to his own house, where she was resuscitated. But far from
feeling grateful for her preservation, she loaded him with reproaches
and ever afterwards manifested the most deadly hatred towards him. "That
women should desire to accompany their husbands in death, is by no means
strange when it is considered that it is one of the articles of their
belief, that in this way alone can they reach the realms of bliss, and
she who meets her death with the greatest devotedness, will become the
favourite wife in the abode of spirits. The sacrifice is not, however,
always voluntary; but, when a woman refuses to be strangled, her
relations often compel her to submit. This they do from interested
motives; for, by her death, her connexions become entitled to the
property of her husband. Even a delay is made a matter of reproach.
Thus, at the funeral of the late king Ulivou, which was witnessed by Mr.
Cargill, his five wives and a daughter were strangled. The principal
wife delayed the ceremony, by taking leave of those around her;
whereupon Tanoa, the present king, chid her. The victim was his own
aunt, and he assisted in putting the rope around her neck, and
strangling her, a service he is said to have rendered on a former
occasion to his own mother."[684] In the case of men who were drowned at
sea or killed and eaten by enemies in war, their wives were sacrificed
in the usual way. Thus when Ra Mbithi, the pride of Somosomo, was lost
at sea, seventeen of his wives were destroyed; and after the news of a
massacre of the Namena people at Viwa in 1839 eighty women were
strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered husbands.[685]

[Sidenote: Human "grass" for the grave.]

The bodies of women who were put to death for this purpose were
regularly laid at the bottom of the grave to serve as a cushion for the
dead husband to lie upon; in this capacity they were called grass
(_thotho_), being compared to the dried grass which in Fijian houses
used to be thickly strewn on the floors and covered with mats.[686] On
this point, however, a nice distinction was observed. While wives were
commonly sacrificed at the death of their husbands, in order to be
spread like grass in their graves, it does not transpire that husbands
were ever sacrificed at the death of their wives for the sake of serving
as grass to their dead spouses in the grave. The great truth that all
flesh is grass appears to have been understood by the Fijians as
applicable chi