time of making the assault.[188] Cook was pleased with the appearance and the ways of these islanders; they seemed kind, and he was struck at seeing “hundreds of truly European faces” among them.  He went so far as to declare that it was utterly wrong to call them savages, “for a more civilized people does not exist under the sun.”  He did not stay with them long enough to discover that they were morally not far above the other South Sea Islanders.

WERE THE TONGANS CIVILIZED?

Mariner, who lived among the Tongans four years, and whose adventures and observations were afterward recorded by Martin, gives information which indicates that Cook was wrong when he said that a more civilized people does not exist under the sun.  “Theft, revenge, rape and murder,” Mariner attests (II., 140), “under many circumstances are not held to be crimes.”  It is considered the duty of married women to remain true to their husbands and this, Mariner thinks, is generally done.  Unmarried women “may bestow their favors upon whomsoever they please, without any opprobrium” (165).  Divorced women, like the unmarried, may admit temporary lovers without the least reproach or secresy.

“When a woman is taken prisoner (in war) she generally has to submit; but this is a thing of course, and considered neither an outrage nor dishonor; the only dishonor being to be a prisoner and consequently a sort of servant to the conqueror.  Rape, though always considered an outrage, is not looked upon as a crime unless the woman be of such rank as to claim respect from the perpetrator” (166).

Many of their expressions, when angry, are

“too indelicate to mention.”  “Conversation is often intermingled with allusions, even when women are present, which could not be allowed in any decent society in England.”

Two-thirds of the women

“are married and are soon divorced, and are married again perhaps three, four, or five times in their lives.”  “No man is understood to be bound to conjugal fidelity; it is no reproach to him to intermix his amours.”  “Neither have they any word expressive of chastity except nofo mow, remaining fixed or faithful, and which in this sense is only applied to a married woman to signify her fidelity to her husband.”

Even the married women of the lower classes had to yield to the wishes of the chiefs, who did not hesitate to shoot a resisting husband.  (Waitz-Gerland, VI., 184.)

While these details show that Captain Cook overrated the civilization of the Tongans, there are other facts indicating that they were in some respects superior to other Polynesians, at any rate.  The women are capable of blushing, and they are reproached if they change their lovers too often.  They seem to have a dawning sense of the value of chastity and of woman’s claims to consideration.  In Mariner’s description (I., 130) of a chief’s wedding occurs this sentence: