Chapter VI
), when the natives assembled in big numbers, and various festivities took place. Afterwards when everything was ready for sailing, a similar crowd gathered on the beach, though less numerous than the previous one, for only the neighbouring villages were there instead of the whole district. The chief addressed the crowd, enjoining strict taboos on strangers entering the village while the men were away. Such taboos, on the surface at least, are very carefully kept, as I had opportunities to observe during the two previous absences of To'uluwa. Early in the evening, everybody retired into his or her house, the outside fires were extinguished and when I walked through the village, it was quite deserted and except for a few old men specially keeping watch, no one was to be seen. Strangers would be careful not to pass even through the outskirts of the village after sunset, and would take another road to avoid the grove of Omarakana.
Even men from the sister-village of Kasana'i were excluded from entering the capital, and on one occasion when two or three of them wanted to visit their friends, they were stopped from doing it by some of the old men, with a considerable display of indignation and authority. As it happened, a day or two afterwards, but still while the Kula party were away, one of the favourite sons of To'uluwa, called Nabwasu'a, who had not gone on the expedition, was caught in flagrante delicto of adultery with the youngest wife of the very old chief of Kasana'i. The people of the latter village were highly incensed, not without an admixture of malicious amusement. One of these who had been expelled two nights before from Omarakana took a conch shell and with its blast announced to the wide world the shame and scandal of Omarakana. As a conch shell is blown only on very important and ceremonial occasion, this was a slap in the face of the supposedly virtuous community, and a reproach of its hypocrisy. A man of Kasana'i, speaking in a loud voice, addressed the people of Omarakana:--
"You don't allow us to enter your village; you call us adulterous (tokaylasi); but we wanted only to go and visit our friends. And look here, Nabwasu'a committed adultery in our village!"
The uvalaku party, to whom we now return, would cross the sea in a few hours and arrive in Kitava. Their manner of sailing, the arrangement of men in the canoe, the taboos of sailing are the same as in Sinaketa. My knowledge of their canoe magic is much smaller than of that in Southern Boyowa, but I think they have got far fewer rites. The sailing on these seas is on the whole easier, for there are fewer reefs, and the two prevailing winds would either bring them towards the Eastern islands, or push them back towards the long coast of Boyowa. The natives of Kiriwina are on the other hand far less expert sailors than the Sinaketans.
They have the same beliefs about the dangers at sea, especially about the participation of the flying witches in shipwreck. The history of such a calamity and the means of escape from it, given in one of the foregoing chapters (