Remember Pursuing the Whale by James Cook? Among the many anecdotes in his book is one about how some islanders (cannibals) of the South Pacific manufactured their poison.
Those arrows are pointed with human bones, sharp as a needle’s point. The poison is put into them by hanging a corpse over a canoe, catching all the drippings of the corpse, and then boiling bones and drippings together. When finished, those bones are so poisonous that, if blood is drawn by the point of one of them, the result is fatal.
John Atkins Cook, Pursuing the Whale (1926)
Cook recounts the story of one naval officer who was ambushed by a “poison arrow shot from behind a bush,” and died within three days. In retribution, the officer’s crew “hauled as close to shore as possible, and delivered such a broadside of shells … that every house was destroyed.”
He adds that “these were people that it behooved one to keep far away from.”