MAORI MORALS AND CAPACITY FOR LOVE

When Hawkesworth visited New Zealand with Captain Cook, he one day came accidentally across some women who were fishing, and who had thrown off their last garments.  When they saw him they were as confused and distressed as Diana and her nymphs; they hid among the rocks and crouched down in the sea until they had made and put on girdles of seaweeds (456).  “There are instances,” writes William Brown (36-37), “of women committing suicide from its being said that they had been seen naked.  A chief’s wife took her own life because she had been hung up by the heels and beaten in the presence of the whole tribe.”

Shall we conclude from this that the Maoris were genuinely modest and perhaps capable of that delicacy in regard to sexual matters which is a prerequisite of sentimental love?  What is modesty?  The Century Dictionary says it is “decorous feeling or behavior; purity or delicacy of thought or manner; reserve proceeding from pure or chaste character;” and the Encyclopaedic Dictionary defines it as “chastity; purity of manners; decency; freedom from lewdness or un-chastity.”  Now, Maori modesty, if such it maybe called, was only skin deep.  Living in a colder climate than other Polynesians, it became customary among them to wear more clothing; and what custom prescribes must be obeyed to the letter among all these peoples, be the ordained dress merely a loin cloth or a necklace, or a cover for the back only, or full dress.  It does not argue true modesty on the part of a Maori woman to cover those parts of her body which custom orders her to cover, any more than it argues true modesty on the part of an Oriental barbarian to cover her face only, on meeting a man, leaving the rest of her body exposed.  Nor does suicide prove anything, since it is known that the lower races indulge in self-slaughter for as trivial causes as they do in the slaughter of others.  True modesty, as defined above, is not a Maori characteristic.  The evidence on this point is too abundant to quote in full.

Shortland (126-27) describes in detail all of the ceremonies which were in former days the pastimes of the New Zealanders, and which accompanied the singing of their haka or “love-songs,” to which reference has already been made.  In the front were seated three elderly ladies and behind them in rows, eight or ten in a row, and five or six ranks deep, sat “the best born young belles of the town” who supplied the poem and the music for the haka pantomime: 

“The haka is not a modest exhibition, but the reverse; and, on this occasion, two of the old ladies who stood in front ... accompanied the music by movements of the arms and body, their postures being often disgustingly lascivious.  However, they suited the taste of the audience, who rewarded the performers at such times with the applause they desired....  It was altogether as ungodly a scene as can well be imagined.”

The same author, who lived among the natives several years, says (120) that