The woman thus had an advantage over the man in being able to transmit her rank to her children, a survival of the matriarchate custom once ruling the world. Polygamy was rarely indulged, though not forbidden. A chief here and there might have two or three wives. Women were allowed only one husband, but often avowed lovers were tolerated, if not feared, by the husband. Mr. Banks, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was horrified after he had made love to Queen Oberea of Papara in the absence of her husband to find her attendant was a cavalière servente. His Anglican morals were shocked. He had thought himself the only male sinner by her complacence.
Before Christianity was forced on them, the Tahitians married in the same rank, and with considerable right to choice. The tie might be dissolved by the same authority binding it, the chief or head of the clan. Inequality of rank, or near consanguinity, were the only obstacles to marriage. Rank might be overcome, but never the other. It was as in China, where Confucius himself laid down the law: “A man in taking a wife does not choose one of the same surname as himself.” And in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason is given for this law: “When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply.” The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children. Their feeling surpasses the parental affection prevailing in the remainder of the world, yet adoption is a stronger bond than blood. No child was raised by its own genitors. The Tetuanuis had brought up twenty-five, all freely given them at birth or after weaning. The taboo was strict.
Illegitimate children were as welcome as others. The husband might have been so jealous as to meditate killing his wife; but when her child was born, although he knew it to be a bastard, he gave it the same love and care as his own. There were exceptions, but one might cite on the opposite side innumerable cases where, despite the most open adultery, the husband has taken his wife’s offspring for his own. It was well that this was so, for adultery was so habitual that were bastards not made welcome, there would have been much suffering by children, innocent themselves. Here, as in civilization, men love their bastards often more than their legitimate sons and daughters.
This prohibition against keeping one’s own must have arisen when there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a natural guarding against sexual relationship in tribes or communities where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity. One must look, as in the case of taboos, deeper than the surface for the beginning of this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted to—friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.
It is said that the powerful sentiment among historical nations opposing marriage between brother and sister and other close kindred originated in the desire to make such connections odious, to preserve virtue and decency among those in hourly intimacy. Monarchs and nations long refused to bend to it. The Ptolemies and Pharaohs married incestuously; Cleopatra, her brother. The Ptolemies married their daughters, as did Artaxerxes, who wedded Atossa. The Ballinese married twins of different sex. Abraham married his half-sister by the same father. Moses’s father married his aunt. Jacob took to wife two sisters, his own cousins. In Great Russia until this century a father married his son to a young woman, and then claimed her as his concubine. When a son grew up, he followed his father’s example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life. More than nine hundred residents of Norfolk Island are descendants of the mutineers of the British ship Bounty. They were begat by eight of the mutineers, and intermarried for a century. They show no deterioration from this cause.
Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but the abomination grew slowly as man progressed. Such ties have been abhorrent for long in most countries. A belief that incestuous children were weak mentally or physically came much later in the ages. The Polynesians must have remarked that inbreeding accentuated the faults in a strain, making for an accumulation of them. This would be a very far advance in human observation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowledge brought from his old Asiatic home, must have held such a theory, and sought in the system of adoption, and in not bringing up consanguineous children together, to ward off such misfortune. This at least is a plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so unquestionably child-lovers.
The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The phratry tie was stronger than that of the father and mother. In the totem scheme of other islands and continental groups all the women of his mother’s totem were taboo to a man, though their relationship might be remote. Yet as husband and wife had different totems, and children took their mothers’ totems, a man might in rare instances, even with this barrier, wed his own daughter. This has happened in Buka and in North Bougainville.
The plan of adoption in Polynesia is matched to a degree by the fosterage common in Ireland in early days. There children were sent to be reared in the families of fellow-clansmen of wealth. At a year they left their own thresholds, and their fosterage ended only at marriage. Every fostered person was under obligation to provide for the old age of his foster-parents, and the affection arising from this relationship was usually greater and regarded more sacred than that of blood relationship. This is true to-day of the Tahitians.
“But children nowadays are often brought up by their own parents,” said Mme. Tetuanui, rising to prepare the déjeuner, and I for a swim in the lagoon, “and if adopted, they go from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that little ones are as precious as life itself.”