en ten children would be killed
by one couple during their married life. Ellis, an English missionary,
says that not fewer than two-thirds of all born were destroyed. This
was the ordinary habit of the Tahitians. The Arioi spared not one.

Ellis wrote ninety years ago. He helped to disrupt the society. The
confessions of scores of its former members were poured into his
burning ears. In his unique book of his life in Tahiti, he described
their dramas, pantomimes, and dances, their religious rituals and
the extraordinary flights to which their merriment and ecstasy
went. Says Ellis:

These, though the general amusements of the Ariois, were not the only
purposes for which they were assembled. They included:

"All monstrous, all prodigious things."

And these were abominable, unutterable; in some of their meetings,
they appear to have placed invention on the rack to discover the worst
pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty, and to have
striven to outdo each other in the most revolting practices. The
mysteries of iniquity, and acts of more than bestial degradation,
to which they were at times addicted, must remain in the darkness in
which even they felt it sometimes expedient to conceal them. I will
not do violence to my sensibilities or offend those of my readers,
by details of conduct, which the mind cannot contemplate without
pollution and pain.

In these pastimes, in their accompanying abominations, and the
often-repeated practices of the most unrelenting, murderous cruelty,
these wandering Ariois passed their lives, esteemed by the people as
a superior order of beings, closely allied to the gods, and deriving
from them direct sanction, not only for their abominations, but even
for their heartless murders. Free from care or labor, they roved from
island to island, supported by the chiefs and priests; and were often
feasted with provisions plundered from the industrious husbandman,
whose gardens were spoiled by the hands of lawless violence, to provide
their entertainments, while his own family were not infrequently
deprived thereby for a time, of the means of subsistence. Such was
their life of luxurious and licentious indolence and crime.

Yet each Arioi had his own wife, also a member of the society. Improper
conduct toward an Arioi's wife by an Arioi was punished often by
death. To a woman such membership meant a singular freedom from the
tabus, prohibitions, that had forbidden her eating wit