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Jules-Sebastien-César Dumont d’Urville is the second and only other witness about Samoan sexual freedom to be called upon by both Williamson and Côté (see Introduction). ‘D’Urville says that girls were entirely free to dispose of their persons till married’, they tell us. And indeed, Dumont d’Urville’s general comments on the customs of Samoa do include this statement. But both authors fail to mention that the French captain was merely summarising the view of a local beachcomber whom he had met. They conveniently ignore the fact that even then the man was only referring to a supposed distant past which he had no experience of whatsoever. And they make no mention of the fact that Dumont d’Urville’s own experience on land was that, ‘contrary to Tahiti’, Samoan females in Apia ‘constantly refused’ to grant their favours to the French; although he adds—and this is his only other reference to the subject—that he had been ‘told’ that, in another village further away from the newly established missionary post, things were different. Contrary to Bougainville’s and Lapérouse’s accounts, Dumont d’Urville’s narrative of his voyage has never been translated into English;[1] hence, as is the case for Lafond de Lurcy’s account, many scholars have not scrutinised the original text.
From 1837 to 1840, Dumont d’Urville was given command, by the King of France, of two ships, the corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée, for a voyage to Oceania and the South Pole. It was his second opportunity to command an expedition to the Pacific, after his voyage in 1826-1829 that included Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Ireland and New Britain. It was as a result of this first Pacific voyage that the French captain proposed his ideas on ‘races’ in the Pacific and, in December 1831, coined the name ‘Melanesia’ to describe a whole geographical and racial region in contradistinction to Polynesia. The second voyage took the French to Antarctica, Australia and Fiji and, in Polynesia, to the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga and New Zealand. Ten volumes recording the history of the voyage and thirteen volumes on various scientific materials were published between 1841 and 1854. Dumont d’Urville died near Paris in 1842. He had the time to edit the first four volumes (Guillon 1986, Rosenman 1992). The Samoan episode is found in volume 4 (Dumont d’Urville 1842: 91-128).
In September 1838, the French expedition called at Nuku-Hiva (in the Marquesas) and at Tahiti. It is important to note, in relation to the ‘very young girls’ mentioned by Lapérouse’s officer Vaujuas, that Dumont d’Urville was surprised, in Nuku-Hiva, to see how many females were offered to the sailors (ibid.: 6). All were young, he said, ‘from 12 to 18 years of age’ and ‘some much younger, no more than 8 to 10 years’ (ibid.). There were no missionaries there. In Matavai Bay (Tahiti), in his view the situation was much worse even than in Nuku-Hiva: there was a generalised ‘prostitution’ for European goods, and it was occurring even with the presence in Tahiti of the Protestant missionaries (ibid.: 40-90; Rosenman 1992: 147).
Following these two landings, the French arrived that same month in Samoa, and were thus inclined to make a comparison with their two previous ports of call. We shall see that Dumont d’Urville developed the comparison. He had expected to find the same situation in Samoa and this provoked two reactions: (i) he was surprised, from what he observed, to find great differences, and (ii) he was quite ready to believe that this was only due to recent missionary influence and that, ‘before the introduction of Christianity’, native ‘girls were entirely free to dispose of their persons…’.
In this examination of Dumont d’Urville’s visit, I shall merely note how the sentence chosen by Williamson and Côté cannot be considered as valid ethnographic information and must be left out of any discussion on the topic. Later in this chapter, in my analysis of Commodore Wilkes’s visit, which took place the same year, I shall explain why the question of the missionary presence in 1838 is irrelevant to the debate (1836 was the date of the first establishment). Furthermore, Lafond’s account of 1831 has already precluded any explanation of that kind. And John Jackson’s observations made in 1840, on the remote island of Ta’ū (where missionary influence was just beginning), will robustly confirm this conclusion.