In the Andaman Islands and elsewhere the women give themselves up before marriage—that is, before becoming the property of one man—to the most unbridled prostitution,[117] and yet the most innocent, according to the morality of the country.
Among the Esquimaux the laxity of sexual customs, both for men and women, is extreme. The husbands feel no shame in selling, or rather hiring out, their wives; and the latter, as soon as their proprietors are gone to the chase or to fish, abandon themselves to an uncontrolled debauch, taking care to post their children outside the hut to warn them in case of the unexpected return of the master.[118] Sexual morality does not yet exist among the Esquimaux, and an Aleout said quite simply to the missionary Langsdorff, “When my people couple they do it like the sea-otters.”[119] In fact, if the cold permitted, the Esquimaux would not be any more clothed than the sea-otters. In their common houses, where two or three hundred people are crowded together, and a high degree of temperature is maintained, they throw off their clothing without distinction of age or sex.[120] They go further still, and, like many savages, practise what is called Socratic love openly and without shame. Thus, among the Inoits, well-favoured boys are brought up with care, dressed as girls, and sold at a high price towards the age of fifteen,[121] without any harm being seen in it.
The Redskins of the extreme north are scarcely more modest than the Esquimaux. Carver relates that among the Nandowessics a woman was particularly honoured because she had first entertained and then treated as husbands the forty chief warriors of the tribe.[122]
But it is especially in Polynesia that the naïve immodesty of primitive peoples was displayed with the greatest indifference to the opinions of others.
“The principal difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich Isles,” says M. de Varigny, “consisted in teaching the women chastity; they were ignorant of the name and of the thing. Adultery, incest, and fornication were common things, approved by public opinion, and even consecrated by religion.”[123]
These customs are of ancient date in Polynesia. The travellers of last century had observed them still the same. The Tahitian women, if they were free, openly bartered their persons, and the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sometimes the husbands, often brought them to the European sailors and hired them out, after a lively bargaining, for nails, red feathers, etc.[124]
At Noukahiva “the young girls of the island,” says Porter, “are the wives of all those who can buy their favours, and a beautiful daughter is considered by her parents as a means of procuring them for a time riches and plenty. However, when they are older, they form more lasting connections, and seem then as firmly attached to their husbands as women of any other country.”[125]
In the same archipelago, the surgeon Roblet says that the French sailors were frequently offered girls of eight years; “and,” he adds, “they were not virgins.”[126]
“Virtue,” says Porter, “such as we understand it, was unknown among them, and they attached no shame to acts which they regarded not only as natural, but as an inoffensive amusement. Many parents thought themselves honoured by the preference given to their daughters, and showed their satisfaction by presents of pigs and fruits, which, on their part, was an extreme of munificence.”[127]
In Polynesia public opinion forbade married women to yield themselves without the authorisation of their owners, and this was almost the only strict rule of morals existing; but the husbands trafficked in their wives without scruple. “Tawee,” says Porter, “was one of the handsomest men of the island, and loved to adorn his person; a bit of red stuff, some morsels of glass, or a whale’s tooth, had irresistible charms for him, and in order to procure these objects he would offer any of the most precious things he possessed. Thus, though his wife was of remarkable beauty, and he was the tenderest of husbands, Tawee offered his wife more than once for a necklace.”[128]