Section: Motives and Origins

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Hiroa agrees with Moon that “human flesh was eaten when procurable,” without such acts requiring any specific justification.70 Cruise reports that the locals he knew unhesitatingly talked about their cannibal customs, repeatedly expressing “their predilection for human flesh.”71 And Marsden notes that the Maori he spoke to practiced cannibalism without any sense of wrongdoing and “appear to have no idea that it is an unnatural crime.” They were “surprised” when he “informed them that this was a custom unknown in Europe, and considered there as a great disgrace to the nation which practises it.”72

Cannibalism was also considered justified by tradition. Shulitea reproached Earle for trying to prevent his relative Atoi and the latter’s friends from eating the flesh of an executed enslaved girl, declaring: “It was an old custom, which their fathers practised before them; and you had no right to interfere with their ceremonies.”73 And acknowledging that things would have to change, but not yet willing to do so, Hongi Hika stated: “We are only following the institutions of our forefathers, which we cannot as yet relinquish. Our forefathers ate human flesh and taught us to do so.”74

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The rapid shrinkage of the animal population after the arrival of the first settlers might nevertheless have caused a practice which in earlier times was rare (if not unknown) to become more widespread and customary.

Hiroa acknowledges this too, writing that “the absence of pigs and the limited supply of dog’s flesh may have been additional factors in inducing the Maoris to satisfy their hunger for meat with human flesh.”82 Shulitea, as we have seen, also pointed to the absence of animal meat as a reason for cannibalism, explaining (possibly with some exaggeration) that, before the introduction of the pig, “the only flesh” available to him and his compatriots “was human.”83 Before he heard this explanation, Earle had already observed a “total absence of quadrupeds”—though contrasted by an “abundance of birds”—and speculated that “to this dearth of animals may be attributed the chief cause of their ferocity, and propensity to cannibalism.”84

Also noted by several witnesses is a clear preference for the taste of human flesh. In the Bay of Islands, Captain Skinner met people who spoke “with delight of eating human flesh, and appear to admire the flavour,” leading him to conclude: “I really believe they prefer it to other food.”85 A European sailor who in 1829 witnessed the beheading and consumption of enemies captured in a battle came to the same conclusion: “They cut off the heads of the prisoners they had taken, then cleaned and washed the interior of the bodies and afterwards cooked them. The avidity shown by these savages, men and women, in that horrible repast, persuaded me that they preferred human flesh to all other.”86

James Burns, a European who had permanently settled among Maori, says that “the natives find the smell [of human flesh being roasted] delicious.”87 And according to Thomson, the superior taste of human flesh over “that of all other animals” was proverbial among various Maori groups.88 It is unclear whether this preference helped to spread the acceptance of cannibalism or whether it was a result of the latter becoming “perfectly normal”89—indeed, both attitudes might have supported each other.

It is notable that in most cases where personal details of eaten slaves are given, the victims were women or teenage or younger children. Why this was so is not—to my knowledge—explicitly addressed in the sources, except that some mention that the flesh of such victims was considered tastier than that of men. Cruise states that “the limbs only of a man are [considered] eatable, while, with the exception of the head, the whole body of a female or a child is considered delicious.”90 Nearly two centuries later, Carole Travis-Henikoff interviewed a Maori who told her that, according to his great-grandfather, “the hands and arms of young children made for the best eating.”91

... Generally, it seems that gender distinctions were less clear-cut in Maori society than in Europe or in many of the highly patriarchal societies we will encounter in subsequent chapters.... The recklessness with which enslaved women and children were sacrificed for the culinary pleasure of their owners nevertheless indicates that their status must have been extremely low, even lower than that of adult male slaves who are rarely mentioned as victims.

Another theoretical possibility is that there were hardly any adult male slaves—after all, captured men were usually killed outright, while women and children were often enslaved.94 But, aside from the fact that enslaved men are occasionally mentioned in sources,95 this poses a logical problem: boys were evidently enslaved, so what happened to them once they grew up? They were certainly not freed—manumission seems to have been unknown in New Zealand—and while some of them were murdered and consumed, there are no hints that enslaved boys were systematically killed in order to prevent them from reaching adulthood.

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From the endnotes:

87. Quoted in Moon, This Horrid Practice, 136. Burns, who seems to have repeatedly witnessed the preparation of human flesh, describes the usual procedure as follows: “First, they separate the head, arms and legs from the trunk, draw out the entrails then roast the body exactly like the body of a pig, by filling it with stones heated in the fire. The limbs are roasted separately” (quoted ibid.).

(Various more theoretical considerations in the section and at the start of the chapter omitted; more chapters to follow.)