Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 53

The Rev. George Turner, who had forty years of experience among the Polynesians, writes (125) that at their dances "all kinds of obscenity in looks, language, and gesture prevailed; and often they danced and revelled till daylight." The universal custom of tattooing was connected with immoral practices (90). During the wedding ceremonies of chiefs the friends of the bride

"took up stones and beat themselves until their heads were bruised and bleeding. The ceremony to prove her virginity which preceded this burst of feeling will not bear the light of description.... Night dances and the attendant immoralities wound up the ceremonies."

The same obscene ceremonies, he adds, were gone through, and this custom, he thinks, had some influence in cultivating chast.i.ty, especially among young women of rank who feared the disgrace and beating that was the lot of faithless brides. Presents were also given to those who had preserved their virtue; but the result of these efforts is thus summed up by Turner (91):

"Chast.i.ty was ostensibly cultivated by both s.e.xes; but it was more a name than a reality. From their childhood their ears were familiar with the most obscene conversation; and as a whole family, to some extent, herded together, immorality was the natural and prevalent consequence. There were exceptions, especially among the daughters of persons of rank; but they were the exceptions, not the rule.

Adultery, too, was sadly prevalent, although often severely punished by private revenge."

When a chief took a wife, the bride's uncle or other relative had to give up a daughter at the same time to be his concubine; to refuse this, would have been to displease the household G.o.d. A girl's consent was a matter of secondary importance: "She had to agree if her parents were in favor of the match." Many marriages were made chiefly for the sake of the attendant festivities, the bride being compelled to go whether or not she was willing. In this way a chief might in a short time get together a harem of a dozen wives; but most of them remained with him only a short time:

"If the marriages had been contracted merely for the sake of the property and festivities of the occasion, the wife was not likely to be more than a few days or weeks with her husband."

COURTSHIP PANTOMIME

Elopements occur in Samoa in some cases where parental consent is refused. A vivid description of the pantomimic courtship preceding an elopement has been given by Kubary (_Globus_, 1885). A young warrior is surrounded by a bevy of girls. Though unarmed, he makes various gestures as if spearing or clubbing an enemy, for which the girls cheer him.

He then selects one, who at first seems coyly unwilling, and begins a dance with her. She endeavors to look indifferent and forbidding, while he, with longing looks and words, tries to win her regard.

Presently, yielding to his solicitations, she smiles, and opens her arms for him. But he, foolishly, stops to reproach her for holding him off so long. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and lo! when he gets ready to grasp her at last, she eludes him again, with a mocking laugh.

It is now his turn to be perverse. Revenge is in his mind and mien.

All his looks and gestures indicate contempt and malice, and he keeps turning his back to her. She cannot endure this long; his scorn overcomes her pride, and when he changes his att.i.tude and once more begins to entreat, she at last allows him to seize her and they dance wildly. When finally the company separates for the evening meal, one may hear the word _toro_ whispered. It means "cane," and indicates a nocturnal rendezvous in the cane-field, where lovers are safe from observation. They find each other by imitating the owl's sound, which excites no suspicion.

When they have met, the girl says: "You know that my parents hate you; nothing remains but _awenga_." Awenga means flight; three nights later they elope in a canoe to some small island, where they remain for a few weeks till the excitement over their disappearance has subsided in the village and their parents are ready to pardon them.

TWO SAMOAH LOVE-STORIES

Turner devotes six pages (98-104) to two Samoan love-stories. One of them ill.u.s.trates the devotion of a wife and her husband's ingrat.i.tude and faithlessness, as the following summary will show:

There was a youth called Siati, noted for his singing. A serenading G.o.d came along, threw down a challenge, and promised him his fair daughter if he was the better singer.

They sang and Siati beat the G.o.d. Then he rode on a shark to the G.o.d's home and the shark told him to go to the bathing-place, where he would find the G.o.d's daughters. The girls had just left the place when Siati arrived, but one of them had forgotten her comb and came back to get it.

"Siati," said she, "however have you come here?" "I've come to seek the song-G.o.d and get his daughter to wife." "My father," said she, "is more of a G.o.d than man--eat nothing he hands you, never sit on a high seat lest death should follow, and now let us unite."

The G.o.d did not like his son-in-law and tried various ways to destroy him, but his wife Puapae always helped him out of the sc.r.a.pe, one time even making him cut her into two and throw her into the sea to be eaten by a fish and find a ring the G.o.d had lost and asked him to get. She was afterward cast ash.o.r.e with the ring; but Siati had not even kept awake, and she scolded him for it. To save his life, she subsequently performed several other miracles, in one of which her father and sister were drowned in the sea. Then she said to Siati: "My father and sister are dead, and all on account of my love to you; you may go now and visit your family and friends while I remain here, but see that you do not behave unseemly." He went, visited his friends, and forgot Puapae. He tried to marry again, but Puapae came and stood on the other side. The chief called out, "Which is your wife, Siati?" "The one on the right side." Puapae then broke silence with, "Ah, Siati, you have forgotten all I did for you;" and off she went. Siati remembered it all, darted after her crying, and then fell down dead.

Apart from the amusing "suddenness" of the proposal and the marriage, this tale is of interest as indicating that among the lower races woman has--as many observations indicate--a greater capacity for conjugal attachment than man.

The courtship scene cited above indicates an instinctive knowledge of the strategic value of coyness and feigned displeasure. The following story, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner gives it, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against the danger and folly of excessive coyness, so inconvenient to the men:

Once there were two sisters, Sinaleuuna and Sinaeteva, who wished they had a brother. Their wish was gratified; a boy was born to their parents, but they brought him up apart, and the sisters never saw him till one day, when he had grown up, he was sent to them with some food. The girls were struck with his beauty.

Afterwards they sat down and filled into a bamboo bottle the liquid shadow of their brother. A report had come to them of Sina, a Fijian girl who was so beautiful that all the swells were running after her. Hearing this, and being anxious to get a wife for their brother, they dressed up and went to Fiji, intending to tell Sina about their brother. But Sina was haughty; she slighted the sisters and treated them shamefully. She had heard of the beauty of the young man, whose name was Maluafiti ("Shade of Fiji"), and longed for his coming, but did not know that these were his sisters.

The slighted girls got angry and went to the water when Sina was taking her bath. From the bottle they threw out on the water the shadow of their brother. Sina looked at the shadow and was struck with its beauty. "That is my husband," she said, "wherever I can find him." She called out to the villagers for all the handsome young men to come and find out of whom the figure in the water was the image. But the shadow was more beautiful than any of these young men and it wheeled round and round in the water whenever Maluafiti, in his own land, turned about. All this time the sisters were weeping and exclaiming:

"Oh, Maluafiti! rise up, it is day; Your shadow prolongs our ill-treatment.

Maluafiti, come and talk with her face to face, Instead of that image in the water."

Sina had listened, and now she knew it was the shadow of Maluafiti. "These are his sisters too," she thought, "and I have been ill-using them; forgive me, I've done wrong," But the ladies were angry still. Maluafiti came in his canoe to court Lady Sina, and also to fetch his sisters. When they told him of their treatment he flew into an implacable rage.

Sina longed to get him; he was her heart's desire and long she had waited for him. But Maluafiti frowned and would return to his island, and off he went with his sisters. Sina cried and screamed, and determined to follow swimming. The sisters pleaded to save and to bring her, but Maluafiti relented not and Sina died in the ocean.

PERSONAL CHARMS OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS

"Falling in love" with a person of the other s.e.x on the mere report of his or her beauty is a very familiar motive in the literature of Oriental and mediaeval nations in particular. It is, therefore, interesting to find such a motive in the Samoan story just cited. In my view, as previously explained, beauty, among the lower races, means any kind of attractiveness, sensual more frequently than esthetic. The South Sea Islanders have been credited with considerable personal charms, although it is now conceded that the early voyagers (to whom, after an absence from sh.o.r.e of several months, almost any female must have seemed a Helen) greatly exaggerated their beauty.

Captain Cook kept a level head. He found Tongan women less distinguished from the men by their features than by their forms, while in the case of Hawaiians even the figures were remarkably similar (II., 144, 246). In Tahitian women he saw "all those delicate characteristics which distinguish them from the men in other countries." The Hawaiians, though far from being ugly, are "neither remarkable for a beautiful shape, nor for striking features" (246).

The indolent, open-air, amphibious life led by the South Sea Islanders was favorable to the development of fine bodies. Cook saw among the Tongans "some absolutely perfect models of the human figure." But fine feathers do not make fine birds. The n.o.bler phases of love are not inspired by fine figures so much as by beautiful and refined faces.

Polynesian and Melanesian features are usually coa.r.s.e and sensual.

Hugo Zoller says that "the most beautiful Samoan woman would stand comparison at best with a pretty German peasant girl;" and from my own observations at Honolulu, and a study of many photographs, I conclude that what he says applies to the Pacific Islanders in general. Edward Reeves, in his recent volume on _Brown Men and Women_ (17-22), speaks of "that fraud--the beautiful brown woman." He found her a "dream of beauty and refinement" only in the eyes of poets and romancers; in reality they were malodorous and vulgar. "All South Sea Island women are very much the same."

"To compare the prettiest Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, or even Rotuman, to the plainest and most simply educated Irish, French, or Colonial girl that has been decently brought up is an insult to one's intelligence."

Wilkes (II., 22) hesitated to speak of the Tahitian females because he could not discover their much-vaunted beauty:

"I did not see among them a single woman whom I could call handsome. They have, indeed, a soft sleepiness about the eyes, which may be fascinating to some, but I should rather ascribe the celebrity their charms have obtained among navigators to their cheerfulness and gaiety. Their figures are bad, and the greater part of them are parrot-toed."

TAHITIANS AND THEIR WHITE VISITORS

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 enn.o.bled by any of the refined, esthetic, intellectual, and moral qualities which are embodied in a refined face and a daintily modelled figure.

Coa.r.s.est 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 a.s.sertion 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 (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 s.e.xes 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 cla.s.ses of the population. They had their own G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds? 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 coa.r.s.e 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.

Love is often compared to a flower; but love cannot, like a flower, grow on a dunghill. It requires a pure, chaste soul, and it requires the fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian a woman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his food and drink, or his cool plunge into the waves, for the reason that she pleased his senses. He could not feel sentimental love for her, since, far from adoring her, he did not even respect or well-treat her. Ellis (I., 109) relates that