Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [39]
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the blackbirders began to visit the islands of Vanuatu. Little better than slavers, they were recruiters searching for indentured workers to toil in the mines of New Caledonia and the sugar and cotton plantations of Fiji, Samoa, and Australia. Many Ni-Vanuatu were kidnapped. Most suffered through years of appalling brutality, but if they survived their years of service, they were returned to their islands. Survived being the operative word. Of the forty thousand Ni-Vanuatu lured to Queensland, Australia, fewer than thirty thousand lived to return. Of the ten thousand who were sent to New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, it is unknown how many lived, though the mines in New Caledonia were known to be a graveyard. Some of those who did manage to return, quite naturally, held a grudge against white men.
In 1878, on the island of Ambae, a returned laborer named Sikeri was in need of victims. For men in Vanuatu, prestige and influence were obtained by passing through demanding grade-taking rituals, which allowed a man to move upward in class. On most islands, a chief earned his position by participating in ceremonies that called for an ever-greater sacrifice of pigs. Pigs equaled wealth in Vanuatu. Now and then, however, a grade-taking ritual required the sacrifice of men, and so when recruiters from the Mystery arrived one fine morning, Sikeri and his followers decided that they would do nicely. Six men were slaughtered and eaten. Three years later, a similar fate befell the crew of the May Queen when another chief on Ambae needed victims to commemorate the death of his child.
But why eat people? Killing people I could understand. It happens all the time. A quick glance at the local news suggests that human beings kill one another for the most trivial of reasons. Indeed, I daresay I too have felt the urge to kill, particularly when I’m driving. If the driver of the white Ford F-150 pickup truck that cut me off last Tuesday is reading this, you should know that I’m looking for you. And in Vanuatu, when one considers what happened subsequent to the arrival of Westerners, it is a wonder that the Ni-Vanuatu did not kill every missionary, sandalwood trader, and colonist who landed upon their shores. Perhaps no country suffered more cruelly from the diseases introduced by Westerners than Vanuatu. Living in such isolation from the rest of the world, the Ni-Vanuatu had not acquired immunity to influenza, measles, whooping cough, and a half-dozen other ailments. What caused a sniffle in London killed in Vanuatu. When the unfortunate Mr. Williams arrived on Erromango in 1839, there were approximately 4,500 people living on the island; by 1930, there were only 500. Aneityum Island had a population of 3,500 in 1850; in 1905, there were 450. On every island touched by Westerners, epidemics followed, and the depopulation of Vanuatu was appalling. In 1800, an estimated one million Ni-Vanuatu lived on the islands. By 1935, there were only 41,000. “Why should we have any more children?” asked one woman on Malekula. “Since the white men came, they all die.”
Local medicine and magic were no antidote to the apocalyptic waves of disease that swept through Vanuatu during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On many islands, epidemics were understood to be the work of sorcerers who had the power to both cause and cure illness. This was a belief that did not work well for missionaries. The death of John Williams had hardly hindered their efforts to convert the Ni-Vanuatu, though the London Missionary Society did think it prudent to send Samoan missionaries for a while to soften the heathens up, as it were, rather than lose another Englishman. For those missionaries who did manage to establish a presence on an island, their work tending to those overcome by measles, smallpox, and the other epidemics of the day was regarded as evidence that they had caused the disease, and for this many were killed and eaten. Some missionaries even went out of their way to take responsibility for an epidemic. When