Musing on "Dignam's potted meat," Bloom thinks of people who
actually do consume human flesh: "Cannibals would with lemon
and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork." His
thoughts here draw on a host of 19th century reports of South
Seas cannibalism, in places like Fiji, Sumatra, New Guinea,
New Zealand, and Australia.
Gifford calls the "too salty" idea a "Legendary (and
quasi-cynical) explanation for the survival of missionaries."
However legendary some of the stories may be, Bloom is
accurately reflecting a number of accounts of Pacific island
cannibalism that appeared in the English-language press. On
the James Joyce Online Notes website, Harald Beck
cites one instance of the idea that cannibals spice human
flesh with lemon juice, in a history of Sumatra that was
reproduced in an 1814 issue of Evangelism Magazine and
Missionary Chronicle: "When mortally wounded, they run
up to him as if in a transport of passion, cut pieces from the
body with their knives,—dip them in a dish of salt,
lemon-juice, and red pepper,—slightly broil them over a fire
prepared for the purpose,—and swallow the morsels with a
degree of savage enthusiasm."
Beck identifies numerous sources for the idea that white
men's flesh was considered too salty. The Diary of a
Working Clergyman in Australia and Tasmania (1859)
contains this entry from 1852, which was reproduced in the 30
June 1859 Irish Times: "This is the first time I
could ever get a confession of cannibalism out of a native. I
have been told that the blacks cannot endure a
white man's flesh. They say that it tastes very
salty, and is highly flavoured with tobacco" (170).
The 24 November 1871 New York Times reproduced an
account of practices on Fiji from another published source:
"At these disgusting carnivals the bodies of native boys of
twelve to fourteen years of age only are eaten. From earliest
childhood these subjects are fattened for the horrid feast. .
. . The native boy flesh is for the palates of the Chiefs
only. That of the white man is considered too salty
and smoky, and is not regarded as toothsome."
Such reports continued into the 1880s, when Bloom was a young
man, although Beck does not cite any published in Ireland. The
1887-88 Transactions of the Annual Meetings of the Kansas
Academy of Science published a report by Joseph Savage
called "The Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand,"
containing the following: "Mr. Snow called a congress of these
ex-cannibals, and they told him of their former ways of
living, killing their enemies and afterwards eating them; all
of which we will omit, except this: That white men
and sliced missionary were too salty for their taste."
The Pall Mall Gazette of 10 September 1889 printed
a story under the headline “Among the Man-Eaters of North
Queensland,” which noted that "when you call them cannibals
you must remember that human flesh is a very rare luxury, for
they only eat foreign tribes. Native tribes, I mean,
for the flesh of the white man is nasty to their palate. He
has a salty flavour, which is very disagreeable to them."
The same article continues: "I never saw a cannibal feast, but
every night in their huts the talk was of women and human
flesh. . . . I gathered that white man was no good –
too salty. Chinaman was not half bad. He fed on
rice and had a tender vegetable flavour about him, like a
mealy cauliflower. But of all varieties there was nothing so
sweet as a native baby – so sweet, so juicy, so fat so
tender."
It is probably impossible to determine the veracity of the
reports of aversion to white flesh, but much of the
surrounding context is clearly factual: cannibalism was
indisputably practiced by many tribes in the region, dozens of
European missionaries were killed by hostile natives, and some
of them were eaten. (In 2009, near Rabaul, tribesmen on the
island of New Britain formally apologized to Fiji's high
commissioner to Papua New Guinea for their Tolai ancestors'
killing and eating of four British missionaries in 1878.)
Victorian newspapers regularly titillated their readers with
reports of cannibalism in the South Seas, particularly in the
Fiji islands, which were known as the Cannibal Isles. Bloom
seems not to be indulging in "legend" so much as reflecting on
what his culture "knew" about life in the South Seas.
