CHAPTER 11, FOREIGNER POACHING IN NEW GUINEA AND THE BISMARCK ARCHIPELAGO

In cases of socially accepted violent cannibalism—people eating—the victims were nearly always outsiders of one kind or another—enemies, slaves, or foreigners. This is hardly surprising, since a society whose members randomly killed and ate each other would certainly not be stable—in fact, it would not be a society at all. In the preceding chapters, we have focused on slavery-related cannibal acts—acts whose victims were slaves or persons killed or captured in slave raids. Now we will turn to victims who were also considered outsiders, but of a different kind: unrelated and unwanted foreigners.

While xenophobia—fear or hatred of foreigners—is a widespread and well-known phenomenon, the connection between xenophobia and cannibalism has rarely been mentioned and never been systematically studied, to my knowledge. And yet there were regions where unwanted foreigners could be entrapped or hunted down and turned into food. The victims were usually lone individuals or small groups of people who had left the safety of their own community and could be captured or killed with limited risk to the attackers. I will use the term foreigner poaching for this mode of acquiring victims since it resembles the hunting or entrapping of wild animals. Such acts are documented in certain islands and groups of islands in the southern Pacific Ocean as well as in several regions in central and western Africa.

In this chapter, we will investigate reports of such practices in the Bismarck Archipelago (which was already a topic of Chapter 3) and the neighboring larger island of New Guinea. The next chapter will extend the discussion to Fiji and—once more—to the Congo basin as well as some other Central African regions. This selection is not arbitrary but rather depends on the wealth of source materials which exist for these regions. Similar practices could also be found in some other regions and sources referring to other regions will sometimes be mentioned in passing or in endnotes. But the most plentiful and reliable sources are available for the regions selected as the main areas of investigation.

Section: New Guinea

It seems that in all regions where foreigners were “poached” and eaten, enemies killed in warfare could be eaten as well (the inverse is not true).1 But it would be premature to conclude that both these acts took place for the same reasons. The British ethnologist Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940) observes that the Wagawaga language spoken in southeastern New Guinea has two different terms for victims of cannibalism. Those killed and “eaten in revenge for a comrade who had been eaten by a hostile community were called maia or maiha.” The killing and consumption of enemies was part of a potentially endless cycle of revenge—if members of one’s community had died in an attack, it was necessary to kill and consume at least the same number of persons from the responsible community to make up for it.2

Anyone killed and eaten for other reasons was called idaïdaga, a term “meaning a debt or an unpaid score that is not going to be paid,” used for “strangers and castaways [who] were invariably killed and eaten, and the same fate often befell straying bushmen, as here reprisals would not as a rule be feared.” The term was also employed for murdered “members of weak distant communities who were so unlikely to take vengeance that none was feared.” Killing such persons did not require a specific explanation or justification—“the desire for a favourite food” was considered sufficient reason.3 Seligman notes that those who “talked freely” about the subject agreed that human flesh had a “more delicate flavour” than pork, “as well as the further advantage . . . that it never produces any painful feeling of satiety or induces vomiting.”4

Regarding the Orokaiva people in eastern New Guinea, the Australian anthropologist Francis E. Williams (1893–1943) likewise notes that revenge killings of enemies were distinguished from the simple entrapment of foreigners. If a member of one’s own group had died violently, it was necessary to kill someone belonging to the slayer’s group to get revenge. A simple exchange of a life for a life was sufficient—there was no need to specifically target the responsible person. Foreigners from unknown groups were regarded with “suspicion,” if not outright “hostility; a complete stranger wandering alone would be regarded both as potential enemy and good meat.” One was not bound by promises given to foreigners—successfully entrapping them through false promises was considered an accomplishment, not something to be ashamed of.5

Within one’s own group, on the other hand, a very different ethics applied: here gift-giving, generosity, and mutual help were widespread and expected.6 The consumption of foreigners does not seem to have had a religious or spiritual meaning; instead, as Williams comments: “The reason for cannibalism itself has been given by natives as the simple desire for good food.”7

A similar distinction between acts of cannibalism motivated by revenge and those that did not need a particular justification seems to have existed in the western part of New Guinea.8 In the mid-1960s, the anthropologist Klaus-Friedrich Koch did field research in the central highlands of this region, among people whose first contact with the outside world had been the establishment of a Christian mission station a few years earlier.9 He collected accounts of various cases of revenge-driven cannibalism involving members of communities hostile to each other.10 But revenge was not always necessary. Around 1925, his informants remembered, a man had convinced a girl from a distant village to “elope” with him. Later, possibly after the man had lost interest, “the girl was killed, cooked, and eaten. Since no hostilities existed between the two regions, her slaying was without cause, and not ‘for an eye’—an act of revenge.”11

While such acts seem to have been relatively rare in the area, cannibal killings for which no revenge motive is known still occasionally occurred even after Koch had left the region. During his stay, he had made a trip to some previously uncontacted “Jalé villages in the Seng Valley south of the Central Range.” While he managed to establish friendly relations with the villagers, two years later they “killed and ate two white missionaries traveling through their valley.”12 It is unclear whether the missionaries had somehow offended the villagers or whether they were treated as any foreigner not considered a friend might be treated.

Among the cases of foreigner poaching described by Seligman is the oral account of a woman named Laido, near whose village in southeastern New Guinea four people—two men and two women—had been shipwrecked. Four men from the village approached them, killing them with tomahawks and a spear, as Laido saw herself. Then “the people made a big fire and scorched the bodies on it, and then they cut pieces off with knives, and put these pieces into pots and cooked them, and when they were cooked the people, and there were many, sat down and ate of the flesh.” In precolonial times, “this was the custom of my country,” she explained.13

In addition to castaways, those who had temporarily left the safety of their community to fish or otherwise gather food were at risk of themselves being captured and used for food. The British colonial officer Wilfred N. Beaver, who spent twenty-seven years in southeastern New Guinea, saw “many hundreds of skulls” in communal longhouses in the delta of the Purari River, all coming from “slain enemies or strangers.” The latter, he notes, were usually random victims encountered “while fishing or hunting.” When he came into the area, cannibalism was still practiced openly, though it was by no means a daily affair, as suitable victims could only be captured from time to time—but whenever that happened, their flesh was “highly appreciated.”14 Cases of fishers and food gatherers—often women and children—being captured and eaten have also been reported from other island groups in the southern Pacific, especially the Loyalty Islands15 (today part of New Caledonia) and the Marquesas Islands16 (today part of French Polynesia).

Runaway carriers from the gold fields in eastern New Guinea also frequently fell victim to cannibal attacks, as both the British resident magistrate Charles Arthur Whitmore Monckton (1873–1936) and the British traveler H. Wilfrid Walker remark. Walker, who visited various South Pacific islands in the early twentieth century, claims that “these carriers”—who had often been recruited by cunning or outright force—“are constantly running away,” but “never” make it to the coast, “being always killed and eaten on the way.”17

Monckton writes that carriers deserting from the gold fields on the Mambare River “were continually being caught and eaten by the tribes along the coast” and that, in particular, a people he calls Mokoru who lived northwest of Cape Nelson had “captured and [eaten] a number of runaway Mambare carriers.” When Monckton threatened the Mokoru with punitive action, “they calmly told me that they would do the same to the police, if I interfered with them, but added, that I myself was so repulsively coloured that they would not dream of eating me, but would feed me to the pigs instead.” Sometime later, he claims, “the Arifamu, to the south, ate some carriers and snapped up one of my constabulary,” who managed to escape.18

Undeterred by the threats, Monckton launched an attack against the Mokoru that ended with the surrender of their chief, Paitoto. The latter “later turned out to be an excellent man” and Monckton appointed him “Government chief and village constable.” After the surrender, Monckton seized one of the chief’s pots for cooking. Later Paitoto told him: “That was the pot in which my wife had made a stew of carriers’ hands.”19 Carriers were also occasionally eaten by Monckton’s own allies, as he mentions elsewhere.20

Another time, Monckton was asked for help by the inhabitants of Collingwood Bay (near the eastern end of New Guinea). They urged him to stop the attacks of the neighboring Doriri people who repeatedly sent “very small parties, which ceaselessly snapped up and killed men, women, and children.” In a punitive expedition, Monckton’s men came across four Doriri fighters, two of whom were killed, while the other two were arrested. When he interrogated them, they told him that “their food supplies were none too good. They really made their expeditions to Collingwood Bay in order to hunt game and make sago, and the killing of the people there was only a supplementary diversion, though of course the bodies of the slain gave them an agreeable change of diet.”21

Monckton’s own carriers, who had suffered under Doriri attacks, would have liked to consume the vanquished enemies. They argued that, if they were “allowed to eat any future Doriri killed . . . it would not only be a great satisfaction to them but also a considerable saving to the stores of the expedition. ‘Really’ they urged, ‘there was no sense in wasting good meat on account of a foolish prejudice.’” Monckton was not moved by their arguments, instead threatening them with a severe beating.22

Section: The Bismarck Archipelago

In the Bismarck Archipelago, a group of dozens of smaller islands situated to the northeast of New Guinea, travel by sea is even more important than on the huge island. From around 1884 to 1919, both northeastern New Guinea and the archipelago were claimed by Germany as a colony. Heinrich Schnee, the Deputy Governor of German New Guinea from 1898 to 1900, lists six cases, with more than thirty victims, of castaways being killed and eaten in New Britain and New Ireland (the two largest islands of the archipelago) between 1896 and 1899. Usually, these cases only came to the attention of the colonial government because some of the castaways managed to escape and report what had happened—the actual figure might therefore have been considerably higher.23

During a punitive expedition which followed one of these incidents, Schnee observed that human bodies were not only eaten but also traded. Several of the eleven victims of the attack had been sold by their killers to inhabitants of surrounding settlements. Schnee notes that the price charged for a corpse was the same as for a fully-grown pig; corpses and pigs were also carried (by tying them to poles) and cooked (by roasting large pieces between hot stones) in the same manner. In one of the villages that had purchased a body, Schnee saw a human shoulder blade and other body parts which had been roasted in this way and were still wrapped in leaves when he reached the fireplace. The flesh, he observed, looked and smelled similar to veal.24 While Schnee was shocked, the native policemen in his company clearly were not. When he queried them, they told him that in their home villages human flesh was prepared in the same manner, so they were accustomed to the sight.25

Albert Hahl, the last governor of German New Guinea, writes that another case of castaways being consumed took place around 1901 not far from Herbertshöhe (today Kokopo), the colonial capital in the east of New Britain. Two survivors arrived in the capital and complained that their companions had been “killed and devoured.” Hahl was particularly disappointed because “this crime was committed so to speak at the very threshold of headquarters and by people who we believed had already been won over to peaceful ways.”26 In another case investigated by Hahl, a group of canoeists had been butchered and eaten after accidentally landing in the wrong spot.27

Sometimes castaways were kept alive until a suitable time to consume them arrived. During one of his journeys to the Bismarck Archipelago, the Australian government agent Douglas Rannie was approached by a man looking notably different from the other islanders, who asked to be hired as a sailor. He explained that he came from the Ontong Java Atoll, a group of islands located seven hundred kilometers to the east.28

> He and five others had been blown away from his island in a gale of wind. After several days at sea they were seen and picked up by the Caen islanders [the island where Rannie met him], in a very emaciated condition. They were well treated by their hosts; but as they improved in condition, his mates had been one by one killed and eaten. As he saw nothing in store for himself but a similar fate, his joy was unbounded when he found a chance of escape in our arrival.29

Rannie also describes three other cases of foreigner poaching, unrelated to shipwrecks, which took place in the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.30

The English Methodist missionary and ethnographer George Brown (1835–1917) heard of another case of a castaway kept alive for consumption which had occurred in New Britain. He was told that, some time ago, a local chief had rescued a man spotted adrift in his canoe. He treated the man well until his health had been restored and he had gained some weight. Then he took the castaway to a dance. Since the latter knew that dancing was usually followed by a feast, he asked whether they had a pig to eat. “‘Oh no,’ they replied, ‘there is no pig, but we are going to eat you after the dance.’ And they did so that same day!” His informant, notes Brown, treated this incident as a “quite ordinary occurrence,” reporting it in passing “without any feeling of reprobation.”31 Castaways, and outsiders in general, had no rights, and treating them in such a way was apparently considered entirely appropriate.

On another occasion, Brown himself witnessed the preparation of a cannibal meal. During his first visit to a certain village in New Britain, “they were cooking a man a few yards distant from the place where I was sitting.”32 He does not say who the victim was.

As in New Guinea, castaways were not the only persons at risk. It rather seems that in some parts of the archipelago, any lone individual or small group of people not tied by friendly relations to the locals could fall victim to a cannibal killing. The German missionary Gerhard Peekel (1876–1949), who worked in New Ireland in the early twentieth century, records that, in addition to enemies killed in battle, “people were also often slain with or without reason, and then appeared on the banquet table as a welcome roast.” In his book on the island, he lists more than twenty cases of people who had been killed and consumed during the living memory of various inhabitants of Namatanai, one of the largest settlements. While all the victims came from the same island, they were inevitably eaten in a settlement different from the one where they had lived, likely after having ventured too far from home.33 One of Peekel’s own pupils told that he had attended a human flesh meal around the year 1900, but he did not eat the flesh since he had been too young; a pupil of another missionary admitted having participated in another meal, but assured that he had only consumed a tiny piece.34

It seems that every foreigner from an unknown region was considered a potential enemy. The German anthropologist Simon Haberberger heard this when he interviewed, in 2002, an inhabitant of the Baining Mountains in the interior of the Gazelle Peninsula (northeastern New Britain), whose father had known men who once practiced cannibalism. The victims, said the fifty-eight-year-old informant, had been enemies or “foreigners who passed through the Baining area and were considered enemies for this reason alone.” Their flesh was said to taste similar to that of tree-kangaroos. No specific spiritual or magical meaning was attributed to the consumption of human flesh, it was simply considered good food.35

In other cases, it seems that people belonging to hostile communities were deliberately kidnapped and then eaten. In 1885, F. T. Goedicke, a young German settler living in the Gazelle Peninsula, convinced the young men of a nearby village to let him spend a few nights in the big longhouse “where the unmarried men of the village lived at night.” Usually, these houses were off-limits to outsiders, but Goedicke won them over with a gift of tobacco. His first night in the longhouse was uneventful, but during the second, a group of young men carried a young woman into the house, ignoring her struggling and screaming. They told him that they had “stalked, and stolen [her] from an enemy village”—as no revenge motive is mentioned and the communities, though hostile to each other, do not seem to have been openly at war, this case may fall between war cannibalism and foreigner poaching.36

“With some ceremony, but with beastliness indescribable, the woman was then taken in turn by all the men” and afterwards killed. “With considerable expertness, the body was divided into small pieces. The fires had meantime been built up; the men, singly or in small groups, squatted around and roasted the bits allotted to them, and thus made their supper.” Goedicke himself was “offered some of the toasted flesh.” He was so traumatized by the events of the night that he soon after left New Britain, never to return. But he recorded the incident in his diary, where the historian Robert W. Robson found it.37

Section: Motives

The accounts we have encountered point to several interrelated explanations driving cannibal acts: foreigners could be eaten because it seemed safe to do so (revenge was unlikely); since one did not know their motives, it was safer to treat them as “potential enemies” and get rid of them before they could do harm; and their flesh was considered “a favourite food” and “an agreeable change of diet.”

The latter motive is confirmed by various other sources. Sir Hubert Murray (1861–1940) led the colonial government of Papua (the southeastern, formerly British part of New Guinea which in 1905 had been transferred to the Australian government) from 1908 until his death. Since he also served as a judge, he was repeatedly involved in cases of alleged murder and cannibalism. A man who confessed to having “killed and eaten a woman” who, as he explained, had tried to steal from his garden, was acquitted by Murray—it seems he considered the deed justifiable because the woman had first transgressed against the man’s property. Another time he acted as an interpreter in the case of “a man . . . charged with having killed and eaten a baby”—he does not report the outcome of the case.38 Regarding the motives of the cannibals, he writes that they “generally give as their usual reason for eating human flesh the simple fact that they like it. . . . [M]ost seem to consider it superior to other flesh.”39

Both in New Guinea and in Fiji, Wilfrid Walker met self-admitted former cannibals who assured him that “human flesh . . . was far better than pig.”40 Among those who said so was Walker’s Papuan “boy,” who freely admitted that “he had often eaten human meat.” Skeptical that those times were really over, Walker adds: “I had good reason for suspecting the young rascal of having partaken of human meat since he had been my servant.”41 Statements praising human flesh as particularly tasty have also been recorded from Vanuatu42 and the Loyalty Islands.43

Some foreigners were seen not so much as potential enemies but as unwanted competitors—this too might have been a reason to “poach” them. In 1878, George Brown heard from “an old fellow called Kail, one of whose accomplishments was that of cutting up the bodies of men or pigs before or after the operation of cooking them,” that several native Christian teachers, including a man named Sailasa, had been murdered and eaten in the interior of New Britain. Knowing that they had indeed recently started a journey inland, Brown “felt a great sinking of heart.” The next day, a man who had hoped to meet Sailasa confirmed the report. As Brown reconstructed the case, Taleli, the chief responsible for the deed, had feared losing his trade monopoly if the missionaries started sending their own men into the interior. Moreover, the attack on the unarmed teachers was “profitable to the assailants, as they would be able to sell portions of the dead bodies to surrounding villages for native money.”44

The incident is also described by the British captain and geographer Wilfred Powell, who writes the chief’s name as “Tarlily.”45 He too notes that “the bodies of these four poor men were then sold in pieces to the inhabitants of all villages anxious to buy them.”46 That human flesh was considered a salable item in the Bismarck Archipelago (and in some other regions) is a point to which we will return later.47 Further accounts of foreigner poaching in the Bismarck Archipelago come from the Danish explorer and anthropologist Richard Parkinson and the German traveler Joachim von Pfeil.48 These will be discussed in more detail later, because they likewise mention the sale of the victim’s flesh.

Section: Patriarchal Patterns: Men Keeping the Best for Themselves, Breasts Preferred

We have already noted earlier that cannibalism often had a distinctly patriarchal form, with men being the primary perpetrators and beneficiaries of such acts, and women and children possibly at a higher risk of falling victim to them, at least in certain situations. When it came to foreigner poaching, it seems that the age and gender of the victims did not matter much—anyone could potentially be eaten. There is a certain disagreement between the sources whether men and women were both allowed to eat human flesh or whether it was restricted to men. Simon Haberberger heard from an informant that men, women, and children had been equally consumed, but the eaters of human flesh had usually been men; only occasionally had one of them shared some slices with his wife or children.49

Joachim von Pfeil likewise notes that any foreigner, whether “adult or elderly man, woman, boy or girl,” was considered a suitable victim, as long as they could be killed without undue risk. He agrees that woman were generally excluded from eating human flesh: “Women have to prepare the meat, but are not allowed to join the meal; they are only entitled to lick the leaves soaked in juice” in which the flesh had been roasted.50 Richard Parkinson, on the other hand, notes that “men, women and children” joined in the consumption of human bodies.51 He need not be wrong, as it is quite possible that customs differed between regions. Moreover, the remark of Haberberger’s informant that men sometimes, at their discretion, shared some of the meat with their wives and children, and Pfeil’s statement that women were allowed to “lick the leaves” indicate that there was no strict taboo against women eating human flesh—it rather seems that, in general, men preferred to keep the best for themselves.

While these accounts refer to the Bismarck Archipelago, the situation in neighboring New Guinea might have been somewhat different. According to Charles Gabriel Seligman, this kind of flesh was generally eaten by men and women alike, but not by children below puberty.52

Another indication of the patriarchal nature of cannibal acts is that women’s breasts are often mentioned as one of the, if not the preferred part of the edible human body. Seligman writes that “the best pieces were the tongue, hands, feet and mammae; the brain, broken up and extracted through the foramen magnum of the boiled skull, was considered a special delicacy.”53 According to Wilfred Beaver, “the arms, legs and the breasts of women are esteemed the best portions, but the whole body is eaten roasted with sago.”54

While these accounts refer to New Guinea, Parkinson claims that, among the people he met in the Bismarck Archipelago, “flanks, fingers, brain and, in the case of female carcasses, the breasts, are considered the best pieces.”55 Haberberger’s informant, on the other hand, does not mention breasts—according to him, heart, liver, and brain had been the favored parts.56 Clearly, such lists should not be overrated. There is a huge amount of variety between the lists given by various authors and the stated preferences might, at least to some degree, have been individual rather than collective—arguably, they may depend strongly on the taste of the informants rather than truly expressing widespread attitudes. Nonetheless it is remarkable that breasts, together with the brain, show up in three of these four lists—arguably this might mean that both were really among the preferred body parts in this region.

A decided preference for female breasts has also been recorded from Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), farther in the southeast. According to the British anthropologists A. Bernard Deacon and Camilla H. Wedgwood, “women were specially fattened for eating, the breasts being the great delicacy.”57 Female victims may have been in particular demand for lavish “feasts for the chiefs and warriors,” where, as the missionary William Gill claims, “a body of a female usually formed the principal part of the repast.”58 In a similar vein, the Swiss ethnologist Felix Speiser (1880–1949) writes about one of the islands belonging to Vanuatu: “In Tanna women were killed on the conclusion of treaties and eaten in a common meal.”59

Speiser states that “the breasts of women and the genitals of men, [as well as the] palms of hands and soles of feet were the most coveted morsels.” While thus also noting a preference for male genitals not recorded in other sources, he adds that, “particularly among the old men, it is a special pleasure to eat female victims and young girls most of all. . . . A chief in Aoba [Ambae Island], according to fairly reliable sources, had a young girl killed every few days but is said to have eaten only her breasts.”60 If this is more than just a rumor, it does not necessarily mean that the rest of the victim’s body was discarded—rather it may have been eaten by the chief’s followers. Likewise reporting from Vanuatu, the French marine officers A. Hagen and A. Pineau note that the breasts of young women, as well as the heads of all victims, were generally reserved for chiefs, while the limbs were distributed among their helpers; the trunk, however, was often thrown to “the dogs and pigs.”61

When it came to being eaters rather than being eaten, Speiser states: “In principle women were debarred from the consumption of human flesh, just as they were forbidden other good food.”62 Similar to the Bismarck Archipelago, it seems that men preferred to reserve “good food” for themselves, while women (and possibly boys as well) had to make do with more modest meals.

But why the preference for female breasts? Was this an alternative way of men taking control of women’s sexuality, by destroying and consuming it (and them) rather than subjugating it to their wills? This may be an explanation—indeed, Speiser notes that “the old men’s craving for human flesh seems to me to be rooted in sadistic perversion.”63 An alternative explanation was recorded by the American anthropologist Michael Krieger, who visited Melanesia in the 1980s. In Malaita (one of the Solomon Islands, situated between the Bismarck Archipelago and Vanuatu), he met an old man who had eaten human flesh in his youth. The best parts, he remembered, were women’s breasts because of the “amount of fat” they contained. “Because of the very low fat content of their diet, any fat is considered a great delicacy.”64

The sources leave little doubt that men were the primary eaters of human flesh in the regions explored in this chapter—but what about the victims? Were women and children more or less likely to fall victim to foreigner poaching than men? Here the situation is less clear. On the one hand, several sources indicate that fishers and food gatherers, who were generally unarmed women or children, were at a high risk of falling victims to such acts. On the other hand, people who traveled far from their own communities, whether by canoe or on foot, were also at risk, and such long-distance travelers might have been men more often than women. Despite the noted preference for women’s bodies and breasts, the cannibals seem to have been quite willing to take victims of whatever gender and age they could get.

Section: Foreign-Born Children and Women as Victims

While travelers were at risk regardless of their gender, the patriarchal character of at least some of the societies investigated here also shows itself in the uncertain status granted to foreign-born women and children. Such women and children were sometimes incorporated into communities—but without completely losing their status as outsiders whose lives could be sacrificed under certain circumstances.

Francis Williams notes that, among the Orokaiva (in eastern New Guinea), captives taken in warfare were usually killed to prevent a possible escape, and then eaten. “Desirable women,” however, were often spared and forced to marry one of the warriors; “little children” were sometimes spared as well and adopted into someone’s family. While adopted children were safe from being eaten within the village which had taken them, their bodies could still be used for political purposes. If a village received a pig from another village and the inhabitants were unwilling to give up one of their own pigs in return, a child captured years earlier might be killed and the body, tied to a pole, sent back as a counter-gift.65 A child born to community members would certainly not have been treated in such a manner, but the status of foreign-born children seems to have been so low that their lives were sometimes considered less valuable than those of pigs.

Charles Monckton reports a seemingly similar case that took place in southeastern New Guinea. When a chief and village constable whom Monckton knew well held a feast for some guests, he ordered a woman who was “staying” in the village to bring her ten-year-old son to him; he then murdered the child before the mother’s eyes and had his flesh served to his guests, together with “plenty of pig, dog, and fish.” While the status of the mother and child is not quite clear, it seems they did not permanently live in the village and no husband or family ties are mentioned—in the chief’s eyes, that seems to have made the boy an expendable outsider. When Monckton heard of the incident, he had the culprit arrested and later executed.66

A desire for revenge could also lead to foreign-born children being killed and consumed. In the 1970s, the anthropologist Don Gardner undertook fieldwork among the Mianmin (or Mian people) in central New Guinea. Gardner collected several eyewitness accounts of an event that had taken place about twenty years earlier. A group of travelers had rested in an abandoned garden when a “strong gust of wind blew down a gigantic tree,” killing three people immediately and hurting another man, the leader of the group, so bad that he later died of his wounds. The people somehow decided that their hostile neighbors, the Atbalmin, had in some way “precipitated” the accident. When Betenab, the uncle of a boy who had died in the accident, heard this, he shot and killed a young girl who had not quite reached marriageable age. “Betenab’s anger was such that he butchered and cooked the girl, then shared her flesh with the rest of the village.” The girl had been abducted from the Atbalmin as a young child and Betenab had raised her as his daughter. But the desire to get revenge for the supposed crime was evidently stronger than whatever family feelings he might have had.67

Like Williams notes regarding the Orokaiva, Gardner heard that the Mianmin had generally killed any enemy men they could lay hands on, while women were abducted and distributed by the warriors among themselves. Women who were crippled or otherwise considered undesirable, however, were killed and eaten. Children were sometimes adopted into the families of the victors; if girls, they were married off to one of the men in the village at a later date.68

Gardner also heard of a case where a local leader was “mourning the death of his child. In his sorrow he decided to kill Sunagei,” a woman who had been abducted in an earlier raid. She was killed with arrows, then her body was cut up and eaten in what seems to have been a mourning ritual.69 Though the abducted women and children were not formally slaves, it seems they were far from being accepted as full community members, and their lives remained at the mercy of the local men.

The status of married women could be uncertain as well. In New Guinea and the neighboring islands, wives usually came from outside their husband’s clan and moved into the latter’s village when entering the marriage.70 If their husbands died and they had no living descendants, this left them in a precarious position—without strong ties in the community, they were essentially outsiders and could be treated as such. In 1907, the German district judge Benno Scholz reported that a widow had recently been murdered and eaten in Nissan, an island situated east of New Ireland.71

A detailed account was published by the Austrian anthropologist Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954), who accompanied Scholz on the punitive expedition that followed the incident. He states that the victim, whose name was Henot, had been born in Buka Island (60 kilometers southeast of Nissan). Three months after the death of her husband, a chief named Salin took her into his house; she became his sexual consort and ran his household. But since Salin had earlier promised to deliver human flesh to Somsom, another chief, the two men agreed that the widow would be “fattened” to fulfill the promise. About half a year later, Somsom hired a man named Mogan to kill and dismember Henot with Salin’s consent. For these services, Somsom gave him a pig, a knife, and various arrows and arm rings. Somsom then sold several body parts in return for arm rings or arrows. Most parts, however, were given away as a compensation for earlier gifts of human flesh or in return for a promise of reciprocating in the same way sometime in the future—a mutual gift exchange at the cost of the victims.72

The relationship between Salin and Somsom was also shaped by such deadly gift giving. Thurnwald states that Salin had to hand the widow over in return for another woman he had received from Somsom. The latter in turn had already started to fatten a woman whom he had planned to give to Salin for consumption one month later—Thurnwald learned the names of all three victims. But cannibalism also had a commercial side: not only had Somsom sold several body parts of the murdered woman, but Thurnwald claims that in earlier times Nissan islanders had frequently sold both women and pigs to the inhabitants of neighboring Buka Island, knowing full well that the latter would eat them. The victims were either captives or women who had no one who might revenge them—because they lacked a protector, being eaten or sold for food was not an unusual end for a widow.73

Ninety-six years later Haberberger visited Nissan and talked with seven locals (aged from thirty-six to about eighty) who still remembered the case. One of them told him that Henat (the woman’s actual name which had been misspelled by the Europeans) had been raped before her death. Another interviewee stated that his great-grandfather had received and eaten the right leg; his young son (the interviewee’s grandfather) had also shared in the meal. The interviewees were unaware of any magical associations of cannibalism. They had heard that it had been practiced “because of the flesh,” and, when enemies were eaten, to prove one’s own superiority. They also knew that Henat’s death had been the last case of cannibalism on the island; the strong reaction of the colonial government—which had sentenced several men to prison—convinced people that they had to give up the practice. Two big men (“chiefs” in older Western sources) reached an agreement that henceforth pork should be consumed instead of human flesh—up to that time, pigs had been eaten rarely and only on special occasions.74

Haberberger points out that the consumption of social outsiders shows the importance of groups and proper group membership. Henat had been accepted as a community member while her husband was alive; after his death, her status became uncertain. Individuals had no rights of their own; if the group to which they were attached decided they were disposable, their fate was sealed.75

The German traveler Friedrich Burger, who visited the Bismarck Archipelago in 1911/12, reports a similar case that had taken place a short time earlier on an island he calls “St. John”—which might have later changed its name, as today no island with this name can be found in the archipelago. As Burger tells it, a widow named Karas had no living relatives; a chief had taken her in and, after using her to satisfy his “lust,” he “fattened her up like you fatten a pig.” Then she was killed with a club, dismembered, “roasted on hot stones,” and eaten by a group of chiefs. According to tradition, each of the invitees was supposed to compensate the host by inviting him at a future date to a similar feast. Widows were usually chosen as victims because they had no relatives who would feel obliged to revenge them.76

Another widow was singled out by one of the participants as material for the next feast. But when she grasped what was about to happen, she fled into the house of a white trader who informed the colonial authorities. The German government then sent a punitive expedition and arrested the chiefs who had joined in the cannibal meal.77 It is not inconceivable that Burger’s description actually refers to the case investigated by Scholz and Thurnwald, but the widows’ names are clearly different and “St. John,” whatever island it might have been, seems to be distinct from Nissan, which had its name already at that time. Thus, it seems more likely that his account refers to another instance of the same deadly tradition.

Even the lives of married women were not safe if their husbands lost interest or decided that they deserved punishment. A. Kleintitschen, one of the German Catholic missionaries employed in New Britain, knew a chief who had bought a young girl and made her his fifth wife, but she was unhappy and repeatedly ran back to her family. Finally, writes Kleintitschen, the old man “lost his patience”: he killed and ate her.78

In what may be a reference to the same or a different case, Karl Lüders, the author of a small book published around 1890 in Germany states that “a chief in Blanche Bay [on the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain] slaughtered and consumed his wife at a feast.” He adds that such acts occurred from time to time since “the husband has the right of life and death over the wife” and if a man had “bought a woman who cannot feel at home in her new home, does not want to work, and repeatedly arouses [his] wrath,” she was occasionally sentenced to death. He notes that the feasts that followed such acts were the only cases of cannibalism where the victim had lived in the same village as those who ate her—otherwise only enemies and foreigners were consumed.79

A German botanist, Kleinschmidt, who had settled in the Gazelle Peninsula some time before the region became a German colony, claims to have twice been invited to feasts where human flesh was consumed. At one, a young woman was served as the main course—he was told that she had been the inviting chief’s ninth wife, but “because she had been afraid and had cried he had become angry and killed her.” At the other feast he attended, the victim was a captured enemy: “a man and his wife from enemy territory had been captured. The man was promptly killed but the wife was added to the chief’s harem and at their wedding feast had helped to eat her late husband.”80 This corresponds to the observations of Williams and Gardner that captured women (and children) had a better chance of being spared and incorporated in the community. But as the cases of the eaten widows and wives show, such an incorporation was not necessarily permanent, and the lives of former outsiders were never completely safe.

That wives could be killed and eaten has also been reported from Fiji81 and from the Congo.82 Just as in the Congo, it seems plausible that a husband’s “right of life and death over the wife” (Lüders) was checked by the risk that her relatives might avenge her if they learned of her death. In the Congo, it therefore seems that, in particular, enslaved women made into wives and women whose relatives had died were in danger of falling victim to their husband’s whim. In the Bismarck Archipelago, though both Kleintitschen and Lüders state that the eaten wives had been “bought,” this does not necessarily mean that they had been slaves—rather it might refer to the custom of men paying a bride price (bridewealth) to the relatives of their future wife. Kleintitschen specifically mentions that the family of the sacrificed girl had lived nearby and that she had repeatedly run back to them. Maybe, as Lüders suggests, the status even of a freeborn woman was so low that her husband had the right to dispose of her as he wished without giving her family a right to revenge; or maybe the responsible chief did consider himself so powerful that he did not have to fear revenge.

Is it just by chance that all the cases of foreign-born children being eaten are from New Guinea, while all reports of wives and widows meeting the same fate are from the Bismarck Archipelago? Alternatively, this may be due to subtle differences in local customs. In New Guinea, except for the case reported by Monckton (where the situation is unclear) the sacrificed children and women had been kidnapped from hostile groups; they were still vaguely associated with the groups from which they came and could be killed as an act of revenge against these groups. It also seems that their lives had very little value for the group in which they lived; they could be killed in mourning or even, as Williams has it, when a community needed to make a present and did not want to sacrifice a pig.

In the Bismarck Archipelago—or maybe only in New Britain, as all cases of wife eating come from that island—on the other hand, it seems that even wives born in friendly communities were at the mercy of their husbands, and that butchering them was an accepted (though rare) alternative to getting a divorce. The fate of widows on Nissan (and possibly elsewhere) is again a somewhat different issue; the lack of living relatives seems to be the main point here. Women usually came from other communities, whether friendly or hostile; if they had lost their husband and had no other strong ties in the community, they could be treated once again as outsiders.

In any case, it is noticeable that the status of women and children oscillated in these patriarchal societies in a way that the status of men did not: they could be integrated into communities, but they could also easily be ejected from them if circumstances changed, with deadly consequences. The status of men was more clear-cut: if they belonged to the local community or to friendly communities, they were usually safe from harm; if not, they were typically treated not just as outsiders but as potential enemies. Men from unknown or hostile communities were often killed and eaten quickly; castaways were sometimes kept alive for some time until meeting the same end, but it seems they were never integrated into a community in the way women and children could be.

Section: White People Rarely Eaten

While the status of women and children who had been married or adopted into neighboring communities was uncertain, white people who came into the region from Europe or the Americas were doubtless foreigners. And occasionally, at least in New Guinea proper, they were treated like any foreigner might be treated—hunted down, killed, and consumed if they were unable to defend themselves. Haberberger documents the case of John Werner, a German American prospector who in 1913 was killed and eaten in the interior of New Guinea. Haberberger found no indications that Werner could have acted in a manner that provoked hostilities; if anything, he seems to have been too sweet-natured and credulous. Nor does revenge seem a plausible reason for his death since he was likely the first European the villagers who killed him had ever met.83

Also in New Guinea, two white miners, Campion and King, were entrapped and carried off to a village, “where they were both roasted alive over a slow fire” and then eaten, according to Walker. The colonial government subsequently arrested several persons who confessed to having participated in these acts.84 The cruel treatment might have been due to culinary reasons, as Walker explains elsewhere: “The Papuans, as a rule, do not torture their prisoners for the mere idea of torture, though they have often been known to roast a man alive, for the reason that the meat is supposed to taste better thus. This they also do to pigs, and I myself, on this very expedition, caught some of our carriers making preparations to roast a pig alive, and just stopped them in time.”85

While these reports show that Westerners were not exempt from being eaten, such cases were rare. In particular it seems that white-skinned individuals were never eaten in the Bismarck Archipelago and the neighboring North Solomon Islands86—or at least no cases where this happened are on record. This caught the attention of Heinrich Schnee, the Deputy Governor of German New Guinea, who notes that in all cases of murder investigated by him, the corpses of white victims were thrown into the sea, while those of “colored” people were consumed.87

Schnee claims to have encountered this unequal treatment of corpses in at least five cases, several of which he describes in his book. In 1898, a ship returning contract workers to Bougainville (the largest of the North Solomon Islands) was raided by a group of men who had come on board under the pretense of trade. They killed the white captain and one “boy” belonging to his native crew, taking the other three “boys” captive—all the “boys” were from neighboring Buka Island. The captain’s corpse was thrown into the sea, but the dead “boy” was sent to a friendly “tribe” for consumption. The captives were taken along for later consumption, but they managed to escape and were picked up by a ship.88

Another time, two white traders and three of their native employees were attacked and killed on Pak (one of the Admiralty Islands in the north of the Bismarck Archipelago). Two other employees, from New Ireland, were on a fishing trip during the attack—they saw what happened but could not help. The corpses of the killed traders were thrown into the sea, while those of the native workers were eaten. Part of the bounty were several rifles which the attackers subsequently used in various raids against neighboring peoples who were only armed with spears. While the victims of these raids were eaten, the two New Irelanders were spared because they had agreed to show the raiders how to use the rifles. Three years later they were picked up by a passing ship and reported what had happened.89 In a third incident reported by Schnee, a trading ship was attacked on Manus, the largest of the Admiralty Islands. Captain and second mate—both white—were killed and thrown overboard, while several native crew members were killed and consumed; the rest were taken captive.90

Robert Robson also observes that cannibals in New Britain hesitated to eat Europeans, asserting that “white-skinned meat was ill-flavoured.” Robson describes the case of a cutter belonging to the trading company of the American-Samoan businesswoman Emma Forsayth (1850–1913). In October 1880, this cutter landed near a village to collect a load of copra (dried coconut kernels). Though supposedly promised, the load was not ready, and a dispute over who was responsible turned into a deadly conflict. Four members of the cutter’s crew were killed—three Europeans and a Buka Islander. Fearing vengeance, the villagers fled into the hills, taking the latter’s body with them for eating, but throwing the dead Europeans into the sea. Forsayth’s request to send a punitive expedition in response was turned down by the commander of a British warship who considered the Europeans responsible for the fight.91

Kleintitschen notes that it is doubtful whether Europeans were ever eaten in New Britain. While he does not venture an explanation of why this was so, he rejects as “fairy tale” the notion spread by some that they were considered “too salty,” pointing out that salt was a sought-after delicacy.92 Also fitting the pattern that white people could be killed but were not eaten is the end of Kleintitschen’s colleague Matthäus Rascher. In August 1904, Rascher and nine other missionaries (five of them nuns) were murdered by a group of local men. The historian Paul Steffen concludes that Rascher had been over-ambitious. He had urged the people to quickly and radically change their customs, relentlessly attacking traditional religious beliefs and social structures. Finally, some of the affected decided to turn against the mission in a hopeless attempt to preserve their traditional way of life.93

Three or four orphan boys raised by the mission, aged from approximately three to fourteen years, were murdered as well. Several witnesses later reported that their bodies were consumed during a feast held on the mission premises to celebrate the victory over the missionaries.94 Once more the bodies of native victims were eaten, while those of white people were not.

In Vanuatu too, “whites are very seldom eaten,” as Felix Speiser observed. He was sceptical of local explanations that they “taste bad,” instead vaguely explaining this restraint as “probably [due to] religious motives.”95 Schnee conjectures that the locals ascribed strong magical powers to white people because of their superior weapons and technology and might therefore have feared that such powerful magicians would, even after their death, harm those who dared to touch their bodies.96 However, considering that the same white people were apparently unhesitatingly killed if the local situation allowed it, this hypothesis is hardly convincing.

In New Guinea, Monckton was once threatened by a group of cannibals who told him that he “was so repulsively coloured that they would not dream of eating me, but would feed me to the pigs instead.”97 In various Asian and American cultures, as well as large parts of Africa, the color white is associated with death, mourning, and illness.98 If such associations existed in the Bismarck Archipelago and possibly other parts of Melanesia as well, it might have been the reason why people shied away from eating white persons—eating those who looked ill or more or less like walking dead must have seemed a dangerous and unhealthy proposition.

Elsewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, cases of foreigners being poached and eaten have been reported from Australia,99 Vanuatu100 and the neighboring Loyalty Islands,101 as well as from the Marquesas Islands.102 Context and motivations of such acts in these regions seem to be similar to those we have investigated in this chapter. More interesting, however, is the situation in Fiji, which reveals a distinctly different context of cannibal kidnappings. This will be the first topic of the next chapter, before we then turn to a different continent altogether.