Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/417

 CA USES OF DECREASE OF HA WAIIAN PEOPLE 40 1

fighting. Then their wars became bloody, and helped materially to diminish the population.

3. Knowledge, like that acquired in the Garden of Eden, has ever been of two kinds, good and evil. In like manner, civiliza- tion has always carried death as well as enlightenment to primi- tive peoples. Besides useful metals and domestic animals, pestilence soon found entrance to the " Paradise of the Pacific." In what way this species of Satan on several occasions gained admittance, we are not fully informed. Rev. J. G. Paton, in his autobiography, tells how in 1860 pestilence was introduced to one of the islands of the New Hebrides. Three ship captains, after putting on shore at different ports of Tanna four young men ill with measles, invited a chief, Kapuku, on board one of the vessels, promising to give him a present. They then confined him for twenty-four hours, without food, in the hold among measles-stricken patients, after which they put him on shore with the disease as the only present. This gift was as fatal to the Tannese as was the wooden horse to the Trojans. " The measles thus introduced spread fearfully, and decimated the population of the island. In some villages men, women, and children were stricken down together, and none could give food or water to the sick or bury the dead." There is little doubt that pestilence has, at times, found entrance to Hawaii in a somewhat similar man- ner, and for a similar purpose "to sweep [the inhabitants] away and let white men occupy the soil." In 1804 an epidemic, commonly thought to have been the plague, was brought to the islands by foreigners though in what particular manner is not now known. An epidemic when it makes its first appearance in a community is most fatal, owing partly to the susceptibility of the people and partly to their inexperience in treating it. Con- cerning this one David Malo related : " In the reign of Kame- hameha, from the time I was born until I was nine years old, the pestilence visited the Hawaiian Islands, and the majority of the people from Hawaii to Niihau died."

Under pestilence may be included venereal disease, because of its ravages and the rapidity with which it spread when first introduced. It was unknown among the natives until 1778.