But, instead of appealing to the chiefs, and calling for an oath, many were contented with their own individual schemes and imprecations to frighten thieves and prevent stealing.  When a man went to his plantation and saw that some cocoa-nuts, or a bunch of bananas, had been stolen, he would stand and shout at the top of his voice two or three times, “May fire blast the eyes of the person who has stolen my bananas!  May fire burn down his eyes and the eyes of his god too!” This rang throughout the adjacent plantations, and made the thief tremble.  They dreaded such uttered imprecations.  Others cursed more privately when a thing was stolen, and called in the aid of a priest.  In common disputes also, affecting the veracity of each other, it was customary for the one to say to the other, “Touch your eyes, if what you say is true.”  If he touched his eyes, the dispute was settled.  It was as if he had said, “May I be cursed with blindness if it is not true what I say.”  Or the doubter would say to his opponent, “Who will eat you?  Say the name of your god.”  He whose word was doubted would then name the household god of his family, as much as to say, “May god So-and-so destroy me, if what I have said is not true.”  Or the person whose word was doubted might adopt the more expressive course still of taking a stick and digging a hole in the ground, which was as if he said, “May I be buried immediately if what I say is not true.”  But there was another and more extensive class of curses, which were also feared, and formed a powerful check on stealing, especially from plantations and fruit-trees, viz. the silent hieroglyphic taboo, or tapui (tapooe), as they call it.  Of this there was a great variety, and the following are specimens:—­

1. The sea-pike taboo.—­If a man wished that a sea-pike might run into the body of the person who attempted to steal, say, his bread-fruits, he would plait some cocoa-nut leaflets in the form of a sea-pike, and suspend it from one or more of the trees which he wished to protect.  Any ordinary thief would be terrified to touch a tree from which this was suspended, he would expect that the next time he went to the sea, a fish of the said description would dart up and mortally wound him.

2. The white shark taboo was another object of terror to a thief.  This was done by plaiting a cocoa-nut leaf in the form of a shark, adding fins, etc., and this they suspended from the tree.  It was tantamount to an expressed imprecation, that the thief might be devoured by the white shark the next time he went to fish.

3. The cross-stick taboo.—­This was a piece of any sort of stick suspended horizontally from the tree.  It expressed the wish of the owner of the tree, that any thief touching it might have a disease running right across his body, and remaining fixed there till he died.