Sometimes two men unite to commit one of these rapes. They glide noiselessly into a neighbouring camp in the night; one of them winds round his barbed spear the hair of a sleeping lubra, the other points his spear at her bosom. She awakes, and dares not cry out; they take her off, bind her to a tree, and then return in the same manner to make a second capture; after that they return in triumph to their own people.[215] The captives rarely revolt, for they are, in a way, accustomed to the capture. From infancy they have been familiarised with the fate that awaits them, for the simulation of the rape is one of the games of the Australian children.[216] Later the life of a pretty Australian girl is marked by a series of plots to carry her off, and of successive rapes, which force her to pass from hand to hand, and expose her to wounds received in conflicts, and to bad treatment inflicted by the other women amongst whom she is introduced. Sometimes she is dragged very far, even hundreds of miles from the place of her birth.[217]
It is the duty of the tribe to which the ravished woman belongs to avenge her, and the Australian has, after his own manner, a strong sentiment of certain obligations, which for him are moral; but more frequently, to escape too great damages, the tribes hold a meeting, and the ravisher submits to a symbolic retaliation agreed on beforehand. Armed with his little shield of bark, he takes his place at about forty yards from a group of ten warriors belonging to the aggrieved tribe, and each one of these throws two or three darts at him, which are nearly always avoided or parried. Thenceforth the offence is effaced, and peace re-established.[218]
The same customs prevail among the Papuans of New Guinea. At Bali the men carry off and violate brutally the solitary women they may meet; and afterwards they agree with the tribe as to compensation.[219] In like manner, in the Fiji Isles, rape, real or simulated, was general and even glorious. A particular divinity presided over it. The ravished woman either fled to a protector or resigned herself, and then a feast given to the parents terminated the affair.[220]
To be able to see in these bestial customs anything resembling marriage, one must be a prey to a fixed idea—a positive matrimonial monomania. There is here no marriage by capture, but rather slavery by capture. This is not the only method of procuring wives practised by the Australians. They often proceed pacifically by traffic, and a man acquires a wife by giving in exchange another woman of whom he has power to dispose—a sister or relative.[221] Certain tribes had also instituted a sort of regulated promiscuity—a collective marriage between all the men of one clan and all the women of another. I shall have to return to the consideration of this singular form of sexual association. For the moment I confine myself to noticing that rape is not always obligatory in Australia.
Neither is it so among the negroes of Africa; it is even more rare there than in Melanesia, but there also it does not constitute a marriage. Women are carried off just in the same way as other things are carried off. Thus the Damara Hottentots often steal wives from the Namaquois Hottentots.[222] Among the Mandingos and the Timanis there is no marriage by capture, properly speaking; already they purchase the daughter from her parents, without, of course, consulting her; then the intending purchaser, aided by his friends, carries off his acquisition in a brutal manner, whether she will or not. It is a simple commercial affair; the daughter is an exchange value representing a certain number of jars of palm wine, of stuffs, etc.
Amongst the natives of America brutal rape was, or still is, very common. In Terra del Fuego, the young Fuegians carry off a woman as soon as they are able to construct or procure a canoe.[223] From tribe to tribe the Patagonians at war exterminate the men and carry off the women. The Oen Patagonians make incursions every year at the time of “the red leaf” on the Fuegians to seize their women, their dogs, and their weapons.[224] The Indians on the banks of the Amazon and Orinoco continually capture women, and thus every tribe is sometimes nearly without women and sometimes overflowing with them.[225] The Caribs so frequently procured wives in this way that their women did not often speak the language of the men.[226] In the Redskin tribe of the Mandans the rape of young women was a perpetual cause of trouble, of disorder, and of vengeance, proportioned to the power and to the anger of the relations of the ravished woman.[227]
We find similar customs among savage or barbarous peoples nearly everywhere. The Tartars, says Barnes, make their wives of the prisoners that they capture in battles.[228]
The Code of Manu also mentions this primitive mode of union more or less conjugal:—“When a young girl is carried off by force from the parental house, weeping and crying for succour, and those who oppose this violence are killed or wounded, and a breach is made in the walls, this mode (of marriage) is called that of the giants.”[229]
The Bible relates several facts of the same kind. Thus the tribe of Benjamin procured themselves wives by massacring the inhabitants of Jabez-Gilead and capturing four hundred of their virgins. Another time the Benjamites practised a Sabine rape in carrying off the women during a feast near Bethel.
The Israelites, having vanquished the Midianites, killed all the men, according to the Semitic custom, and took away the cattle, the children, and the women.[230] But Moses, always directly inspired by the Lord, ordered them to put to death the women and even the male children, and to keep the young girls and virgins.[231] There were sixteen thousand maidens, of whom thirty-two were reserved for the Lord’s share, which doubtless means for the priests. Of the sheep, oxen, asses, and maidens that remained, Moses further deducted the fiftieth part, which he gave to the Levites of the tabernacle.[232]