the better. Captain Cook already
referred to the Areois who made a business of depravity (220). "So
agreeable," he wrote,

"is this licentious plan of life to their disposition, that
the most beautiful of both sexes thus commonly spend their
youthful days, habituated to the practice of enormities
which would disgrace the most savage tribes."

Ellis, who lived several years on this island, declares that they were
noted for their humor and their jests, but the jests

"were in general low and immoral to a disgusting degree....
Awfully dark, indeed, was their moral character, and
notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposition,
and the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion
of the human race was ever, perhaps, sunk lower in brutal
licentiousness and moral degradation than this isolated
people" (87).

He also describes the Areois (I., 185-89) as "privileged libertines,"
who travelled from place to place giving improper dances and
exhibitions, "addicted to every kind of licentiousness," and
"spreading a moral contagion throughout society," Yet they were "held
in the greatest respect" by all classes of the population. They had
their own gods, who were "monsters in vice," and "patronized every
evil practice perpetrated during such seasons of public festivity."

Did the white sailors also give the Tahitians their idea of Tahitian
dances, and professional Areois, and corrupt gods? Did they teach them
customs which Hawkesworth, himself a sailor, and accustomed to scenes
of low life, said "no imagination could possibly conceive?" Did the
European whites teach these natives to regard men as _ra_ (sacred) and
women as _noa_ (common)? Did they teach them all those other customs
and atrocities which the following paragraphs reveal?

HEARTLESS TREATMENT OF WOMEN

It can be shown that quite apart from their sensuality, the Tahitians
were too coarse and selfish to be able to entertain any of those
refined sentiments of love which the sentimentalists would have us
believe prevailed before the advent of the white man.

Love is often compared to a flower; but love cannot, like a flower,
grow on a dunghill. It requires a pure, chaste soul, and it requires
the fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian a
woman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his food
and drink, or his cool plunge into the waves, for the reason tha