Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Fijians do; yet how far
they were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obvious
from the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, on
penalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles of
food, such as bananas, cocoanuts, pork, turtle; or refused them
permission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divine
worship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods.
The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by "Häolé's"
reference (123) to "the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian
queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the _ne plus ultra_
of female beauty." Incest was permitted to the chiefs, and the people
vied with their rulers in the grossest sensuality.
"Nearly every night, with the gathering darkness,
crowds would retire to some favorite spot, where, amid
every species of sensual indulgence, they would revel
until the morning twilight" (412).
"In Hawaii, whether the woman was married or single,
she would have been thought very churlish and boorish
if she refused any favor asked by a male friend of the
family,"
says E. Tregear;[189] and in Dibble's _History of the Sandwich
Islands_ (126-27) we read:
"For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to
interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship,
and persons who would not do this were not considered
on good terms of sociability. For a man or a woman to
refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was
considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was
this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to
the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the
feeling of meanness in making a refusal."
The Hawaiian word for marriage is _hoao_, meaning "trial." It was also
customary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as
_punula_. The word _hula hula_ is familiar the world over as the name
of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. The
famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations
"warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The
Tartarean gloom was slightly relieved by torches
ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut.
Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness--their
faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light--and
divested of every particle of apparel, they
promiscuously united in dancing the _hula hula_ (the
licentious dance).... Wives were exchanged, and so were
concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and
brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest."
Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 the
missionaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible to
preserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in
1846 seventy per cent of all the crimes punished were of a lewd
character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of
eleven years of age. Isabella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiian
women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is
to be any future for this race it must come through a higher
morality."