Parallèle entre les mœurs des peuples d’espèce malaie placés sous un climat froid, et les mœurs des

CHAP. 24: > Parallel between the morals of the peoples of the Malay species placed under a cold climate, and the morals of the peoples of the same species placed between the tropics.

What I have said in the preceding chapters on the social state and on the morals of the peoples of the Malay species applies only to those of these peoples who live between the tropics or who are placed only at a very small distance from them; if, therefore, one observes some differences among them, one can hardly attribute them to the difference of climates. But there exist, in the great Ocean, other peoples who belong to the same species and who are placed under a higher latitude; these are the inhabitants of Easter Island, who live under the twenty-seventh degree of south latitude, and those of New Zealand, who live between the thirty-fourth and the forty-seventh. It is in describing their morals that we will see in what they differ from those of the peoples of the tropics.

On Easter Island and in New Zealand, one finds only a single species of men. One does not see here, as in the archipelagos of the tropics, enslaved cultivators who cannot touch the foods they grow, nor organized conquerors living on the lands and labors of the ancient possessors. These islanders are therefore exempt from the evils that slavery engenders for masters as for slaves; they are moreover placed under a cold or at least very temperate climate, which, according to several philosophers, is a very favorable circumstance for virtue. They are far, however, from having purer morals than those of the peoples of the same species we have already seen.

The inhabitants of New Zealand are divided into a multitude of tribes, and each of them is always at war with the others. These islanders have no social organization, and consequently each is the judge and avenger of the offenses he believes he has received. Thus there are no men on the globe who are more suspicious, more distrustful, more disposed to vengeance [620]. Whether they work, or whether they travel, they are always on their guard: they always have their weapons in hand; even the women are armed; they carry pikes eighteen feet long [621]. Each tribe having received injustices or outrages from the neighboring tribes, they all live in continual dread, ceaselessly occupied with protecting themselves from vengeance, or watching for the opportunity to avenge themselves. They have made a fort of each village, and they dare scarcely leave it to cultivate a few narrow pieces of land [622]. The desire for vengeance, the need for security, and the hunger that always besieges them, continually push them to the destruction of one another; and the deserted and ruined villages encountered by travelers attest that the complete destruction of a tribe is the consequence of defeat [623]. Cook, solicited by several of these islanders to put one of their chiefs to death, assures that he could have exterminated the entire race, if he had followed the advice of this kind that he received; the inhabitants of all the villages or hamlets each in their turn begged him to destroy their neighbors. It is not easy, says Cook, to conceive the motives for so terrible an animosity; and it proves in a striking manner to what point these unfortunate tribes are divided among themselves [624]. These peoples are not pushed to war only by the desire to avenge themselves or to shelter themselves from vengeance; they are pushed to it also by the desire to feed on the corpses of their enemies. They eat not only the men fallen on the field of battle; they eat all those they take alive, without excepting the children [625].The women of the New Zealanders are enslaved like those of the peoples placed between the tropics; but they are treated in a harsher manner. It is not rare to see a man who possesses two or three of them. A father prostitutes his daughter, a husband his wife, as in the other islands [626]. The slightest fault a woman commits is punished by violent outrages [627]. A mother who, offended by her son, inflicts a light punishment on him, is herself chastised by her husband in a cruel manner. The English travelers often had occasion to see similar examples of cruelty; they saw sons who struck their mothers, while the fathers watched them in order to beat them themselves if they undertook to defend themselves or to chastise their children. Among the savages, says one of these travelers, women are the servants or the slaves who do all the work, and upon whom all the husband's severity is deployed. It seems that the New Zealanders carry this tyranny to excess: boys are taught, from their earliest age, to despise their mothers [628]. However, there is for women a still greater misfortune than that of being exposed to the brutality of their husbands; it is that of not being married; then they are abandoned to themselves and become the plaything of anyone who has strength [629].

The ill-treatment that husbands make their wives experience in cases where they inflict some light corrections on their children is not the effect of paternal tenderness; it is the effect of the contempt they have for the weaker sex. The parents of two young New Zealanders who followed Cook, although informed that they would never see them again, manifested no kind of regret.

“I believe,” says the traveler, speaking of the father of one of these two children, “that he would have left his dog with less indifference. He seized the few clothes the child was wearing, and left him completely naked. I had taken useless pains to make them understand that they would never return to New Zealand; neither their parents nor any of the natives were concerned about their fate [630].”

The inhabitants of Easter Island have the same morals as most of the peoples closer to the equator; one observes only that their vices have more energy; they appeared more hypocritical, more thieving, and less susceptible to gratitude. The women did not show more delicacy than those of the other islands; their husbands or their fathers offered them with the same impudence. The French travelers who visited them made no use of their forces against them, which these islanders did not fail to recognize, since the mere gesture of aiming a rifle made them flee. On the contrary, they landed on their island only to do them good: they showered them with presents; they overwhelmed all weak beings with caresses, particularly suckling children; they sowed all sorts of useful seeds in their fields; they left pigs, goats, and sheep in their dwellings; they asked for nothing in exchange: nevertheless, these same islanders threw stones at them; they stole from them everything they were able to carry away [631].

The inhabitants of the Society Islands and the Friendly Islands show themselves to be merciless in their wars; but they are much less barbarous than those of New Zealand: they do not feed on the flesh of their prisoners. They are very brutal toward their inferiors; but they are not strangers to gratitude like the inhabitants of Easter Island. When they learn of the loss of men whom they had considered their friends, they manifest very keen regrets; and some have proven that they could long preserve the memory of the benefits they had received [632]. They treat their women less harshly than the New Zealanders; they do not burden them with the most painful occupations; they impose on them only the interior labors of the house, or let them live in idleness [633]. The tenderness and care of the women of the Sandwich Islands for their children struck the English navigators, who often saw the men help them in these domestic occupations [634]. Finally, these peoples have distinguished themselves by a cleanliness that one does not find among the peoples situated under colder climates [635].

The Navigator Islands, closer to the equator than the Sandwich Islands and the Society Islands, have been less frequented. A part of La Pérouse's crew experienced, from the inhabitants of these islands, an attack similar to that which Wallis endured from the inhabitants of the Society Islands; but the resistance did not have the same success; the assailants remained victors; the French officer and sailors were massacred. If these islanders had failed in their enterprise; if, like the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands and the Society Islands, they had experienced the power of artillery, it is probable that they would have had the same conduct. But one has been able to know of them only their perfidy, their audacity, their strength, and the facility with which they lavish the favors of their daughters or their wives.

These islanders were at first judged very gentle by the men of the crew that La Pérouse commanded; they had sold them more than two hundred tame wood pigeons, which would eat only from the hand; they had also exchanged the most charming turtledoves and parakeets, as tame as the pigeons. What imagination would not have pictured happiness in so delightful a sojourn! These islanders, said the navigators, are doubtless the happiest inhabitants of the earth; surrounded by their wives and their children, they pass pure and tranquil days in the bosom of repose; they have no other care than that of raising birds; and, like the first man, of gathering, without any labor, the fruits that grow above their heads [636].

But whatever the virtues or the vices of these peoples in their private relations, it is certain at least that one finds among them neither that inactivity nor that weakness that is attributed to peoples who live under hot climates; they appear, on the contrary, more active, more energetic, more audacious than the peoples of the same species placed at a greater distance from the equator; their robust bodies, covered with scars, prove well enough that they do not live in softness [637].

The English navigators made the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands experience the power of their arms the first time they visited them. Cook's crew, seeing three of these islanders moving away in their boat, and having learned that one of them was carrying away an iron candlestick, fired on them, and one fell dead at the third shot [638]. The French and the Russians who later visited the same peoples have borne witness to their gentleness, their humanity, their hospitality, their peaceful character. Not only did the French receive no outrage from them, but after having gravely wounded one of them by imprudence while traveling the country, they continued to receive from him marks of benevolence. Captain Chanal remarked with sensitivity that a young man whom a musket shot had gravely wounded, and whom he had taken care to have dressed, walked above him, and that several times, in his difficulties, he offered him the support of the only arm of which the imprudence of the French had left him the use [639]. The French navigators left these islands without any event having destroyed or weakened the good opinion they had conceived of these islanders. The Russian navigator who visited them had no more to complain of them. He saw them always gay and content, goodness appearing painted on their faces. During the ten days he spent with them, he was never obliged to fire a single shot loaded with a ball [640].

The Russian traveler, however, gives us few advantageous ideas of the morals of these peoples, on the testimony of a Frenchman and an Englishman long established among them. He questioned these two men separately, and he learned from them that these peoples are all as false and as perfidious as those of whom La Pérouse speaks; that they are continually at war with one another; that they seek to vanquish their enemies by surprise rather than by force; and finally that they eat their prisoners [641]. Krusenstern believed he found confirmation of these reports in the skulls that the islanders offered to sell him, in the hair and human bones with which their weapons and furniture were adorned, and finally in their pantomimes [642]. The French navigators, who had sought to discover what the relations of these peoples were with their neighbors, had not been able to procure exact information in this regard; but, on seeing their offensive weapons and the serious wounds of which some bore the scars, they had conjectured that the scourge of war was not foreign to them [643].

The two individuals whose reports the Russian navigator collected affirmed, moreover, that, in times of famine, the islanders devour children and women; but the phenomena that one observes in times of famine can only with difficulty characterize the morals of a people in its natural state. One has seen facts similar to those of which the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands are accused, among the most civilized peoples; when European crews, abandoned in the middle of the seas, have been reduced to the horrible necessity of doing as they did or of perishing, this latter course is the one they have rejected. To judge, moreover, that these islanders are inferior, in this respect, to the inhabitants of the other islands, it would be necessary to have observed them all in the same circumstances. Cook found in New Zealand parents who abandoned their children to him with as much facility as they would have abandoned the most despicable of animals. Marchand, on the contrary, observed in the Marquesas Islands fathers who overwhelmed their children with caresses. “Often,” he says, “men tenderly pressed in their arms children of whom they gloried in being fathers [644].”

Thus, one finds among the peoples of the Malay species who inhabit cold or temperate climates no moral superiority over the peoples of the same species who inhabit hot climates. One finds, on the contrary, among several of the latter less energy in the malevolent passions, and more force in the social affections than in the former.