Malo — invoked in full as Malo-Bomai — was the supreme deity of Mer (Murray Island) and the focus of the eastern islands' great secret cult before the London Missionary Society reached the strait in 1871. In the Meriam account he was one of several brothers who set out from the New Guinea coast; separated from them by a storm and wrecked off Mer, he drifted among the reefs, changing his shape into a succession of sea creatures and at last into an octopus. In this form he was speared by a woman named Kabur as she fished and carried ashore in her basket, whereupon the Meriam acclaimed him as their god and protector. Malo gave the people their law, their ceremonies and the discipline of the fraternity that bore his name; the eight arms of the octopus were read as the god reaching out to bind the districts of the island under a single rule. His code — that each person keep hands and feet from what belongs to another — remains among the most cited statements of Islander customary law. Bomai is the sacred, secret name of the same power, spoken only by initiates; sources differ on whether Bomai and Malo were originally two beings, an uncle and his sister's son who became one, or a single deity known by an outer and an inner name.