Garry Hogg - Cannibalism And Human Sacrifice

[dem bones]

Garry Hogg - Cannibalism And Human Sacrifice (Pan, 1973: originally Robert Hale, 1958)

From the blurb:

"When a taste for human flesh is once indulged, such taste quickly develops into a fierce and eventually unappeasable lust"

And then there's the introduction ...

Material was forthcoming in the unlikeliest places - much of it in the form of diaries and letters written by missionaries in ink that would often seem to have been home made and on flimsy paper stained by damp, by seawater, by rough handling by messengers on land and crews on the packed boats that brought such missives back to England a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. Many of these were deeply moving: to read between the lines written with these spidery pens was a sobering experience. More than one of the writers had just seen their wives and children brutally massacred and worse, and well knew that a like fate probably awaited them too ....

You can almost see those doomed missionaries boiling in huge pots, scribbling down their sensations as the natives lob in a few carrots, can't you? One of those books where the blurb is shorthand for "buy me, you sick bastard!", and far be it from me to resist such a come-on.

Hogg collects tales of headhunting, grave robbing cannibals from all points of the globe bar Europe, and the fact that, in some cases, all this human-roasting is actually tied in with skewed (to us) Religious beliefs just about qualifies it for this section. My favourite of the adventurers who made it their business to visit such then no-go areas as Fiji and observe the ghouls at play is unquestionably Alfred St. Johnston, author of Camping Among Cannibals (MacMillan, 1883) who, as Hogg observes, is maybe a little too regretful that he never got to join in the feast ....