Section: Cases Not Motivated as Punishment

In the cases discussed so far, the killing and consumption of slaves was explained as a reaction to a minor or not-so-minor misbehavior on their part. In other cases, it is unclear whether such a cause—or pretext—existed. In 1821, the Wesleyan missionary Samuel Leigh (1785–1852) met a man who was in the process of cooking a boy whose age Leigh estimated to be around fourteen. He saw the victim’s body, which was complete, except for the head, and already “half roasted.” In the nearby village, he “found a great number of natives seated in a circle, with a quantity of coomery [sweet potatoes] before them, waiting for the roasted body of the youth.” They told him that the boy was a slave who had been killed for the occasion—if he had somehow misbehaved to provoke such an act, they did not say so.39

Leigh adds that he “prevailed on them to give up the body to be interred, and thus prevented them from gratifying their unnatural appetite.”40 It is unclear whether he was more successful in this attempt than Earle would be a few years later. In a similar case, the missionary Nathaniel Turner saw in 1823 “a cookey [slave] stretched out and partly roasted.”41

In another case, relayed to Joel Polack by a trader who was nearby when it occurred, a man from the Waikato area (in the west of the North Island), “ordered a young female slave to make a very large oven, as he intended to regale his friends with a feast.” Having done so, she “enquired what provisions should be put in; he peremptorily ordered herself to go into it.” She pleaded with him, but to no avail: “the relentless wretch seized her, lashed her hands and knees together, and threw her in the oven alive. After the body was cooked, it was devoured by this monster and his friends.”42 No justification other than a desire “to regale his friends” is given. The claim of live cooking might sound too cruel to be believed, but there are other accounts of this practice. The English explorer and painter George French Angas (1822–1886) met a local chief who “boast[ed] of having roasted slave children alive, and then partaken of their flesh,”43 and several sources mention that captives were occasionally roasted alive after battles.44

R. Skinner, the captain of the ship on which Richard Cruise traveled, did not believe that slaves’ misbehaviors were responsible for them being killed: “There indeed appears not the smallest doubt but they frequently kill what they term their slaves, or persons taken in war, for the sole purpose of eating them,” he writes, adding that “there were two or three instances of their eating human flesh while we were laying at the Bay of Islands.”45 That young children and babies were among the eaten also indicates such acts were not always meant as punishments. Polack reports that one of his acquaintances, a local chief, had a healthy appetite—so healthy, in fact, that he once consumed “nearly . . . a [whole] baby at a meal, without any after complaint of inconvenience and indigestion.”46 In his account of the conquest of the Chatham Islands by a group of Maori who killed or enslaved the Indigenous Moriori population, the politician and anthropologist Edward Tregear (1846–1931) mentions that one of their “leading chiefs” ordered six enslaved children to be slaughtered and cooked for a single meal held “to regale his friends.”47

Generally, it seems that there were cases where the desire to give a feast, or celebrate a special event, was the primary motive for the consumption of slaves—though it is quite possible that those who had formerly displeased their owners stood a higher risk of being sacrificed at such occasions. According to the ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856–1931), in the eastern regions of the North Island a slave was sometimes killed for the “tattooing of a young woman of rank”—an important coming-of-age ceremony—“and the flesh of the hapless victim [was] the principal dish of the ritual feast.” Best adds that he could not find any “religious significance” in the act—the body was simply “used as food,” as some of the people who adhered to this custom explained it.48 His account is confirmed by Te Rangi Hiroa, who writes: “Sometimes slaves or other persons were killed and baked on special occasions such as the tattooing of a high chief’s daughter, a chiefly marriage, or the funeral of a high chief.”49

The consumption of slaves at festive occasions might have been more common before the introduction of the pig, when—besides people—dogs, rats, and birds were the only sources of meat.50 When Polack visited a hahunga—an exhumation ceremony held annually in honor of the dead51—at which a considerable number of pigs were served, he heard that formerly it had been usual to “sacrifice slaves” for the occasion, but that, due to “the scarcity in the slave-market of late years (their services being at a premium), the multitude are restricted from this much-esteemed food, and are now obliged to felicitate themselves on only a bit of pork.”52

During the period of the Musket Wars, more persons were enslaved than in earlier times, but there was also an increased demand for slaves who were frequently employed to cultivate and dress flax for sale—often to Europeans.53 It is therefore quite possible that they became more valuable, and owners preferred to exploit them for work purposes rather than sacrifice them for food, as Polack suggests. But it must also be remembered that pigs had not been known on the North Island until the turn of the century, and dogs and rats might have been considered too small and unpretentious to form the main course at important celebrations.

Samuel Marsden, who in 1815 opened the first Christian mission in New Zealand (in Rangihoua Bay, a smaller bay within the Bay of Islands), states: “I have heard of slaves being killed in cool blood as well as in moments of revengeful anger. One young woman was killed and eaten when I was there at this time, near my lodgings.” In this context, “in cool blood” seems to mean an unprovoked murder, as opposed to one triggered by “anger” over a slave’s perceived misbehavior. He adds: “When the chiefs return from battle and have any particular cause for rejoicing or mourning, they will kill a slave or slaves and eat them.”54

In one case witnessed by several members of the Anglican mission at Kerikeri (today the largest town in Northland, the most northern of New Zealand’s regions) “some slaves were killed and eaten” when Hongi Hika (ca. 1772–1828), the leader of the Ngāpuhi people (who live around the Hokianga estuary in the north of the North Island), returned from a successful war campaign.55 And in a letter written in February 1822, Samuel Leigh states: “Hongi-Hika and his party have killed more than 20 slaves since their return from war . . . , most of whom they have roasted and eaten.”56 It is unclear whether this refers to the same incident—Leigh’s Wesleyan mission was located at Kaeo, about twenty kilometers northwest of Kerikeri.

Polack also mentions the feasts held by Hongi Hika and his commanders, for which “many of those doomed creatures [slaves] were slaughtered and cooked.”57 Jacky Marmon (ca. 1800–1880), an Australian sailor, who deserted his ship in 1824 and from then on lived among the Maori of Hokianga,58 freely admits to having eaten the flesh of slaves. He first did so at a feast held in honor of Hongi Hika for which several enslaved women had been butchered. Later he remembered that their flesh, “as served up by the Maori cooks was very passable. When chopped up with kumeras and potatoes it resembles a rather fatty stew.”59

Slaves were not only eaten to celebrate victories, they were sometimes also taken along for war campaigns to provide food for the hungry warriors, as Andrew Vayda notes.60 A group of Europeans sailors once saw how a successful war party on their way back home “killed a girl of their own party and ate her.”61 It seems likely that the girl was a slave or captive, as the warriors would certainly not have murdered one of their own daughters.

Earle estimates that a slave was more likely to be killed and “devoured by his brutal master” than to die a natural death—in the latter case, the body was not eaten, but “dragged to the outside of the village, there to be made sport of by the children, or to furnish food for the dogs.” He also notes that it was not rare for slaves to be “sacrificed on the death of a chief.”62 He does not say whether those sacrificed at such occasions were consumed, but Percy Smith records the oral account of an unnamed Ngāpuhi warrior who said that, after the death of an important chief in a war campaign, “we conquered and took many slaves, with whom we returned to the place where our chief who had been speared lay, and there killed all the slaves as food for the mourners.”63