CHAPTER VII—­HUSBAND AND WIFE

The trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to learn among the Gilberts.  The ridi is but a spare attire; as late as thirty years back the women went naked until marriage; within ten years the custom lingered; and these facts, above all when heard in description, conveyed a very false idea of the manners of the group.  A very intelligent missionary described it (in its former state) as a ‘Paradise of naked women’ for the resident whites.  It was at least a platonic Paradise, where Lothario ventured at his peril.  Since 1860, fourteen whites have perished on a single island, all for the same cause, all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived.  The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key.  The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; and the dart went through their liver.  In place of a Paradise the trader found an archipelago of fierce husbands and of virtuous women.  ’Of course if you wish to make love to them, it’s the same as anywhere else,’ observed a trader innocently; but he and his companions rarely so choose.

The trader must be credited with a virtue:  he often makes a kind and loyal husband.  Some of the worst beachcombers in the Pacific, some of the last of the old school, have fallen in my path, and some of them were admirable to their native wives, and one made a despairing widower.  The position of a trader’s wife in the Gilberts is, besides, unusually enviable.  She shares the immunities of her husband.  Curfew in Butaritari sounds for her in vain.  Long after the bell is rung and the great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof, this chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets or go down to bathe in the dark.  The resources of the store are at her hand; she goes arrayed like a queen, and feasts delicately everyday upon tinned meats.  And she who was perhaps of no regard or station among natives sits with captains, and is entertained on board of schooners.  Five of these privileged dames were some time our neighbours.  Four were handsome skittish lasses, gamesome like children, and like children liable to fits of pouting.  They wore dresses by day, but there was a tendency after dark to strip these lendings and to career and squall about the compound in the aboriginal ridi.  Games of cards were continually played, with shells for counters; their course was much marred by cheating; and the end of a round (above all if a man was of the party) resolved itself into a scrimmage for the counters.  The fifth was a matron.  It was a picture to