Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land. A story of old Fiji онлайн

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“The customs of this country,” said he, “oblige the natives to kill castaways. They look upon all such people—whom they describe as persons with ‘salt-water in their eyes’—as being delivered to them by the gods to be eaten, and if they neglected the practice they would be fearful of some terrible calamity befalling them.”

“To be killed and eaten,” added the mate, “is not the worst there is to fear, either. These wretches sometimes torture their helpless victims in a fiendish way. Only a year ago an English sailor, who had been hospitably received on one island, got wrecked on another in a canoe while endeavouring to reach a ship in the offing, and he had not the good fortune to be clubbed outright. His eyelids were cut away by the sharpened shell of the pearl-oyster, and he was then bound to a tree with his exposed orbs turned to the full glare of the sun. When the poor fellow was perfectly blind they skinned the soles of his feet, and then tormented him with firebrands to make him jump about in that wretched condition.”