La Pérouse’s narrative gives us some clues about the scenes in which the Samoan girls made the French believe that they were “mistresses of their own favours.” In the conclusion to his narrative, La Pérouse adds a passage which, given his typically cautious style, he was clearly hesitant about including in his official journal:[9]
As the story of our voyage can add a few pages to that of mankind I will not omit pictures that might shock in any other kind of book and I shall mention that the very small number of young and pretty island girls I referred to soon attracted the attention of a few Frenchmen who in spite of my orders endeavoured to establish links of intimacy with them; since our Frenchmen’s eyes revealed their desires they were soon discovered; some old women negotiated the transaction, an altar was set up in the most prominent hut, all the blinds were lowered, inquisitive spectators were driven off; the victim was placed within the arms of an old man who exhorted her to moderate her sorrow for she was weeping (qui lexortoit à moderer sa douleur,[10] car elle pleuroit); the matrons sang and howled during the ceremony, and the sacrifice was consummated in the presence of the women and the old man was acting as altar and priest. All the village’s women and children were around and outside the house, lightly raising the blinds and seeking the slightest gaps between the mats to enjoy this spectacle. Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them … (1995, 419–20).
If the last sentence – which unerringly made its way into the twentieth-century literature as we have seen – is a typical example of European over-interpretation and over-generalisation, the preceding lines tell us what La Pérouse actually saw or at least what he had been told by some of his officers.
[9] A record that he knew he would be sending to the French authorities from his next port of call, which was Australia. This is how the narrative of his voyage up until early 1788 came to be left for posterity, since, once he left southern Australia, no further word was heard from the expedition. See Tcherkézoff (2004a, 28–9, 49) for discussion of the fate of the expedition, which was shipwrecked in the Solomons (Vanikoro), and the recent archaeological findings that relate to it.
[10] The French expression may imply physical pain as well as sorrow.