At the Sandwich Islands, Kaahumanu, the gigantic old dowager queen — a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee — was accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee. Incredible as this may seem, it is a fact. While at Lahainaluna — the residence of this monstrous Jezebel — a humpbacked wretch was pointed out to me, who, some twenty-five years previously, had had the vertebrae of his backbone very seriously discomposed by his gentle mistress.

— Herman Melville Typee (1846)

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