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I shall not cumber this narrative with my observations on the life and customs of the Indians—their religion, their intricate system of tapu, their manner of making war, their arioi society, and their arts and sciences, all of which have been fully described by Cook, Bougainville, and other early visitors to Tahiti. But I shall do the people of Tahiti the justice to mention two of their customs, shocking in themselves, but less so when the reasons for them are made clear. I allude to infanticide and human sacrifice.

Nowhere in the world are children cherished more tenderly than in the South Sea, yet infanticide was considered by the Indians a praiseworthy act of self-sacrifice. The object of the arioi society—the strolling players whose chiefs were of the most considerable families in Tahiti—was to set an example both to chiefs and to commoners, as a warning against overpopulating the island. Should a member of the society give birth to a female child, it was killed at once, in the quickest and most painless manner, and their greatest term of contempt was vahine fanaunau—a fertile woman. The Indians had a perfect understanding of the dangers of overpopulation, and guarded against them by making large families unfashionable. Cruel as the method seems, it should not be criticized without reflecting that men increase, while the amount of habitable land on a small island remains the same.