Feeding small boys to large cephalopods
Something I'm sorely tempted to do this morning following an incident we won't go into, but which involved deliberately making holes in someone else's lunchbag water bottle...
Couldn't resist sharing a Pacific island version of the Kraken.
'It is not an ordinary kwita [octopus] of exceptional size, but a special one, so gigantic that it would cover a whole village with its body; its arms are thick as coco-nut palms, stretching right across the sea... ... One of the old men of Sinaketa tells how, coming from Dobu, when he was quite young, he sailed in a canoe ahead of the fleet, some canoes being to the right and some to the left behind him. Suddenly from his canoe, they saw the giant kwita right in front of them.... ..... At once they turned round, and the fleet divided into two, took big bends in their course, and thus gave the octopus a wide berth. For woe to the canoe caught by the giant kwita! It would be held fast, unable to move for days, till the crew, dying of hunger and thirst, would decide to sacrifice one of the small boys of their number. Adorned with valuables, he would be thrown overboard, and then the kwita, satisfied, would let go its hold of the canoe, and set it free. Once a native, asked why a grown-up would not be sacrificed on such an occasion, gave me the answer:
"A grown-up man would not like it; a boy has got no mind. We take him by force and throw him to the kwita."'
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Routledge, 1922, p. 234.
I wonder if Jack knew about that...
Couldn't resist sharing a Pacific island version of the Kraken.
'It is not an ordinary kwita [octopus] of exceptional size, but a special one, so gigantic that it would cover a whole village with its body; its arms are thick as coco-nut palms, stretching right across the sea... ... One of the old men of Sinaketa tells how, coming from Dobu, when he was quite young, he sailed in a canoe ahead of the fleet, some canoes being to the right and some to the left behind him. Suddenly from his canoe, they saw the giant kwita right in front of them.... ..... At once they turned round, and the fleet divided into two, took big bends in their course, and thus gave the octopus a wide berth. For woe to the canoe caught by the giant kwita! It would be held fast, unable to move for days, till the crew, dying of hunger and thirst, would decide to sacrifice one of the small boys of their number. Adorned with valuables, he would be thrown overboard, and then the kwita, satisfied, would let go its hold of the canoe, and set it free. Once a native, asked why a grown-up would not be sacrificed on such an occasion, gave me the answer:
"A grown-up man would not like it; a boy has got no mind. We take him by force and throw him to the kwita."'
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Routledge, 1922, p. 234.
I wonder if Jack knew about that...