TRIBAL TABOOS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 223, 20 September 1935, Page 5

TRIBAL TABOOS.

DEFIED IN TAHITI. BRITISH SPORTSMAN'S FIND. CLEVER NATIVE SURGERY. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, August 2S. "The ghosts of the dead kings will rise from their graves and plunge spears into your heart. If you are lucky enough to escape this, a cursc will be placed upon you and you will die a violent death. Our ancestors have decreed it so." Such was the warning given Captain Charles P. McKenzie, British sportsman and explorer, by superstitious native chieftains of the Society Islands, when he declared his intention to explore the burial caves of the ancient kings of Tahiti, ho disclosed upon arrival in San Francisco, carrying with him a valuable collection of Polynesian anthropological relics which he expected to present to museums in tlio United States and

i Britain. ; Captain McKenzie, who arrived in the i Union Steamship's liner Makura, and j was on his way to his adopted home i in Los Angeles, said he disregarded the ! advice of the mid-Pacific chiefs, delved | into one of the pits, and gathered for \ his museum collections two fragmentary i cannibal skulls with filed teeth. They were about 200 years old, he said. "In the rear of the cave," the explorer stated, "were rows of skulls, stocked on shelves of earth much like | jars of fruit in a country cellar. I was i the first white man ever to enter this ' cave. 1 was told. As for the curse, I I have heard cases of horrible deaths following violation of 'taboos,' but, you see, I am still in one piece. The death ; of Fred Murnau, the German motion j ' picture director, was foretold by a nati\e chieftain after he transgressed upon the 'Holy Land of Bora-Bora' with liis cinema crew. Also many natives lia\o come to strange ends following their disregard for the sanctity of tfcs. burial : I gruundi."

Captain McKenzie also discovered a skull that had been trepanned by native surgeons, and the bone replaced with a. piece of polished coconut shell, rivalling the surgery of old Egypt.

The improvised methods of crude sur-1 gery in "patching" bone fractures, in his opinion, provided evidence that the Polynesians of that age had attempted one of the most difficult and delicate of present-day surgical operations, that of trepanning. The skulls he brought back showed filed teeth and other evidences convincing him that the Polynesians of French. Oceania practised cannibalism in the past.

Among the captain's effects were 200 dried specimens of Taliitian flow.ers. One was a Specie of popping orchid that opens at sunrise. He exhibited three big sea turtles placed in his keeping by members of the Falinstock expedition. They were consigned to Frank Buck, big game hunter. The explorer also told of finding a. strange fern that wilts if touched by a human hand.