With reference to the Australian natives, Mr. Moore Davis says, “Promiscuous intercourse between the sexes is not practised by the Aborigines, and their laws on the subject, particularly those of New South Wales, are very strict. When at camp, all the young unmarried men are stationed by themselves at the extreme ends, while the married men, each with his family, occupy the centre. No conversation is allowed between the single men and the girls or the married women.... Infractions of these and other laws were visited either by punishment by any aggrieved member of the tribe, or by the delinquent having to purge himself of his crime by standing up protected simply by his shield, or a waddy, while five or six warriors threw, from a comparatively short distance, several spears at him.”[334] Concerning several tribes in Western Victoria, Mr. Dawson likewise states that, at the corroborees and great meetings of the tribes, unmarried adults of both sexes are kept strictly apart from those of another tribe. “Illegitimacy is rare,” he says, “and is looked upon with such abhorrence that the mother is always severely beaten by her relatives, and sometimes put to death and burned. Her child is occasionally killed and burned with her. The father of the child is also punished with the greatest severity, and occasionally killed.”[335]
Turning to the American peoples: among the early Aleuts, according to Veniaminof, “girls or unmarried females who gave birth to illegitimate children were to be killed for shame, and hidden.”[336] Egede tells us that, among the Greenlanders, unmarried women observed the rules of modesty much better than married women. “During fifteen full years that I lived in Greenland,” he says, “I did not hear of more than two or three young women, who were gotten with child unmarried; because it is reckoned the greatest of infamies.”[337] According to Cranz, a Greenland maid would take it as an affront were a young fellow even to offer her a pinch of snuff in company.[338] Among the Northern Indians, girls are from the early age of eight or nine years prohibited by custom from joining in the most innocent amusements with children of the opposite sex. “When sitting in their tent,” says Hearne, “or even when travelling, they are watched and guarded with such an unremitting attention as cannot be exceeded by the most rigid discipline of an English boarding-school.”[339] Mr. Catlin asserts that, among the Mandans, female virtue is, in the respectable families, as highly cherished as in any society whatever.[340] Among the Nez Percés,[341] the Apaches,[342] and certain other North American peoples,[343] the women are described as remarkably chaste, the seducer being viewed by some of them with even more contempt than the girl he has dishonoured. And Dobrizhoffer praises the Abiponian women for their virtuous life.[344]