Cook Islands Cookin'

Wednesday, inshallah, I will be en route for the Cook Islands.

This is how the islanders used to look before the killjoy missionaries came and asked them to cut their hair, remove the knives from their ears, stop taking multiple wives/husbands, eating people and chewing kava.

Maretu (b. 1802), an islander who became a missionary, tells in his somewhat boring book, Cannibals and Converts, how, as a child, he once stole the head of a cooked human that was by rights his father's, and secreted it away so he wouldn't have to share.

Now they do a brisk business in tourism and have rousing church services.