lonely in its passage to the invisible world, and that by such an offering its
happiness might be at once secured.[55]
The Earl of Pembroke, in his light, gossipy book entitled, “South Sea Bubbles,”
describes a visit which he paid to one of the old sacrificial maraes, or inclosures,
in the island of Raiatea.
“Strange places they were,” he says; “built of enormous slabs of rock or coral,
arranged in an oblong shape, and the space inside them filled with shingle and
coral, so as to form a platform about eight feet high. I think the largest was about
fifty yards long; we scrambled up on to it by help of a tree, and stood on the spot
stained with so much blood shed in the name of religion. What horrible stories
those stones could tell if they could speak!...
“What made the human sacrifices of the Society Islands so strangely ghastly and
horrible, was the fact that the wretched victim was always chosen from one of
certain families, set apart for that special purpose for generation after generation
for ever. How this caste originated I do not know. Many of these families used to
put to sea secretly in canoes, preferring an almost certain death by drowning or
starvation to the terribly uncertain fate that was always hanging over their heads.
“When a man came to the priests to beg some heavenly, or rather infernal,
favour, they would tell him, either from whim, malice, or some reason best
known to themselves, that the god required a human sacrifice, and naming the
victim, present the supplicant with the death-warrant in the shape of a sacred
stone. He hides this carefully somewhere about him, and collecting a few
friends, seeks out the doomed man. At last they find him sitting lazily under a
tree or mending his canoe, and squatting down round him begin talking about the
weather, fishing, or what not. Suddenly a hand is opened—the death stone
discovered to his horrified view. He starts up terror-stricken, and tries to escape
—one short, furious struggle and he is knocked down, secured, and carried off to
the merciless priests. Ugh! it is an ugly picture.”[56]