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Bengt Danielsson

Love in the South Seas

Europeans generally associate the South Sea Islands with girls in grass skirts, endless dancing and an unquenchable joie de vivre. The natives are known to have free and lighthearted habits that even excite our envy. In this popular-scientific account of the sexual life and family relations of the Polynesians, Bengt Danielsson (one of Thor Heyerdahl's comrades on the famous Kon-Tiki raft) reveals the extent to which this widespread conception of the South Sea as a lovers' paradise is justified.

This comprehensive account—the first of its kind—is based on personal observation during years of travel and residence among various Polynesian peoples, as well as extensive literary research. Most of the descriptions quoted in the book are taken from older records of Polynesian habits and ideas in many languages that have not for the most part been available to English readers.

Love in the South Seas is written in an easy and entertaining style. It deals with a variety of matters such as aesthetic ideals and means of attraction, sexual education and the games played by Polynesian youth, the laws of marriage and marital fidelity, polygamy, and "unnatural" tendencies, religion, and the sexuality and social position of woman. The author's numerous parallels with conditions in Europe serve to enlighten in a new and rather unexpected way our own sexual problems.