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It is difficult to ascertain the grounds on which it is believed the separation is made in the other world; but theirs, like all false and superstitious religions, makes happiness after death to depend more upon ritual observances than upon moral conduct; the power and authority of the priest is made to avail more than the personal character of the worshipper. But as the priests are the conservators of the religious mysteries, and as they look upon the missionaries with a very jealous eye, they have been very reluctant to communicate any information bearing upon the religious belief of the natives. Their deities are all represented as malignant beings, and hence fear, and not love, is the leading motive in their worship. “Nai-jernun” is one of their chief divinities: in moral attributes he is very like Satan. Benevolent deities they have none. The God of the Bible, a being of goodness, mercy, and purity, is to them an unknown God.

The tapu is employed in all the islands to preserve persons and objects. The cocoa-nuts are laid under a tapu till all the other crops are planted, or till some feast is celebrated; and death is the penalty of touching the forbidden fruit. Circumcision is practised in New Caledonia, and possibly in all those islands. It is performed at any period before puberty; but Ishmael’s, rather than Isaac’s age, appears to be the example followed. It is confined principally to the sons of chiefs and influential persons, and is celebrated by a feast. At Malata, in the Solomon group, the surgeon of the “Havannah” saw two eunuchs; they were tall and thin, with narrow shoulders, prominent abdomen, and a weak feminine voice.

In natural disposition the natives appear to be in general mild, affectionate, and susceptible of great improvement. In Aneiteum, after two years’ experience, the missionaries have the most entire confidence in their honesty and fidelity. Although at first the natives stole articles, speared their pigs, and injured their property, now persons and property are both perfectly secure. But when the cupidity and the sanguinary passions of the natives are excited, as they often have been and still are, by sandal-wood traders and others, neither property nor life are safe. In all the groups the women are noted for their easy virtue, and their intercourse with foreigners has deteriorated, and not improved, their morals. Polygamy prevails to some extent, especially among the chiefs. In the New Hebrides the wife is put to death by strangling, upon the death of her husband, or even when he is long absent from home, and all the children not able to support themselves share the same fate. In Aneiteum the dead are not buried, but with some ceremonies thrown into the sea. In all the groups the rites of sepulture seem to be but little attended to. In different places we saw quantities of bones, apparently not those of enemies, bleached and withered beneath the winds and suns of successive years. To express deep grief, the women inflict wounds by burning on the upper part of their arms,

But the fearful moral degradation of both Eastern and Western Polynesia is seen in nothing so clearly as in the nearly universal practice of cannibalism. No practice is so revolting to humanity, so brutalizing and demoralizing, as the eating of human flesh—a practice happily all but unknown in the northern hemisphere, either in ancient or in modern times—a practice never hinted at in Scripture or in Josephus, except in connection with the extreme of famine, and even then as producing a feeling of the deepest horror. The ancient poets feign that Diomedes, a king of Thrace, fed his horses with man’s flesh, and that Hercules slew him, and threw him to be eaten by his own horses. The Roman historians bring some doubtful charge of cannibalism against some of the western barbarians. It is only certain that the Druids offered human victims in sacrifice, but this was to the gods. The ferocious sea-kings of Scandinavia, as a token of revenge and victory, drank their wine out of the skulls of vanquished enemies. Shakespeare makes Othello class among travellers’ wonders—

“The cannibals that eat each other,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago Mendana and Quiros, who first discovered these islands, and even the navigators who re-discovered them in the end of the last century, suspected the existence of cannibalism amongst the natives rather than believed it could be true. Up to that time the history of the world furnished little more than doubtful proof of the real existence of such a practice. It was looked upon as barely possible, but never as certainly true. But now, of late years especially, it has been demonstrated that cannibalism has been, to a greater or less degree, universal in both Eastern and Western Polynesia. The Papuans, however, appear by far the worst of the two races. In open day, and as an ordinary practice, human bodies have been cooked and eaten by the score and by the hundred. With the exception of the natives of Fiji, the New Caledonians are among the worst cannibals of Polynesia. The interpreter on board the “Havannah,” who had resided more than a year among them, assured us—and from the uniform truthfulness of his statements we had no reason to doubt this—that at Shuaka, on the east of New Caledonia, one chief, in the space of thirty-five days, caused as many as seventy people to be killed for the express purpose of being eaten. He always alleged some crime against them; but it was well known that the real object was to obtain flesh to eat. This chief is dead: he was pre-eminently cruel, his successor is equally cruel, but wants capacity for carrying it into effect. The natives, however, are everywhere beginning to feel ashamed of the practice. The influence of missionary operations, and the visits of ships of war, are telling powerfully upon them, and if these means are continued, cannibalism may be as completely eradicated from the Western Pacific as it is now from New Zealand.