Travellers, scientists, and traders still visit the {95} interior, and some come out all right, but to every one that survives a dozen succumb, simply because cannibalism is to a certain extent a religious ceremony to these natives.

They do not kill and eat human beings for the sake of their taste, or because they are hungry, as some writers will insist on having us believe. The cause is farther back than this; in nearly every case when human beings are killed and eaten, it is on occasions when such a sacrifice is necessary, according to the natives’ religious beliefs.

Like the prophets and priests of old they believe in sacrifices; they honestly consider that they are doing the correct thing when they kill, cook, and eat a man or woman, and it will take many years and many missionaries to persuade them to the contrary. Of late, however, there are indications that in some of the islands head-hunting is losing favour, particularly with the younger generation, which sounds satisfactory, for if the rising generation decide against the practice it will soon die out. Other causes sometimes arise which may help to stop the custom. For instance, in one part of New Georgia the chief, some years ago, gave orders that no more human flesh was to be eaten, which to many might look as if his cannibalistic views were {96} changing, but the cause of it was not a moral, but a physical one: the last feast of man they had indulged in caused an epidemic of sickness to run through the tribe, and the chief did not wish such a thing to occur again. He felt that either the digestion of his tribe had altered, or that the particular tribe on which he had been feasting was no longer palatable, so he stopped it. Again, in other parts certain chiefs boast that they do not eat human flesh, and hope is again raised that these savages are reforming, but a little closer inquiry shows that the particular chief deals in human flesh, trading it to other natives, and, like the man who makes the sausage, he does not eat it.

Throughout these islands there are very few tribes who are still actually cannibals, in the sense of the word as it is generally accepted, but in spite of this grain of promise life is just as uncertain, because one can never tell when a head is needed for a religious ceremony. You may live on the most friendly terms with a tribe for months, and go away with the idea that cannibalism is dead, and laugh at those who have tried to make you believe otherwise, but had you remained one day longer, or the chief’s son died one day sooner, that laugh would never have come off, but instead your head would {97} have, and your comely carcase would have been frizzling in the kai-kai dish; and the very men who had made so much of you a little before, would with equal glee have made less of you then.