Note 214 — Chapter II · GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVERY.

The notes of the other ethnographers relate to single parts of this group. Verguet states that in St. Christoval (in the southeastern part of the group) the slaves “are treated as adopted children; the slave cultivates the master’s fields together with the master himself; he helps him to prepare the food and accompanies him when hunting or fighting; he shares in his pleasures as well as in his work; when the tribe celebrates a feast, the slaves are not excluded from it. When full-grown, they marry into their master’s tribe, erect their houses next to their master’s house or share the latter. Sometimes the master does not disdain to marry his slave”214. Codrington, whose notes mainly relate to the same parts of the group, remarks: “There is no such thing as slavery properly so called. In head-hunting expeditions prisoners are made for the sake of their heads, to be used when occasion requires, and such persons live with their captors in a condition very different from that of freedom, but they are not taken or maintained for the purposes of service. In the same islands when a successful attack and massacre enriches the victors with many heads, they spare and carry off children, whom they bring up among their own people. Such a seka will certainly be killed for a head or for a sacrifice before any native member of the community; but he lives as an adopted member, shares the work, pleasure and dangers of those with whom he dwells, and often becomes a leading personage among them. A refugee or a castaway is not a slave but a guest; his life is naturally much less valued than that of a man of the place, and useful services are expected from him, while he mixes freely and on equal terms with the common people”215. Guppy says: “I will turn for a moment to the subject of slavery in the eastern islands of the group. In Ugi it is the practice of infanticide which has given rise to a slave-commerce regularly conducted with the natives of the interior of St. Christoval. Three-fourths of the men of this island were originally bought as youths to supply the place of the natural offspring killed in infancy. But such natives when they attain manhood virtually acquire their independence, and their original purchaser has but little control over them.… Connected in the manner above shown with the subject of slavery is the practice of cannibalism. The completion of a new tambu-house is frequently celebrated among the St. Christoval natives by a cannibal feast. Residents in that part of the group tell me that if the victim is not procured in a raid amongst the neighbouring tribes of the interior, some man is usually selected from those men in the village who were originally purchased by the chief. The doomed man is not enlightened as to the fate which awaits him, and may perhaps have been engaged in the erection of the very building at the completion of which his life is forfeited”. On the neighbouring small island of Santa Anna the natives are reputed to abstain from human flesh; but “the war-chief has acquired a considerable fortune, in a native’s point of view, by following the profitable calling of purveyor of human flesh to the man-eaters of the adjacent coasts of St. Christoval.… I am told that there is a faint gleam of tender feeling shown in the case of a man who, by long residence in the village, has almost come to be looked upon as one of themselves. He is allowed to remain in ignorance of the dreaded moment until the last; and, perhaps, he may be standing on the beach assisting in the launching of the very canoe in which he is destined to take his final journey, when suddenly he is laid hold of, and in a few moments more he is being ferried across to the man-eaters of the opposite coast”216.