Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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Hina’s manners were as handsome as her person. She had the smiling dignity and perfect assurance only to be found among the highest circles of our own race, a poised urbanity, neither forward nor shy. And this is, perhaps, a fitting place to say a word for the Indian ladies, so often and so shamelessly slandered by the different navigators who have visited their island. Captain Cook alone, who knew them best and was their loyal friend, has done them justice, saying that virtue was perhaps as common and as highly prized among them as among our own women at home, and that to form an impression of the ladies of Tahiti from the women who visited his ships would be like judging the virtue of Englishwomen from a study of the nymphs of Spithead. In Tahiti, as in other lands, there are people given over to vice and lewdness, and women of this kind naturally congregated upon the arrival of a ship; but, so far as I know, there was also as great a proportion of faithful wives and affectionate mothers as elsewhere, many of whom were a veritable honour to their sex.