Robert Henry Codrington

“ The name of Qat is given also to remarkable objects and effects in nature; when fish die in the sea from excessive heat of the sun, Qat is said to have poisoned them; a kind of fungus is his basket, a fungia coral is his dish, the sulphur at the volcanic vents in Vanua Lava is his sauce, a beam of light shining through the roof in the dusty air is his spear; and the flying shadow of a solitary cloud over the sea is the shadow of Qat. With all this it is impossible to take Qat very seriously or to allow him divine rank. He is certainly not the lord of spirits. ”

“ Many of the Banks' Island dances, in elaborate figures carried out with the greatest precision, are really beautiful and interesting; the performers, with their heads wonderfully adorned, and their limbs decorated with shining fringes of unopened palm-fronds, advance and retire in two lines, interlace in curves, cross and recross in ranks, waving their arms and stamping their feet, on which rattling anklets of empty nuts are hung, to the beat of a bamboo drum carried by a leader, or beaten by a seated performer. ”

“ If a man is nearly killed he says, 'I have been close to Panoi, and have returned.' There is much there that is like the upper world, villages, houses, trees with red leaves, and there is day and night; it is even a beautiful place, for at a great festival when the village place is bright with flowers and coloured leaves, and thronged with people dancing, drumming and singing, the saying is that it is 'like a sura, as if the mouth of Panoi were opened.' When a ghost first descends, he waits at first outside the ghostly village; he is weak, and he stops till he has recovered strength. ”

“ There are, therefore, land ghosts and sea ghosts. The former are seen about the villages and heard to speak, haunting their graves and relics; their appearance that of men lately dead, their voice a hollow whisper. Their aid can be obtained by those who know them, and they are believed to fight among themselves with ghostly weapons. The ghosts that haunt the sea have a great hold on the imagination of the natives of the south-eastern Solomon Islands, and as these people love to illustrate their life in sculpture and painting, they show us clearly what they conceive these ghosts to be. ”

“ And what is the name of that fellow over there? and he said, Molwor. And she said, Aia! true enough! your name is Molgon, Go-catch, and you have come here and have caught on to the pigs which belong to you and me, and the house, and the gamal, and the food, and the money; but he, his name is Molwor, Go-clear, and he has come here to be clear of all the goods of you and me. And he cried and cried. Then the woman said, Get up, let us go and see him; and they went over and found him dead, lying in the canoe, for the sun had smitten him dead with its rays. ”

“ When a ghost is seen what is seen? Not the soul, the atai, but the dead man, the tamate; for the atai can never be seen, the nunuai, echo, of the body, its taqangiu, outline, can be seen, but indistinctly. ”

“ Then they think that the ghosts and he who has lately died come back to the world for this, and that the ghosts call this the great feast of the man who died. They believe that they come and carry away food and pig's flesh for themselves to eat; but men are not aware of their taking anything away, they speak figuratively. It is just as when a little mash, or cocoa-nut, or bit of pig is put upon a dead man's grave for him to eat; they do not think that the ghosts take the things as men do ”

“ The next month is the vusiaru, the wind beats upon the casuarina trees upon the cliffs; the next again is called tetemavuru, the wind blows hard and drives off flying fragments from the seeded reeds; these are hurricane months. The last in order is the month that beats and rattles, lamasag noronoro, the dry reeds; the wind blows strong and steady, work is begun again, they rakasag, to dry the rubbish of their clearings, and make ready the fences for new gardens. By this time the heat is past, the grass begins to spring again, and the winter months return. ”

“ A looser connexion than this is enough to make an usur as when a boy's father has had a wife, not the mother of the boy, who after becoming a widow marries another man; the boy will take liberties with the man as having come into his father's place; he will take yams from his garden. When a step-father sneezes the step-son will cry out, Matia revereve gam o sulate! a sneeze to draw out a worm for you! the notion being that the former husband has a certain grudge against his successor, and sends a worm from a point of land on which ghosts congregate. ”

“ In Aurora the fragment of food is made up with certain leaves; as these rot and stink the man dies. In Lepers' Island the garata is boiled, together with certain magical substances, in a clam shell with charms which call on Tagaro. It is evident that no one who intends to bring mischief to a man by a fragment of his food will partake of that food himself, because by doing so he would bring the mischief also on himself. ”

“ If a common man were to take upon himself to tambu anything he might, people would think that he would not do it unless he knew that he had the power to do it; they would watch, and if any one who violated his tambu were to fall sick, he would be recognized at once as one who had a powerful tindalo, and he would rise. Each tindalo has his special leaf, and a man will set his tambu with the leaf of his tindalo as a mark; men do not always know whose leaf it is, but they know that they have to deal with a tindalo, not only with a man, if they disregard the mark. ”

“ In Mota there is no such use of nunuai, but there is a notion that a man may have something, not exactly his atai or tamaniu, with which he is originally connected. A man will scatter money into a deep pool among the rocks on the shore into which the tide is pouring, a sacred place; he will call on his near forefathers, dive in, and seat himself upon the bottom. If he sees anything there, a crab or cuttle-fish perhaps, he fancies that is his real origin and beginning; he gets mana, supernatural power, from it, and pigs will multiply to him. At Maewo, Aurora, nunu is never the soul ”

“ Living men visit the island, as in the story of Samuku, and see these rocks; they see also forms as of men which vanish as they are approached; they find paths round the island neatly kept, and bathing-places cleared of stones; if they hang up fish in the trees, they seek for them in vain in the morning; marks made to shew a road are taken away. On the top of the island is a pool of water, Kolapapauro, and thither the ghosts, when they arrive, repair to present themselves to Bolafagina, the tindadho who is the lord of the place. ”

“ It is a singular thing that they make halcyon days; it is the name of the kingfisher that carries the magic power in the charm for sunshine, for the sigo is thought to control storms and rain, and the charm calls on it to eat the rising waves and make a calm. ”

“ Bags of small stones and short pieces of bamboo are provided for the people of the village, and are charmed by those who have the knowledge of the magic chant appropriate for the purpose. Two men, each with two white stones in his hands, sit in the dead man's house, one on either side. These men begin to clink the stones one against the other, the women begin to wail, the neighbours—who have all assembled at one end of the village—begin to march through it in a body to the other end, throwing the stones into the houses and all about, and beating the bamboos together. ”

“ But tarunga is not equivalent to soul any more than spirit is equivalent to soul; a soul is a tarunga, and no other name is given to it. Pigs have tarunga; when a man sells a pig he takes back from it its tarunga in a dracæna leaf, which he hangs up in his house; thus he does not lose more than the fleshly accidents of the pig, the tarunga remains waiting to animate some pig that will be born. A pig is an animal of distinction and has a tarunga; yams and such things have none; they do not live with any kind of intelligence. ”

“ He was not born there, but there he lived, made his canoe, built his house and his gamal, and created and raised his food. His life was full of wonders; his cocoa-nuts increased as he ate them; dry nuts out of which he scooped the meat filled up again. Finally Tagaro became angry because some one stole his pig, and went off to Mamalu, no one knows where; he turned the island upside down, and went off eastwards in his canoe from the east coast of the island, taking with him the best of everything, and never to return. ”

“ In some of the Banks' Islands, again, a visitor on entering a village would see one or more platforms squarely built up of stones, with high, pointed little edifices upon them, open in the front like shrines, the embers of a fire below, and above an image grotesquely shaped in human form. ”

“ When it is certain that it is gone the wailing for death begins. At first the tamtegi does not go far away, and there are sounds which shew its presence; they never drive it away, it is only the soul of one who has been eaten that is driven off with the blowing of conchs; when the time comes it goes, and the time is a hundred days. The corpse is buried wrapped in the mats which serve as money. When Mairuru died they wrapped him at once in mats, and added more next day, till the corpse with its wraps was so large that it took two days to dig a grave for it, and on the third day they buried him. ”

“ These are seen like ghosts, but are not sacrificed to or invoked. The name vigona is known also at Florida, and is applied to beings whose power exercises itself in storms, rain, drought, calms, and in the growth of food; but these the natives decline to admit to be simple spirits, thinking they must once have been men; and doubtless some so called were men not long ago. One being only is asserted there to be superhuman, never alive with a mere human life, and therefore not now a ghost; one that now receives no worship, but is the subject of stories only, without any religious consideration. ”

“ Many a voyager, not an observer, carries away as a sort of joke the story that the natives think their shadows are their souls, who could not tell exactly what he means by the word 'soul' which he uses himself. It may suffice to make the statement that, whatever word the Melanesian people use for soul, they mean something esseutially belonging to each man's nature which carries life to his body with it, and is the seat of thought and intelligence, exercising therefore power which is not of the body and is invisible in its action. ”

“ At the feast a bit of the food is thrown into the fire for the deceased, with the call, 'This is for you.' As the mourners eat, they are anxious about swallowing the food well down; if a morsel sticks in any one's throat, it is a butuli, a portent, the man will die. When they hang up the dead man's arms on his house, they make great lamentations; all remains afterwards untouched, the house goes to ruin, mantled as time goes on with the vines of the growing yams, a picturesque and indeed, perhaps, a touching sight ”

“ Money in this same way of sacrifice, if so it can be called, is scattered in a deep hole in a stream, or in a pool among the rocks upon the beach; wherever some impressive touch of natural awe comes upon the native mind it apprehends the presence of some haunting vui, and is moved to an act of worship; but it is not to the stone or stream or tree, or to the spirit of it, that the offering is made; the vui is a person as a man is, and its presence makes the place sacred. ”

“ Women's dances are everywhere ungraceful and uninteresting; in the rorohi of Florida they sway their bodies and stamp their feet in a circle; in the lenga of the Banks' Islands they stamp, and scream a song. In a Banks' Island feast while the men sing and dance round the drum, the women, two and two, with the arms of each over the other's neck, tramp round the dancing-ground with short heavy steps, shaking as they go. ”

“ To keep them right in their steps they repeat to themselves the words of the song belonging to the dance. In Maewo, Aurora, clapping of hands plays a great part in common dancing and singing. In Lepers' Island, when a hundred or more men dance and sing round a drum or drums in a bue, 'the earth shakes under their feet, and the land resounds about them;' and indeed it is no wonder that such dances give excitement and delight. The favourite time for dancing is a moonlight night, if the dance is the chief thing in view; the dancing and drumming of the common feast goes on in daytime. ”

“ The house of the family is the father's, the garden is his, the rule and government are his; it is into the father's house that the young bridegroom takes his wife, if he has not one ready of his own. The closest relationship, however, according to native notions, is that which exists between the sister's son and the mother's brother, because the mother who transmits the kinship is not able to render the service which a man can give. A man's sons are not of his own kin, though he acts a father's part to them ”

“ Besides, every one, missionary and visitor, carries with him some preconceived ideas; he expects to see idols, and he sees them; images are labelled idols in museums whose makers carved them for amusement; a Solomon islander fashions the head of his lime-box stick into a grotesque figure, and it becomes the subject of a woodcut as 'a Solomon Island god.' It is extremely difficult for any one to begin enquiries without some prepossessions, which, even if he can communicate with the natives in their own language, affect his conception of the meaning of the answers he receives. ”