though it were but a single drop, it rendered the thing sacred
to him, so that it could be used by nobody else. Thus it once happened
that a party of natives came in a fine new canoe to pay their respects
to an eminent chief; the great man stepped into the canoe, and in doing
so he chanced to strike a splinter into his foot, which bled. That
sufficed to consecrate the canoe to him. The owner at once leaped out,
drew the canoe ashore opposite to the chief's house and left it
there.[114] Again, a Maori gentleman, visiting a missionary, knocked
his head against a beam in the house, and his sacred blood was spilt.
The natives present thereupon told the missionary that in former times
his house would after such an accident have belonged to his noble
visitor.[115] Even the cast garments of a chief had acquired, by contact
with his holy body, so virulent a degree of sanctity that they would
kill anybody else who might happen in ignorance to find and wear them.
On a journey, when a chief found his blanket too heavy to carry, he has
been known to throw it very considerately down a precipice where nobody
would be likely to light on it, lest some future traveller should be
struck dead by appropriating the sacred garment. Once a chief's lost
tinder-box actually caused the death of several persons; for having
found it and used it to light their pipes, they literally died of fright
on learning the sacrilege which they had committed.[116] Such fatal
effects consequent on the discovery of a breach of taboo were not
uncommon among the Maoris. For instance, a woman once ate some peaches
which, though she did not know it, had been taken from a tabooed place.
As soon as she heard where the fruit had come from, the basket which she
was carrying dropped from her hands, and she exclaimed in agony that the
spirit (_atua_) of the chief whose sanctuary had thus been profaned
would kill her. That happened in the afternoon, and next day by twelve
o'clock she was dead.[117] Again, a slave, a strong man in the prime of
life, once found the remains of a chief's dinner beside the road, and
being hungry ate it up without asking any questions. No sooner, however,
did he hear to whom the food had belonged than he was seized with the
most extraordinary convulsions and cramps in the stomach, which never
ceased till he died about sundown the same day. The English eyewitness
who reports the case adds, that any European freethinker who should have
denied that t