_ Tongan girls are referred to in Reeves's book as "bundles of blubber." It is not necessary to refer once more to the fact that "blubber" is the criterion and ideal of "beauty" among the Pacific Islanders, as among barbarians in general. Consequently their love cannot have been ennobled by any of the refined, esthetic, intellectual, and moral qualities which are embodied in a refined face and a daintily modelled figure.
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 Cythere, 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. 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."
[FOOTNOTE 186:
See Westermarck, 67, and footnotes on that page.]
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. "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."
[FOOTNOTE 187:
If sentimentalists were gifted with a sense of humor it would have occurred to them how ludicrous and illogical it is to suppose that savages and barbarians, the world over, should in each instance have been converted by a few whites from angels to monsters of depravity with such amazing suddenness. We know, on the contrary, that in no respect are these races so stubbornly tenacious of old customs as in their sexual relations.]
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".
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? _