Cannibalism

"My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire."

"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."

"Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: "In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children." ... People ate their own relatives – often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet... Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh."

"I told her, "Mother, we had to eat our dead friends", ... and she said, "That's okay, that's okay, sweetie"."

"I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about two hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet."

"First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could of [sic] had I wished. She died a virgin."

"In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to $3 a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh."

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

"But why does Tararo frown and look so angry?" said I."Because the girl's somewhat obstinate, like most o' the sex, an' won't marry the man he wants her to. It seems that a chief of some other island came on a visit to Tararo and took a fancy to her, but she wouldn't have him on no account, bein' already in love, and engaged to a young chief whom Tararo hates, and she kicked up a desperate shindy; so, as he was going on a war expedition in his canoe, he left her to think about it, sayin' he'd be back in six months or so, when he hoped she wouldn't be so obstropolous. This happened just a week ago; an' Tararo says that if she's not ready to go, when the chief returns, as his bride, she'll be sent to him as a long pig.""As a long pig!" I exclaimed in surprise; "why what does he mean by that?""He means somethin' very unpleasant", answered Bill with a frown. "You see these blackguards eat men an' women just as readily as they eat pigs; and, as baked pigs and baked men are very like each other in appearance, they call men long pigs. If Avatea goes to this fellow as a long pig, it's all up with her, poor thing."

"Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras."

"He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month."

"He showed me, locked up in a house, a group of young girls who had been caught on another island and who were kept and fattened for the next cannibal feast. It had just been decided that this feast would take place the same day on the occasion of our presence in Malaita. The girls were no doubt aware that their last hour was soon to come.... They seemed to accept the situation with great resignation."

"Mr. Gillan, the missionary at Uripiv, told me that he knew of a vendetta between two villages which had been closed, not as is usual by the payment of pigs, but by the sending of a small boy as sacrifice; and who, he concluded, was afterwards eaten."

"They made no secret of their relish for human flesh. At one place of call where we were landing ..., the savages brought down quite a quantity of the flesh of a young woman whom they had just cooked. In offering parts for sale, they said that if we white men did not like to eat it possibly some of our native boatmen would enjoy it."

"Sometimes even the victim was not killed, but was placed bound and alive in the oven; and their fiendish revenge, not being satisfied by the mere death of its object, tortures too horrible to describe were often inflicted – frequently a living man having to eat part of his own body before death was allowed to end his sufferings.... Women were not allowed to partake of the awful banquet, yet women were considered better for cooking than men, and the thighs and arms the best portions. So delicious was human flesh considered, that the highest praise that they could give to other food was to say, "It is as good as bakolo.""

"The expression "long pig" is not a joke, not a phrase invented by Europeans, but one frequently used by the Fijians, who looked upon a corpse as ordinary butcher's meat, and call a human body puaku balava, "long pig", in contradistinction to puaka dina, or "real pig". The flesh was never eaten raw, but was either baked whole in the ovens, or cut up and stewed in the large earthen pots that they use for cooking.... If a man was to be cooked whole, they would paint and decorate his face as though he were alive, and ... the corpse ... was placed in a sitting position, and ... handed over to the cooks, who prepared it and placed it in the oven, filling the inside of the body with hot stones, so that he would be well cooked all through."

"I stopped to gratify my curiosity, there being a fleshy smell rising from an oven. I opened the latter, and there saw a female child half roasted. The skull had been stove in, the whole of the inside cleaned out and refilled with red hot stones. The hideous habit of murdering, and eating, the little girls is carried on far more in these jungles than in any other part of the colonies, which accounts for the female children being so scarce. One of the Mourilyan aborigines informed me that they catch the unsuspecting child by the legs and bash its head against a tree; also that a piccaninny makes quite a delicious meal – he had assisted in eating many."

"It will give some idea of the state of these people if I give a story which was told me on April 3 in the most matter-of-fact way, as though it was something of quite ordinary occurrence. It was reported without any feeling of reprobation on the part of my informant. He said that some time ago a poor man drifted to this island in a canoe. The chief saw him outside, and went off and rescued him. He was in a very deplorable state from starvation and exposure; but the chief took him to his home, gave him food, and, some time afterwards, when he was recovered, took him to the place where the dances were usually held, and where one was being carried on at the time. As the people were dancing the poor castaway asked one of them, "Why is this dancing? Is there some pig to be eaten?" "Oh no," they replied, "there is no pig, but we are going to eat you after the dance." And they did so that same day!"

"This village (Kuras) is the place where they were cooking a man a few yards distant from the place where I was sitting on my first visit here."

"Cannibalism is a luxury, not an ordinary practice; but Buckley mentions a tribe called the Pallidurgbarrans, who eat human flesh whenever they get a chance, and employ human kidney fat, not as a charmed unguent for the increase of their valour, but as a sort of Dundee marmalade, viz., "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast." These gentlemen are the colour of "light copper, their bodies having tremendously large and protruding bellies." They ate so many natives at last that war was declared, and some inglorious Pelissier drove a few hundred of them into a cave, and setting fire to the surrounding bush, suffocated them with great success."

"You foreigners have salt beef to eat when you sail about; we have no beef, and therefore make use of human flesh."

"This morning we witnessed a shocking spectacle. 20 dead bodies of men, women, & children were brought to Rewa as a present to Tui Dreketi from Tanoa. They were distributed among the people to be cooked and eaten.... The children amused themselves by ... mutilating the body of a little girl.... Human entrails were floating down the river in front of the mission premises, mutilated limbs, heads and trunks of the bodies of human beings have been floating about, & scenes of disgust and horror have been presented to our view in every direction."

"Early on Sunday morning the cooked human flesh was carried past the Mission house in a canoe.... Truly the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty."

"Fiji, cannibal Fiji! Pity, O pity, cannibal Fiji!"

"A Maori relating an account of an expedition said, incidentally. "On the way I was speaking to a red-haired girl who had just been caught out in the open.... As we came back, I saw the head of the red-haired girl lying in the ferns by the side of the track. Further on, we overtook one of the Waihou men carrying a back-load of the flesh, which he was taking to our camp to cook for food. The arms of the girl were round his neck, whilst the body was on his back." If one can mentally picture the scene, with the man striding along, carrying the headless, disembowelled trunk of the naked girl, enough of this kind of horror will have been evoked."

"One of the latest cannibal feasts of consequence was held at Ohariu, near Wellington, when 150 of the Muaupoko tribe went into the ovens. When the Maoris overcame the gentle Morioris of the Chatham Islands, not only did they keep the captives penned up like live-stock waiting to be killed and eaten, but one of the leading chiefs of the invaders ordered a meal of six children at once to be cooked to regale his friends."

"Killing people is as easy as killing pigs. Children cry out for help but no one answers them. They are killed with a knife since meat has become more valuable than human life."

"The Shanxi poet Wang Xilun... describ[ed] in an essay how children whose starving parents had abandoned them in ditches were slaughtered and eaten by other famine victims as though they were sheep or pigs."

"A young Basongo chief came to our Commandant while at dinner in his tent and asked for the loan of his knife, which, without thinking, the Commandant gave him. He immediately disappeared behind the tent and cut the throat of a little slave-girl belonging to him, and was in the act of cooking her when one of our soldiers saw him.... This cannibal was put in irons, but [shortly after his liberation] he was brought in by some of our Hausa soldiers, who said that he was eating the children in and about our cantonments. He had a bag slung round his neck, which on examining we found contained an arm and a leg of a young child."

"A woman [is sold for the price of two goats]. A man [brings the price of three goats], or four if he is plenty large... If there is as much to eat on a man as on three goats, he brings the price of three goats... as the point of view of the final purchaser determines the price, and the consumers are cannibals, the price of a man is generally determined by the amount of meat on him."

"I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke ..., but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old at the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell. Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest ... that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me... When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it."

"Many's the poor devil I've killed, at one time or another – and the time has been that I've been obliged to feed on some of 'em."

"Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on the spit and eat him with relish. "Oh, how mistaken they are", the Hungarian observed, "to disdain this meat, there's nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise savages understand who have such a predilection for it." "That", said Voldomir, "is simply another of your European absurdities: after having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being...""

"Comme je mange ce que je fouts, cela m'évite la peine d'avoir un boucher."

"Je ne me nourris que de chair humaine; j'espère que vous serez contens du régal que je compte vous en faire, et l'on a tué pour notre souper un jeune garçon de quinze ans, que je foutis hier, et qui doit être délicieux."

"I was surprised one morning early, with seeing no less than five canoes all on shore together, on my side the island.... I observed, by the help of my perspective glass, that they were no less than thirty in number; that they had a fire kindled, and that they had had meat dressed; how they cooked it, that I knew not, or what it was; but they were all dancing in I know not how many barbarous gestures and figures, their own way, round the fire. When I was thus looking on them, I perceived by my perspective two miserable wretches dragged from the boats, where, it seems, they were laid by, and were now brought out for the slaughter: I perceived one of them immediately fall, being knocked down, I suppose, with a club or wooden sword, for that was their way; and two or three others were at work immediately, cutting him open for their cookery, while the other victim was left standing by himself, till they should be ready for him."

"Pigs, too frequent at our table... are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast, or any other publick entertainment."

"As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs."

"A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter."

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

"When Great Britain was first visited by the Phoenicians, the inhabitants were painted savages, much less civilized than those of Tongataboo, or Ota-heite; and it is not impossible, but that our late voyages may, in process of time, spread the blessings of civilization amongst the numerous islanders of the South Pacific Ocean, and be the means of abolishing their abominable repasts, and almost equally abominable sacrifices."

"A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had."

"If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses, It will come: Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep."

"... The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd, As thou my sometime daughter."

"The Cannibals and savage people do not so much offend me with roasting and eating of dead bodies, as those which torment and persecute the living."

"I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive, then to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and tear him... (as we have not only read, but seen very lately..., not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of piety and religion) then to roast and tear him after he is dead."

"During the Ch'ing period, Chi Hsiao-lan, a great Confucian scholar, in his Yüeh Wei Ts'ao T'ang Pi Chi (Diary at the Small Thatched-roof House), described stories of famine and cannibalism in the northwestern parts of China (Shensi Province). The sale of human meat at open markets and its consumption among the people in this region were so common that the government officially sanctioned this inhumane transaction to stave off food shortage. Those who dealt in this business were known as people cooking human meat (ts'ai-jen); their profession was to kill people and sell their meat for food. The most famous story is about a traveler and a woman. A traveler heard a screaming voice from inside a restaurant. He went in and found a woman, totally naked, who was being washed and put on the board to be butchered for food. He was shocked at the scene, and he decided to save her life because she was so young and beautiful. So he tried to buy her from the butcher; he offered to pay double the price, hoping to make her his wife. Knowing of his motive, she declined the offer with thanks because she was already married to another man. She said, however, that she was willing to work for him as a slave servant for the rest of her life. In short, she could not compromise morality for life. Finally, she was butchered and her meat was cooked and sold for food."

"They have shambles for human flesh as we have of animals, even eating the enemies they have killed in battle, and selling their slaves if they can get a good price for them; if not, they give them to the butcher, who cuts them in pieces, and then sells them to be roasted or boiled. It is a remarkable fact in the history of this people, that any who are tired of life, or wish to prove themselves brave and courageous, esteem it great honor to expose themselves to death by an act which shall show their contempt for life. Thus they offer themselves for slaughter, and as the faithful vassals of princes, wishing to do them service, not only give themselves to be eaten, but their slaves also, when fattened, are killed and eaten. It is true many nations eat human flesh, as in the East Indies, Brazil, and elsewhere, but to devour the flesh of their own enemies, friends, subjects, and even relations, is a thing without example, except amongst the Anzichi tribes."

"(after seeing how a prisoner was killed and dismembered) The cut-off flesh, once boiled, is put into the pepperpot and eaten as good food. I have spoken to two Christians who had tried it and declared it tasted very nice."