“before marriage the greatest license is permitted to young females.  The more admirers they can attract and the greater their reputation for intrigue, the fairer is their chance of making an advantageous match.”

William Brown writes (35) that “among the Maoris chastity is not deemed one of the virtues; and a lady before marriage may be as liberal of her favors as she pleased without incurring censure.”  “As a rule,” writes E. Tregear in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1889),

“the girls had great license in the way of lovers.  I don’t think the young woman knew when she was a virgin, for she had love-affairs with the boys from the cradle.  This does not apply, of course, to every individual case—­some girls are born proud, and either kept to one sweetheart or had none, but this was rare.”

After marriage a woman was expected to remain faithful to her husband, but of course not from any regard for chastity, but because she was his private property.  Like so many other uncivilized races the Maori saw no impropriety in lending his wife to a friend. (Tregear, 104.)

The faces of Maori women were always wet with red ochre and oil.  Both sexes anointed their hair (which was vermin-infested) with rancid shark’s oil, so that they were as disagreeable to the smell as Hottentots. (Hawkesworth, 451-53.) They were cannibals, not from necessity, but for the love of human flesh, though they did not, like the Australians, eat their own relatives.  Food, says Thompson (I., 160), affected them “as it does wild beasts.”  They practised infanticide, killed cripples, abandoned the sick—­in a word, they displayed a coarseness, a lack of delicacy, in sexual and other matters, which makes it simply absurd to suppose they could have loved as we love, with our altruistic feeling of sympathy and affection.  William Brown says (38) that mothers showed none of that doting fondness for their children common elsewhere, and that they suckled pigs and pups with “affection.”  “Should a husband quarrel with his wife, she would not hesitate to kill her children, merely to annoy him” (41).  “They are totally devoid of natural affection.”  The men “appear to care little for their wives,” apparently from

“a want of that sympathy between the sexes which is the source of the delicate attentions paid by the male to the female in most civilized countries.  In my own experience I have seen only one instance where there was any perceptible attachment between husband and wife.  To all appearance they behave to each other as if they were not at all related; and it not infrequently happens that they sleep in different places before the termination of the first week of their marriage.”

Thus even in the romantic isles of the Pacific we seek in vain for true love.  Let us now see whether the vast continent of North and South America will bring us any nearer to our goal.