The suitor came. "The early hours of the evening were devoted to
refreshments, to free family sociality, to singing, and to evening
worship. Then one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar
aspirations, introduced as strangers, to separate at midnight as
interested friends.
"In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it looked
down upon two of the children of earth giving themselves wholly to their
heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand as his good gift,
pledging themselves to each other as close companions in the race of
life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work among the
heathen."
After six months on the wave, she approaches the "land of darkness
whither I am bound. When I reflect on the degradation and misery of
the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and forward to the
great day of retribution, all my petty sufferings dwindle to a point."
They anchor, and "soon the islanders of both sexes came paddling out
in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and
the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips
downward. To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly
scanty. But we learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation."
The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first
sight of the welcoming savages, was the keynote of the new domination of
the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced that
it was a state of ungodliness. Their reasoning was based on the fig leaf
tied about them by the first man and woman when they became conscious of
sin, and it proceeded to the logical teaching that the less of the body
exposed the more godly the condition. When they found this nakedness
associated with a relation of the sexes utterly opposed to their own,
and when, especially, the first white wives on the South Sea beaches,
found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the islands, making
ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness of bodily bareness
became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the infidel to the true
worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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