day perform the kayga’u in the village during a burial, and affirm that the mulukwausi are in a mist, though obviously a perfectly clear atmosphere surrounds the whole proceedings. The natives will tell how, sailing on a windy but clear day, after a kayga’u has been recited into the eye of the wind, they hear the shrieks of the mulukwausi , who, losing their companions and the scent of the trail, hail one another in the dark. Again, some expressions seem to represent the view that it is mainly an action on the eyes of the witches. ‘ Idudubila matala mulukwausi ,’—‘It darkens the eyes of the mulukwausi,’ or ‘ iguyugwayu ’—‘It blinds,’ the natives will say. And when asked:
“What do the *mulukwausi* see, then?” they will answer: “They will see mist only. They do not see the places, they do not see the men, only mist.”
Thus here, as in all cases of belief, there is a certain latitude, within which the opinions and views may vary, and only the broad outline, which surrounds them, is definitely fixed by tradition, embodied in ritual, and expressed by the phraseology of magical formulæ or by the statements of a myth.
I have thus defined the manner in which the natives face the dangers of the sea; we have found, that the fundamental conceptions underlying this attitude are, that in shipwreck, men are entirely in the hands of the witches, and that from this, only their own magical defence can save them. This defence consists in the rites and formulæ of the kayga’u, of which we have also learnt the leading principles. Now, a consecutive description must be given of how this magic is performed when a toliwaga sets out on an expedition. And following up this expedition, it must be told how the natives imagine a shipwreck, and what they believe the behaviour of the shipwrecked party would be.
III
I shall give this narrative in a consecutive manner, as it was told to me by some of the most experienced and renowned Trobriand sailors in Sinaketa, Oburaku, and Omarakana. We can imagine that exactly such a narrative would be told by a veteran toliwaga to his usagelu on the beach of Yakum, as our Kula party sit round the camp fires at night. One of the old men, well-known for the excellence of his kayga’u, and boastful of it, would tell his story, entering minutely into all the details, however often the others might have heard about them before, or even assisted at the performance of his magic. He would then proceed to describe, with extreme realism, and dwelling graphically on every point, the story of a shipwreck, very much as if he had gone through one himself. As a matter of fact, no one alive at present has had any personal experience of such a catastrophe, though many have lived through frequent narrow escapes in stormy weather. Based on this, and on what they have heard themselves of the tradition of shipwrecks, natives will tell the story with characteristic vividness. Thus, the account given below is not only a summary of native belief, it is an ethnographic document in itself, representing the manner in which such type of narrative would be told over camp fires, the same subject being over and over again repeated by the same man, and listened to by the same audience, exactly as we, when children, or the peasants of Eastern Europe, will hearken to familiar fairy tales and Märchen. The only deviation here from what would actually take place in such a story-telling, is the insertion of magical formulæ into the narrative. The speaker might indeed repeat his magic, were he speaking in broad daylight, in his village, to a group of close kinsmen and friends. But being on a small island in the middle of the ocean, and at night, the recital of spells would be a taboo of the kayga’u; nor would a man ever recite his magic before a numerous audience, except on certain occasions at mortuary vigils, where people are expected to chant their magic aloud before hundreds of listeners.