“Oh no, they had eaten their own suppers and gone to sleep. Women do as they like with us. You see, in a town we could go out and buy something ready cooked, but that is not possible here.”
The idea that wifely duty involved getting up and providing something, rather than that a husband who had been kept at sea overtime should go hungry to bed, seemed to them a sweet, but unattainable ideal. I deprecate wife-beating, but I asked “Did you not feel inclined to strike them?” but that course would have meant settling with the father and brothers-in-law, the explanation that the husbands had come in hungry from the sea and had found no supper provided being, to their ideas, adequately met by the retort, “You must let them do as they like, that is the custom of our tribe and you must do as others do.”
Plate XXII
Fig. 48. Spinning goats’ hair. Note nose ring and bead ornaments
(N.B. The word WAR on the tent door merely means that the sack originally contained War Office stores)
Marriage is by purchase, and though the bride has no choice, brothers and sons-in-law are carefully chosen. I once ventured on the impertinent question, “Now that your sister’s marriage with so-and-so is not to take place who will she marry?”
“It is so hard to find a husband who will treat her well.”
“Oh yes, of course you don’t want her to marry a man who might beat her.”
“No I don’t, for if he did it would be my business to beat him, and I do not intend to have that bother put upon me,” brotherly love being thus seen to have a practical side.
I know of few cases of legal polygamy and but one or two of concubinage. One of the former cases is that of my oldest skipper, a really good old man, whose one grief is that he remains childless near the close of life.