BLACK RULERS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 15 January 1927, Page 11

BLACK RULERS

EBONY KINGS OF SOUTHERN SEAS

QNE of the most remarkable things about Nararkad—who wears no clothes, lives in a dark hut, and maintains his high office as much by his skill as a warrior and hunter as by possession of royal blood—is that, until 1 told him otherwise, he believed himself the only king in the world, writes .Tack McLaren, in the Dailv Mail.

In the Gilbert Group, says Mr. .McLaren, I came across a ruler whose kingdom was the sea. His name was Wosi-Tama, which means King of the Rea, and he had nothing to do with matters of the land. It was he who decided when the fishing-fleets should go forth, and his subjects paid him tribute of the pearls, and tortoiseshell they found.

Mr. McLaren, who spent eight years alone among the wild blacks of North Australia, recently delivered to King George a message of greeting from Nararkad. a North Australian black king. Mr. McLaren received a reply that King George has read the message with interest.

Tn Fiji was another ruler who lived in state. A direct descentant of one of Fiji’s original cannibal monarchs, he had a large thatched house for a palace, and commoners always knelt to him, and walked backwards from his presence. Tie had a European coolc, but he preferred the foods of his race, and the cook had little to do. He received me seated on the mats of the main room, in his house, and bade a pair of maidens chew kava for me to drink.

The hereditary ruler of a* large group of tribes in inland New Guinea is a tall, middle-aged man who has killed and helped to oat more men than anv other cannibal of mv acquaintance. On ceremonial occasions he wears a headdress of birds-of-para-dise plumbes beautifully arranged, the whole thing being six feet high.

None of the wives of any of these rulers had any particular standing, except perhaps in the ease of the Fijian, i Nararkad’s chief wife, for instance, had to cook and carry burdens as did other women of the tribe.