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Updated: August 18, 2024
At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: "Yes, I suppose life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?" "Indeed, then," she replied decisively, "you are not to suppose anything of the kind. The danger is not alone for the white people."
"It is the same in the South Seas among the natives Samoans, Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can as you know, Mr. Roscoe," her voice had a subterranean meaning, "travel from end to end of those places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man corrupts them.
The Atua pow or mischievous gods. 6. From this it appears that the "Atuas" of the Polynesian are exactly equivalent to the "Elohim" of the old Israelite. The Tongans had no doubt that these Atuas daily and hourly influenced their destinies and could, conversely, be influenced by them.
I bade him think of the time when the Tongans, in token of magnanimous amity, rubbed noses with the white man, and of where those noses were now between the fingers of the Caucasian. He appeared becomingly attentive, and did me the honour before I began my peroration to change the pandanus flower from the ear next to me to the other.
The Tongans once had a rough and coarsely effective means for preserving order and morality, but the whole scheme was too absurdly simple. Now, with a Constitution and a Sacred Majesty, and two Houses of Parliament, and a native Magistracy, they show that they are capable of becoming European in its most pregnant meaning. As the machinery has increased the grist for the mill has grown.
The analogy of the custom with the old English practice of bringing scrofulous patients to the king to be healed by his touch is sufficiently obvious, and suggests, as I have already pointed out elsewhere, that among our own remote ancestors scrofula may have obtained its name of the King's Evil, from a belief, like that of the Tongans, that it was caused as well as cured by contact with the divine majesty of kings.
The Tongans had earthen ware which they learned to make from the Fijians, but the Polynesians had left the mainland before the beginning of this art. Thus they remained a people who were, despite their startling advances in many lines, the least encumbered by useful inventions of any race in the world.
Those tribes having for their customs the practice of compound major mutilations are the Fiji Islanders, Sandwich Islanders, Tahitians, Tongans, Samoans, Javanese, Sumatrans, natives of Malagasy, Hottentots, Damaras, Bechuanas, Kaffirs, the Congo people, the Coast Negroes, Inland Negroes, Dahomeans, Ashantees, Fulahs, Abyssinians, Arabs, and Dakotas.
Cook and all other navigators have praised their robust physical aspect, and they undoubtedly, with the Fijians and the Tongans, stand at the head of all island races.
The large canoe was formed of planks lashed together with cocoanut plait; beams were then laid between the two, on which was erected a house for the stowage of provisions; above this rose a platform surrounded by a railing, forming the deck of the vessel. It had been built by Tongans in the Fijis, where suitable timber could alone be procured.
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