quoted says whole volumes might be written concerning the “silly affection” of the women for animals.  They carry them in their bosoms, and do not hesitate to suckle them.  It is one of their duties to drive pigs to the market, and one day “Haeole” came across a group of native women who had taken off their only garments and soaked them in water to cool their dear five hundred-pounder, while others were fanning him!  As late as 1881 Isabella Bird wrote (213) that

“the crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love of pleasure and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it are apparently still stronger among the women than the maternal instinct, and they do not take the trouble necessary to rear infants....  I have nowhere seen such tenderness lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with them.”

HAWAIIAN MORALS

Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Fijians do; yet how far they were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obvious from the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, on penalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles of food, such as bananas, cocoanuts, pork, turtle; or refused them permission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divine worship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods.

The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by “Haeole’s” reference (123) to “the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the ne plus ultra of female beauty.”  Incest was permitted to the chiefs, and the people vied with their rulers in the grossest sensuality.

“Nearly every night, with the gathering darkness, crowds would retire to some favorite spot, where, amid every species of sensual indulgence, they would revel until the morning twilight” (412).

“In Hawaii, whether the woman was married or single, she would have been thought very churlish and boorish if she refused any favor asked by a male friend of the family,”

says E. Tregear;[189] and in Dibble’s History of the Sandwich Islands (126-27) we read: 

“For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship, and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability.  For a man or a woman to refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the feeling of meanness in making a refusal.”

The Hawaiian word for marriage is hoao, meaning “trial.”  It was also customary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as punula.  The word hula hula is familiar the world over as the name of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be.  The famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it.  In past generations