THE PUZZLED SAVAGE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20380, 11 April 1928, Page 10

THE PUZZLED SAVAGE.

“THOSE QUEER WHITE MEN.” CANNIBAL’S WONDERMENT. ■■ & OUR PECULIAR CUSTOMS. The naked cannibal was puzzled. Ha told the visitor to the South Seas that he could _ not understand why white people dross in the daytime and undress at night. “ In the night, when it is cold,” ho said, “wo people put our clothes on; and in daytime when it is hot we take mem oft.” It sounded very logical. In a word, Jack M’Laren, the traveller, remarks in the Daily Mail that the white man is just os peculiar to savages as savages are to the white man. Mr M’Laren gives some instances of what strikes the islander as queer in Europeans and Americans. He writes: “In a remote Soloman Islands village, close to where the recent murder of two white men took place a man asked mo was it true, as he had heard, that in white men’s countries the people quarrelled and stole so much that strong men called policemen continually walked the streets to keep the peace. “In his own village, he said, there was little quarrelling—except with other villages or with intruders—and hardly anv stealing at all. He said he had thought that white men would have known bettor than to behave like that. Another savage, said he thought it strange that whites rejoiced and made holiday only «t sopcified times—such as Christmas and Easter. His people, he said, jubilated just whenever they felt like it, which incidentally, was very often indeed. Ho thought that white peoples’ capacity for enjoyment must be extremely limited, n that they had to have special times and arrangements for it. “ In New Guinea, a native told me that the meanest person he had ever heard of was a white man he had been told about during a brief visit to a mission station. This ’ man, it appeared, discovered that a mighty flood was coming, whereupon he built a large boat with a house on it. placed on board all his pigs, fowls, and dogs, and with his family sailed away and let the rest of the people ; to. drown. The name of this mean person was Moses, hs thought, and the boat was called Moses’ Ark. Perhaps I had heard of it. "In some of the South Seas settlements there are kinemas, but the films shown are usually very old and •c>- • wherefore the natives , have a firm belief that in the white men’s countries it is always raining! I have beard natives declare that the white men in the South Seas are there because : they could not endure the everlasting rain of their own country.”