[Footnote 53: _The Polynesian Race_, pp. 44, 167, 168.]
[Footnote 54: This was the Fijian deluge. There are traditions of great floods within historical times. One of them, about 1793, purged the land of the great Lila epidemic. The waters rose over the housetops; hundreds were swept away, and the silt left by the receding waters raised the alluvial flats of the Rewa river several feet, a statement that is borne out by the fact that a network of mangrove roots underlies the alluvial soil at a depth of four or five feet. This flood was preceded by a great cyclone. Traditions of great floods are preserved by almost every primitive people.]
[Footnote 55: Dengei was supposed to inhabit a cavern in Nakauvandra.]
[Footnote 56: _Oliva_ is the name of Captain Olive, formerly Commandant of the Armed Constabulary; _virimbaita_ is "to hedge in." The other words mean nothing.]
[Footnote 57: The alignments at Carnac in Brittany and Merivale on Dartmoor are suggestive of the rites of the Mbaki.]
[Footnote 58: _Journal Anthrop. Instit._, Vol. xiv, p. 29.]
[Footnote 59: _Internationales Archiv. für Ethnographie_, Bd. II, 1889.]
[Footnote 60: Probably Nemani Ndreu, whose career I have described.]
[Footnote 61: Williams's _Fiji and the Fijians_, p. 224.]
[Footnote 62: Williams's _Fiji and the Fijians_, p. 224.]
[Footnote 63: Such a one was Kaikai of Singatoka, whose exploits as a prison-breaker were set forth in my _Indiscretions of Lady Asenath_.]
[Footnote 64: In 1902, under the flooring stones of a prehistoric kistvaen near the Sepulchral Circle on Pousson's Common, Dartmoor, two tresses of human hair were discovered, neatly coiled up. They were doubtless the record of witchcraft practised within the nineteenth century, on the same plan as that of the Fijians.]
[Footnote 65: _Nine Years at the Gold Coast_, by Rev. D. Kemp.]
[Footnote 66: _Campaigning on the Upper Nile and Niger_, by Lieut. Vandeleur.]
[Footnote 67: _East Africa_, by W. W. Fitzgerald.]
From the writings of early travellers it might be inferred that the Fijians practised polygamy to the same extent as the Arabs and other Mahommedan nations, but a moment's reflection will show that this was impossible. The high chiefs, it is true, were accustomed to cement alliances by taking a daughter of every new ally into their households, and these women with their handmaids, who were also the chief's potential concubines, swelled their harems inordinately; and as travellers were always the guests of the chiefs, and described things as they found them, these exceptional households were taken as fair samples of Fijian family life. But inasmuch as the Fijians could not draw upon other races for women, and the sexes of the children born throughout the group numbered about the same, to say nothing of the practice of female infanticide, it is obvious that for every addition to the chief's harem, some commoner had to go without a wife.