from following
them home. This practice clearly shews the fear which the natives feel
for the ghosts of the newly dead. A man is buried with money, porpoise
teeth, and some of his personal ornaments; but, avarice getting the
better of superstition, these things are often secretly dug up again and
appropriated by the living. Sometimes a dying man will express a wish to
be cast into the sea; his friends will therefore paddle out with the
corpse, tie stones to the feet, and sink it in the depths. In the island
of Savo, another of the Solomon Islands, common men are generally thrown
into the sea and only great men are buried.[560] The same distinction is
made at Wango in San Cristoval, another of the same group of islands;
there also the bodies of common folk are cast into the sea, but men of
consequence are buried, and some relic of them, it may be a skull, a
tooth, or a finger-bone, is preserved in a shrine at the village. From
this difference in burial customs flows a not unimportant religious
difference. The souls of the great people who are buried on land turn
into land-ghosts, and the souls of commoners who are sunk in the sea
turn into sea-ghosts. The land-ghosts are seen to hover about the
villages, haunting their graves and their relics; they are also heard to
speak in hollow whispers. Their aid can be obtained by such as know
them. The sea-ghosts have taken a great hold on the imagination of the
natives of the south-eastern Solomon Islands; and as these people love
to illustrate their life by sculpture and painting, they shew us clearly
what they suppose these sea-ghosts to be like. At Wango there used to be
a canoe-house full of sculptures and paintings illustrative of native
life; amongst others there was a series of scenes like those which are
depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs. One of the scenes represented a
canoe attacked by sea-ghosts, which were portrayed as demons compounded
partly of human limbs, partly of the bodies and tails of fishes, and
armed with spears and arrows in the form of long-bodied garfish and
flying-fish. If a man falls ill on returning from a voyage or from
fishing on the rocks, it is thought that one of these sea-ghosts has
shot him. Hence when men are in danger at sea, they seek to propitiate
the ghosts by throwing areca-nuts and fragments of food into the water
and by praying to the ghosts not to be angry with them. Sharks are also
supposed to be animated by the ghosts of the dead.