at Saa comes from his birth and personal qualities, not from his intimacy with supernatural beings and his magical knowledge; he may have these, and is in fact pretty sure to have them, but if one, like Dorawewe now, sacrifices for the family, it is not as chief, but because he has had the knowledge how to do it passed on to him. In the same way the chief curses in the name of a lio'a, powerful ghost, forbidding something to be done under the penalty of death, taboos, because of his ancestral connexion with that lio'a. He inherits wealth from his father, and adds to it by the fines he imposes and by the gifts of the people; but no wealth or success in war could make a man a chief at Saa if not born of the chief's family[1].
The hereditary element is not absent in the succession of chiefs in other islands, though it is by no means so operative as it appears to be. A story hereafter to be narrated illustrates the manner in which a man becomes a chief in Santa Cruz. The most conspicuous chief in Florida at the time and in the place in which Europeans became acquainted with that island was Takua of Boli, whose position it may be safely said was never so exalted in the eyes of the natives as in the eyes of their visitors. He was not a native of Florida but of Mala, and his greatness rested in its origin on a victory in which as a young man he took a principal part, when a confederation of enemies attacked the people of Ta na ihu in Florida, where he was then staying. His reputation for mana, spiritual power, was then established; and from that, as a member of a powerful family of the Nggaombata, with his brothers Sauvui and Dikea, his
- ↑ The word used to designate a chief in Malanta, Ulawa, and San Cristoval, ma'eraka, ma'elaha, means literally great death or war, and shews that to the native mind a chief is a warrior. It is customary both at Saa and in Arosi, San Cristoval, to adopt by purchase into the chief's family a boy who promises to be a stout warrior, and to bring him up to be the fighting man and champion of the town. Such a one I remember to have seen at Ubuna in Arosi, a dwarf, whom his purchasers had taken to be a remarkably strong and sturdy child, when he was really a boy much older than they thought. He turned out to be a maeraha indeed who scorned to use a shorter spear than full-grown men.
of the mother's brother to his nephew maintains itself where the system has become patriarchal.
