Part 50 (1/2)

On the island of Mabniag, after a girl has sent an intermediary to bring a string to the man she covets, she follows this up by sending him food, again and again. But he ”lies low” a month or two before he ventures to eat any of this food, because he has been warned by his mother that if he takes it he will ”get an eruption all over his face.” Finally, he concludes she means business, so he consults the big men of the village and marries her.

If a man danced well, he found favor in the sight of these island damsels. His being married did not prevent a girl from proposing. Of course she took good care not to make the advances through one of the other wives--that might have caused trouble!--but in the usual way. On this island the men never made the first advances toward matrimony.

Haddon tells a story of a native girl who wanted to marry a Loyalty Islander, a cook, who was loafing on the mission premises. He did not encourage her advances, but finally agreed to meet her in the bush, where, according to his version of the story, he finally refused her.

She, however, accused him of trying to ”steal” her. This led to a big palaver before the chief, at which the verdict was that the cook was innocent and that the girl had trumped up the charge in order to force the marriage.

If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the back with a charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because ”she asked the man”). It was expected they would marry, but if they did not nothing could be done. If it was the man who was unwilling, the girl's father told the other men of the place, and they gave him a sound thras.h.i.+ng. Refusing a girl was thus a serious matter on these islands!

The missionaries, Haddon was informed,

”discountenance the native custom of the women proposing to the men, although there is not the least objection to it from a moral or social point of view; quite the reverse. So the white man's fas.h.i.+on is being introduced. As an ill.u.s.tration of the present mixed condition of affairs, I found that a girl who wants a certain man writes him a letter, often on a slate, and he replies in a similar manner.”

On the island of Tud it often happened that the girl who was first enamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him in marriage, was one who ”like too many men.” The lad, being on his guard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her, making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informing the elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, to the girl's mortification.

Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that if the women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was not from coyness but because the selfishness of the men and their arrangements made it impossible in most cases. On these neighboring islands the women could propose; yet the cause of love, of course, did not gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only to stimulate licentiousness. Haddon gathered the impression that ”chast.i.ty before marriage was unknown, free intercourse not being considered wrong; it was merely 'fas.h.i.+on along we folk.'” Their excuse was the same as Adam's: ”Woman, he steal; man, how can he help it?”[182]

Nocturnal courts.h.i.+p was in vogue:

”Decorum was observed. Thus I was told in Tud a girl, before going to sleep, would tie a string round her foot and pa.s.s it under the thatched wall of the house. In the middle of the night her lover would come, pull the string, and so awaken the girl, who would then join him. As the chief of Mabuiag said, 'What can the father do; if she wants the man how can he stop her?'”

On Muralug Island the custom is somewhat different. There, after the girl has sent her gra.s.s-ring to the man she wants,

”if he is willing to proceed in the matter, he goes to the rendezvous in the bush and, not unnaturally, takes every advantage of the situation. Every night afterwards he goes to the girl's house and steals away before daybreak. At length someone informs the girl's father that a man is sleeping with his daughter. The father communicates with the girl, and she tells her lover that her father wants to see him--'To see what sort of man he is?' The father then says, 'You like my daughter, she like you, you may have her.' The details are then arranged.”

Sometimes, if a girl was too free with her favors to the men, the other women cut a mark down her back, to make her feel ashamed. Yet she had no difficulty on this account in subsequently finding a husband.

Besides the existence of ”free love,” there are other customs arguing the absence of sentiment in these insular affairs of the heart.

Infanticide was frequently resorted to, the babes being buried alive in the sand, for no other reason than to save the trouble of taking care of them. After marriage, in spite of the fact that the girl did the proposing, she becomes the man's property; so much so that if she should offend him, he may kill her and no harm will come to him. If her sister comes to remonstrate, he can kill her too, and if he has two wives and they quarrel, he can kill both. In that love-scene reported by Maino, the chief of Tud, the girl gives us her ”sentimental” reasons why she loves him: because he has a fine leg and body, and a good skin. The ”romance” of the situation is further aggravated when we read that, as in Australia, swapping sisters is the usual way of getting a wife, and that if a man has no sister to exchange he must pay for his wife with a canoe, a knife, or a gla.s.s bottle. Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wife seven pieces of calico, one dozen s.h.i.+rts, one dozen singlets, one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, besides tobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl sh.e.l.ls. He finished his enumeration by exclaiming ”By golly, he too dear!”

How did these islanders ever come to indulge in the custom, so inconsistent with their general att.i.tude toward women, of allowing them to propose? The only hint at an explanation I have been able to find is contained in the following citation from Haddon:

”If an unmarried woman desired a man she accosted him, but the man did not ask the woman (at least, so I was informed), for if she refused him he would feel ashamed, and maybe brain her with a stone club, and so 'he would kill her for nothing.'”

BORNEAN CAGED GIRLS

The islands of the Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters are almost innumerable. To give an account of the love-affairs customary on all of them would require a large volume by itself. In the present work it is not possible to do more than select a few of the islands, as samples, preference being given to those that show at least some traces of feelings rising above mere sensualism. One of the largest and best known of these islands is Borneo, and of its inhabitants the Dyaks are of special interest from our point of view. Their customs have been observed and described by St. John, Low, Bock, H. Ling Roth and others.[183]

In some parts of Dutch Borneo the cruel custom prevails of locking up a girl when she is eight to ten years old in a small, dark apartment of the house, which she is not allowed to leave for about seven years.

She spends her time making mats and doing other handiwork, but is not allowed to see anyone--not even of her own family--except a female slave. When she is free from her prison she appears bleached a light yellow, as though made out of wax, and totters along on small, thin feet--which the natives consider especially attractive.

CHARMS OF DYAK WOMEN

Dyak girls are not subjected to any such restraints, and in some respects they enjoy more liberty than is good for them. As usual among the lower races, they have to do most of the hard work. ”It is a sad sight,” says Low (75), ”to see the Dyak girls, some but nine or ten years of age, carrying water up the mount in bamboos, their bodies bent nearly double, and groaning under the weight of their burden.”

Lieutenant Marryat found that the mountain Dyak girls, if not beautiful, had some beautiful points--good eyes, teeth, and hair, besides good manners, and they ”knew how to make use of their eyes.”

Denison (cited by Roth, I., 46) remarks that

”Some of the girls showed signs of good looks, but hard work, poor feeding, and intermarriage and early marriage soon told their tale, and rapidly converted them into ugly, dirty, diseased old hags, and this at an age when they are barely more than young women.”