But in a greater or less degree this was the ever-recurring story, and the days of joy and rejoicing for men, women, and little children, were those on which canoes arrived bringing _bokola_, which were thrown into the sea and ignominiously dragged ashore with shouts of joy, and made the occasion for wild orgies and mad dances of death. It was only people who had been killed that were considered good for food. Those who died a natural death were never eaten,—invariably buried. But it certainly is a wonder that the isles were not altogether depopulated, owing to the number who were killed. Thus in Namena, in the year 1851, fifty bodies were cooked for one feast. And when the men of Bau were at war with Verata, they carried off 260 bodies, seventeen of which were piled on a canoe and sent to Rewa, where they were received with wild joy, dragged about the town, and subjected to every species of indignity ere they finally reached the ovens. Then, too, just think of the number of lives sacrificed in a country where infanticide was a recognised institution, and where widows were strangled as a matter of course! Why, on one occasion, when there had been a horrible massacre of Namena people at Viwa, and upwards of one hundred fishermen had been murdered and their bodies carried as _bokola_ to the ovens at Bau, no less than eighty women were strangled to do honour to the dead, and the corpses lay strewn in every direction round the mission station! It is just thirty years since the Rev. John Watsford, writing from here, describes how twenty-eight victims had been seized in one day while fishing. They were brought here alive, and only stunned when they were put into the ovens. Some of the miserable creatures attempted to escape from the scorching bed of red-hot stones, but only to be driven back and buried in that living tomb, whence they were taken a few hours later to feast their barbarous captors. He adds, that probably more human beings were eaten on this little isle of Bau than anywhere else in Fiji. It is very hard indeed to realise that the peaceful village on which I am now looking has really been the scene of such horrors as these, and that many of the gentle, kindly people round me have actually taken part in them.