Leprosy At Penrhyn.

Some ten years ago, Mr Ben Herd was trading in the atoll. Several
whites had then recently been murdered; and the traders carried
their lives in their hands. Once in particular, Mr Herd believes
there was a plan to slay him. He had gone down from one settlement
to the other on affairs. A little girl came to him when he was alone
and pressed him to return; -"you had better come with me," was her
word. He asked her why; he told her of his business; he pressed her
for a reason. To all she had but the one answer; "you had better
come with me" He was growing impatient of her iteration; when of a
sudden the fear of death fell cold upon his spirit, and he caught
her by the hand, ran for his boat, and fled with her alone in the
lagoon. I have seen her, now grown a stalwart woman, and never, from
that day to this, has she explained her conduct.

In 1890, when I was at Penrhyn, Mr Herd was supercargo on the Janet Nicoll; and knowing that I had visited the lazaretto on Molokai, he called me in consultation . -"It is strange," said he. "When I was here there was ne such thing as leprosy upon the island; and won there seems a great deal. Look at that man, and tell me what you think. "The man was leprous as Naaman . The story goes that a leper escaped from Molokai in an open boat, and landed, some say in Penrhyn, some say first in Main hiki . There are many authentic boat voyages difficult to credit; but this of thirty degrees due north and south, and from the one traid to the other across the equatorial doldrums, ranks with the most extraordinary. We may suppose the

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westerly current to have been entirely intermixed, the easterly
strong, and the fugitive well supplied with food. Or we may explain
the tail to be a legend, framed to conceal the complaiscence of
some ill-judging skipper. One thing at least is sure: a Hawaiian
leper, in an advanced stage of the disease, and admitting that he
had escaped from Molokai, appeared suddenly in these distant islands,
and was seen by Mr H.J. Moore of Apia walking at large in Penrhyn.

Mr Moore is not quite certain of the date, for he visited the atoll
twice in eighty three and again in eighty four; but another of my
neighbors, Mr Harper, was trading in Penrhyn all the first year, he
saw nothing of the Hawaiian, and this pins us to the later date.

I am tediously particular upon this point, because the result is
amazing. Seven years is supposed to be the period of leprous in-
cubation, and the whole of my tale, from the first introduction of
the taint to the outbreak of a panic on the island, passes (at the
outside) in little more than six. At the time when we should have
scarsed looked for the appearance of the earliest case, the pop-
ulation was already steeped in leprosy. The Polynesians assuredly
derive from Asia; and Asia, since the dawn of history, has been a
camping ground of this disease. Of two things, one: either the Polyn-
esian left ere the disease began, and is now for the first time ex-
posed to the contagion; as he has been so long sequestered, that
asiatic leprosy has had the time to vary, and finds in him a virgin
soil. The facts are not clear: we are told, on the one hand, that some

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indigenous form of the disease was known in Samoa within the memory of man, we are assured, on the other, that there is not even a name for it in any island language. There is no doubt, at least, about the savage rapidity with which it spread when introduced. And there is none that, when the leper is first seen, the islanders approach him without disaffection and are never backward to supply him with a wife. I find this singular; for few races are more sensitive to beauty, of which their own affords so high a standard; and I have observed that when the symptoms are described to him in words, the islander displays a high degree of horror and disgust. The stringent ideals of courtesy and hospitality, and a certain debile kindliness of disposition, must explain his conduct. As for the marriage, the stranger once received, it follows as a thing of course. To refuse the man is still considered in most parts of Polynesia a rather unlovely rigime in the female; and if a man be disfigured, I believe it would be held a sort of charity to console his solitude. A kind island girl might thus go to a lepers bed in something of the same spirit as we visit the sick at home with tracts and pounds of tea. The waif who landed on Penrhyn was much marred with the disease; his head deformed with growths; a thing for children to flee from screaming. Yet he was received with welcome, entertained in families, and a girl was found to be his wife.

It is hard to be just to this Hawaiian. Doubtless, he was a man of a wild strain of blood, a lover of liberty and life; doubtless he had

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harlomed in the high woods and the rains, a spectral Robin Hood,
armed to defend his wretched freedom; perhaps he was captured fight-
ing; and of one thing we may be sure, that he had escaped early from
the lazaretto, still untaimed, still hot with resentment. His boat
voyage was a discipline well fitted to inspire grave thoughts; in
him it may have only sharpened the desire of pleasure; for to cer-
tain shallow natures the imminence of death is but a whet. In his
own eyes, he was as innocent prisoner escaped, the victim of a name-
less and a senseless tyranny. What did he ask ? To taste the common
lot of man, to sit with the house folk, to hear the evensong, to
share in the days gossip, to have a wife like others and to see
children round his knees. He landed in Penrhyn, enjoyed for a while
these simple pleasures, died, and bequeathed to his entertainers a
legacy of doom. These were early warned, Mr Moore warned them in
eighty four, and they made light of his predictions, the long incub-
ation of the malady deceiving them. The leper lived in their midst ;
no harm was seen. He died, and still there was no harm. It would be
interesting, it is probably impossible, to learn how soon the plague
appeared. By the midst of eighty nine, at least, the island was dotted
with lepers; and the Janet Nicoll had not long gone by, before the
islanders awoke to an apprehension of their peril. I have already
mentioned traits which they show with their Paunotnan kindred;
their conduct in this born of awakening is another. There were cer-
tain families—twenty I was told; we may apply a corrective, and
guess ten—entirely contaminated, the clean waited on the sick and

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bade them leave the settlement. Some six years before they had opened their doors to astranger; now they must close them on their next to kin. It chanced that among the tainted families were some of chief importance, some that owned the solum of the village. It was their first impulse to resent the measure of expulsion. — "The land is ours," they argued. "If any are to leave, let it be you" And they were thought to have answered well; "let them stay," was the reconsidered verdict; and the clean people began instead to prepare their own secession. The coming of the missionary ship decided otherwise; the lepers were persuaded; a few of some size, hard by the south entrance, was now named Molokai after its sad original; and thither, leaving their lands and the familiar village, self doomed, self sacrificed, the infected families went forth into perpetual exile. The palms of their lost village are easily in view from Molokai. The sequestered may behold the smoke rise from their old homes, they can see the company of boats skim forth with daylight to the place of diving. And they have yet nearer sights. A pier has been built in the lagoon; a boat comes at intivals, leaves food upon its seaward end, and goes again; the lepers not entering on the pier till it be gone. There on the beach, those in the boat, old friends and kinsfolk thu s behold each other for a moment silently. The girl who bid Mr Herd flee from the settlement, opened her heart to him on his last visit. She would never again set eyes, she told him, on her loved ones; and when he reminded her that she might go with the food boat and see them from a distance on the beach-Never!

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she csied: if she went, if she saw them, her heart would pluck her
from the boat; and she must leap on the pier, she must run to the
beach, she must speak again with the lost and with the act, the doors
of the prison isle would close upon herself. Long may it so con-
tinue; and I would I could infect with a like severity every isle
of the Pacific. But self indulgence and sentiment menance instead
the mere existance of the island race; perhaps threaten our own
with a new struggle against an enemy refreshed. Nothing is less
proved than this peril to ourselves; yet it is possible. To our
syphilis we are inured, but the syphilis of eastern Asia slays us;
and a new variaty of leprosy, cultivated in the virgin soil of
Polysenian races, might prove more fatal than we dream. So that we
ourselves, it may be, are no strangers to the case; it may be it was
for us the men of Penrhyn resigned their acres; and when the defac-
ed chimaera sailed from Molokai, bringing sorrow and death to isles
of singing, we also and our babes may have been the target of his
invisable arrows. But it needs not this, The thought of that hob-
goblin boatman alone upon the sea-of the perils he escaped-of the
evil he lavished on the world-may well strike terror in the minds
even of the distant and the unawarred. In mine, at the memory of my
termagant minstrel, hatred glows.------

his prodigality is energetic; he gives, scattering wealth publicly and with a certain rapture: the Samoan only suffers himself to be drained by trafficking connections, escaping when he can, lamenting when he cannot. The tongue of Penrhyn is said to present affinities with old Paumotuan; the rough and lawless manners of the race suggest a similar connection. Till recently the isle was counted dangerous; first-and-last blood has been shed often; and when they the natives quarrel with a trader, the will boast of his predecessors whom they slew.
I could hear, within man's memory, of but one chief who had maintained authority, and he with stripes, binding offenders to a tree and lashing them with his own hand.
He-was-vest With turbulent women, he was very sharp; and perhaps one of these took a post mortem vengeance. For this was that the same chief who rose again and was reburied prone. At the main village law is today respected: the laws were brought on board as soon as we were anchored, exhibiting a goodly list of fines, some wise, some fantastically funny; and-on-eh! and our cook, having gone ashore late, found himself a prisoner at our few and was not suffered to leave the house before-sunrise till morning. All the while, at the other side of the atoll, the people lived in mere misrule; and fighting, particularly combats of women, were frequent. The women of Penrhyn are still great belligerents. When my little mistress is grown up, she should be a woman of her hands.

Poor little mistress! and where is she now? Where are my minstrels? There was a cloud upon their island. They sang that day under its shadow; it has burst since then.

Published in *The Sun*. May 24, 1891,
*Vailima Edition*. 1923, vol.26,
*South Seas Edition*, 1925, vol.20.