In islands, as in unproductive highlands where hunger stalks abroad, marriage readily takes the form of polyandry.  On the Canary Islands, at the time of their conquest in 1402, polyandry existed in Lancerote and possibly in Fuerteventura, often assigning one woman to three husbands; but in the other islands of the group monogamy was strictly maintained.[998] In Oceanica polygamy, monogamy or polyandry prevails according to a man’s means, the poverty of the islands, and the supply of women.  A plurality of wives is always the privilege of the chiefs and the wealthy, but all three forms of marriage may be found on the same island.  Scarcity of women gives rise to polyandry in Tahiti,[999] and consigns one woman to four or five men.  In old Hawaii, where there were four or five men to one woman a kind of incipient polyandry arose by the addition of a countenanced paramour to the married couple’s establishment.[1000] Robert Louis Stevenson found the same complaisant arrangement a common one in the Marquesas, where the husband’s deputy was designated by the term of pikio in the native vocabulary.[1001] Polyandry existed in Easter Isle, among whose stunted and destitute population the men far exceeded the women, and children were few, according to reports of the early visitors.[1002] Numerous other instances make this connection between island habitat, deficiency of women, need of checking increase, and polyandrous marriages an obvious one.[1003]

[Sidenote:  Infanticide.]

This disproportion of the sexes in Oceanica is due to the murder of female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation, licentiousness, and the violence of the men.[1004] The imminence of famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica.  In some parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is so habitual, that in some families all children are killed, and substitutes purchased at will.[1005] In the well-tilled Fiji Islands, a pregnant girl is strangled and her seducer slain.  The women make a practice of drinking medicated waters to produce sterility.  Failing in this, the majority kill their children either before or after birth.  In the island of Vanua Levu infanticide reaches from one-half to two-thirds of all children conceived; here it is reduced to a system and gives employment to professional murderers of babies, who hover like vultures over every child-bed.  All destroyed after birth are females.[1006] And yet here, as on many other islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, such offspring as are spared are treated with foolish fondness and indulgence.[1007] The two facts are not incompatible.

[Sidenote:  Approved by the state.]