A young surgeon on a whaler, John Stevens quit his ship when it called at Manono (one of the two small Samoan islands situated between Upolu and Savai’i). The missionary Williams met him on his arrival in 1832 (during Williams’s second visit) and saw in him ‘a respectable young man’. In his journals, Williams tells us how Stevens described to him his own arrival in Samoa:
When he first went on shore among them, the females gathered around him in great numbers, and some took their mats off before him, exposing their persons as much as possible to his view. Perceiving him bashful, the whole of women [sic], old and young, did the same and began dancing in that state before him desiring him not to be bashful or angry as it was Fa’aSamoa, or Samoan Fashion (Moyle ed., 1984: 232).
In order to understand what happened, one must read Williams’s description of the Samoan dances of the time, when a village group welcomed visitors from another village. It was the ‘most obscene’ dance, says Williams, that the Samoans practised at that time. But his description, far from mentioning any sexual offers and sexual hospitality, shows how groups of adolescents did indeed strip off during the final moments of the dance and had a competition to produce the most outrageous and hilarious display in their telling of sexual jokes and their sexually suggestive movements. But all of this took place under the surveillance of the old people, who were in charge of the whole performance. The only girls involved in this final performance were the village virgins. After the dances by older women, the young ‘virgins’ of the village (as explicitly stated by Williams), who always played the main role in receiving the visitors from another village, presented themselves in a state of nudity. But this presentation was not the prelude to anything more (Tcherkézoff 2003b: 384-98).[11]
As to an explanation of the girls’ nakedness in such performances, it lends itself to three possible interpretations each of which is in fact a variant of the same fundamental hypothesis about the sacredness of the unmarried female. The first, following Sahlins’s analysis for Hawaii, would see in it a theatrical display deriving from a mythology in which male fertility gods were attracted by mortal females. A second hypothesis would refer to how, throughout Polynesia, a very formal manner of greeting a visitor was for high-ranking females to undo the fine mat or barkcloth that enveloped their body and then offer it to the visitors (see chapter 10). A third explanation would look to the typical battle formation of pre-Christian Samoa in which the virgins stood in the front line of the army (see chapter 4, section 7).
[11] Williams’s account is in his journals (Moyle ed. 1984: 246-7) and in Moyle’s study of the Samoan music and dances (Moyle 1988: 208-9, 222). Richards (1992: 29) gives some details about Stevens’s life.