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 Cythère, 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 sexes 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 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?