The other
females "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting
the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down
their cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the rites
were ended, these women "were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had
returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being "obliged by
custom" to mourn day and night.
"The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the
deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all
armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon
it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled
to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed
from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the
wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was
thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of
their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture
until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself
almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely
to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they
dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody
quarrels."
Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply
a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival
of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or
otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the
world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old
Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the
Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African
countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New
Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various
other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.
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