“Of course this explained why that pig had been left when all the other live stock and portable property was cleared out.  Nobody would touch a taboo pig, and that pig, I tell you, was tabooed an inch thick.  The man he belonged to had been a Tohunga, and still ‘walked,’ in the shape of a lizard.  Well, the interpreter, acting most fairly, I must say, explained all this to the Bush tribe, and we went down to the boat and lunched.  Presently a smell of roast pork came drifting down on the wind.  They had been hungry and mad after their march, and they were cooking the taboo pig.  The interpreter grew as white as a Kaneka can; he knew something would happen.

“Presently the Bush fellows came down to the boat, licking their lips.  There hadn’t been much more than enough to go round, and they accepted some of our grub, and took to it kindly.

“‘Let’s offer them some rum,’ says Thompson; he never cruised without plenty aboard.  ‘No, no,’ says I; ‘tea, give them tea.’  But Thompson had a keg of rum out, and a tin can, and served round some pretty stiff grog.  Now, would you believe it, these poor devils had never tasted spirits before?  Most backward race they were.  But they took to the stuff, and got pretty merry, till one of them tried to move back to the village.  He staggered up and down, and tumbled against rocks, and finally he lay flat and held on tight.  The others, most of them, were no better as soon as they tried to move.  A rare fright they were in!  They began praying and mumbling; praying, of all things, to the soul of the taboo pig!  They thought they were being punished for the awful sin they had committed in eating him.  The interpreter improved the occasion.  He told them their faults pretty roundly.  Hadn’t he warned them?  Didn’t they know the pig was taboo?  Did any good ever come of breaking a taboo?  The soberer fellows sneaked off into the bush, the others lay and snoozed till the Coast tribe came out of hiding, and gave it to them pretty warm with throwing sticks and the flat side of waddies.  I guess the belief in taboo won’t die out of that Bush tribe in a hurry.”

“It was like the companions of Odysseus devouring the oxen of the Sun,” I said.

“Very likely,” replied the beach-comber.  “Never heard of the parties.  They’re superstitious beggars, these Kanekas.  You’ve heard of buying a thing ‘for a song’?  Well, I got my station for a whistle.  They believe that spirits twitter and whistle, and you’ll hardly get them to go out at night, even with a boiled potato in their hands, which they think good against ghosts, for fear of hearing the bogies.  So I just went whistling, ‘Bonny Dundee’ at nights all round the location I fancied, and after a week of that, not a nigger would go near it.  They made it over to me, gratis, with an address on my courage and fortitude.  I gave them some blankets in; and that’s how real property used to change hands in the Pacific.”