Chapter III: Preface: {vii} (3)

[Sidenote: Similar beliefs and customs among the tribes of Dutch Borneo.] The foregoing accounts refer especially to the tribes of Borneo under British rule; but similar ideas and customs prevail among the kindred tribes of Dutch Borneo. Thus the Kayans or Bahaus in the interior of the island believe that adultery is punished by the spirits, who visit the whole tribe with failure of the crops and other misfortunes. Hence in order to avert these evil consequences from the innocent members of the tribe, the two culprits, with all their possessions, are first placed on a gravel bank in the middle of the river, in order to isolate or, in electrical {51} language, to insulate them and so prevent the moral or rather physical infection from spreading. Then pigs and fowls are killed, and with the blood priestesses smear the property of the guilty pair in order to disinfect it. Finally, the two are placed on a raft, with sixteen eggs, and allowed to drift down stream. They may save themselves by plunging into the water and swimming ashore; but this is perhaps a mitigation of an older sentence of death by drowning, for young people still shower long grass stalks, representing spears, at the shamefaced and dripping couple.[51.1] Certain it is, that some Dyak tribes used to punish incest by fastening the man and woman in separate baskets laden with stones and drowning them in the river. By incest they understood the cohabitation of parents with children, of brothers with sisters, and of uncles and aunts with nieces and nephews. A Dutch resident had much difficulty in saving the life of an uncle and niece who had married each other; finally he procured their banishment to a distant part of Borneo.[51.2] The Blu-u Kayans, another tribe in the interior of Borneo, believe that an intrigue between an unmarried pair is punished by the spirits with failure of the harvest, of the fishing, and of the hunt. Hence the delinquents have to appease the wrath of the spirits by sacrificing a pig and a certain quantity of rice.[51.3] In Pasir, a district of Eastern Borneo, incest is thought to bring dearth, epidemics, and all sorts of evils on the land.[51.4] In the island of Ceram a man convicted of unchastity has to smear every house in the village with the blood of a pig and a fowl: this is supposed to wipe out his guilt and ward off misfortunes from the village.[51.5]

[Sidenote: Failure of the crops and other disasters thought to be caused by incest in Celebes.] When the harvest fails in Southern Celebes, the Macassars and Bugineese regard it as a sure sign that incest has been committed and that the spirits are angry. In the years 1877 and 1878 it happened that the west monsoon did not {52} blow and that the rice crop in consequence came to nothing; moreover many buffaloes died of a murrain. At the same time there was in the gaol at Takalar a prisoner, who had been formerly accused of incest. Some of the people of his district begged the Dutch governor to give the criminal up to them, for according to the general opinion the plagues would never cease till the guilty man had received the punishment he deserved. All the governor’s powers of persuasion were needed to induce the petitioners to return quietly to their villages; and when the prisoner, having served his time, was released shortly afterwards, he was, at his own request, given an opportunity of sailing away to another land, as he no longer felt safe in his own country.[52.1] [Sidenote: Disastrous effects supposed to follow from shedding the blood of incestuous couples on the ground.] Even when the incestuous couple has been brought to justice, their blood may not be shed; for the people think that, were the ground to be polluted by the blood of such criminals, the rivers would dry up and the supply of fish would run short, the harvest and the produce of the gardens would miscarry, edible fruits would fail, sickness would be rife among cattle and horses, civil strife would break out, and the country would suffer from other widespread calamities. Hence the punishment of the guilty is such as to avoid the spilling of their blood: usually they are tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea to drown. Yet they get on their journey to eternity the necessary provisions, consisting of a bag of rice, salt, dried fish, coco-nuts, and other things, among which three quids of betel are not forgotten.[52.2] We can now perhaps understand why the Romans used to sew up a parricide in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape for company, and fling him into the sea. They probably feared to defile the soil of Italy by spilling upon it the blood of such a miscreant.[52.3] Amongst the Tomori of Central Celebes {53} a person guilty of incest is throttled; no drop of his blood may fall on the ground, for if it did, the rice would never grow again. The union of uncle with niece is regarded by these people as incest, but it can be expiated by an offering. A garment of the man and one of the woman are laid on a copper vessel; the blood of a sacrificed animal, either a goat or a fowl, is allowed to drip on the garments, and then the vessel with its contents is set floating down the river.[53.1] Among the Tololaki, another tribe of Central Celebes, persons who have defiled themselves with incest are shut up in a basket and drowned. No drop of their blood may be spilt on the ground, for that would hinder the earth from ever bearing fruit again.[53.2] Among the Bare’e-speaking Toradjas of Central Celebes in general the penalty for incest, that is for the sexual intercourse of parents with children or of brothers with sisters, is death. But whereas the death-sentence for adultery is executed with a spear or a sword, the death-sentence for incest is usually executed among the inland tribes by clubbing or throttling; for were the blood of the culprits to drip on the ground, the earth would be rendered barren. The people on the coast put the guilty pair in a basket, weight it with stones, and fling it into the sea. This prescribed manner of putting the incestuous to death, we are informed, makes the execution very grievous. However, the writers who furnish us with these particulars and who have lived among the people on terms of intimacy for many years, add that “incest seldom occurs, or rather the cases that come to light are very few.”[53.3] In some districts of Central Celebes, the marriage of cousins, provided they are children of two sisters, is forbidden under pain of death; the people think that such an alliance would anger the spirits, and that the rice and maize harvests would fail. Strictly speaking, two such cousins who have committed the {54} offence should be tied together, weighted with stones, and thrown into water to drown. In practice, however, the culprits are spared and their sin expiated by shedding the blood of a buffalo or a goat. The blood is mixed with water and sprinkled on the rice-fields or poured on the maize-fields, no doubt in order to appease the angry spirits and restore its fertility to the tilled land. The natives of these districts believe that were a brother and sister to commit incest, the ground on which the tribe dwells would be swallowed up. If such a crime takes place, the guilty pair are tied together, their feet weighted with stones, and thrown into the sea.[54.1]

[Sidenote: Excessive rains, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions supposed to be produced by incest in Halmahera.] When it rains in torrents, the Galelareese of Halmahera, another large East Indian island, say that brother and sister, or father and daughter, or in short some near kinsfolk are having illicit relations with each other, and that every human being must be informed of it, for then only will the rain cease to descend. The superstition has repeatedly caused blood relations to be accused, rightly or wrongly, of incest. Further, the people think that alarming natural phenomena, such as a violent earthquake or the eruption of a volcano, are caused by crimes of the same sort. Persons charged with such offences are brought to Ternate; it is said that formerly they were often drowned on the way or, on being haled thither, were condemned to be thrown into the volcano.[54.2] In the Banggai Archipelago, to the east of Celebes, earthquakes are explained as punishments inflicted by evil spirits for indulgence in illicit love.[54.3]

[Sidenote: Breaches of sexual morality thought to blight the fruits of the earth and otherwise disturb the course of nature in Africa.] In some parts of Africa, also, it is believed that breaches of sexual morality disturb the course of nature, particularly by blighting the fruits of the earth; and probably such views {55} are much more widely diffused in that continent than the scanty and fragmentary evidence at our disposal might lead us to suppose. Thus, the negroes of Loango, in West Africa, imagine that the commerce of a man with an immature girl is punished by God with drought and consequent famine until the transgressors expiate their transgression by dancing naked before the king and an assembly of the people, who throw hot gravel and bits of glass at the pair as they run the gauntlet. The rains in that country should fall in September, but in 1898 there was a long drought, and when the month of December had nearly passed, the sun-scorched stocks of the fruitless Indian corn shook their rustling leaves in the wind, the beans lay shrivelled and black on the ruddy soil, and the shoots of the sweet potato had flowered and withered long ago. The people cried out against their rulers for neglecting their duty to the primeval powers of the earth; the priests of the sacred groves had recourse to divination and discovered that God was angry with the land on account of the immorality of certain persons unknown, who were not observing the traditions and laws of their God and country. The feeble old king had fled, but the slave who acted as regent in his room sent word to the chiefs that there were people in their towns who were the cause of God’s wrath. So every chief called his subjects together and caused enquiries to be made, and then it was discovered that three girls had broken the customs of their country; for they were with child before they had passed through what is called the paint-house, that is, before they had been painted red and secluded for a season in token that they had attained to the age of puberty. The people were incensed and endeavoured to punish or even kill the three girls; and the English writer who has recorded the case has thought it worth while to add that on the very morning when the culprits were brought before the magistrate rain fell.[55.1] Amongst the Bavili of Loango, who are divided into totemic clans, no man is allowed to marry a woman of his mother’s clan; and God is {56} believed to punish a breach of this marriage law by withholding the rains in their due season.[56.1] Similar notions of the blighting influence of sexual crime appear to be entertained by the Nandi of British East Africa; for we are told that when a warrior has got a girl with child, she “is punished by being put in Coventry, none of her girl friends being allowed to speak to or look at her until after the child is born and buried. [Sidenote: Sexual purity required of those who handle corn or enter a granary.] She is also regarded with contempt for the rest of her life and may never look inside a granary for fear of spoiling the corn.”[56.2] Among the Basutos in like manner “while the corn is exposed to view, all defiled persons are carefully kept from it. If the aid of a man in this state is necessary for carrying home the harvest, he remains at some distance while the sacks are filled, and only approaches to place them upon the draught oxen. He withdraws as soon as the load is deposited at the dwelling, and under no pretext can he assist in pouring the corn into the basket in which it is preserved.”[56.3] The nature of the defilement which thus disqualifies a man from handling the corn is not mentioned, but we may conjecture that unchastity would fall under this general head. For amongst the Basutos after a child is born a fresh fire has to be kindled in the dwelling by the friction of wood, and this must be done by a young man of chaste habits; it is believed that an untimely death awaits him who should dare to discharge this holy office after having lost his innocence.[56.4] In Morocco whoever enters a granary must first remove his slippers and must be sexually clean. Were an unclean person to enter, the people believe not only that the grain would lose its blessed influence (_baraka_), but that he himself would fall ill. A Berber told Dr. Westermarck {57} that he had suffered from painful boils through entering a granary in a state of uncleanness.[57.1] The same rule applies in Morocco to a vegetable garden. Only the sexually clean may enter it, otherwise both the vegetables and the person entering would be the worse for it.[57.2]

[Sidenote: Incest supposed by the Dinkas to be punished with sterility.] The Dinkas of the Upper Nile believe that incest angers the ancestral spirits (_jok_), who punish the girl by making her barren. Even should she marry, she will have no children until she has confessed her sin, and atonement has been made for it. Her lover must provide a bullock for sacrifice. His father kills the animal, and the girl’s father takes some of the contents of the large intestine and smears it on his daughter’s abdomen and on that of her guilty partner. Thus the taint of sin is removed, and the woman is rendered capable of bearing children.[57.3] The Maloulekes and Hlengoues, two tribes of Southern Africa to the north of the Thonga, think that if a young man gets a girl, who is not his wife, with child, people will die in the village. Hence, when the girl’s pregnancy is discovered, the lover has to provide a girl by way of fine.[57.4]

[Sidenote: Incest enjoined in certain cases as a mode of ensuring good luck.] It is very remarkable, however, that among tribes which strongly disapprove of incestuous relations in general, the act of incest is nevertheless positively enjoined in certain circumstances as a mode of ensuring good luck. Thus in the Thonga tribe of South-Eastern Africa, round about Delagoa Bay, there is a class of men who devote themselves to the business of hunting hippopotamuses on the rivers. In the pursuit of their trade they observe a number of curious superstitions which have been handed down among them for generations from father to son. For example, they inoculate themselves with a certain drug which is supposed to endow them with such a power over the hippopotamuses that when the hunter wounds one of them the animal cannot go far away and the man can track and {58} despatch it. During the day the hunter fishes in the river, keeping his eye all the time on the unwieldy monsters disporting themselves in the water or lumbering through the thickets on the banks. [Sidenote: Incest of Thonga hippopotamus hunter with his daughter.] “When he sees that the propitious season has come and when he is ready to undertake a hunting expedition of one month, he first calls his own daughter to his hut and has sexual relations with her. This incestuous act, which is strongly taboo in ordinary life, has made of him a ‘murderer’: he has killed something at home; he has acquired the courage for doing great deeds on the river. Henceforth he will have no sexual relations with his wives during the whole campaign. On the same night, immediately after the act, he starts with his sons; they close the drift where the beasts leave the river by putting a canoe across the track.” Meantime the hippopotamuses are browsing in the forest or trampling down the crops of the fields in their clumsy fashion. As they come trooping back to the river they are stopped by the canoe in the path, and while they are examining the strange obstacle, the hunters, lying in ambush, dart their spears into the thick hides of the beasts. The handles of the spears are loosely attached to the blades, but connected with them by a long string, so that when the wounded monster, crashing irresistibly in his rage through the thicket, plunges into the river and sinks out of sight in the water, the handle of the spear becomes detached from the blade and floats like a buoy on the surface, shewing the direction taken by the beast. As soon as the hunter has thrown his spear he runs home to tell his wife. She must at once shut herself up in the hut and remain perfectly quiet, without eating or drinking or crushing her mealies; for were she to do any of these things, the wounded hippopotamus would shew fight and might kill her husband, whereas if she keeps quiet, the animal will be quiet too. All the hunters in the village are then called up, and embarking in a canoe, paddle away after their prey, whose retreat is marked by the bobbing of the spear-handle on the surface of the water and the occasional emergence of a great flat snout to breathe. When the beast has been despatched, and the carcase landed on the bank, it is turned on its back and the hunter creeps between its legs {59} from behind and along its belly and chest as far as the mouth. Then he goes away. By this ceremony the man is supposed to take upon himself the defilement, possibly the nature, of the animal, so that in future when he meets hippopotamuses the animals will not perceive him to be a man but will mistake him for an hippopotamus; and thus he will be able to slaughter the deluded creatures with impunity.[59.1]

[Sidenote: Suggested explanation of the Thonga practice.] So far as we can guess at the meaning of these curious rites, their general intention seems to be to identify the hunter and his family with the game which he hunts in order to give him full power over the animals. This intention is manifested in the behaviour of the hunter’s wife while the hippopotamus is wounded; she so far identifies herself with the animal that whatever she does he is supposed to do. If she goes about her work briskly and refreshes herself with food and drink, the hippopotamus also will be brisk and refreshed, and will give warm work to his pursuers; whereas if she keeps perfectly still, the animal will make no resistance but follow the hunters like a sheep to the slaughter. Perhaps the same train of thought partially explains the incest which the hunter has to commit with his own daughter before he sets out for the chase. Can it be that by this violence done to his offspring he is supposed to acquire power over the beast? It may be so, yet it is difficult to see why the violence should take this particular form, and why, on the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, a pretence of wounding and killing the girl with a spear would not have served his turn better.

[Sidenote: Incest prescribed among the Antambahoaka of Madagascar.] Another tribe of savages who imagine that in certain circumstances incest is the road to fortune are the Antambahoaka of South-Eastern Madagascar. Before setting out for the chase or the fishing or war or other enterprise, every Antambahoaka arranges to have sexual relations with his sister or with his nearest female relation; he thinks in this way to ensure the success of his expedition.[59.2] What the {60} exact train of thought may be which prompts these exceptional and deliberate aberrations from the usual rules of morality, it is difficult to understand; I mention the facts because they apparently contradict the ordinary savage view of conduct, and so far help us to perceive how little as yet we really know about the inmost workings of the savage mind.

[Sidenote: Similar beliefs as to the disastrous effect of sexual crimes among the civilized peoples of antiquity.] Leaving out of account these remarkable and as yet not fully explained exceptions to the rule,[60.1] we may say generally that among many savage races breaches of the marriage laws are believed to draw down on the community public calamities of the most serious character, and that in particular they are thought to blast the fruits of the earth through excessive rain or excessive drought. Traces of similar beliefs may perhaps be detected among the civilized races of antiquity. [Sidenote: The Hebrews.] Thus among the Hebrews we read how Job, passionately protesting his innocence before God, declares that he is no adulterer; “For that,” says he, “were an heinous crime; yea it were an iniquity to be punished by the judges: for it is a fire that consumeth unto Destruction, and would root out all mine increase.”[60.2] In this passage the Hebrew word translated “increase” commonly means “the produce of the earth”;[60.3] and if we give the word its usual sense here, then Job affirms adultery to be destructive of the fruits of the ground, which is precisely what many savages still believe. This interpretation of his words is strongly confirmed by two narratives in Genesis, where we read how Sarah, Abraham’s {61} wife, was taken by a king into his harem, and how thereafter God visited the king and his household with great plagues, especially by closing up the wombs of the king’s wife and his maid-servants so that they bare no children. It was not till the king had discovered and confessed his sin, and Abraham had prayed God to forgive him, that the king’s women again became fruitful.[61.1] These narratives seem to imply that adultery, even when it is committed in ignorance, is a cause of plague and especially of sterility among women. Again, in Leviticus, after a long list of sexual crimes, we read:[61.2] “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomiteth out her inhabitants.” This passage seems to imply that the land itself was somehow physically affected by sexual transgressions in such a way that it could no longer support the inhabitants. [Sidenote: The Greeks.] Apparently the ancient Greeks entertained a similar view of the wasting effect of incest; for according to Sophocles the land of Thebes suffered from blight, pestilence, and the sterility both of women and cattle under the reign of Oedipus, who had unwittingly slain his father and married his mother; the country was emptied of its inhabitants, and the Delphic oracle declared that the only way to restore prosperity to it was to banish the sinner.[61.3] No doubt the poet and his hearers set down these public calamities in part to the guilt of parricide which rested on Oedipus; but probably they also laid much of the evil at the door of the incest which he had committed with his mother. [Sidenote: The Romans.] In the reign of the emperor Claudius a Roman noble was accused of incest with his sister. He committed suicide, his sister was banished, and the emperor ordered that certain ancient ceremonies derived from the laws of King Servius Tullius should be performed, and that expiation should be made by the pontiffs at the sacred grove of Diana.[61.4] As Diana appears to have been a goddess of fertility in general and of the {62} fruitfulness of women in particular,[62.1] the expiation for incest offered at her sanctuary may perhaps be accepted as evidence that the Romans, like other peoples, attributed to sexual immorality a tendency to blast the fruits both of the earth and of the womb.

[Sidenote: Blighting effect attributed to incest by the ancient Irish.] According to an ancient Irish legend Munster was afflicted in the third century of our era with a failure of the crops and other misfortunes. When the nobles enquired into the matter, they learned that these calamities were the result of an incest which the king had committed with his sister. In order to put an end to the evil they demanded of the king his two sons, the fruit of this unholy union, that they might consume them with fire and cast their ashes into the running stream.[62.2] Again, Irish legend relates that Cairbre Musc “had two sons by his sister. Her name was Duben, and theirs were Corc and Cormac respectively. The children were twins, and the story of their birth is no less strange than that of Dylan and Llew, for one of them was found to have nipped off his brother’s ears before his birth. The crime of their parents caused the crops to fail, which, according to the idea prevalent in ancient Ireland, was its natural result, and Cairbre was obliged to confess his guilt to the nobles of his realm, who, when the children were born, ordered them to be burnt, that the incest might not remain in the land. ‘Give me,’ said Cairbre’s druid, ‘that _Corc_[62.3] there, that I may place him outside Erinn, so that the incest may not be within it.’ Corc was given to the druid, and the latter, with his wife, whose name was Bói, took him to an island. They had a white cow with red ears, and an ablution was performed by them every morning on Corc, placed on the cow’s back; so in a year’s time to the day the cow sprang away from them into the sea, and she became a rock in it; to wit, the heathenism of the boy had entered into her. _Bó Búi_, or Bói’s Cow, is the name of the rock, and _Inis Búi_, or Bói’s Isle, that of the island. The boy was {63} afterwards brought back into Erinn. Such is the story how Corc was purged of the virulence of his original sin, and the scene is one of the three islets called the Bull, the Cow and the Calf, not far from Dursey Island, in the gulf called Kenmare River.”[63.1]

[Sidenote: Thus sexual irregularities are often supposed to endanger the whole community.] Thus it appears that in the opinion of many peoples sexual irregularities, whether of the married or the unmarried, are not merely moral offences which affect only the few persons immediately concerned; they are believed to involve the whole people in danger and disaster either directly by a sort of magical influence or indirectly by rousing the wrath of gods to whom these acts are offensive. Nay they are often supposed to strike a blow at the very existence of the community by blighting the fruits of the earth and thereby cutting off the food supply. Wherever these superstitions prevail, it is obvious that public opinion and public justice will treat sexual offences with far greater severity than is meted out to them by peoples who, like most civilized nations, regard such misdemeanours as matters of private rather than of public concern, as sins rather than crimes, which may perhaps affect the eternal welfare of the individual sinner in a life hereafter, but which do not in any way imperil the temporal welfare of the innocent community as a whole. [Sidenote: Hence the extreme rigour with which sexual crimes have been punished by many races.] And conversely, wherever we find that incest, adultery, and fornication are treated by the community with extreme rigour, we may reasonably infer that the original motive for such treatment was superstition; in other words, that wherever a tribe or nation, not content with leaving these transgressions to be avenged by the injured parties, has itself punished them with exceptional severity, the reason for doing so has probably been a belief that the effect of all such delinquencies is to disturb the course of nature and thereby to endanger the whole people, who accordingly must protect themselves by effectually disarming and, if necessary, exterminating the delinquents. [Sidenote: Ancient codes.] This may explain, for example, why the Indian Laws of Manu decreed that an adulteress should be devoured by dogs in a public place, and that an adulterer should be roasted to death on a red-hot iron {64} bed;[64.1] why the Babylonian code of Hammurabi sentenced an adulterous couple to be strangled and cast into the river; and why the same code punished incest with a mother by burning both the culprits.[64.2] On the same supposition we can understand the severity of the punishments meted out to certain sexual offences by the Mosaic law. Thus, for example, under it an adulteress and her paramour were sentenced to death:[64.3] a woman who at marriage was found not to be a maid was stoned:[64.4] the unchaste daughter of a priest was burned with fire;[64.5] and if a man married a woman and her daughter, he and they were in like manner doomed to the flames.[64.6]

[Sidenote: Rigorous penalties inflicted in Africa.] Many African tribes repress sexual crimes by rigorous penalties, or did so until their moral standard was modified by contact with Europeans. [Sidenote: The Baganda, their punishments for breaches of sexual morality.] Among the Baganda of Central Africa, “though death was usually the punishment inflicted for adultery, an offender’s life would sometimes be spared, and he be fined two women, if he were able to pay them; the culprit was, however, maimed; he lost a limb, or had an eye gouged out, and showed by his maimed condition that he had been guilty of a crime. A slave taken in adultery with one of his master’s wives was invariably put to death. Women were compelled by torture to name their seducers; if the accused man denied the charge, the woman was asked to describe some personal peculiarity of his, or some mark on his body which could be identified; then if the man was found to have the peculiarity, he was either fined or put to death. In order to arrive at the truth, a man who denied a charge made against him was sometimes stretched out with his arms and feet tied to stakes driven firmly into the ground, a piece of barkcloth was then fastened about his private parts, and set smouldering. As soon as the fire reached his body, the pain became too great {65} to bear, and the man would own himself guilty in order to be released from torture. He would then be either killed or fined. An adulterer was called a murderer (_musi_), because he was looked upon as a man who deliberately set about to compass the death of the woman’s husband; either directly, for he would go armed to visit the woman, and if he was disturbed, he would not hesitate to strike; or indirectly, by offending the fetiches. Men knew that, if they were caught in the act of adultery, the penalty would be death, unless they were related to the person wronged, in which case the latter might be willing to accept a fine, and might content himself with mutilating the culprit. The worst consequence to the injured husband was the anger of his fetiches and gods, whose custodian was his wife. By her action the wife had involved her husband in their displeasure; he was thus left exposed to the malice of any enemy, and his danger was increased in the time of war, because the gods had withdrawn their protection from him.”[65.1] Thus among the Baganda adultery was regarded not simply as a civil offence but as a sin, which brought down the anger of the gods, not as we might expect, on the adulterer, but on the injured husband. Further, the Baganda were divided into a number of totemic clans, and members of any one clan were strictly prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with each other. “Sexual intercourse with a member of the same clan (_kive_), or with a woman of the mother’s clan, was punished by the death of both parties, because they were considered to have brought the god’s displeasure on the whole clan.”[65.2]

[Sidenote: Fornication, adultery, and incest severely punished by other African tribes.] Among the Basoga, who border on the Baganda to the east, when a man got a virgin with child, the guilty couple used to be dragged off to the River Ntakwe; there stones were tied to their ankles and legs, and, along with a sacrificial sheep, they were thrown into the water and drowned. However, this rigorous penalty was abolished and a fine substituted before the country came under British rule.[65.3] Among the Kavirondo, who border on the Basoga to the {66} east, “until quite recently adultery on the part of a wife was punished with death, and death equally was meted out to young men and girls who were found guilty of fornication. It was thought a shameful thing if a girl was not found to be a virgin on her wedding day.”[66.1] Among the Nandi, who border on the Kavirondo to the north-east, “incest, intercourse with a step-mother, step-daughter, cousin or other near relation, is punished by what is known as _injoket_. A crowd of people assemble outside the house of the culprit, who is dragged out, and the punishment is inflicted by the women, all of whom, both young and old, strip for the occasion. The man is flogged, his houses and crops destroyed, and some of his stock confiscated.”[66.2] Among the Barea, a tribe on the borders of Abyssinia, when a single woman, whether maid or widow, is found with child, she is strangled by her father or brother, and the same punishment is inflicted on her seducer; the child of their unlawful union is stabbed. This custom is rigorously carried out, except when the seducer is a noble and his paramour a vassal; in that case both are spared, but the infant is killed.[66.3] Among the Beni Amer, another tribe of the same region, an unmarried girl found pregnant is put to death by her own brother, whatever her rank, and the seducer is killed by his own brother; the child also is slain. But the law is not so severe on a widow or divorced wife who is detected in a slip; her seducer has only to pay a fine; but the child is buried alive. The Beni Amer will not suffer a bastard to live.[66.4] Among the Anyanja of British Central Africa adultery was punished by drowning and shooting. If one of the culprits was a chief’s wife, she was tied to her paramour, and the pair were then thrown into a river to drown or left in the open space of the village to die of hunger and exposure. A man who had committed a rape was bound, weighted with stones, and cast into the lake.[66.5] Among the Awemba of Northern Rhodesia, {67} when a husband detected his wife in the act of adultery, he killed both her and her partner in guilt. For such execution he might not be indicted for murder or manslaughter. He would merely return the blood-stained spear to the woman’s father, who by his words in the marriage ceremony, “You shall spear the man who lusts after your wife,” was estopped from taking vengeance for the death of his daughter. If the husband spared the erring couple and the wife was again taken in adultery, the villagers themselves decreed the punishment. The unfaithful wife and her lover were dragged outside the village and impaled on sharp stakes amid the taunts and jeers of the bystanders, who only desisted from their mockery when death had stilled the writhing agony of the sufferers.[67.1] “The Hottentots,” says an old writer, “allow not marriages between first or second cousins. They have a traditionary law, which ordains, that both man and woman, so near to each other in blood, who shall be convicted of joining together either in marriage or fornication, shall be cudgel’d to death. This law, they say, has prevail’d through all the generations of ’em; and that they execute it at once, upon a conviction, without any regard to wealth, power or affinity.”[67.2]

[Sidenote: Incest and adultery severely punished in the East Indies.] We have seen that in the East Indies sexual crimes, particularly incest, adultery, and fornication, are often viewed with grave displeasure because they are believed to draw down the wrath of the higher powers on the whole community. Hence it is natural that such offences should be treated as high treason and the offenders punished with death. A common punishment is drowning. For example, when incest between a parent and a child or between a brother and a sister has been detected among the Kubus, a primitive aboriginal tribe of Sumatra, the culprits are enclosed in a large fish-trap, made of rattan or bamboo, and sunk in a deep pool of the river. However, they are not pinioned; nay, they are even furnished with a tin knife, and {68} if they can cut their way out of the trap, rise through the bubbling water to the surface, and swim ashore, they are allowed to live.[68.1] In the island of Bali incest and adultery are punished by drowning; the criminals are sewed up in a sack half-filled with stones and rice and cast into the sea. A like doom is incurred by a woman who marries a man of a lower caste; but sometimes she dies a more dreadful death, being burnt alive. [Sidenote: Modes of execution adopted which avoid the shedding of blood.] Both modes of execution may be adopted in order to avoid shedding the blood of the sinners; for in Bali, the ordinary way of despatching a criminal is to stab him to the heart with a creese (kris) or crooked Malay sword.[68.2] In the island of Celebes, as we saw, the blood of persons who have been guilty of certain sexual crimes is believed to blast the ground on which it falls;[68.3] so that it is natural in their case to resort to a bloodless mode of execution such as drowning or burning. In Mamoedjoe, a district on the west coast of Celebes, the incest of a father with his daughter or of a brother with his sister is punished by binding the culprits hand and foot, weighting them with stones, and flinging them into the sea.[68.4] Among the Bugineese of Southern Celebes persons of princely rank who have committed this crime are placed on a raft of bamboos and set floating away out to sea.[68.5] [Sidenote: Persons guilty of incest buried alive.] In Semendo, a district of Sumatra, the punishment for incest and murder used to be to bury the criminals alive. Before they were led to their doom, it was customary for the villagers to feast them, every family killing a fowl for the purpose. Then the whole population escorted the culprits to their grave outside the village and saw the earth shovelled in upon them. In the year 1864, at the village of Tandjong Imam, this doom was executed on a man and his deceased wife’s sister, with whom he had been detected in an intrigue. “Great was my emotion and indignation,” said the humane Dutch governor, {69} “when I stood by the grave of these poor wretches along with the unworthy chiefs who had sat on the bench of justice during the enforced absence of Pangeran Anom and pronounced this sentence. I told them in plain language that judges who pronounced such a sentence of death on grounds so trivial (the request of the family concerned) deserved themselves to undergo the same punishment.” The Dutch Government has since issued stringent orders that no one henceforth is to be buried alive, and has threatened with death any person who shall dare to disregard its orders.[69.1] The same punishment for incest is, or used to be, inflicted by the Pasemhers, another tribe of Sumatra, but more merciful than the people of Semendo they gave the culprits at least a chance for their life. The guilty pair were bound back to back and buried in a deep hole, but from the mouth of each a hollow bamboo communicated with the upper air; and if when the grave was opened after seven days the wretches were found to have survived a prolonged agony far worse than death, they were granted their life.[69.2] Nor was even this dreadful fate the worst that could befall the sinner who broke the rules of sexual morality in Sumatra. [Sidenote: Adulterers killed and eaten.] The Battas or Bataks of Central Sumatra condemned an adulterer to be killed and eaten; strictly speaking he should be speared to death first and eaten afterwards, but as the injured husband and his friends were commonly the judges and executioners, it sometimes happened that, passion proving too strong for a strict adherence to the letter of the law, they cut the flesh from his living body, ate it, and drank his blood, before it occurred to them to terminate his sufferings by a spear-thrust. However, an adulterer occasionally escaped with his life on the payment of a fine, always provided that his accomplice was not the wife of a chief; for in that case there was no help for it but he must be killed and eaten.[69.3]

Even trivial misdemeanours or acts which we should {70} deem perfectly innocent may draw condign punishment on the thoughtless, the imprudent, the light-hearted in the Indian Archipelago. [Sidenote: Extreme severity of the code of sexual morality in Lombok.] Thus we read that in the island of Lombok “the men are exceedingly jealous and very strict with their wives. A married woman may not accept a cigar or a sirih leaf from a stranger under pain of death. I was informed that some years ago one of the English traders had a Balinese woman of good family living with him--the connexion being considered quite honourable by the natives. During some festival this girl offended against the law by accepting a flower or some such trifle from another man. This was reported to the Rajah (to some of whose wives the girl was related), and he immediately sent to the Englishman’s house ordering him to give the woman up as she must be ‘krissed.’ In vain he begged and prayed, and offered to pay any fine the Rajah might impose, and finally refused to give her up unless he was forced to do so. This the Rajah did not wish to resort to, as he no doubt thought he was acting as much for the Englishman’s honour as for his own; so he appeared to let the matter drop. But some time afterwards he sent one of his followers to the house, who beckoned the girl to the door, and then saying, ‘The Rajah sends you this,’ stabbed her to the heart. More serious infidelity is punished still more cruelly, the woman and her paramour being tied back to back and thrown into the sea, where some large crocodiles are always on the watch to devour the bodies. One such execution took place while I was at Ampanam, but I took a long walk into the country to be out of the way till it was all over.”[70.1]

[Sidenote: The severity of the code based at bottom on superstition.] As the Malay peoples of the Indian Archipelago, from whom the foregoing examples are drawn, have reached a fair level of culture, it might perhaps be thought that the extreme severity with which they visit offences against their code of sexual morality springs from an excessive refinement of feeling rather than from a crude superstition; and no doubt it may well happen that extreme sensitiveness on the point of honour, of which the Malays are susceptible, contributes in many cases to sharpen the sword of justice {71} and add fresh force to the stroke. Yet under this delicacy of sentiment there appears to lie a deep foundation of superstition, as we may see by the extraordinary and disastrous influence which in the opinion of these people sexual crime exerts, not so much on the criminals themselves, as on the whole realm of nature, drawing down deluges of rain from the clouds till the crops rot in the fields, shaking the solid earth beneath men’s feet, and blowing up into flames the slumbering fires of the volcano, till the sky is darkened at noon by a black canopy of falling ashes and illumined at night by the sullen glow of the molten lava shot forth from the subterranean furnace.[71.1] [Sidenote: A similar severity in sexual matters observed among the Australian aborigines, the lowest of existing savages.] And however much an over-refinement of feeling may be invoked to explain the more than Puritanical severity of the Malay moral code in sexual matters, no such explanation can be applied to the like emotion of horror which similar offences excite among the savage aborigines of Australia, the lowest and the least refined probably of all the races of men about whom we possess accurate information. These rude savages also treated with rigorous severity all breaches of that widely ramified network of prohibitions in which throughout the Australian continent, before it fell under English rule, the two sexes lived immeshed. The whole community of a tribe or nation was commonly subdivided into a number of minute bodies, which we are accustomed to call classes or clans according to the principle on which they were variously constituted. No man might marry a woman of his own class or clan, and in most tribes his freedom of choice was still further limited by complex rules of marriage and descent which excluded him from seeking a wife in many more subdivisions of the tribe, and sometimes compelled him to look for her only in one out of them all. And the ordinary penalty for any violation of these rules was death. The offender was lucky who escaped with his life and a body more or less riddled with spear wounds. [Sidenote: Severe punishments inflicted for sexual offences among the aborigines of Victoria.] Thus one who knew the aborigines of Victoria well in the old days, before they were first contaminated and then destroyed by contact with European civilization, tells us that “no marriage or betrothal is permitted without the approval {72} of the chiefs of each party, who first ascertain that no ‘flesh’ relationship exists, and even then their permission must be rewarded by presents. So strictly are the laws of marriage carried out, that, should any signs of affection and courtship be observed between those of ‘one flesh,’ the brothers, or male relatives of the woman beat her severely; the man is brought before the chief, and accused of an intention to fall into the same flesh, and is severely reprimanded by the tribe. If he persists, and runs away with the object of his affections, they beat and ‘cut his head all over’; and if the woman was a consenting party she is half killed. If she dies in consequence of her punishment, her death is avenged by the man’s receiving an additional beating from her relatives. No other vengeance is taken, as her punishment is legal. A child born under such conditions is taken from the parents, and handed over to the care of its grandmother, who is compelled to rear it, as no one else will adopt it. It says much for the morality of the aborigines and their laws that illegitimacy is rare, and is looked upon with such abhorrence that the mother is always severely beaten by her relatives, and sometimes put to death and burned. Her child is occasionally killed and burned with her. The father of the child is also punished with the greatest severity, and occasionally killed. Should he survive the chastisement inflicted upon him, he is always shunned by the woman’s relatives, and any efforts to conciliate them with gifts are spurned, and his presents are put in the fire and burned. Since the advent of the Europeans among them, the aborigines have occasionally disregarded their admirable marriage laws, and to this disregard they attribute the greater weakness and unhealthiness of their children.”[72.1]

[Sidenote: Severe punishments inflicted for sexual offences in the Wakelbura tribe of Queensland.] Again, in the Wakelbura tribe of eastern Queensland the law was extremely strict as to unlawful connexions or elopements between persons too nearly related to each other. Such persons might be, for example, those whom we call cousins both on the father’s and the mother’s side, as well as those who belonged to a forbidden class. If such a man {73} carried off a woman who had been betrothed to another, he would be pursued not only by the male relations of the woman and of her betrothed husband, but also by the men of his own tribal subdivision, whom he had outraged by his breach of the marriage law; and wherever they overtook him, he would have to fight them all. His own brothers would challenge him to fight by throwing boomerangs or other weapons at him; and if he did not accept the challenge, they would turn on the woman and cripple or kill her with their weapons, unless she could escape into the bush. Nay, the woman’s own mother would cut and perhaps slay her with her own hands. Sooner or later the ravisher had to engage in single combat with the man he had injured. Both were fully armed with shield, spear, boomerang and knife. When they had exhausted their missiles, they closed on each other with their knives, a dense ring of blacks generally forming round the combatants to see fair play. In such a fight the man who had broken the tribal law always came off worst; for even if he got the better of his adversary, the other men and even his own brothers would attack him and probably gash him with their knives. Fatal stabs were sometimes given in these fights, but more usually, it would seem, the onlookers interfered and wrested the weapons from the two combatants before they proceeded to extremities. In any case the woman who had eloped was terribly mauled with knives, and if she survived the ordeal was restored to the man whom she had deserted.[73.1]