During a space of four months, from the 18th June to the 23rd October, I
visited the Fijis, where I saw skulls still surrounded with remnants of
extraordinary haloes of stiff hair, women clad in girdles made of thongs
fixed in a belt, and, in Samoa near, bodies crowned with coronets of
nautilus-shell, and traces of turmeric-paint and tattooing, and in one
townlet a great assemblage of carcasses, suggesting by their look some
festival, or dance: so that I believe that these people were overthrown
without the least fore-knowledge of anything. The women of the Maoris
wore an abundance of green-jade ornaments, and I found a peculiar kind
of shell-trumpet, one of which I have now, also a tattooing chisel, and
a nicely-carved wooden bowl. The people of New Caledonia, on the other
hand, went, I should think, naked, confining their attention to the
hair, and in this resembling the Fijians, for they seemed to wear an
artificial hair made of the fur of some creature like a bat, and also
they wore wooden masks, and great rings--for the ear, no doubt--which
must have fallen to the shoulders: for the earth was in them all, and
made them wild, perverse and various like herself.
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