Coarsest of all the Polynesians were the Tahitians; yet even here efforts have been made[186] to convey the impression that they owed their licentious practices to the influence of white visitors. The grain of truth in this assertion lies in the undoubted fact that the whites, with their rum and trinkets and diseases, aggravated the evil; but their contribution was but a drop in the ocean of iniquity which existed ages before these islands were discovered by whites. Tahitian traditions trace their vilest practices back to the earliest times known. (Ellis, I., 183.) The first European navigators found the same vices which later visitors deplored. Bougainville, who tarried at Tahiti in 1767, called the island Nouvelle Cythère, on account of the general immorality of the natives. Cook, when he visited the island in the following year, declined to make his journal "the place for exhibiting a view of licentious manners which could only serve to disgust" his readers (212). Hawkesworth relates (II., 206) that the Tahitians offered sisters and daughters to strangers, while breaches of conjugal fidelity are punished only by a few hard words or a slight beating:
"Among other diversions there is a dance called Timorodee, which is performed by young girls, whenever eight or ten of them can be collected together, consisting of motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton, in the practice of which they are brought up from their earliest childhood, accompanied by words which, if it were possible, would more explicitly convey the same ideas." "But there is a scale in dissolute sensuality, which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination could possibly conceive."
This is the testimony of the earliest explorers who saw the natives before whites could have possibly corrupted them.[187] The later missionaries found no change for the better. Captain Cook already referred to the Areois who made a business of depravity (220). "So agreeable," he wrote,
"is this licentious plan of life to their disposition, that the most beautiful of both sexes thus commonly spend their youthful days, habituated to the practice of enormities which would disgrace the most savage tribes."
Ellis, who lived several years on this island, declares that they were noted for their humor and their jests, but the jests
"were in general low and immoral to a disgusting degree…. Awfully dark, indeed, was their moral character, and notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposition, and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion of the human race was ever, perhaps, sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation than this isolated people" (87).
He also describes the Areois (I., 185-89) as "privileged libertines," who travelled from place to place giving improper dances and exhibitions, "addicted to every kind of licentiousness," and "spreading a moral contagion throughout society," Yet they were "held in the greatest respect" by all classes of the population. They had their own gods, who were "monsters in vice," and "patronized every evil practice perpetrated during such seasons of public festivity."
Did the white sailors also give the Tahitians their idea of Tahitian dances, and professional Areois, and corrupt gods? Did they teach them customs which Hawkesworth, himself a sailor, and accustomed to scenes of low life, said "no imagination could possibly conceive?" Did the European whites teach these natives to regard men as ra (sacred) and women as noa (common)? Did they teach them all those other customs and atrocities which the following paragraphs reveal?
HEARTLESS TREATMENT OF WOMEN
It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitians were too coarse and selfish to be able to entertain any of those refined sentiments of love which the sentimentalists would have us believe prevailed before the advent of the white man.