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 glass bottle.  Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wife seven pieces of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, besides tobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl shells.  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 attitude 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]