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Pompous ceremony as in the Islands is here kept secret. We never saw so much as a grave where any one had been interrd; nor were they always alike in the accounts they gave of the manner of disposing of Dead bodies, in the Northern parts they told us that they buried them in the ground and in the southern said that they threw them into the sea, having first tied to them a sufficient weight to cause their sinking. Howsoever they disposd of the dead their regret for the loss of them was sufficiently visible; few or none were without scarrs and some had them hideously large on their cheeks, arms, thighs, legs &c. which proceeded from the cuts they had given themselves during their mourning. I have seen several with such wounds of which the blood was not yet staunchd and one only, a woman, while she was cutting herself and lamenting. She wept much, repeating many sentences in a plaintive tone of voice, at every one of which she with a shell cut a gash in some part of her body; she however contrivd her cutts in such a manner that few of them drew blood and those that did penetrated
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Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from State Library of NSW Transcription of Banks's Journal page (vol. 2) 215, February 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-banks_remarks-245.html