are brought up with care, dressed as girls, and sold at a high price towards the age of fifteen,[1] without any harm being seen in it.
The Redskins of the extreme north are scarcely more modest than the Esquimaux. Carver relates that among the Nandowessics a woman was particularly honoured because she had first entertained and then treated as husbands the forty chief warriors of the tribe.[2]
But it is especially in Polynesia that the naïve immodesty of primitive peoples was displayed with the greatest indifference to the opinions of others.
"The principal difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich Isles," says M. de Varigny, "consisted in teaching the women chastity; they were ignorant of the name and of the thing. Adultery, incest, and fornication were common things, approved by public opinion, and even consecrated by religion."[3]
These customs are of ancient date in Polynesia. The travellers of last century had observed them still the same. The Tahitian women, if they were free, openly bartered their persons, and the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sometimes the husbands, often brought them to the European sailors and hired them out, after a lively bargaining, for nails, red feathers, etc.[4]
At Noukahiva "the young girls of the island," says Porter, "are the wives of all those who can buy their favours, and a beautiful daughter is considered by her parents as a means of procuring them for a time riches and plenty. However, when they are older, they form more lasting connections, and seem then as firmly attached to their husbands as women of any other country."[5]
In the same archipelago, the surgeon Roblet says that the French sailors were frequently offered girls of eight years; "and," he adds, "they were not virgins."[6]
- ↑ Élie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 80.
- ↑ Carver, Travels in North America, p. 245.
- ↑ De Varigny, Quatorze ans aux îles Sandwich, p. 159.
- ↑ Wallis, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xviii. p. 364.—Edwards, ibid. t. xiii. p. 426.
- ↑ Porter, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xvi. p. 232.
- ↑ Marchand, ibid. t. xv. p. 406.—Moerenhout, Voy. aux îles, t. I^{er.} p. 313.
