We find this last punishment specially applied to adultery in various countries, and Diodorus will tell us the motive for it. On the Senegal coast the all-powerful protection of money saved the life of adulterers, and the offended husbands spared them in order to sell them to European slave-traders.
In Abyssinia the conjugal bond is so frail, morals are so shameless, and divorce is so easy, that adultery is rarely taken in a tragic light. Formerly the injured husband often confined himself to chasing from his house the adulterous woman, clothed in rags for the occasion.[1]
IV. Adultery in Polynesia.
Polynesian customs alone would suffice to prove that in primitive countries adultery is simply punished as a robbery, or commercial fraud. As regards sexual morality, or rather immorality, nothing can be compared to what was practised in Polynesia, where all modesty was unknown, where the husbands willingly let out their wives, and the intimate friend of the husband (tayo) had the right to share his wife with him. But dissolute as they were, these islanders were very determined conjugal proprietors, and they sometimes punished adultery with the most extreme severity. The missionary, Marsden, relates that a New Zealand chief killed his adulterous wife by dealing her a blow on the head with his club. Public opinion approved of the deed, and the brother of the dead woman came to take the body, only making a feint of retaliation, because the punishment was considered to be merited.[2]
Cook saw at Tahiti a native man punished in the same way for adultery, by blows of the club; but in this case there was the aggravating circumstance that the woman belonged to a class superior to his.[3] In some islands, especially at Tahiti and Tonga, where the customs were less savage, and licence was more unbridled than in New
