flesh, dripping with hot oil, and which I took to be part of an eel for the moment, but only for a moment, as I suddenly divined that the steaming pot contained a mess of stewed snakes. The chief handed me the piece he had fished up, and I took it and tasted it, and, finding it palatable in itself, although the grease it had been cooked in was nauseating, I managed to get it down, but respectfully declined a repeat.[1]
The appetite of my host was, as Dominie Sampson would have said, prodigious! Having lived for weeks on bad salt junk and rotten biscuit, I was in a condition to do full and ample justice to the good things spread before me. And I am satisfied that I did so; but it was nothing, a mere picking, a mouthful, when compared with what the chief stowed away. He gorged to such an extent that I almost expected to see him roll over in a fit of apoplexy. But the capacity of his stomach was apparently unlimited. And at each fresh bout he came up smiling, until there was little left to eat, and that little was distributed to the crowd outside, who snarled and wrangled for the pieces like angry wolves.
"I wandered about the village."
When the important ceremony of dining was over, I rose with a tighter waistband than I had had for weeks; and I gave my entertainer to understand that I should like to see the village. Thereupon he gave some instructions, and led the way outside, and I wandered about the village for some little time. The huts I noted were built in clusters. They were formed by digging a pit that was plastered with wet mud like cement, and allowed to dry in the sun. Then above this pit was reared a roof of sticks and leaves, the top being rounded off
- ↑ On mentioning this circumstance of the dish of stewed snakes some months later to friends of mine in China, they insisted that I must have been mistaken, as none of the South Sea Islanders were snake-eaters. But that some of the tribes do eat snakes has been amply proved since by Mr. C. M. Woodford, who visited the Solomon Group of Islands several times, and lived for months on some of the smaller islands. It appears that it is only certain tribes who eat the snakes; and they are held in contempt by the other tribes who do not use snakes. After my friends so persistently averred that I was mistaken, I came to that conclusion myself; but now I have no longer a doubt that I partook of boiled snake on that memorable day, and, as far as I remember, I found it a toothsome dish, but I bar the oil it was cooked in. That oil, I believe, was made from the blubber of shark.—The Author.
