A.: There are some curious things in this Voyage of Bougainville
B.: Plenty.
A.: Does he not assert that wild animals come up to men,
and birds come to settle on them, before they have learned the
danger that springs from such familiarity ?
B.: Others have said that before him.
A.: How does he explain the fact that some animals inhabit
islands separated from the main land by terrifying stretches of
sea ? Who brought the wolf there, or the fox, the dog, the stag,
the snake ?
B.: He explains nothing. He merely states the fact.
A.:. And you, how do you explain it ?
B.: Who knows the first history of our globe ? How many
stretches of land, now isolated, were once joined up ? The only
phenomenon about which one could form some conjecture is the direction
taken by the mass of waters which has separated them:
A.: And how so ?
B.: From the general lines followed by the erosion. Some
day we will amuse ourselves with this study, if you care to. And
now, look at that island called The Lancers [Also called Akiaki,
a tiny island in the Low Archipelago, N.E. from New Zealand.].
Everyone who observes its position on the globe wonders who placed
men there: what ties formally bound them to the rest of their
species: what happens to them as they multiply on an area not
more than two miles in diameter.
A.: They kill and eat each other. And here, perhaps we
see a first period of cannibalism which would be very ancient
and quite natural, insular in origin.
B.: Or multiplication of the species is limited by some
superstitious law: there the infant is crushed in the body of
its mother, who is trampled under foot by a priestess.
A.: Or the man expires with his throat cut, under the
knife of the priest: or men have recourse to the castration of
males.
B.: And the infibulation of females. From this springs
many a custom of a strange inevitable cruelty, of which the cause
is lost in the night of time and becomes a matter of torture to
philosophers. One thing has been consistently observed. Supernatural
and divine institutions strengthen themselves and become eternal,
by becoming transformed in the long run into civil and national
laws, while civil and national institutions become consecrated,
and degenerate into supernatural and divine precepts.
A.: That is one of the gloomiest of all vicious circles.
B.: One strand the more to add to the cord that binds
us.
A.: Was he not in Paraguay just at the moment when the
Jesuits were expelled ?
B.: Yes.
A.: What does he say about it ?
B.: Less than he might. But enough to tell me that these
cruel Spartans in the black jacket used their Indian slaves as
the Lacedemonians did their helots: condemned them to continual
toil: made them drink their own sweat; and allowed them no right
of property: kept them in degraded superstition; exacted from
them profound veneration: strode among them whip in hand, and
struck without distinction of age or sex. A hundred years more
and their expulsion would have been impossible or entailed a long
war between the monks and their sovereign, whose authority they
had bit by bit thrown off.
A.: And those Patagonians about whom Doctor Maby and La
Condamine of the Academy have made such a to-do ?
B.: Very good fellows who come up and hug you, crying Chaoua. Strong, vigorous, and yet rarely more than six foot high:
with nothing gigantic about them, but their corpulence, the size
of their heads, and the thickness of their limbs. Man is born
with love for the marvellous and exaggerates everything round
him. How should he then keep his sense of proportion about things,
when he has, so to speak, to justify his journey and the trouble
he has taken in going so far to see them ?
A.: And what does he think of the savage ?
B.: Apparently the cruel character sometimes observed
in him is due to his daily war of defence against the animal creation.
He is always innocent and gentle where nothing troubles his repose
and security. All wars originate in a common claim to the same
piece of property. Civilized man has a common claim along with
another civilized man to the possession of a field, where they
already occupy the two ends. And this field becomes a subject
of dispute between them.
A.: And the tiger has a common claim, along with the savage
man, to the possession of a forest. This is the first claim and
the cause of the earliest of wars. Have you seen the Tahitien
whom Bougainville took on board and brought back here?
B.: Yes. He was called Aotourou. He took the first piece
of land he saw for the home of the travellers. Either they had
lied to him about the length of the journey, or else he was deceived
quite naturally by the apparently small distance between the shores
of the sea, by which he dwelt, to the spot where the sky seemed
to merge in the horizon, and knew nothing about the real measurement
of the earth. The holding of women in common was a custom so well
established in his mind that he threw himself on the first European
woman he met, and very seriously intended to show her the courtesy
of Tahiti. He grew bored with us. As the Tahitien alphabet has
neither b, c, d, f, g, x, y nor z he could never learn to speak
our language. It offered his rigid organs too many strange articulations
and new sounds. He never stopped sighing after his own country,
and I am not surprised at it. The voyage of Bougainville is the
only one to give me the taste for a country other than my own.
Till I had read it, I had always thought that one was nowhere
so contented as at home; a state of mind which held good, I thought,
for each inhabitant of the globe; and which sprang quite naturally
from the charm of the soil, and the comforts which gather round
the conveniences one enjoys and is not equally sure of finding
elsewhere.
A.: What! Do you not think that the inhabitants of Paris
are as sure that corn grows in the Roman Campagna as in the fields
of the Beauce ?
B.: No, I do not. Bougainville sent back Aotourou, after
providing for his expenses and the safety of his journey.
A.: O Aotourou! How happy wilt thou be to see once more
thy father, thy mother, thy brothers, thy sisters, thy mistresses,
thy compatriots! What wilt thou tell them of us?
B.: Very little, and that they will not believe.
A.: Why very little?
B.: Because he has taken in very little, and because he
will find in his own language no terms corresponding to that little
of which he has gathered some notion.
A.: And why will they not believe him?
B.: Because after comparing their own customs to ours,
they will rather think Aotourou a liar than believe we are so
mad.
A.: Really ?
B.: No doubt of it. Savage life is so simple and our societies
are such complicated mechanisms. The Tahitien is near the origin
of the world, the European near its old age. The interval which
separates him and us is greater than that between the child at
birth and the tottering old man. He understands nothing of our
laws and customs or only sees in them impediments disguised in
a hundred forms, impediments which can excite only the indignation
and contempt of a being in whom the sentiment of liberty is the
deepest of all.
A.: Do you want to weave a fable round Tahiti?
B.: This is no fable: and you would have no doubt as to
the sincerity of Bougainville if you knew the supplement to his
voyage.
A.: And where is this supplement to be found?
B.: There, on that table.
A.: Will you trust me with it?
B.: No. But we can run through it together if you like.
A.: Certainly, I like. See, the fog is falling again and
the blue of the sky is beginning to appear. It seems my fate to
be in the wrong with you about the smallest things. I must be
very good-natured to overlook such an unfailing superiority as
yours.
B. Come, come, read. Skip the preamble, which is unimportant,
and, go straight on to the farewell addressed by the chief of
the island to our travellers. That will give you some idea of
these people's eloquence.
A.: How did Bougainville understand these farewells pronounced
in a language he did not know?
B.: You will see. It is an old man talking.
***************************
CHAPLAIN: Can a father sleep with his daughter, a mother
with her son, a brother with his sister, a husband with another
man's wife?
OROU: Why not?
CHAPLAIN: We may tolerate fornication. But incest! But
adultery!
OROU: What do you mean by these words fornication,
incest, adultery?
CHAPLAIN: Crimes, terrible crimes, for any one of which
men are burnt in my country.
OROU: I do not mind if people are burnt in thy country
or not. But thou shalt not judge the morals of Europe by those
of Tahiti nor those of Tahiti by thine own. We need a surer rule:
and what shall that rule be? Do you know any other except the
general good and private usefulness? Now tell me what there is
contrary to our two ends of human action in thy crime incest?
Thou art mistaken, my friend, if you thinkest all is said once
a law is published, an ignominious word invented or a torture
decreed. Answer me then, what meanest thou by incest?
CHAPLAIN: But an incest . .
OROU: An incest? Is it so long ago that thy great
workman without head, hands and tools made the world?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Did he make the whole human race at once?
CHAPLAIN: No, he only made a woman and a man.
OROU: Did they have children.
CHAPLAIN: Certainly.
OROU: Suppose these two first parents had only had daughters,
and their mother died the first, or that they only had sons, and
the woman lost her husband.
CHAPLAIN: That is a difficult question. But say what thou
wilt, incest is an abominable crime. And now let us talk
of something else.
OROU: Thou art pleased to say so. For myself, I express
no opinion until thou tellest exactly what this abominable crime
of incest is.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. I admit that perhaps incest
does not go against nature. But is not the fact that it is a menace
to the political order sufficient? What would become of the safety
of the chief and the tranquillity of the state if a whole nation
composed of several million persons found itself revolving round
fifty heads of families?
OROU: The worst that could happen would be that instead
of one big society there would be fifty small ones, more happiness
and one crime the less.
CHAPLAIN: I suppose, however, that even here a son does
not often sleep with his mother.
OROU: Not unless he has a great deal of respect for her,
and a tenderness which makes him overlook difference of age and
prefer a woman of forty to a girl of nineteen.
CHAPLAIN: And the union of fathers and daughters?
OROU: Are hardly more common, unless the daughter be ugly
and in small demand. If the father loves her, he sets to work
to prepare her a dowry of children.
CHAPLAIN: All this leads me to think that those whom nature
has not favoured cannot be very happy in Tahiti.
OROU: Which shows thou hast no very high opinion of our
young men's generosity.
CHAPLAIN: As to the union of brother and sister. I suppose
that is quite common.
OROU: And highly approved.
CHAPLAIN: From what thou sayest, this passion, the source
of so many crimes and ills in our country must seem quite innocent
to you.
OROU: Stranger, thou art without judgment and memory.
Judgment, for whenever a thing is forbidden, one is naturally
tempted to do it and one does it, and memory, for thou dost not
remember what I told thee. We have dissolute old women who go
out by night without their black veil and receive men when nothing
can come of their connection. If they are recognized or caught
they are punished with banishment to the north of the island as
slaves: and we have precocious girls who remove their white veil
without their parents' knowledge (and we have for them an enclosure
in the hut): also we have young men who lay aside their chains
before the time prescribed by nature and the law (and we reprimand
their parents): we have women for whom the time of pregnancy is
too long; unscrupulous women and girls who throw off their grey
veils. But to tell the truth, we attach no great importance to
any of these faults: thou canst have no notion how much the idea
of private and public wealth, which is associated in our minds
with the idea of population, purifies our morals in this matter.
CHAPLAIN: But are not disorders occasioned by the passion
of two men for the same woman or of two women or girls for the
same man?
OROU: I have not seen half a dozen examples. The man's
or woman's choice finishes everything. Violence on the part of
the man would be a serious fault. But a public complaint would
be necessary, and it is almost unheard of for a woman or a girl
to complain. All I have observed is that our women have less pity
for ugly men than our young fellows for ill-favoured women. And
that we do not mind.
CHAPLAIN: So I see you hardly know what jealousy is. But
marital tenderness, motherly love, these two sentiments, so powerful
and so sweet, must be fairly weak here if not quite unknown.
OROU: We have made up for them with another one, far more
general, energetic and lasting, self interest. Put thy hand upon
thy conscience: leave out this fanfaronade of virtue which is
for ever on the lips of thyself and thy comrades and which resides
not in the bottom of their hearts. Tell me, if in any country
in the world there exists a father, who save for the shame that
restrains him, would not rather lose his son, a husband, who would
not rather lose his wife than his fortune and his worldly comfort.
And be sure that wherever man is attached to the preservation
of one like him, as he is to his bed, his health, his repose,
his cabin, his fruits, his fields, he will do his utmost for him.
It is here that tears damp the couch of the suffering child ;
it is here that mothers are nursed in sickness: it is here that
we prize a fruitful wife, a nubile daughter, an adolescent boy.
It is here that we are busy with their establishment, because
their preservation is always an increase, their loss a diminution
of wealth.
CHAPLAIN: I am afraid this savage is right. The wretched
peasant of our country, who overworks his wife to spare his horse,
allows his children to perish without assisting them, and calls
in the doctor for his ox.
OROU: I do not quite understand what thou hast just said:
but on thy return to thy admirably regulated country, try to introduce
this motive, and then people will appreciate the value of the
child who is born and the importance of population. Wouldst thou
have me reveal thee a secret? Let it go no further. You all arrive.
We abandon you our wives and daughters: you are astonished. You
show a gratitude that makes us laugh. You thank us when we are
levying on thee and thy compatriots the heaviest of all impositions.
We have not asked thee for money. We have not hurled ourselves
on thy merchandise. We have despised thy goods. But our wives
and daughters have come to squeeze out the blood from thy veins.
When thou goest away, thou wilt have left us children behind thee.
In thy opinion is not this tribute on thy person and on thy substance
better than any other? If thou wouldst realise its worth, remember
that thou hast two hundred leagues of coastline to traverse and
that every twenty miles thou wilt be subject to the same tax.
We have vast fields lying fallow. We have no arms to exploit them
and we have asked thee for them. We have calamitous epidemics
to make good and we have employed thee to repair the gaps they
will leave. We have hostile neighbours to fight and need of soldiers;
so we have asked thee to provide them. Our wives and daughters
are too numerous for the men and we have associated thee in our
task. Among our wives and daughters are some from whom we cannot
breed and these we exposed first to your embraces. We have to
pay a debt in men to a tyrannical neighbour: thou and thy comrades
will meet the bill. And in five or six years we shall send them
your sons, if they be not as good as ours. We are more robust
and healthy than you ; but we perceived you surpassed us in intelligence
and immediately we decided that some of our fairest wives and
daughters should gather in the seed of a race which is better
than our own. It is an experiment we have made which may well
be profitable. We have extracted from thee and thine the only
advantage possible. And, believe me, savages as we are, we also
know how to calculate. Go wherever thou wilt, and man will always
be as subtle as thyself. He will never give thee anything save
that which he does not want, and he will always ask for something
useful from thee. If he gives thee a piece of gold for a piece
of iron, it is that he cares nothing for gold and values iron.
But now tell me why art thou not clothed like the others? What
signifies that long cassock, which envelops thee from head to
foot, and that pointed sack that thou lettest fall over thy shoulders
or pullest over thy ears?
CHAPLAIN: The reason is, that such as I am, I am one of
a society of men, called in my country monks. The most sacred
of their vows is to have no dealings with women and not to have
any children.
OROU: What do you do then?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing.
OROU: And thy magistrates tolerate this, the worst of
all forms of idleness?
CHAPLAIN: More than that, they respect and make others
respect it.
OROU: First, I had thought that nature, an accident or
some cruel act had deprived you of the power to produce one in
your image. And by pity, they preferred letting you live to killing
you. But, monk, my daughter told me thou wert a man and a man
as robust as any in Tahiti: further she had hopes thy repeated
caresses would not be fruitless. Now that I understand why thou
calledst out yesterday evening "But my religion, but my
calling," perhaps thou wilt tell me the reason for the
favour and respect that the magistrates allow thee.
CHAPLAIN: I do not know.
OROU: But at least thou knowest why, being a man, thou
hast willingly condemned thyself not to be one.
CHAPLAIN: That would be too long and difficult to explain.
OROU: And is the monk always faithful to this vow of barrenness?
CHAPLAIN: No .
OROU: I was sure not. Have you also female monks?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: And are they as virtuous as the males?
CHAPLAIN: They are more hedged in. They wither with grief
and perish of boredom.
OROU: And so the injury done to nature is avenged! What
an unhappy country ! If everything is arranged on the same basis,
you are far more barbarous than us.
The worthy chaplain tells us he spent the rest of the day touring
the island and visiting the cabins. In the evening after supper
father and mother besought him to sleep with their second daughter,
and Palli presented herself in the same undress as Thia. Several
times during the night he cried out "But my religion, but
my calling," and the third night he was stirred by the same
remorse with the eldest, Asto. The fourth night, as in honour
bound, he consecrated to the wife of his host.
****************************************
A.: The chaplain remarks in the third morsel, which I
have not read you at all, that the Tahitien does not blush at
those involuntary movements which are excited in him beside his
wife and among his daughters: and that his daughters, when spectators
of them, are sometimes much moved, never embarrassed. As soon
as women became male property and the furtive enjoyment of a girl
was considered a theft, we find the phrases modesty, restraint,
propriety came into being, quite imaginary virtues and vices.
In a word, society wished to raise up barriers between the two
sexes which should prevent their inviting each other to violate
the laws imposed on them, barriers which often produced the opposite
effect by heating the imagination and stimulating desire. When
I see trees planted round our great houses and a neckpiece which
reveals part of a woman's neck, I seem to recognize a secret return
towards the forest and an appeal to the first liberty of our former
home. The Tahitien would say to us, "Why do you cover yourself
up? What are you ashamed of? Are you doing wrong by yielding to
the most august of natural impulses? Man, show yourself frankly,
please. Woman, if this man suits you, receive him with equal frankness."
B.: There is no need to be angry. We may begin as civilized
men: we nearly always finish as Tahitiens.
A.: But there is need. These conventional preliminaries
take up half the time of a man of genius.
B.: But what does it matter as long as this pernicious
impulse of the human spirit, against which you were crying out
just now, is today considerably weakened? One of our present-day
philosophers, asked why men courted women, not women men, answered
it was natural to ask the person who could always give.
B.: That reasoning has always appeared to me more specious
than solid. Nature, indecent if you will, inclines one sex without
distinction towards the other. And when man is in the brutal savage
state, which can be imagined, though it perhaps exists nowhere
--
A.: Not even in Tahiti?
B.: No, the distance separating a man from a woman would
be crossed by the most amorous. If they hang back, if they run
away, if they pursue, if they avoid each other, if they attack,
if they defend themselves, it is because passion, progressing
at different rates, does not reside in them with equal force.
So it happens that pleasure increases, is consumed and dies in
the one, when it has hardly begun to operate in the other, and
both parties are discontented. That is the faithful picture of
what would occur between two young, free, and perfectly innocent
beings. But when a woman has learnt by experience or education
the more or less painful consequences of one sweet moment, her
heart trembles at a man's approach. A man's heart does not tremble.
His senses command and he obeys. A woman's senses explain and
she fears to listen. It is the man's business to divert her from
her fear, to intoxicate her and seduce her. Man retains all his
natural impulse towards woman. The natural impulse of a woman
towards a man varies, as a mathematician would say, directly as
passion and inversely as fear, a ratio which is complicated by
a multitude of diverse elements in our societies, elements which
nearly all go to increase cowardice in one sex and length of pursuit
in the other. It is a kind of tactic in which the resources of
defence and the means of attack have developed on parallel lines.
We have sanctified the resistance of the woman: we have attached
disgrace to the violence of the man. Violence would be only a
slight offence in Tahiti. It becomes a crime in our towns.
A.: But how has it come about that this act, so solemn
in its object, and to which nature invites us by the most pressing
of attractions, the greatest, the sweetest, and the most innocent
of pleasures, has grown to be the most fruitful source of all
our depravity and evil?
B.: Orou explained it a dozen times to the chaplain. Listen
to him again and try to remember it.
By the tyranny of man, who has turned the possession of a woman
into a right of property.
By manners and customs, which have overweighted the conjugal
union with conditions.
By civil laws, which have subjected marriage to an infinity of
formalities.
By the nature of our society, in which difference of rank and
fortune have introduced the proper and improper.
By a strange contradiction, common to all existing societies,
by which the birth of a child, which was always regarded as an
increase of wealth for the nation, is now more often and more
certainly an increase of poverty for the family.
By the political views of sovereigns, who have related everything
to their own interest and safety.
By religious institutions, which have attached the names of vice
and virtue to actions not susceptible to moral treatment.
How far we are from nature and happiness! The empire of nature
cannot be destroyed. However much you handicap it with obstacles
it will endure. Write as much as you please on tables of bronze
(to use the expression of the wise Marcus Aurelius), that the
pleasurable friction of two intestines is a crime, the heart of
man will still be torn between the threats on your inscriptions
and the violence of its own leanings. This untutored heart will
not cease to cry out, and a hundred times in the course of life
your terrifying inscriptions will disappear before our eyes. Engrave
upon marble: Thou shalt not eat the dodo or the gryphon: thou
shalt only know thy wife: thou shalt not be the husband of thy
sister; and do not forget to increase the punishment to suit the
strangeness of the discipline. You will become cruel yourselves,
but you will not succeed in changing my nature.
A.: How short the code of nations would be if it conformed
rigidly to the law of nature. How many errors and vices man would
be spared!
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From Herman Melville's Typee: A Peep
at Polynesian Life:
Top of Page
From Hiram Bingham's Twenty-Years'
Residence...: