ial prosperity.
"The priests only," we are told, "can impose a general taboo, but every
individual has a right to pronounce one upon his own property: this is
done by declaring, if his wish be to preserve a breadfruit, or a cocoa
tree, a house or a plantation, from robbery and destruction, that the
spirit of his father or of some king, or indeed of any other person,
reposes in this tree, or house, which then bears the name of the person,
and nobody ventures to attack it. If any one is so irreligious as to
break through a taboo, and should be convicted of it, he is called
_kikino_; and the _kikinos_ are always the first to be devoured by the
enemy, at least they believe it to be so, nor is it impossible that the
priests should so arrange matters as that this really happens."[66]
Again, if a man's pig had been stolen, and he suspected who had done the
deed, he would lay a taboo on the swine or other property of the thief
by giving his own name, or the name of somebody else, to the animals or
the trees or whatever it might be. After that, in the opinion of the
people, the property so named was bewitched or haunted by the spirit of
the person, whether alive or dead, whose name it bore; and this belief
sometimes sufficed to compel the thief to abandon his possessions and to
settle elsewhere.[67] A wreath of leaves or a strip of white cloth
attached to a house, a canoe, a fruit-tree, or other piece of property,
was the symbol of taboo, and in ordinary circumstances was enough to
protect it.[68]

[66] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 172. In this quotation I have
altered the spelling _tahbu_ into _taboo_.

[67] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 116.

[68] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 157; Melville, _Typee_, p. 230;
Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 264.

But the taboo was an instrument which could be used capriciously to
thwart, as well as to further, the course of justice. Thus we read how,
under the French government of the islands, a wife set out for the
police-office to complain of the ill-treatment to which she had been
subjected by her husband. But scarcely had she put her foot outside the
door, when her husband, aware of her intention and determined to
frustrate it, called out after her, "The road from here to the
police-office is your father." On hearing that, the woman at once
stopped short, for under no circumstances would she dare to trample on
the author of her being. On the contrary, she immedia