It seems that this method of making an offering was peculiar to young women or rather to young girls. Cook specifically mentions ‘young girls’ in his notes on dances. Such offerings were made at the end of a dance and, according to both the sources relating to Cook’s voyages as well as missionary sources on Samoa, the females in the front row were ‘virgins’ (Tcherkézoff 2003b: 384) or ‘without any connection with men’ (Tcherkézoff in press-1).

It is possible that the young women offering cloth remained clothed in a maro, which means that they were only ‘naked’ from the European point of view. In that case, all these accounts simply document the respectful presentation of cloth before a superior (chief or European guest), as a means of enveloping and incorporating this superior. Then again, it is possible that these accounts describe how the young girls’ or women’s bodies were deliberately stripped naked, and if so we should regard these cases as being linked to the more specifically sexual displays which are recorded as having occurred in the first instances of contact. We are then left with the same three interpretations that I advanced for the similar scene reported by the ex-surgeon Stevens who narrated to Williams his landing in Samoa: ‘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’ (see above chapter 6, section 8).

These interpretations are centred around the main hypothesis about the sacredness of unmarried females, and their role in Polynesian fertility rites and the capturing of the life-giving powers of external forces (the gods) through the containment—that is the wrapping-up—of their ‘images’ (chiefs, first Europeans). In this vein, one additional fact should be mentioned for the Tahitian case.

The episode is told by Forster senior. A chief from Raiatea often came to visit Cook’s ship. One day when he was there he saw two of his sisters coming towards the ship in a canoe. He asked Forster to turn to the younger one and say ‘Veheina-poowa’ (vahine + ?).^[25] As soon as Forster had uttered this word, the elder sister

Forster then relates that after asking some questions about what had taken place, he grasped that there had been some teasing involved. A very common form of criticism would be to tell a girl that she is not yet pubescent. He also indicates in the following lines that, as soon as the signs of ‘puberty’ were visible (without being more precise), the girl was tattooed.

And he added that, if a man tries to criticise a pubescent girl for not yet being so, then the girl will not hesitate to show by such explicit means that this is not the case.^[26]

It is clearly regrettable that, in their accounts about dancing and the giving of tapa, observers like Cook and Banks did not concern themselves with the question of tattooing, which they treated separately in the summaries they made about customs. However, Banks and, later, Morrison make it quite clear that tattooing of the girls did take place. Banks: ‘This morning I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performed upon a girl of about 12 years old’.^[27] Morrison suggests that it was the general rule, and that as long as the tattooing remained unfinished (which could take months, with long intervals in between because of the intense pain) the girl remained a child: ‘till which time they never Conceive themselves Company for Weoman—being only Counted as Children till they have their Tattowing done’.^[28]

We therefore have a significant piece of evidence to add to the argument: for a girl, the fact of revealing the lower part of the body can be entirely linked to the symbolism of childbearing and have nothing to do with the expression of desire.^[29] This episode should be kept in mind when one reads the various accounts of the presentation of ‘disrobed’ young Polynesian girls during first contacts. This information from Forster, Banks and Morrison is in keeping with the general hypotheses developed in chapter 3: the presentation of young girls to the Europeans was linked to the value placed on the ability to bear a child.

Relying on Morrison and on other sources such as Teuira Henry, Oliver attempts a generalisation in relation to these presentations of cloth:

But, in this last sentence, Oliver infers the presence of an element of sexual attraction which is undoubtedly misplaced and which occurs to him under the influence of the Western myth about Polynesian sexuality.^[30] Indeed, we should not think that the idea was only to charm the recipient and to arouse his sexual desire. In my interpretation, the fact of choosing young women for this type of gift was not determined by attributing sexual desire to men with an appetite for young women, but was a reference to the possibility of procreation. The ‘young woman’ was there as a pubescent girl, but one who had not yet borne a child.

These female displays were not evidence of any ‘sexual hospitality’ offered to male voyagers in search of rest and pleasure, but rather, evidence of the attempt to capture through impregnation, real or metaphorical, apparently super-human powers. To capture these powers is to incorporate these new arrivals. In Polynesian civilisation, to incorporate was and, in some cases, still is to envelop. My hypothesis is that it was intended that both cloth and the young girls’/women’s bodies be used to envelop the new arrivals.

This incorporation was achieved through wrapping up the body of the new arrival in the sacred cloth, in order to domesticate his dangerous sacredness, but also through wrapping up the body of the new arrival with the body of a young girl (through a sexual act intended to bring procreation). Sexual attraction, if there were any such dimension, was only meant to arouse the desire of the visiting male so that he could perform what was expected of him, and not to defer to any cult of sexual pleasure and to please the male visitor by offering him sexual hospitality. Both the cloth and the young girls were a very specific kind of ‘wrapping’ material which contained a super-human principle of life. Both were a channel for godly forces and signs of life. Gods could follow ‘the path of the cloth’ to come down on earth, as in the Lau Islands, or they could follow the channel of the young female’s body and come down on earth in the guise of a child. And that is why children were considered a priori to be tapu; at birth, they still belonged to the godly world. Conferring on them a state of noa (‘touchable’, a state of humanity) involved a long process of desacralisation rites; for a female, the last step was marriage, and marriage meant the production of a child who would himself be tapu.

Perhaps the hypothesis already made for the Samoan case should indeed be generalised: young girls/women were the most effective means of incorporating what came from afar. As such they became the main ‘tool’ of the chiefs’ policy when the Papālagi-Popa’a appeared on Polynesian shores.