Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/17

Rh ject, which continues for a long while," and offering no suggestion as to its likeness to yaws—a disease which, nevertheless, was well known to most voyagers about that time by reason of their usual training in the West Indian and Guinea trade.

Captain Cook himself writes, in reference to the Tongans of Namuka: "The people of this isle seem to be more affected by the leprosy or some scrofulous disorder than any I have seen elsewhere. It breaks out more in the face than any other part of the body. I have seen several whose faces were ruined by it, and their noses quite gone. In one of my excursions, happening to peep into a house where one or more of them were, one man only appeared at the door or hole by which I must have entered, and which he began to stop up by drawing several parts of a cord across it. But the intolerable stench which came from his putrid face was alone sufficient to keep me out, had the entrance been ever so wide. His nose was quite gone, and his whole face was one continued ulcer, so that the very sight of him was shocking. As our people had not all got clear of a certain disease they had contracted at the Society Isles, I took all possible care to prevent its being communicated to the natives here; and I have reason to believe my endeavours succeeded." Apparently, on the testimony of Mariner and of Labillardiere they did; but the whole passage is an admission that leprosy, scrofula, and syphilis were, in Cook's mind, not easily distinguished the one from the other. And, when referring to the reported introduction of some new form of disease to Tahiti by the Peruvian ship in 1773, and of the Apa no Pretane (as, not distinguishing between