Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of the Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (N.T.A., 265):
"Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our tent. I employed them to catch small fish for bait; and for hours they would amuse themselves in this way, screaming with excitement and fun, and chasing the small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets; their figures were generally well-shaped…. The men were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the Athabara, and were perfectly naked, although close to the women; we soon became accustomed to this daily scene, as we do at Brighton and other English bathing towns."
In his work on German Africa (II., 123) Zöller says that in Togoland
"the young girls did not hesitate in the least to remove their only article of clothing, a narrow strip of cloth, rub themselves with a native soap and then take a dip in the lagoon, before the eyes of white men as well as black."
A page would be required merely to enumerate the tribes in Africa,
Australia, and South America which never wear any clothing.
Max Buchner (352-4) gives a graphic description (1878) of the nude female surf swimmers in the Hawaiian Islands. Nor is this indifference to nudity manifested only by these primitive races. In Japan, to the present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by a partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zöller relates of the Cholos of Ecuador (P. and A., 364) that "men and women bathe together in the rivers with a naïveté surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders." A writer in the Ausland (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay he saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the sun to dry it, they stood by naked calmly smoking their cigars.
But natural indifference to nudity is the least of the curiosities of modesty. Sometimes nakedness is actually prescribed by law or by strict etiquette. In Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden to wear clothing of any sort. The King of Mandingo allowed no women, not even princesses, to approach him unless they were naked (Hellwald, 77-8). Dubois (I., 265) says that in some of the southern provinces of India the women of certain castes must uncover their body from the head to the girdle when speaking to a man: "It would be thought a want of politeness and good breeding to speak to men with that part of the body clothed."
In his travels among the Cameroon negroes Zöller (II., 185) came across a strange bit of religious etiquette in regard to nudity. The women there wear nothing but a loin cloth, except in case of a death, when, like ourselves, they appear all in black—with a startling difference, however. One day, writes Zöller,
"I was astounded to see a number of women and girls strolling about stark naked before the house of a man who had died of diphtheria. This, I was told, was their mourning dress…. The same custom prevails in other parts of West Africa."
Modesty is as fickle as fashion and assumes almost as many different forms as dress itself. In most Australian tribes the women (as well as the men) go naked, yet in a few they not only wear clothes but go out of sight to bathe. Stranger still, the Pele islanders were so innocent of all idea of clothing that when they first saw Europeans they believed that their clothes were their skins. Nevertheless, the men and women bathed in different places. Among South American Indians nudity is the rule, whereas some North American Indians used to place guards near the swimming-places of the women, to protect them from spying eyes.