Bouru is highly reminiscent of Buru, a large island in the centre of the Moluccan area, and a pair of topographical coincidences strengthens the suggestion that Buru may have been the ancestral land of the renga tradition. A further reference to the chart will disclose the Banda Islands and Banda Sea immediately to southward of Buru. Some further coincidences of nomenclature demand record in conjunction with these facts. Matang, the name of the other renga paradise already mentioned, is a widespread Indonesian place-name between Mattang of Sarawak and Medang of New Guinea; and Mwaiku, yet another Gilbertese paradise, recalls Waigiou by the Macassar Straits.
Gilolo, facing Waigiou on the other side of the Straits, and immediately north of Buru, has already claimed notice in connection with the Kiroro cooking-oven, and Unauna in the northern bight of Celebes in connection with the Onouna of the katura oven. The cumulative value of these coincidences is enhanced by the diverse nature of the traditions which make them apparent. Two similarities of nomenclature have appeared in connection with cooking-ovens; four from an examination of Gilbertese place-names; one in a paradise story; and three in the paradise- renga traditions.
It is certainly remarkable that whenever, in this diffuse material, the name of an original land is mentioned, it finds its counterpart in a single small area of Indonesia. The effect is that of - 59 a series of sign-posts set up at different points in Gilbertese culture and tradition, every one of them pointing to a common centre.
Adding to this the commonly admitted likelihood that from this very centre—the Moluccan area—both the betel-people and other migrant swarms emerged into the Pacific, there seems to be very reasonable ground for the belief that Buru, the Banda Islands, Serang, Gilolo, and the places grouped around them were once the homes of those Gilbertese ancestors who chewed the red food called te renga.
Taakeuta of Marakei told me that the tree whose leaves were taken to chew with the renga mixture was Tara-kai-maiu, thus suggesting that the Tree of Life discussed in the previous section was neither a coconut as believed by the masses nor a pandanus as held by the initiated , but a betel-palm.
Though Taakeuta's other evidence about te renga is backed by a good deal of outside testimony, he is the only witness known to me who associates the Tree of Life with the red food, and he is unable to state whence he obtained this exceptional information. On the other side, the identification of Tara-kai-maiu with the pandanus is based upon the direct testimony of the Karongoa clan—the preeminent authority—being also supported by the Baanaban myth and by the etymology of the tree's name.
The likelihood therefore is that Taakeuta who is not a Karongoa man has not the authentic story. Nevertheless, I have found him, despite his great age, a reliable witness in many directions, and I cannot avoid feeling that his association of te renga with the Tree of Life amounts to something more than a mere confusion. Upon this matter further research may throw a light which I have been unable to obtain, perhaps necessitating a modification of my conclusion that a single tree only—the pandanus—is bound up in the tradition of Tara-kai-maiu.
There can be no doubt that sporadic cases of cannibalism have occurred throughout the Gilbert Islands until very recent times. A man was pointed out to me on Butaritari in , whose father, just deceased at the age of about 80, was known to have strangled one of his wives a short while before the establishment of the British Protectorate , and eaten raw her thumbs, great toes and breasts.
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It seems that he committed this atrocity whilst drunk with sour toddy, under the goad of sexual jealousy. His object was not to procure food, but to load the dead woman with the last imaginable indignity. Individual cases of cannibalism from two to five generations old collected from eight islands including both northern and southern units, and also Baanaba indicate that by far the most common motive of cannibalism, in later times, was that which appeared in the above example—the ultimate abasement of the dead. A common practice during war-time in the Northern Gilberts was to pluck out the eyes of enemies slain in battle, and crush them between the teeth.
The mere biting in two appears, as a rule, to have sufficed, but I have obtained from several old men of Tarawa and Marakei the admission that they actually swallowed the eyes thus enucleated. The operation was usually performed in the heat of battle, standing over the newly-fallen enemy; but there is a tale of a certain High Chief of the Northern Gilberts, not very long dead, to the effect that he would occasionally cause his suspected rivals to be murdered in cold blood and brought to him, in order that he might bite their eyeballs with due deliberation. An interesting story from Baanaba relates that, four or five generations ago, a Tabiteuean canoe containing five starving occupants drifted ashore there.
The castaways - 61 were kindly treated, one of them, named Tebuke, being adopted into a household of the village of Buakonikai. After several years, Tebuke was suddenly missed from the village and, after vain search, was given up for dead. From that time onward many other people of the same village district began to disappear mysteriously, and it was believed that they had become victims of the same evil power that had spirited away Tebuke.
After a good many years, Tebuke reappeared, sick and on the point of death. Just before dying, he confessed that he had lain hidden all the time in a hollow rock now known as Tebuke's rock , which stood near one of the paths taken by fishermen to reach the eastern shore of the island. Whenever a man or a woman passed the rock alone, Tebuke had followed and killed the victim; he then dragged the corpse back to his hiding place, to eat it at his leisure. There seems to be no reason for doubting this story, which shows that, in some cases at least, there was a tendency to revert to cannibalism for purely gastronomic reasons.
This, however, is one of the most carefully-hidden secrets of the Karongoa clan; it was not until my ninth year among the Gilbertese that an authentic account of the facts was given to me. In , three old men of the high chiefly group of Little Makin 15 allowed me to take down at their dictation the text of which a translation appears in Appendix 1. Though some parts only of the narrative are pertinent to - 62 cannibalism and head-hunting, the text is given in full, as it contains much that will be of use hereafter.
Section 2 of the story opens with an account of the place in Samoa where according to Section 4 human heads were laid in sacrifice, and of the spiritual powers to whom they were offered. Section 4 proceeds to give a clear account of how organized head-hunting raids were conducted against one island to westward of Samoa, called Butuna, and two to the south, called Tonga and Nuku-maroro.
Butuna is clearly Futuna, or Horne Island, about miles due west of Savaii; Tonga, correctly placed to southward, needs no explanation; and Nuku-maroro, given the alternative name of Nieue by the old men of Butaritari, is easily identified as Savage Island, a little to eastward of Tonga. The salient features of the Little Makin account are corroborated by a somewhat less detailed version collected from the Karongoa sib of Beru in the Southern Gilberts: Further supporting evidence is supplied by the traditions connected with the canoe-crest of Karongoa.
This crest consists of various arrangements of tufts and pennants of pandanus-leaf, which I have described elsewhere. As I have stated, the head-hunting and cannibalism of the Gilbertese ancestors in Samoa and elsewhere is the dark secret of an inner circle of Karongoa. Members of the outer circle, and of other social groups, possess versions of the Little Makin story, told, not in terms of fact, but in curious cryptic form, which they relate without in the least understanding their hidden significance, and which, set side by side with the authentic story, form a most interesting study.
They are mythopoeic renderings of the truth which the initiates of Karongoa have put into currency, in order the more completely to conceal the real facts of history. It is related in the cryptic class of traditions that stranded porpoise formed the favourite food of the people of Samoa, and that the heads of the porpoise were the portion tiba of the kings of Karongoa.
To a bitter quarrel arising out of the unfair division of certain porpoise is attributed the scattering of the people from Samoa, and their migration to the Gilbert Group. This, it is seen, agrees in general outline very well with the Little Makin account; only, porpoise-flesh replaces human flesh, and all details concerning the practice of head-hunting, the rituals - 64 surrounding it, and the deities with whom it was associated, are suppressed.
Assembling the details with which the two classes of tradition, read side by side, furnish us, we have the following information:. The connection of Batuku the skull-god with the moon is arresting, because the association of cannibalism with beings who dwelt in the sky is of common occurrence in the Pacific. In the next few sections it will appear how closely the tree-god Auriaria, who shared with Batuku the sacrifice of human heads upon the sacred mountain of Samoa, was associated in agricultural rituals with the sun and moon; and later still he will be shown as the sun-god in very person.
This being once apparent, the connection of human sacrifices with the moon by the Gilbertese ancestors in Samoa seems to be but one aspect of a sun-moon cult which embraced a wide range of religious activities. I thus anticipate my subject only to point out in passing that the astronomical associations of cannibalism throughout Polynesia—and especially in the Tawhaki traditions—may owe their origin to an ancient cult of the sun and moon, wherein the sacrifice of human heads and the subsequent - 66 eating of human flesh played a part.
The likelihood of such a hypothesis will become more apparent when the deeper strata of Gilbertese myth and religion have been examined. Much light is thrown upon the antecedents of the Auriaria-Batuku-Tree people of Samoa by a series of traditions from Tabiteuea Southern Gilberts , which is presented at full length in Appendix 2, and will now be examined side by side with the Little Makin series of Appendix 1, which I have just reviewed.
Opening with a version of the Creation Myth, the Tabiteuea tale passes in its second, third, and fourth sections through a series of exploits of the well-known trickster type, wherein Na Areau the creator is the malicious hero; 20 but the fourth section ends with a good deal of genealogical information, up to which climax the whole preceding series of narratives, in the manner common to such annals in the Gilbert Islands, is intended to lead.
The opening sentence of Section 1 of the tale relates how, before the creation era—which is to say, in the very distant past—two western lands named Aba-the-little Abaiti and Aba-the-great Abatoa were the home of the first ancestral tree the ancestress sun , a pandanus, whereof the presiding spirit was none other than the deity - 67 whom we have already seen in possession of the tree of Samoa, Auriaria. There can hardly be in the history of the Gilbertese race two different and unrelated ancestral pandanus-trees, both owned by the single god Auriaria.
Any doubt as to whether the two texts do indeed refer to the same people, god, and tree will disappear as the comparison proceeds. Kai-n-tikuaaba, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is the name found attached in the Little Makin text to Auriaria's tree of Samoa: The - 68 final stage of the migration, i. The section opens by describing how Na Areau the creator, whilst at Tabiteuea, stole from a being named Taranga his wife Kobine, and made her the progenitress of ancestors. We have already seen this tale, under a rather different guise, in the Little Makin series Appendix 1 , for it is there related Section 1 how Auriaria stole from Taranga in the underworld not a wife indeed, but a tree which nevertheless became an ancestress.
The essential myth-fabric—the victim, his name Taranga, the theft, its result the birth of ancestors—is the same in both cases; only externals vary, 23 and the story has been localized in the Tabiteuea account: The names of Na Areau's progeny by Taranga's wife on Tabiteuea are given as Au-te-rarangaki, Au-te-venevene, and Au-te-tabanou, which signify respectively: Au-the-continually-overturned, Au-the-continually-reclining, and Au-the-skull.
The same context links them together in a single religious category by stating that their anti was Auriaria. Their names obviously belong to the same family as that of Au-riaria, which signifies Au-continually-rising-over-the-horizon, 24 and it seems pretty - 69 clear that in the god and his three eponyms who are certainly not human ancestors we have but four different personifications or attitudes of a single central identity named Au, who was the object of the Karongoa cult.
Having thus defined his groups by reference to their socio-religious indices, the native historian proceeds to describe the migration from Tabiteuea to Samoa, making Au-the-skull now the inclusive index of the movement: The day of voyaging came. Au-the-skull with his people voyaged to Samoa. In the next paragraph 22 , dealing with the settlement of the immigrants in Samoa, the Tabiteuea history links itself directly with the Little Makin tradition through the name of Batuku. The only differences are that, in this version, Batuku is presented not as a god or a skull, but as the king of the tree of Samoa and the progeny of Au-the-skull; while Koururu the brow appears as his brother, not his offspring as the Little Makin story [Appendix 1, Section 2 9 ] makes him.
As far as the practice of human sacrifice is concerned, the text from Tabiteuea tersely confirms the more detailed Little Makin account by recording that the food of the kings of the tree was human heads. Such, upon the evidence of the Tabiteuea tradition, is the tale of migrations implied in those few opening words of Section 2 in the Little Makin text: Section 6 of the Tabiteuea version deals with that event in semi-mythical language, stating - 70 that the progeny of Au-the-skull were flung by their anti Auriaria northward from Samoa to Tabiteuea Island.
The Little Makin version interlocks perfectly with this account, in that it also brings a child of the skull, one Rairaueana, from Samoa to Tabiteuea; after which, in its closing paragraph 53 it shows how the line of Rairaueana migrated still farther northward, up to Butaritari, there to produce the ancestors of three high-chiefly dynasties in the Gilbert Group, and of another in Mille of the Marshalls. Traced backwards into history, therefore, upon the evidence of the texts examined, the lineage of, say, the high-chiefly dynasty of Butaritari takes us first southward to Tabiteuea, and thence southward again into Samoa.
Looping back northward, the line passes once more through Tabiteuea; thence, up to Tarawa; thence, westward to the land called Kai-n-tikuaaba; and finally, back to the earliest fatherlands called Abaiti and Abatoa. According to the Tabiteuea account, it was in those very ancient homes of the race that Auriaria, the god of the head-hunting rituals of Samoa, first dwelt with his tree, a pandanus, whose name was The Ancestress-Sun. To quote now from the Beru text:. Batuku and Kanii are said to have been kings beneath the tree of Samoa, and their food was the heads of the first-born, the eldest.
The heads of the first-born children of the people of Nikumaroro were taken to be the food of those kings. And in the men Kanii and Batuku appeared the breed of Samoa, the breed of red men, who were called the people of Matang, the people of the tree Kai-n-tikuaaba: Matang, as will be remembered from the preceding section, is in popular belief the far-western paradise where the fair-skinned ancestral deities—Auriaria, Nei Tituaabine, Tabu-ariki, and others—forever feast upon the red food called te renga.
The inference has been drawn that this land was one of the early fatherlands of the Gilbertese ancestors. It is almost unnecessary to point out how greatly such an inference is strengthened by the independent evidence from Beru and Tabiteuea that the race of Auriaria was still called, long after it had migrated out of the west into Samoa, the breed or people of Matang. The concrete nature of such evidence clearly sets the land of Matang within the category of material realities.
As a piece of cultural information, the direct connection of Batuku and his breed with Matang is of first-rate importance, for it brings their practice of head-hunting, allied with the cult of an ancestral skull, into immediate concatenation with the chewing of the red food called te renga. The close original association of the betel-chewing habit with the practice of head-hunting and a highly developed cult connected with the skulls of relatives has been demonstrated by Rivers.
Rivers has stated that there is no evidence of headhunting in Polynesia as an organized and habitual practice, having the social or religious importance which attaches to the habit among the head-hunting peoples of Melanesia. The evidence of Gilbertese tradition just examined is therefore of a somewhat sensational nature, and if, as it seems to show, a numerous head-hunting folk with memories of the betel-chewing habit did indeed penetrate, by way of the Gilbert Islands, as far as Samoa, it will be necessary to explain why the vestigia of the betel-culture now traceable in Polynesia are—if any at all—so slight as to be almost unrecognizable.
A sufficient explanation will, I think, disclose itself when certain other aspects of the culture of the tree-people shall have been examined. The remainder of this section will be devoted to a review of some further traditions of cannibalism in the Gilbert Group, obtained from social groups other than the Karongoa clan.
Aboriginal significance of the Pandanus tree celebrated
The first of these, whereof the vernacular text and an interlinear translation appear in Appendix 3, emanates from the clan of Keaki, which claims the tropic-bird as one of its totems 30 and Nei Tituaabine as its ancestral deity. The free translation of the story here follows:. After this point, the narrative describes the voyages of the tropic-bird people, under the leadership of Koura, down the Gilbert Group, and their colonization of the four islands of Butaritari, Abaiang, Tarawa, and Beru.
This carries the tradition beyond the scope of the present subject, but it is worth while to point out in passing the evident criss-cross of immigrant currents that was set up in the Gilbert Islands by the return of the Samoan branch of the race to Micronesia. While the Karongoa clans of the two texts first examined are seen to have entered the group at Tabiteuea in the south, and to have proceeded thereafter up to the extreme northerly islands of Little Makin and Butaritari, the tropic-bird groups of the tradition now presented took the diametrically opposite course of invading the group at Little Makin, and working their way thence down to Beru, an island as far to the southward as - 76 Tabiteuea.
This single example must suffice at present to illustrate the restless and complex swirl of clan-movements that vexed the group during the period immediately succeeding the incursion from Samoa. Regarding now the technique of the Keaki tradition, we have in this narrative a good example of the method common to many clan-histories in the Gilbert Islands.
The tale is fundamentally a record of facts, the central event being the immigration of a certain man-eating group from Samoa into Little Makin; but, instead of naming the actual ancestors who took part in the invasion, the historian uses the clan-deity and totem-creature—Nei Tituaabine with her tropic-bird—as social indices, and attributes to them the historic acts of the whole Keaki group of immigrants for which they stand.
Setting aside the myth-fabric, and rationalizing the account of facts, the tradition may be read as follows: When the ancestors of the Keaki clan were obliged to leave Samoa, they fled northward until they came to Little Makin. There they landed, having secured their first foothold in the neighbourhood of the bathing-pool called Tengare-n-nao.
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From that centre, they proceeded to attack the local population, their victims being killed and eaten. The practice of cannibalism, however, ceased for a very definite reason, which is made apparent in the prayer to Nei Tituaabine put into the mouths of the victimized people paragraph 3 of text: The passage means that Nei Tituaabine was the ancestral deity not only of the invaders, but of the invaded: This is, of course, valuable support to the conclusion dictated by the Tabiteuea text Appendix 2 , that the immigration from Samoa into the Gilbert Group was nothing more that the return of a race—or part of a race—along an ancient migration-route to one of its earlier homes.
The intent of the historian, in the passage quoted above, is to explain that the incoming tropic-bird folk, though first obliged to fight their own ancestral kin for a foothold upon Little Makin, nevertheless ceased to practice cannibalism upon them because they shared with them the cult of a single clan-deity, Nei Tituaabine. This naturally raises the question why the people of the Keaki clan are not, to this day, high chiefs of the island.
The answer is implied in the final paragraph of the Little Makin text Appendix 1 which we have examined.
Aboriginal significance of the Pandanus tree celebrated | Coolum & North Shore News
While the tropic-bird group was invading the extreme northerly Gilbert Islands, that branch of the Karongoa group which was led by Rairaueana the Man-of-Matang, child of Batuku the skull, was immigrating into Tabiteuea. The genealogical details supplied in the closing sentence of the text show that, in a later generation, the Karongoa clan moved northward, in the person of Rairaueana's descendant Teietoa, to Butaritari. By that time, the tropic-bird folk must have been well established as overlords of Little Makin, and probably also of Butaritari, but such was the sacred prestige of Karongoa among the Samoan immigrants that it is very doubtful whether the tropic-bird folk withstood—or even desired for a moment to withstand—the prerogative of Rairaueana's group to supersede them.
But perhaps the clearest evidence of the racial identity of the tropic-bird clans with the breed of Matang 38 is contained in the intimate relationship of their ancestral beings, Koura and Nei Tituaabine, with that very index of the Karongoa-Matang culture, the ancestral pandanus of Auriaria called Kai-n-tikuaaba, the tree of the sacred mountain. Out of - 79 that tree, according to the Little Makin text in Appendix 1 paragraph 4 , sprang not only the Karongoa god Tabuariki, but also every other great clan-deity of the head-hunting people, including Nei Tituaabine, who grew from one of the branches, and Koura, child of the first bloom.
The inference is that all the social groups who believed themselves descended through their gods from the tree were, equally with Karongoa, of the breed of Matang. The following very explicit passage from the Beru text already quoted confirms the conclusion: The tree of Auriaria may thus be regarded henceforth as the index, not only of Karongoa, but of a whole congeries of red i.
But the full lore of the tree—its myth, its history, its head-hunting rituals—was peculiar to Karongoa. Only such fragments of that lore as Karongoa passed for circulation were permitted to subsist in the traditions of other social groups, and these were so cryptically presented that, in the course of time, their meaning was lost to the uninitiate clans who purveyed them.
Examples of such morsels of occulted truth are to be seen in the Keaki text. In paragraph 1, the man-eating tropic-bird of Nei Tituaabine is pictured as having settled at Little Makin upon the branch of a pandanus-tree, whereof one of the three recorded names is Ara-maunga-tabu Pandanus-of-the-sacred-mountain. In paragraph 6, the ancestral being Koura is shown to have grown from this same tree. The pandanus of the tropic-bird on Little Makin is but a projected shadow of the ancestral pandanus of Auriaria, the parent of the Keaki deities, the mother-tree of a cannibal race, where of Keaki was a member, and whose kings once received sacrifice of human heads on the slopes of a sacred mountain.
A tradition of the social group called Karumaetoa 41 concerning an ancestor named Tewatu or Towatu links itself usefully with the Keaki text, and emphasizes the association of cannibalism with the land of Matang. A free translation of the Karumaetoa narrative appears in Appendix 4, and will now be very shortly analyzed. The first five paragraphs of this story form an effective digest of the Keaki tradition concerning the invasion of Little Makin by the tropic-bird people, and confirm the account of their man-eating habits duly inhibited by Nei Tituaabine which we have already examined.
The text indeed adds somewhat to our knowledge of the invaders' movements before their onset upon the Northern Gilberts, by describing in figurative language paragraph 1 what seems to have been their unsuccessful attempt to establish themselves first upon the island of Beru. But as far as the mythical content of the narrative is concerned, it is interesting to note the Karumaetoa historian's complete silence as to the association of Koura and Nei Tituaabine with a pandanus tree.
The reason is, that the origin of the Keaki ancestral deities is no concern of Karumaetoa's: From paragraph 6 onward, the narrative is purely Karumaetoa history. Pandanus iceryi Horne ex Balf. Pandanus montanus Bory Pandanus multispicatus Balf. Kuntze [39] Pandanus palustris Thou. Pandanus parvicentralis Huynh Pandanus prostratus Balf. Pandanus pyramidalis Barkly ex Balf. Pandanus spathulatus Martelli Pandanus spiralis R. Stone Pandanus utilis Bory — common screwpine Pandanus vandermeeschii Balf. World Checklist of Selected Plant Families.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Retrieved 22 October Retrieved 18 December Retrieved 19 November European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy. Archived from the original on 25 October Retrieved 15 October New Papuan species in the section Microstigma collected by C. Archived from the original on Outlines of the Geography of Plants: Archived from the original PDF on 29 November Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Botany. Philippine Journal of Science. Lecciones de historia natural: Retrieved 28 April Pandan, the Asian Vanilla".
Roots of the Earth: Crops in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Retrieved 27 September Culture change, language change - case studies from Melanesia. Retrieved 25 October Retrieved 20 October Berkala Penelitian Hayati in Indonesian.
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Journal of the Polynesian Society. As of , all canoes on Satawal were using dacron sails sewn by the men themselves. Most Carolinian canoes had used canvas acquired during the Japanese presence in the islands. The people of Satawal, however, were reluctant to switch from the cumbersome pandanus-mat sails, probably because canoes and voyaging were included in the elaborate pre-Christian taboo system.
When I and Gary Mount, as Peace Corps volunteers, demonstrated the obvious superiority of dacron over canvas with only a 4-inch square sample, the men agreed to purchase sails for the canoes of the island. As word of the superiority of dacron spread, the people of Ifalik , Elato , Woleai , Pulusuk , Pulap and Puluwat have equipped at least one canoe on each island with dacron.
Cycad Burrawang nut Ginkgo nut Araucaria spp. Retrieved from " https: Pandanus Pandanales genera Medicinal plants. Archived copy as title CS1 maint: Uses authors parameter CS1 Indonesian-language sources id Articles with 'species' microformats All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from November Commons category link is on Wikidata. Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikispecies. This page was last edited on 6 December , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.