, who were
less nice in their eating.[235]

[234] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 220.

[235] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 112 _sq._, 120-126, ii.
220.

It was customary that the chief widow of the Tooitonga should be
strangled and interred with his dead body.[236] But the practice of
strangling a wife at her husband's funeral was not limited to the widows
of the Tooitongas. A similar sacrifice seems to have been formerly
offered at the obsequies of a king; for at the funeral of King Moomoeoe
the first missionaries to Tonga saw two of the king's widows being led
away to be strangled.[237]

[236] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 135, 209 _sq._, 214.

[237] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern
Pacific Ocean_, p. 240.

The funeral and mourning customs which we have passed in review serve to
illustrate the Tongan conceptions of the soul and of its survival after
death. The strangling of widows was probably intended here as elsewhere
to despatch their spirits to attend their dead husbands in the spirit
land;[238] and the deposition of valuable property in the grave can
hardly have had, at least in origin, any other object than to ensure the
comfort of the departed in the other world, and incidentally, perhaps,
to remove from him any temptation to return to his sorrowing friends in
this world for the purpose of recovering the missing articles. The
self-inflicted wounds and bruises of the mourners were clearly intended
to impress the ghost with the sincerity of their regret at his departure
from this sublunary scene; if any doubt could linger in our minds as to
the intention of these extravagant proceedings, it would be set at rest
by the words with which, as we have seen, the mourners accompanied
them, calling on the dead man to witness their voluntary tortures and to
judge for himself of the genuineness of their sorrow. In this connexion
it is to be borne in mind that all dead noblemen, in the opinion of the
Tongans, were at once promoted to the rank of deities; so that it was in
their power to visit any disrespect to their memory and any defalcation
of their dues with the double terror of ghosts and of gods. No wonder
that the Tongans sought to keep on good terms with such mighty beings by
simulating, when they did not feel, a sense of the irreparable loss
which the world had sustained by their dissolution.

[238] This was the reason assigned for the strangling of widows