The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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Some Persons, It Does Not Appear Whether They Were English Or
American, Attempted His Conversion; But The Astute Savage, After
Listening to their eloquent statements of the power of faith,
pressed on them as a crucial test to throw themselves
From the top
of an adjacent precipice, making his reception of their religion
contingent on their arrival unhurt at its base. He built large
heiaus, amongst others the one at Kawaihae, at the dedication of
which to his favourite war god eleven human sacrifices were offered.
To the end he remained devoted to the state religion, and the last
instances of capital punishment for breaking tabu, a thraldom deeply
interwoven with the religious system, occurred in the last year of
his reign, when one man was put to death for putting on a chief's
girdle, another for eating of a tabooed dish, and a third for
leaving a house under tabu, and entering one which was not so.
His last prayers were to his great red-feathered god Kukailimoku,
and priests bringing idols crowded round him in his dying agony.
His last words were "Move on in my good way and" - In the death-
room the high chiefs consulted, and one, to testify his great grief,
proposed to eat the body raw, but was overruled by the majority. So
the flesh was separated from the bones, and they were tied up in
tapa, and concealed so effectually that they have never since been
found. A holocaust of three hundred dogs gave splendour to his
obsequies.
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