RoTH] CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 561 
parents. Speaking in general, the Indian girl, after her first menstru- 
ation, will take up with some young fellow for a month or so, then 
make a change and live for some years, perhaps, a life of pleasure. 
Finally, she will meet her life companion and become a true and hard- 
working wife. As a rule she will not bear a child during her years 
of freedom; if she does, she will probably settle down. As Norden- 
skidld has pointed out elsewhere in South America, these Indians, 
in spite of the absolutely free life in which they have spent their 
youth, are strong and healthy people; their girls, all of whom have 
flown from flower to flower, bear fine, upstanding children when once 
they start their own household. It is only from the sexual diseases 
and other vices introduced by the European that the race is deterio- 
rating. Free love is quite the ordinary thing among these people, 
and that there should be anything wrong in this so-called immoral life 
is absolutely unintelligible to them. We need not believe that girls 
who change their lovers every, or every other, night are in any way 
worse than if they had been left untouched. They are good and in- 
dustrious and will become excellent housewives and good mothers. 
The life they lead is quite as natural to them as it is to their parents 
and other relatives (NOR, 88). It was said of the island Carib 
that there are mothers who turn their children into prostitutes 
when they begin to mature and are not taken to wife (PBR, 251). 
At the present day, on the upper Rio Negro, the Maku Indian 
girl slaves act as free women for the. young men (KG, 1, 269). 
Once married, however, the Indian expects fidelity to his bed, and 
the older records would show that he seldom hesitated to take drastic 
steps to enforce and punish it. What ordinarily took place in the 
islands is well portrayed in the following account left us by 
Rochefort: “Nor are the Caribbeans the most indulgent and the 
least jealous of their honor in this case [of breach of conjugal 
love]. Heretofore they knew not how to punish this crime, because 
it reigned not among them before their commerce with the Christians; 
but now if the husband surprises his wife prostituting herself to some 
other or have otherwise any certain knowledge of it, he does himself 
justice, and seldom pardons her, but dispatches her, sometimes with 
his club, sometimes by ripping up her belly from above downward 
with a razor or the tooth of an agouti, which is nearly as sharp. This 
execution being done, the husband goes to his father-in-law and tells 
him in cold blood, ‘I have killed thy daughter, because she proved 
unfaithful to me.’ The father thinks the action so just that he is so 
far from being angry with him, that he commends him, and con- 
ceives himself obliged. ‘Thou hast done well,’ replies he; ‘she de- 
served no less.’ And if he hath any more daughters to dispose of he 
immediately proffers him one of them, and promises to bestow her 
