k, had the power of life
and death; even whites seem to have possessed it; and their wives, when
they had transgressed beyond forgiveness, made haste to pronounce the
formula of deprecation--_I Kana Kim_. This form of words had so much
virtue that a condemned criminal, repeating it on a particular day to
the king who had condemned him, must be instantly released. It is an
offer of abasement, and, strangely enough, the reverse--the
imitation--is a common vulgar insult in Great Britain to this day. I
give a scene between a trader and his Gilbert Island wife, as it was
told me by the husband, now one of the oldest residents, but then a
freshman in the group.

"Go and light a fire," said the trader, "and when I have brought this
oil I will cook some fish."

The woman grunted at him, island fashion.

"I am not a pig that you should grunt at me," said he.

"I know you are not a pig," said the woman, "neither am I your slave."

"To be sure you are not my slave, and if you do not care to stop with
me, you had better go home to your people," said he. "But in the
meantime go and light the fire; and when I have brought this oil I will
cook some fish."

She went as if to obey; and presently when the trader looked she had
built a fire so big that the cook-house was catching in flames.

"_I Kana Kim!_" she cried, as she saw him coming; but he recked not, and
hit her with a cooking-pot. The leg pierced her skull, blood spouted, it
was thought she was a dead woman, and the natives surrounded the house
in a menacing expectation. Another white was present, a man of older
experience. "You will have us both killed if you go on like this," he
cried. "She had said, _I Kana Kim_!" If she had not said _I Kana Kim_ he
might have struck her with a caldron. It was not the blow that made the
crime, but the disregard of an accepted formula.

Polygamy, the particular sacredness of wives, their semi-servile state,
their seclusion in kings' harems, even their privilege of biting, all
would seem to indicate a Mohammedan society and the opinion of the
soullessness of woman. And not so in the least. It is a mere appearance.
After you have studied these extremes in one house, you may go to the
next and find all reversed, the woman the mistress, the man only the
first of her thralls. The authority is not with the husband as such, nor
the wife as such. It resides in the chief or the chief-woman; in him or
her who has inherited the lands of the clan