REPORT of a MISSIONARY TOUR in the NEW HEBRIDES, &c., on board H. M. S. "Havannah," by the Rev. John Inglis, Reformed Presbyterian Missionary, New Zealand.— Continued from our last. [From the "Government Gazette."]

New Zealander, Volume 7, Issue 531, 17 May 1851, Page 3

REPORT of a MISSIONARY TOUR in the NEW HEBRIDES, &c., on board H. M. S. " Havannah," by the Rev. John Inglis, Reformed Presbyterian Missionary, New Zealand. — Continued from our last. [From the " Government Gazette."]

Their traditions are much the 6ame as those, in the Eastern Pacific. I speak principally of Aneiteum, where, the missionaiies having mastered the language a key has been obtained to unlock this depositoiy of knowledge. They have the same traditions respecting the creation, the deluge, and some other great facts of universal history ;—that the island was fiished up by one of the gods, who afterwards made a man and a woman, from whom the inhabitants vrere descended,—, that in consequence of the wickedneis of the people the gods were angry, and one of them sent a flood, which drowned all the people except a man and his wife that were saved in a canoe. A native was one day listening to an oral translation of the flood, made by one of the missionaiies ; he appeared particularly attentive, and at last said to the missionary, «• Stop ! that is almost the same as our account;" and, after detailing their tradition, he added " but your forefathers having written an account for you, while ours only told it to their children, yours must be more correct than ours." In Aneiteum the natives believe in and worship superior beings called Natmasies. Their mode of worship is thus ; they select long-shaped stones, from three to eighteen inches long, and pile them up under a banyan tree. They suppose that the spirit of the divinity resides in each of these stones. There is generally a small chip broken off one corner of the stone, at which the spirit goes in and out. Offerings of food of various kinds are presented before these piles of Natmaskes, on which, in some invisible way, they are supposed to feed. They have an order of priesthood, but it is usually held by the chiefs, who thereby increase their influence. A future slate of rewards and punishments is believed in ; but heaven partakes much of the character of earth—the cocoa-nuts and the breadfruit are finer in quality and so abundant in quantity as never to be exhausted. It is difficult to ascertain the grounds on which it is believed the separaiion is made in the other hoi Id ; but theirs, like all false and superstitious religions, make happiness after death to depend more upon ritual observances than upon moral conduct; the power and authority of the priest is made to avail more than the personal character of the worshipper. But as the priests are the conservators of the religious myslenes, and as they look upon the missionaries with a very jealous eye, they have been very reluctant to communicate any information bearing upon the religious belief of the natives. Their denies ate all represented as malignant bein««> «""* '"■"<*<• fear,

and not love, is the leading motive in their worship. " Naijerun" is one of their chief divinities: in moral atttijbutes he is very like Satan. Benevolent deities they have none. The God of the Bible, a being of goodness, mercy, and purity, is to them an unknown God. j The tapn is employed in all the islands to preserve persons and objects. The cocoa-nuts are laid under a tapu till all the other crops are planted, or till some feast is celebrated ; and death is the penalty of touching the forbidden fruit. Circumcision is practised it> New Caledonia, and possibly in all those islands. It is performed at any period before puberty ; but Ishm3el's, rather than Isaac's age, appears to be the example followed. It is confined principally to the sons of chiefs and influential persons and is celebrated by a great feast. At Malata, in the Solomon group, the surgeon of the " Havannah" saw two eunuchs ; they were tall and thin, with narrow shoulders, prominent abdomen, and a weak feminine voice. In natural disposition the natives appear to be in general mild, affectionate, and susceptible of great improvement. In Aneiteum, after two years' experience, the missionaries have the most entire confidence in their honesty and fidelity, Although at first the natives stole articles, ipeared their pigs, and injured their property, now persons and property are both perfectly secure. But when the cupidity and the sanguinary passions of the natives are excited, as they often have been and still are, by sandal-wood traders and others, neither property nor life are safe. In all the groups the women aie noted for their easy virtue, and their incercouise with foreigners has deteriorated, and not improved their morals. Polygamy prevails to some extent, especially among the chiefs. In the New Hebrides the wife is put to death by strangling, upon the death of her husband, or even when he is long absent from home, and all the childien not able to support themselves share the same fate. In Aneiteum the dead are not buried, but with some ceremonies thrown into the sea. In all the groups the rites of sepulture seem to but little attended to. In different places we saw quantities of bones, apparently not those of enemies, bleached and withered beneath the winds and suns of successive years. To express deep grief, the women inflict wounds by burning on the upper part of their arms. But the fearful moral degradation of both Eastern, and Western Polynesia is seen in nothing so clearly as in the nearly universal practice of cannibalism. No practice is so revolting to humanity, so brutalizing and demonizing, as the eating of human flesh— a practice happily all but Unknown in the northern hemisphere, either in ancient or in modern lime!*-— a practice never hinted at in Scripture or in Josephus, except in connection with the extreme of famine, and even then As producing a feeling of the deepest horror. The ancient poets feign that Diomedes, a king of Thrace, fed his horses with man's flesh, and that Hercules >lew him, and threw him to be eaten by his own horses. The Roman historians bring some doubtful charge of cannibalism against some of the western baibarians. It is only certain that the Druids offered human victims in saciafice, but this was to the godi. The ferocious sea-kings of Scandinavia, as a token of revenge and victory, drank their wine out of the sculls of vanquished enemies, Shakespeare makes Othello class among traveller' wonders,— '' The cannibals that eat eacli other, The Anthropophagi, and men ■whose heads Do giow beneath their shoulders." Two hundred and fifty years igo Mendana and Quiros, who first discovered these islands, and even the navigators who re«discovered them in the end of the last century, suspected ths existence of cannibalism amongst the natives rather than believed it could be true. Up to that time ihe history of the world furnished little more than doubtful proof of the real existence of such a practice, it was looked upon as barely possible, but never as certainly true. But now, of late years especially, it has been demonstrated that cannibalism has been, to a greater or less degree universal in both Eastern and Western Polynesia. The Papuans, however, appear by far tlie worst of the two races. In open day, and as an ordinary, practice, human bodiei have been cooked and eaten by the score and by the hundred. With the exception of the natives of Fiji, the New Caledonians are among the wont cannibals of Polynesia. The interpreter on board the " Havannab," who had resided more than a year among them, assured us—and from the uniform truthfulness of his statements we had no reason to doubt this — that at Shuaka, on the east of New Caledonia, one chief, in the space of thirty- five days, caused, as many as seventy people to be killed for the express purpose of being eaten. He always alleged some crime against them ; but it was well known that the real object was to obtain their flesh to eat. This chief is dead : he was pre-eminently cruel, his successor it equally cruel, but wants capacity for car« rying it into effect. The natives, however, are everywhere beginning to feel ashamed of the practice. The influence of missionary operations and the visits of ships of war, are telling powerfully upon them, and if these means are continued, cannibalism, may be es completely eradicated from the Webtern Pacific as it is now from New Zealand. 1 The language of the Pdpuan tribes in the Western Pacific is entirely distinct, both in vocables and structure, from the language of the Malay race in the Eastern Pacific. With the exception of the dialects spoken on Aneiteum and Tana, so very little is yet known of the Papuan language or languages, that it would be unsife to speak much dogmatically on any point. There are si few points, however, on which the lauguages of the two races may be compared, or rather contrasted. From the Sandwich Islands to New Zealand, and from Tahiti to the borders of the New Hebrides, the language spoken by the Malay races is essentially one; but among the Papuans, in every island, and almost in every tribe, the language appeals to be perfectly different from all the others So great is the diversity of language among the Papuans, that the Western Pacific might with propriety be calied Polyglottia, or the Polyglot Islands. Ie appears as if the progenitors of the present inhabitants had come direct from Babel, and that, having lived as IshmaeU ites, through all the intervening generations, their lan* guages bad never in any degree amalgamated. In the Malay language, every syllable, aud consequently every word, ends in a vowel, and double consonants are few, in some dialects none at all ; in the Papuan dialects, both syllables and words often end in consonants, and double consonants are not unfrequent. In Malay, the numeiation, as in most languages, is decimal; in Papuan it is invariably quintal ; alter five the series of numbers begin anew, something like five and one, five and two, &c. In Malay, the the nomitivt generally follows thevab ; in Papuan, in seems to precede the verb. In the Malay, at least in the New Zealand dialect, the passive form of the veib is by far the most common ; so strongly does the passive form prevail, thac in regimen the adverb often assumes a passive termination. In Papuan, at lease in the dialect of Aneiteum, the best known of any of them, the missionaries have not been able to discover a I single passive form in any of the verbs ; every verb is used in the active form only. In AneiUum, thete is a dual, if not also a trial number in the pronouns. (To be continued.)