The woman thus had an advantage over the man in being able to transmit her rank to her children, a survival of the matriarchate custom once ruling the world.  Polygamy was rarely indulged, though not forbidden.  A chief here and there might have two or three wives.  Women were allowed only one husband, but often avowed lovers were tolerated, if not feared, by the husband.  Mr. Banks, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was horrified after he had made love to Queen Oberea of Papara in the absence of her husband to find her attendant was a cavaliere servente.  His Anglican morals were shocked.  He had thought himself the only male sinner by her complacence.

Before Christianity was forced on them, the Tahitians married in the same rank, and with considerable right to choice.  The tie might be dissolved by the same authority binding it, the chief or head of the clan.  Inequality of rank, or near consanguinity, were the only obstacles to marriage.  Rank might be overcome, but never the other.  It was as in China, where Confucius himself laid down the law:  “A man in taking a wife does not choose one of the same surname as himself.”  And in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason is given for this law:  “When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply.”  The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us.  It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption.  Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children.  Their feeling surpasses the parental affection prevailing in the remainder of the world, yet adoption is a stronger bond than blood.  No child was raised by its own genitors.  The Tetuanuis had brought up twenty-five, all freely given them at birth or after weaning.  The taboo was strict.

Illegitimate children were as welcome as others.  The husband might have been so jealous as to meditate killing his wife; but when her child was born, although he knew it to be a bastard, he gave it the same love and care as his own.  There were exceptions, but one might cite on the opposite side innumerable cases where, despite the most open adultery, the husband has taken his wife’s offspring for his own.  It was well that this was so, for adultery was so habitual that were bastards not made welcome, there would have been much suffering by children, innocent themselves.  Here, as in civilization, men love their bastards often more than their legitimate sons and daughters.

This prohibition against keeping one’s own must have arisen when there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a natural guarding against sexual relationship in tribes or communities where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity.  One must look, as in the case of taboos, deeper than the surface for the beginning of this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted to—­friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.