There dreadful human sacrifices were offered, concluded by cannibal feasts.

Whenever such a sacrifice was required, the priest and king despatched messengers to the chiefs of the districts around to inquire whether they had a broken calabash, or a rotten cocoa-nut.

These terms indicated a man whom they would be willing to give up.

The victim was then either knocked down with a blow of a small stone at the back of his head, or else speared in his own house; and when one man of a family had thus been sacrificed, all the rest had the same horrid preference.
The last human victim of Tahiti was verily a martyr.

He was designated because he had begun to pray.