BASKET OF BONES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19050, 1 July 1924, Page 7

BASKET OF BONES

“A THREE-LEGGED MAN.” GILBERT ISLANDS GIANT. INSPECTION BY EXPLORER. (Correspondent N.Z. Herald.) ? SUVA, June 16. Dr. Lambert, in telling the story o£ his travels in the Gilbert Group recently says:—“On the island of Tabatauca there is a village, a few miles from the District Officer’s house, where the bones of the ancestor' of the chief’s family are still kept in great veneration and worshipped by the people. He is said to be the conqueror of the island in the old days of conquest by the people from Beru. He was said to be of gigantic size. “The consent of all branhees of the family of this hero had to be secured by the district officer, Mr. Anderson, before I could see them. On the appointed day we sailed down and walked about a mile across sandy flats, left by the tide ,to the village. The bones are kept suspended in a wicker basket decorated with fancy shells. It hangs high up in the centre of the roof of a muniapa. This is a building consisting of a long roof with a high pitch supported on pieces of corl rock about six feet high and a dozen in number. Wooden pillars made of masts of wrecked ships support the ridge pole. Some of these muniapas are two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. The whole village met us in the muniapa, and there was a great palaver in Gilbertese while Mr. An derson explained what ah honour the village was receiving.” In describing his inspection of the bones. Dr. Lambert says:—“Two men, whose' duty it is, washed their hands, placed a clean mat under the basket of bones, and lowered it by a pulley arrangement on to the mat and placed the bones on the mat. I asked if I was permitted to handle them, and after same more discussion consent was given front the various divisions of the family from various parts of the muniapa. all conversation being carried on in a full voice that was deafening. On inspection I found a very finely shaped skull of a man who had a remarkable large brain pan. with plenty of room above the eye-brows and ears, two thigh bones, two tibias, the large bone of the leg, and at -first two fibulas or smaller bones of the leg. But one of these was smaller than the other. “I asked if the man was said to have walked with a limp, and they said no. Then I found another fibula and another tibia—apparently the man was three-legged—three radius bones where an unheroic man should have Lad two and three pelvic bones

where there should have been but two, and some very small ribs. They were very sure, on questioning, that all these came from the one man. At any rate the presumption is that the skull came from the hero, for that is the part that would be carefully preserved by his descendants. Probably when they came afterwards to collect the rest of his remains their meagre knowledge of Gray’s Anatomy may have led them slightly astray. ’“After the inspection of the bones the people asked what I could tell them about their ancestor. I told them that he must have been a great man,, by the appearance of the skull. They asked how big he had been. I said undoubtedly a big man about the size of his direct descendant, who was in the muniapa and who was the biggest man in the village. I also said that he must have been a very wise man. They seemed quite edified by what f said, or what Mr. Anderson translated it to be, and I am not too sure what may have been.”