him of trying to "steal" her. This led to a big
palaver before the chief, at which the verdict was that the cook was
innocent and that the girl had trumped up the charge in order to force
the marriage.

If a man and a girl began to keep company, he was branded on the back
with a charcoal, while her mark was cut into the skin (because "she
asked the man"). It was expected they would marry, but if they did not
nothing could be done. If it was the man who was unwilling, the girl's
father told the other men of the place, and they gave him a sound
thrashing. Refusing a girl was thus a serious matter on these islands!

The missionaries, Haddon was informed,

"discountenance the native custom of the women
proposing to the men, although there is not the least
objection to it from a moral or social point of view;
quite the reverse. So the white man's fashion is being
introduced. As an illustration of the present mixed
condition of affairs, I found that a girl who wants a
certain man writes him a letter, often on a slate, and
he replies in a similar manner."

On the island of Tud it often happened that the girl who was first
enamoured of a youth at his initiation, and who first asked him in
marriage, was one who "like too many men." The lad, being on his
guard, might get rid of her attentions by playing a trick on her,
making a bogus appointment with her in the bush, and then informing
the elder men, who would appear in his place at the trysting-place, to
the girl's mortification.

Various details given in the chapter on Australia indicated that if
the women on that big island did not propose, as a rule, it was not
from coyness but because the selfishness of the men and their
arrangements made it impossible in most cases. On these neighboring
islands the women could propose; yet the cause of love, of course, did
not gain anything from such an arrangement, which could serve only to
stimulate licentiousness. Haddon gathered the impression that
"chastity before marriage was unknown, free intercourse not being
considered wrong; it was merely 'fashion along we folk.'" Their excuse
was the same as Adam's: "Woman, he steal; man, how can he help
it?"[182]

Nocturnal courtship was in vogue:

"Decorum was observed. Thus I was told in Tud a girl, before
going to sleep, would tie a string round her foot and pass
it under the thatched wall of the house. In the middle of
t