The mention of ‘very young girls’ (filles très jeunes) may appear surprising. In my view, it must in fact be a crucial piece of information that can assist us to interpret the whole context. But this view is built on a limited comparative study and it is offered here with due reserve as a working hypothesis that has yet to be tested against other existing data on first contacts in Polynesia.

If what these accounts can tell us about Samoan beliefs and practices concerned only sexual advances and a search for sexual pleasure, if indeed the goal were just to attend to the sexual desire of male travellers who had been deprived of female company for some time, then the presentation of young—therefore inexperienced—and weeping girls would be somewhat surprising. Similar scenes to those recorded in Lapérouse’s narrative can be found in reports describing Tahitian, Maori, Tongan and Marquesan cases of sexual presentation.^[24] The obvious conclusion is that the ‘women’ were bringing and presenting the ‘girls’, and that the girls were not presented for a kind of sexual hospitality offered to European sailors. Why were they presented? One possibility (is there any other?) is the kind of ‘theogamic’ scheme that has already been mentioned. Here I am following Sahlins’s well-known hypothesis for Hawaii (Sahlins 1985a: chapter 1). But why the ‘(very) young’ girls?

The Tahitian and Hawaiian, as well as the Samoan, data on ritual dances indicate that, in following a mythical theme, only young girls who were virgins were presented to the gods—and later to the Papālagi when these creatures appeared on the scene. Why such a presentation to the gods? Because in Polynesia the pre-contact mythical idea of a divine pregnancy, rightly identified by Sahlins as the central aspect of the mythical structure that Polynesians applied to the historical conjuncture of the first encounters with Europeans, had two characteristics which historians and anthropologists have tended to overlook. One of these was an essential requirement. It was also accompanied on occasions by another, paradoxical, aspect.

The essential requirement was the virginity of the girls. More exactly, the girls must not yet have given birth. Here, too, a specialised discussion is necessary. The critical issue—very far from any masculine Eurocentric representation of ‘female purity’— concerned certain cosmological theories about the fecundity of the female blood within a ‘closed’ body, with a symbolic link between the blood in the veins, the hymeneal blood, and the menses. Bligh was told in Tahiti that when a girl of high rank married, the first child was the result of a god’s action (and not of the husband’s). Cook and Banks were given to understand that girls were allowed to stay in the Tahitian dancing schools only as long as ‘they did not have any connection with [a] man’. The question was not the integrity of the female body seen from a masculine Eurocentric point of view, but the ritual work of producing ‘sacred children’ through a first giving birth (the Samoan tamasā, the Tahitian matahiapo, etc.).

The other and paradoxical aspect was, apparently, that this mythical presentation of females to the gods was disconnected from the physical reality of pubescence. The girls were often rather young, for the reason just given, but, sometimes, they could be extremely young: the age range of ‘8 to 10 years old’ is mentioned occasionally, in Tahiti and elsewhere (for instance, Dumont d’Urville noted it in the Marquesas, as we shall see in chapter 7). This applied to the dances and, apparently, some of the presentations to the Papālagi (Europeans). There are some indications that families tried their hardest to get their daughters into the dance schools (in fact schools where students received instruction about the entire cosmological system, as is well known in relation to the Hawaiian performance, the hula) as soon as possible. We can see that it did not matter greatly if the girls were of a very young age, since, as long as the scene was limited to dancing with the male gods and to the mythical idea of virgin birth (girls impregnated by the rays of the sun, etc.), the presence of pre-pubescent girls obviously did not present any practical contradiction to the mythical template.^[25] But in the scenario of the first contacts with Europeans, things became different.

I hypothesise that, at the initiative of the chiefs and/or orators, this whole cosmogonic context, a complex mythical structure, was transposed onto the scene of the encounters with the Papālagi, and this therefore included those aspects of the female agent (the ‘(very) young’ age) which have not been taken into account in previous discussions of the first encounters between Polynesians and Europeans.

But, at the time, the European visitors, who understood the scene only in terms of sexual hospitality offered to them, were astonished to see the young age of (all or some of) the girls presented. Of course, they could rationalise this observation in only one way. It gave them a further reason to conclude that the main goal of the children’s education, according to the ‘customs’ of the islanders, was the proper or even ‘artistic’ performance of sexual acts; in effect, an apprenticeship to what would later become the ‘main preoccupation’ and activity of their adolescent and adult lives. John Hawkesworth was an even more active proponent of this particular misinterpretation than Bougainville and his companions: in 1773, when he was given the task of editing for publication the manuscript of the narrative of Cook’s first expedition, he unfortunately re-phrased Cook’s and Banks’s observations, noted in 1769 in Tahiti, to accord with this view. Being himself a director of a school, Hawkesworth misinterpreted what he read in terms of a whole educational-cultural value specific to these societies. Shortly afterwards, from his reading of Bougainville’s book and Cook’s narrative as rephrased by Hawkesworth, the French philosopher Voltaire concluded in 1775, and made it known to all Europe, that, since the French and the British ‘observations are identical’, this vision of the ‘Tahitian custom’ must indeed be true. The Western myth of Polynesian sexual freedom was then ready to spread in every direction. Twelve years later, Lapérouse’s interpretation was already a consequence of that myth. Furthermore, the interpretations of Williamson a hundred and fifty years later and of Côté more than two centuries later, are no less due to the cultural misreading which created the Western myth of ‘Polynesian sexuality’.

There is no further information on our topic to be found in Lapérouse’s narrative and we can let his ships sail away. After 11 December, Lapérouse stayed for the next two days ‘tacking in front of the bay’ where the attack happened. On the morning of 14 December, he set sail for Upolu and had to cruise along the coast for the next days because of the lack of wind. Brief contacts were made at sea (see next chapter). On 17 December, he was in front of Savai’i. No canoes came out to make contact with his ships. On the evening of that day, the French lost sight of land and sailed towards the islands of ‘Cocos’ (north Tonga).^[26]