Table of Contents
We can see that, from 1722 up until the 1830s to 1840s, the contacts between Samoans and Europeans all followed the same pattern of mutual defiance. This tendency increased markedly on the European side after 1787. For the Samoans, it had probably been there almost from the very beginning, following the spread of the stories about the Dutch cannons, which were reinforced after they had experienced the firepower of the French in 1787 (Lapérouse) and of the British in 1791 (the crew of the tender of Edwards’s expedition).
The only significant change in the overall pattern was that, after 1771, the Tahitian interlude described in Bougainville’s narrative became part of every European captain’s mental landscape. The first to express it was Lapérouse in 1787, in the wake of Bougainville himself who used Tahiti as a benchmark when he met the Samoans. Two things followed from this constant reference to Tahiti. The Samoans in general became ‘less’ attractive, ‘more savage’ than the Tahitians; and their women’s and girls’ sexual attitude came to be systematically compared to the Tahitian scene. Samoan sexual behaviour was invoked either to be rapidly assimilated to its Tahitian counterpart, albeit through supposition rather than observation (mainly Lapérouse and Dumont d’Urville, and Hamilton to some extent), or to be contrasted with it based on more accurate observations (Lafond de Lurcy, Wilkes and his companions).
As for the question of sexual freedom in adolescence, we are now in a position to reach a conclusion that can leave no room for doubt. If we discard the moral judgements and the overinterpreted conclusions of Lapérouse and Dumont d’Urville who reiterated the stereotyped formulas from Bougainville’s account for Tahiti, these two French captains being the only witnesses called upon today by Côté, there is no evidence left for the thesis of customary pre-marital sexual freedom. When we consider only the daily events as recorded by each voyager, including the descriptions of Lapérouse and Dumont d’Urville, we cannot in any way view pre-Christian Samoan custom in the terms set down by Williamson and Côté. From 1722 to the 1840s there is not a single observation that could lead to the view that ‘girls were entirely free to dispose of their persons till married’ and that ‘girls were, before marriage, mistresses of their own favours’. The Old Samoa imagined by Côté via Williamson has never been observed by any traveller.