It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitians
were too coarse 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
"The men were allowed to eat the flesh of the pig, and of
fowls, and a variety of fish, cocoanuts, and plantains, and
whatever was presented as an offering to the gods; these the
females, on pain of death, were forbidden to touch, as it
was supposed they would pollute them. The fires at which the
men's food was cooked were also sacred, and were forbidden
to be used by the females. The baskets in which their
provision was kept, and the house in which the men ate, were
also sacred, and prohibited to the females under the same
cruel penalty. Hence the inferior food, both for wives,
daughters, etc., was cooked at separate fires, deposited in
distinct baskets, and eaten in lonely solitude by the
females, in little huts erected for the purpose."
Not content with this, when one man wished to abuse another in a
particularly offensive way he would use some expression referring to
this degraded condition of the women, such as "mayst thou be baked as
food for thy mother." Young children were deliberately taught to
disregard their mother, the father encouraging them in their insults
and violence (205). Cook (220) found that Tahitian women were often
treated with a degree of harshness, or rather "brutality," which one
would scarcely suppose a man would bestow on an object for whom he had
the least affection. Nothing, however, is more common than "to see the
men beat them without mercy" (II., 220). They killed more female than
male infants, because, as they said, the females were useless for war,
the fisheries, or the service of the temple. For the sick they had no
sympathy; at times they murdered them or buried them alive. (Ellis,
I., 340; II., 281.) In battle they gave no quarter, even to women or
children. (Hawkesworth, II., 244.)
"Every horrid torture was practised. The females experienced
brutality and murder, and the tenderest infants were perhaps
transfixed to the mother's heart by a ruthless
weapon--caught up by ruffian hands, and dashed against the
rocks or the trees--or wantonly thrown up into the air, and
caught on the point of the warrior's spear, where it writhed
in agony, and died, ... some having two or three infants
hanging on the spear they bore across their shoulders" (I.,
235-36). The bodies of females slain in war were treated
with "a degree of brutality as inconceivable as it was
detestable."