actice with great horror and detestation.[28] But we have the
testimony of other early missionaries that in their wars they
occasionally resorted to it as a climax of hatred and revenge, devouring
some portion of an enemy who had rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious
by his cruelty or his provocations. Traditions, too, are on record of
chiefs who habitually killed and devoured their fellow-creatures. A form
of submission which a conquered party used to adopt towards their
conquerors has also been interpreted as a relic of an old custom of
cannibalism. Representatives of the vanquished party used to bow down
before the victors, each holding in his hands a piece of firewood and a
bundle of leaves, such as are used in dressing a pig for the oven. This
was as much as to say, "Kill us and cook us, if you please." Criminals,
too, were sometimes bound hand and foot, slung on a pole, and laid down
before the persons they had injured, like pigs about to be killed and
cooked. Combining these and other indications we may surmise that
cannibalism was formerly not infrequent among the ancestors of the
Samoans, though among their descendants in the nineteenth century the
practice had almost wholly died out.[29] It is further to the credit of
the Samoans that their public administration of justice was on the whole
mild and humane. Torture was never employed to wring the truth from
witnesses or the accused, and there seems to be only a single case on
record of capital punishment inflicted by judicial sentence. At the same
time private individuals were free to avenge the adultery of a wife or
the murder of a kinsman by killing the culprit, and no blame attached to
them for so doing. The penalties imposed by the sentence of a court or
judicial assembly (_fono_) included fines, banishment, and the
destruction of houses, fruit-trees, and domestic animals. But a criminal
might also be condemned by a court to suffer corporal punishment in one
form or another. He might, for example, be obliged to wound himself by
beating his head and chest with a stone till the blood flowed freely; if
he seemed to spare himself, he would be ordered by the assembled chiefs
to strike harder, and if he still faltered, the prompt and unsparing
application of a war club to his person effectually assisted the
execution of the sentence. Again, he might be condemned to bite a
certain acrid and poisonous root (called in the native language _tevi_)
which caused the mouth