Royal Navy Staff Surgeon A.B. Messer conducted an investigation of the "poisoned arrows" which had supposedly killed his captain and two crew members in 1875.

Messer noted that "it has been the popular belief from the earliest times that many of the more savage races which Europeans have met in different parts of the world are in the habit of using poisonous arrows and darts … Nowhere perhaps at the present day does so much of this sensational and unscientific rumour exist as among the Islands of the South Pacific, owing partly to the fact that most of it has been derived from uneducated sailors, and others who have traded with or lived amongst these islanders, and whose stories as a rule are more marvellous than consistent with fact."

His study concluded "That direct experiments, so far as they are recorded, with these arrows on the lower animals show them to be innocuous … That in the numerous cases in which men have been wounded by these arrows, no recorded instances are known of poisonous effects following" and "That tetanus or "locked jaw" has followed these arrow wounds in comparatively few of the total cases wounded, and not more frequently than it does after similar wounds in like condition where no question of poison has existed."

The doctor concluded that "mental and superstitious influences" among islanders, lower-class Europeans (like sailors), and nervous or "hysterical" people, were the real poisons involved in many cases. He believed that such people frightened themselves to death!

Quotations from A.B. Messer, An Enquiry into the Reputed Poisonous Nature of the Arrows of the South Sea Islanders, in relation to the Occurrence of Three Fatal Cases of Tetanus after wounds by them, On Board her Majesty’s Ship "Pearl", in 1875 (London: Admiralty, n/d), 1, 5.

© 2006, Jane Samson and Matthew and Katalin Wangler.