe punish- 
 I ment to eaters of human flesh, the savages are care- 
 ful not to be caught at their ghoulish feasts. Still, 
 our luck might turn, we thought, if we changed is- 
 lands, and we should find the evidence we had been 
 seeking for so many weeks. 
 
 The very day after we made this decision, a small 
 cutter nosed into the passage between Vao and Mal- 
 ekula. The owner was a full-blooded Tongan trader, 
 named Powler. He was on his way to get some coco- 
 nuts he had bought from a native on an island near 
 by, but he promised to return in a few days and take 
 us to Santo. When he arrived, we had our equip- 
 ment packed and were ready to go aboard. The na- 
 . tives helped us with a will and showed real regret at 
 parting with us, for they knew that they would never 
 again get so much tobacco in return for so little 
 work. 
 
 The wind was favorable, and we fairly flew along. 
 Shortly after dark we anchored off Tongoa, a small 
 island a stone's throw from Santo. To my great de- 
 light, Powler agreed to remain with us. He was a 
 great, good-natured giant, never out of sorts and 
 
180 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 strong as an ox. I wished we had met with him 
 sooner. The natives trusted him. His dark skin and 
 his abiHty to grasp the languages of the island tribes 
 stood him in good stead. Besides, he had the reputa- 
 tion, among both natives and whites, of being abso- 
 lutely honest in his dealings — a trait as rare in the 
 South Seas as elsewhere. In his company, we went 
 ashore early on the morning after our arrival. 
 
 We found the men of Santo, who gathered on the 
 beach to greet us, quite different in type from the 
 Malekula bush savages. They were smaller and more 
 gracefully built. They wore flowers and feathers in 
 their hair. They had a curious custom of removing 
 part of the bone that divides the nostrils so that 
 the bridges of their noses had fallen in and they 
 appeared to be always scowling. To enhance their 
 fierceness still further, they put sticks through their 
 noses. 
 
 Such nose ornaments are characteristic of the 
 blacks of the South Seas. The Solomon Islander 
 wears a ring fashioned from bone or shell and highly 
 polished and ornamented. The native of Santa 
 Cruz adorns himself with a piece of polished tor- 
 toise-shell shaped like a padlock. But the man of 
 the New Hebrides thrusts into his nose anything 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 181 
 
 that he happens upon — usually a stick picked up 
 along the trail. 
 
 To my great delight, the Santo men wore a gee- 
 string of calico. As I have said before, the dress of the 
 men of Malekula, if you can call it dress, draws at- 
 tention to their sex rather than conceals it. On my 
 first visit among them, I had taken motion-pictures 
 of them as they were. When I returned to America, 
 I found that naked savages shocked the public. 
 Some of my best films were absolutely unsalable. On 
 this second trip, accordingly, I managed, whenever 
 possible, to persuade the savages to wear geestrings 
 or loin-cloths or aprons of leaves. Since "costum- 
 ing " was very difficult (the blacks, naturally enough, 
 could see no reason for it), I was glad that I should 
 not have to spend time in persuading the men of 
 Santo to put on more clothing. 
 
 At daybreak on the following morning, we started 
 for the hills. With us were Powler and three of his 
 boys and fifteen trustworthy Tongoa natives. We 
 were bound for a village of pottery-makers — but 
 we never got there. We had tramped for about three 
 hours when we came suddenly upon a group of lit- 
 tle men. They were too surprised to run, and too 
 frightened. They were all, with the exception of one 
 
182 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 of their number who carried a gun as big as he was, 
 armed with bows and arrows, but they did not show 
 any hostility. Instead, they just gathered close to- 
 gether and stared at us in terror. 
 
 These were the dwarfs I had heard about. I got 
 out some presents for them. Soon their timidity 
 wore off, and I persuaded them to walk one by one 
 under my outstretched arm. Although their fuzzy 
 wool stood out in great bushy mops, not a hair 
 touched my arm as they passed under. There were 
 sixteen of them, all told. Five were old fellows with 
 grizzled whiskers, ten were of middle age, and one, 
 the tallest of them all, was a boy of about fifteen. 
 
 We settled down near a stream and I took pic- 
 tures as long as the light lasted. That night, our lit- 
 tle friends camped close by, and the next day, when 
 we set out for the beach, they followed us. We 
 showed them everything we had in our trunks. They 
 were as pleased as children, and, when I allowed the 
 old chief to shoot my big automatic revolver, he 
 fairly danced with excitement. 
 
 The next day, I sent messengers into the hills to 
 hunt for a chief about whom Mr. King had told us. 
 This chief had achieved a great reputation as a 
 prophet and a worker of magic. A year before, he had 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 183 
 
 been nobody — just a savage. Then he had gone 
 mad. He had once been recruited as a member of the 
 crew of a mission ship, where he had heard hymns 
 and Bible stories, which he now adapted to his own 
 use. He told the natives there was going to be a 
 great flood, which would cover Santo. He himself, 
 however, would not be drowned, for he was going to 
 bring Hat Island, a little island off the coast, over to 
 rest on Santo Peak. Hat Island was a barren and 
 undesirable piece of real estate, but the prophet said 
 that he had made arrangements to have twenty Eu- 
 ropean steamers come regularly with food and to- 
 bacco for the inhabitants. Since he had been fairly 
 successful in foretelling the weather, the natives be- 
 lieved in him, and each clamored for a place on Hat 
 Island. But the salvation offered by the old savage 
 came high. Reservations on Hat Island could be se- 
 cured only at the price of ten pigs each. Soon the 
 prophet had cornered most of the pigs in that sec- 
 tion of Santo. Seeing his power, he raised the price 
 of admission. He secured, in addition to the pigs, 
 the most desirable women in the vicinity. In fact, he 
 appropriated everything he wanted, and occasion- 
 ally he ran amok and killed several of his compatri- 
 ots — as he said, to put the fear of God into them^ 
 
184 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 The next recruiter that came to Santo was be- 
 sieged with savages begging to be allowed to go to 
 work on copra plantations. He soon learned that the 
 natives had not suddenly grown industrious, but 
 that even work seemed pleasant in contrast with the 
 reign of terror of the inspired chief. The chief saw 
 possibility of profit in the desire of his people to es- 
 cape and made the recruiter pay heavily in tobacco 
 and calico for every native taken away. 
 
 Reports of his rule had reached the Government 
 officers at Vila, and Commissioner King, who had 
 sent for him several times to no avail, had given me 
 a letter to present to the old fellow, in case I should 
 go to Santo. I now sent word to the chief that I had 
 an important message that could be delivered only to 
 him in person. To my surprise, two days after the 
 message had been delivered, the prophet appeared. 
 
 I had made everything ready for a motion-picture 
 show to entertain my pigmies. Just before dark, as I 
 was testing my projector, thirty armed natives came 
 down the beach. The dwarfs wanted to run, but we 
 made them understand that we would protect them, 
 and they huddled behind us, frightened, but with 
 perfect faith in our ability and readiness to take care 
 of them in any crisis. 
 
 1 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 185 
 
 The newcomers were a nasty-looking lot. The 
 prophet, ridiculous in a singlet and overalls and a 
 high hat, came up to me with no sign of hesitation 
 and held out his hand. I could distinguish words in 
 the greeting he grunted at me, but they had no con- 
 nection. His eyes were bloodshot and wild, his lips 
 were abnormally red, and he drooled as he talked. 
 
 I presented Commissioner King's letter, which 
 was an imposing document with a red official seal. 
 In high-sounding language it enjoined the chief to 
 give me and my party every possible aid, and ended 
 with an invitation to his prophetic highness to come 
 to Vila on the Euphrosyne the next time she passed 
 that way and the promise that he would not be 
 harmed if he would do so. 
 
 When the prophet saw the red seal, his assurance 
 fell from him, and he rolled his eyes in terror. 
 
 "Me sick; me sick,'* he repeated over and over. I 
 tried to explain that Commissioner King realized 
 that he was sick, and for that very reason wanted to 
 see him and help him, but I doubt if he understood 
 anything I said. 
 
 After dark, we started the show. The dwarfs 
 chattered and giggled like children, but our other 
 guests were unsmiling and ominously silent. Only 
 
186 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 the prophet kept talking. One of the boys told me 
 afterward that he was telling his men that he had 
 sent for me in order to work his magic through me — 
 that I and my projector had nothing to do with the 
 pictures; he himself was responsible. 
 
 But halfway through the performance he appar- 
 ently began to doubt his power. Rocking back and 
 forth, he repeated over and over, "By-em-by me 
 die, by-em-by me die." He was looking forward to 
 the day when he would be captured and carried off to 
 Vila and, as he imagined, put to death. I was glad 
 when the show was over and the prophet and his fol- 
 lowers withdrew for the night. It had not been an 
 especially merry evening. 
 
 Early next morning a delegation of the prophet's 
 followers sought me out and begged me to take their 
 chief by force to Vila and have him hanged. 
 
 "He bad. He takem plenty pigs; he takem plenty 
 women; he killem plenty men," they explained. 
 
 I was sorry for them, but I could do nothing. I 
 tried to make them understand that I had nothing to 
 do with the Government and consequently no au- 
 thority to arrest a man, but I could see that they did 
 not quite believe me. They went off muttering to 
 themselves. 
 
 1 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 187 
 
 In a few minutes they departed with their chief in 
 quest of a certain kind of shellfish to be found about 
 five miles up the beach, and we decided to take ad- 
 vantage of their absence and visit one of the villages 
 in the prophet's territory. 
 
 We walked for about three hours without seeing 
 any signs of a village. Then we heard, faint in the 
 distance, the sound of a tom-tom. Soon we were 
 within hearing of a chanted song. We advanced with 
 caution, until we reached the edge of a village clear- 
 ing. From behind a clump of bushes we could watch 
 the natives who danced there. The dance was just 
 the ordinary native hay-foot, straw-foot, around the 
 devil-devils in the center of the clearing, now slow, 
 now gradually increasing in tempo until it was a run. 
 What interested me was the feast that was m 
 preparation. On a long stick, over the fire, were a 
 dozen pieces of meat. More meat was grilling on the 
 embers of another fire. On leaves near by were the 
 entrails of the animal that was cooking. I do not 
 know what it was that made me suspect the nature 
 of this meat. It certainly was not much different in 
 appearance from pork. But some sixth sense whis- 
 pered to me that it was not pork. 
 The savages had no suspicion of our nearness. As 
 
188 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 a matter of fact, the keenness of sight and hearing 
 that primitive peoples are generally credited with 
 are entirely lacking in the New Hebrideans. Many 
 a time Osa and I have quietly crept up to a native 
 village and stolen away again without being detected. 
 Often on the trail we have literally run into blacks 
 before they realized that we were approaching. 
 Even the half -starved native dogs have lost their 
 alertness. More than once I have come suddenly on 
 a cur and laughed at him as he rolled over backward 
 in an attempt to escape. With the natives lost in a 
 dance, we were quite safe. 
 
 For an hour we watched and took long-range 
 photographs. The dance continued monotonously. 
 The meat sizzled slowly over the fire — and nothing 
 happened. Then I gave one of the Tongoa boys who 
 accompanied us a radium flare and told him to go 
 into the clearing, drop the flare into the fire, and run 
 to one side out of the picture. He did as I asked him. 
 The natives stopped dancing and watched him as he 
 approached. He threw the flare into the fire and 
 jumped aside. As they stooped down close to the 
 flame to see what he had thrown there, the flare took 
 fire and sent its blinding white light into their faces. 
 With a yell they sprang back and ran in terror di- 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 189 
 
 rectly toward us. When they saw us, they stopped 
 so quickly that they ahnost tumbled backward. 
 Then they turned and ran in the opposite direction. 
 The half -minute flare had burned out; so they 
 grabbed the meat from the fire and carried it with 
 them into the bush. 
 
 My boys sprang into the clearing. I, with my 
 camera on my shoulder, was just behind them. 
 When I came up to them, they were standing by the 
 fire, looking at the only remnant of the feast that 
 was left on the embers. It was a charred human 
 head, with rolled leaves plugging the eye-sockets. 
 
 I had proved what I had set out to prove — that 
 cannibalism is still practiced in the South Seas. I 
 was so happy that I yelled. After photographing the 
 evidence, I wrapped the head carefully in leaves, to 
 take away with me. We picked the fire over, but 
 could find no other remainder of the gruesome feast. 
 In one of the huts, however, we discovered a quan- 
 tity of human hair, laid out on a green leaf, to be 
 made into ornaments. 
 
 Some of the cannibals returned and, from a dis- 
 tance, watched us search their huts. I then took 
 their pictures. They grinned into the camera, as in- 
 nocent as children. 
 
190 CANNIBAL-LAND 
 
 We arrived at the beach a little after dark. Pow- 
 ler had shot some pigeons, fried their breasts, and 
 made a soup from the remainder, and he had cut 
 down a coconut tree and made a salad of the heart. 
 We did full justice to the meal. After it was over, we 
 sat and admired the roasted head — at least I ad- 
 mired it. Osa did not think much of it. As for 
 Powler, he tried in vain to conceal that he thought 
 me absolutely crazy to care so much about an old 
 charred head. 
 
 The next day, while I was printing pictures on the 
 beach, a delegation of cannibals appeared on the 
 scene. They were good-natured and friendly. I 
 showed them a big mirror. It was apparently the 
 first they had ever seen. They were awed and puz- 
 zled, touching the glass with cautious fingers and 
 looking behind the mirror suddenly, to surprise who- 
 ever might be fooling them. I photographed them 
 as they peered at their reflection and grimaced like 
 a bunch of monkeys. We invited them to luncheon. 
 Their favorite dish of "long pig" was not on the bill 
 of fare. But they ate our trade salmon and biscuits 
 with gusto and smacked their lips over the coffee 
 that Osa made for them — the first they had ever 
 tasted. They remained with us until the following 
 
A CANNIBAL FEAST 191 
 
 day, when we picked up our apparatus and sailed qflf 
 on the first lap of our journey home. 
 
 In seven months in the New Hebrides I had ex- 
 posed twenty -five thousand feet of film, and had, be- 
 sides, about a thousand "stills." I was well satisfied 
 with my work; for I knew that my pictures would 
 help the Western world to realize the life lived by the 
 fast-disappearing primitive races of the earth; and I 
 had actual evidence — my long-range photographs 
 and the charred head that I so carefully cherished — 
 that cannibalism is still practiced in the islands of the 
 South Seas. 
 
 THE END 
 

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