MARITAL JEALOUSY 125 



exchange for payment. Not that this occurs against 

 the woman's will : they are too independent for that : 

 in most cases it is their inclination that is gratified. It 

 need hardly be said that adultery is quite customary 

 and is unpunishable. On Nauru the husband some- 

 times takes a sterner view, but he has no right to put 

 his wife or her paramour to death ; and if he divorce 

 her the latter commonly marries her. Rape is not 

 punished ; on Yaluit resistance by a woman is 

 unknown. 1 



On Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, exchange 

 of wives between friends and relations is occasionally 

 practised. 2 At Tonga where, contrary to the general 

 rule among the Polynesian peoples, descent was traced 

 through the mother sexual licence was more restricted 

 than on most of the islands where agnatic kinship 

 prevailed. Examples of domestic happiness were by 

 no means uncommon. Yet even there we are told 

 there was lasciviousness, great licence existed and it 

 was difficult to designate with certainty the father of a 

 child. On the other hand the women were kindly and 

 considerately treated and almost idolised by the men. 3 



On Guam, one of the Ladrone Islands, it was cus- 

 tomary for young men to live in concubinage with girls 

 whom they "purchased" from their parents by presents; 

 nor did this injure the girls' prospects of marriage after- 



1 Kohler, citing official reports, Zeits. vergl. Rechtsw. xiv. 417, 

 416, 418, 433, 445; Steinmetz, 432, 433; Brandeis, Globus, xci. 

 76. In Yaluit, however, the penalty for adultery with a chiefs wife 

 is death ; and where a chief is married to a lady of high rank and 

 exercises his undoubted privilege of an amour with any woman of 

 his tribe, his wife will not seldom put her to death, which apparently 

 she has a right to do. In both cases the offence is really a kind of 

 fese-majeste . * Christian, 74. 



West, 270, 260. Cf. Mariner, ii. 141 sqq. 



