We have previously seen that among the black populations of Africa marriage is a simple bargain, and that the negresses are only moderately chaste. Now, as the purchase of wives and the absence of chastity in the women are factors eminently suited to produce adultery, we shall not be surprised to find that it is very common in Africa; it is nevertheless very severely punished there, but only because it is a very grave outrage on property. Among the Hottentots, the husband, having the right of life and death[631] over his wife or wives, and being allowed to kill them for the smallest offence, naturally enjoys the same right, with a much stronger reason, when they commit an unauthorised infidelity, for he can lend or let them to strangers if he likes.[632]
In the tribes where polygamy already inclines to monogamy, and where there exists a chief wife ruling over the others, the gravity of the crime of adultery is in relation to the position occupied by the woman. Thus, at the Gaboon, Du Chaillu tells us, where the women are extremely dissolute, a distinction is made in their infidelities. The adultery of the chief wife is an enormous crime. The man who has been an accomplice in it is, at the very least, sold as a slave; but adultery with less important wives can be atoned for by a large compensation.[633] As for the woman, her pecuniary value often protects her. The husband-proprietor has bought his wife, and he cares very little for the purity of her morals, since he has no scruple in making her an object of traffic;[634] therefore, whenever she is unfaithful without his permission, the consideration of the cost of purchase and of the possible profit of letting her out, often restrains his vengeful arm. He is free, however, to punish or to pardon, and sometimes the chastisement of adultery is terrible. At Bornou, for example, the guilty ones are bound hand and foot, and their heads are smashed by being struck together.[635] At Kaarta, says Mungo Park, the two guilty ones are put to death. With the Soulimas there is a singular exception to this. The adulterous woman merely has her head shaved, and she loses a privilege which is probably of Berber origin—viz., that of quitting her husband at will, simply by refunding him the amount of purchase-money he has paid for her. All the vengeance of the husband falls on the lover, and he makes him his slave.[636] At Jouida, in Dahomey, the offended husband had still the right, in 1713, of invoking judicial power in order to have his guilty wife strangled or beheaded by the public executioner.[637] Her accomplice was not spared, and sometimes, says Bosman, he was burned at a slow fire. This cruel wish to make delinquents suffer a long time is found again in Uganda, where King M’tesa caused adulterers to be dismembered, having one limb at a time cut off and thrown to the vultures, who feasted on it before the eyes of the sufferers.[638] With the Ashantees, the husband, as sovereign justiciary, can either kill his wife, or marry her to a slave, or cut off her nose, according to his pleasure.[639] We find this last punishment specially applied to adultery in various countries, and Diodorus will tell us the motive for it. On the Senegal coast the all-powerful protection of money saved the life of adulterers, and the offended husbands spared them in order to sell them to European slave-traders.
In Abyssinia the conjugal bond is so frail, morals are so shameless, and divorce is so easy, that adultery is rarely taken in a tragic light. Formerly the injured husband often confined himself to chasing from his house the adulterous woman, clothed in rags for the occasion.[640]
IV. Adultery in Polynesia.
Polynesian customs alone would suffice to prove that in primitive countries adultery is simply punished as a robbery, or commercial fraud. As regards sexual morality, or rather immorality, nothing can be compared to what was practised in Polynesia, where all modesty was unknown, where the husbands willingly let out their wives, and the intimate friend of the husband (tayo) had the right to share his wife with him. But dissolute as they were, these islanders were very determined conjugal proprietors, and they sometimes punished adultery with the most extreme severity. The missionary, Marsden, relates that a New Zealand chief killed his adulterous wife by dealing her a blow on the head with his club. Public opinion approved of the deed, and the brother of the dead woman came to take the body, only making a feint of retaliation, because the punishment was considered to be merited.[641]
Cook saw at Tahiti a native man punished in the same way for adultery, by blows of the club; but in this case there was the aggravating circumstance that the woman belonged to a class superior to his.[642] In some islands, especially at Tahiti and Tonga, where the customs were less savage, and licence was more unbridled than in New Zealand, the women sometimes got off with a simple correction. We must again remark that what was blamed and punished was not the adultery itself, but adultery unauthorised, or not commanded by the legal owner—in short, theft.
At Noukahiva, says Krusenstern, there was a functionary called the “fire-lighter” who lived with the wife of a king. The duty of this dignitary was, in the first place, to obey the queen, and in the next to supply her husband’s place with her in case of prolonged absence on his part.[643] Taking this fact by the side of others, as, for example, the unlimited right of the friend, or tayo, over the wife, we see clearly what the Polynesians understood by adultery.
V. Adultery in Savage America.
The Esquimaux, who are as free from prejudices in their conjugal customs as the Polynesians, have also, at least certain of them, adopted the custom of joint husbands, cicisbei, who replace the husband in case of absence.[644] There are some, however, who blame the adultery of wives, and believe even that the fairies would kill them if their wives were unfaithful during their absence.[645] But all the Esquimaux are not equally easy going; some of them, the reindeer Koriaks, for example, kill at once the man and woman taken in adultery.[646]
The Redskins are always less tolerant; with them adultery is a very serious affair, although they often also consider the exchange of wives a mark of friendship. It is generally the husband who takes vengeance as he pleases, and he often does so by cutting open with his teeth the nose, and sometimes the ears, of the guilty woman. This was the practice with the Comanches,[647] the Yumas,[648] and the Sioux.[649] But the injured, or robbed, husband is at liberty to make a composition with the seducer.[650] He can at will either pardon—as did a Mandan husband who sent the wife to her lover, adding three horses to the present[651]—or he can put to death the faithless wife and her accomplice. By a rare exception, the Omahas recognised the right of the wife to revenge herself on an adulterous husband and his mistress.[652] With the Omahas, also, an adulterous wife was bound to a stake in the prairie, abused by twenty or thirty men, and then abandoned by her husband.[653] We have seen that this obscene mode of retaliation is in use at New Caledonia, and we shall find it again in the Roman Empire. The mode of vengeance with the Redskins, whether of the husband or the tribe, varied according to locality, but was often atrocious. Thus the Modocs of California publicly disembowelled the guilty woman.[654] Among the Hoopsas, another tribe of Californian Redskins, the male accomplice in the adultery lost one eye,[655] or, if he was married, the injured man took his wife.