The sacrifices of the Fijians are of a costlier character. The Fijian chiefs had from twenty to a hundred wives, according to their rank; and at the interment of a principal chief, the body was laid in state "upon a spacious lawn," in the presence of a great crowd of interested spectators. After the natives had exercised all the taste and skill at their command in adorning her person, the principal wife would walk out and take her seat near her husband's body. A rope was passed round her neck; eight or ten powerful men pulled at it with all their strength until she died of suffocation; and the body was then laid by that of the chief. This done, a second wife seated herself in the same place; the process of strangulation was repeated, and she, too, died. A third and a fourth became voluntary sacrifices in the same manner; and all were interred in a common grave, one above, one below, and one on either side of the husband. The motive of this barbarous practice was said to be, that the spirit of the chief might not be lonely in its passage to the invisible world, and that by such an offering its happiness might be at once secured.[55]
The Earl of Pembroke, in his light, gossipy book entitled, "South Sea Bubbles," describes a visit which he paid to one of the old sacrificial _maraes_, or inclosures, in the island of Raiatea.
"Strange places they were," he says; "built of enormous slabs of rock or coral, arranged in an oblong shape, and the space inside them filled with shingle and coral, so as to form a platform about eight feet high. I think the largest was about fifty yards long; we scrambled up on to it by help of a tree, and stood on the spot stained with so much blood shed in the _name_ of religion. What horrible stories those stones could tell if they could speak!...
"What made the human sacrifices of the Society Islands so strangely ghastly and horrible, was the fact that the wretched victim was always chosen from one of certain families, set apart for that special purpose for generation after generation for ever. How this caste originated I do not know. Many of these families used to put to sea secretly in canoes, preferring an almost certain death by drowning or starvation to the terribly uncertain fate that was always hanging over their heads.