chap, xxvii A RELAPSE INTO SAVAGERY 307
as I have already said,1
they merely squeeze them to exclude the digested matter and then eat
them. Most of the women bind these entrails, when dried, round their
legs, especially those of wild beasts which their husbands slay in the
woods, and they wear them as ornaments. They also eat turtles after
they have roasted them for a short time, so that the shells can be
removed. Th«y are very skilful in hurling the assegai, a kind of dart,
and those who have not got one, use a stick an inch thick, of a very
hard wood, and of the same length as the dart. They make a point on it
and hurl it to a considerable distance with their hands. They take
these sticks with them to the margin of the sea, and as soon as a fish
comes to the surface they do not fail to transfix it.
As
for those birds which are like our ducks, their eggs contain no yolk ;
there are a great number in the country, and in a bay which is eighteen
miles from the Cape they are killed with blows of a stick.2
During
the time while M. Vandime was General, the Dutch captured a young Cafre
boy at the Cape and sent him to Batavia. The General took great pains
to have him instructed in languages, so that in seven or eight years he
learned Dutch and Portuguese in perfection. He then wished to return to
his country, and the General not desiring to constrain him to remain,
equipped him with linen and clothes, thinking that when he arrived at
the Cape he would live like the Dutchmen, and would aid them in
obtaining supplies for their vessels whenever they arrived. But he was
no sooner at the Cape than he threw his garments into the sea and fled
with the other blacks, eating raw flesh as before, and since then he
has remained with them without having any intercourse with the Dutch.3
1 See above p. 302. * See i. 174, ii. 302.
3
Some curious examples of this kind of speedy relapse into savagery,
after a long course of education from infancy, have occurred among the
inhabitants of the Andaman islands. A good ease of a similar reversion
to savagery is that of Billy Button, told by Charles Darwin (Voyage of a Naturalist, chap. x). Miss Gordon Cumming gives instances of the same kind in Eiji (At Home in Fiji). The question forms the subject of a story by Grant Allen, ' The Reverend John Creedy ' (Strange Stories, 1892).
x 2
