THE SOUTH SEAS

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 9368, 10 August 1891, Page 3

THE SOUTH SEAS

[COPYRIGHT.]

By Robert Louis Stevenson. Author ol ‘Treasure Island,’ ‘Kidnapped,’ ‘ The Strange Story of Dr Jekyll aud Mr Hyde, etc. >

CHAPTER XXII. Leprosy at Pbnhhyn. A leper waif—Leprosy and the Polynesians— A new Molokai Possible danger to Europe. Some ten years ago Mr Ben Herd was trading in the atoll. Several whites had then recently been murdered t aud tho traders carried their lives in their hand. Once in particular, Mr Herd believes, there was apian to slay him. Ho had gone down from one settlement to tho other on business. 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 ; ho told her of his business ; he pressed her for o 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 tho fear of death fell cold upon his spirit, and he caught her by the hand, ran for.his boat, and fled with her alone on the lagoon. I hare 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 Penrbyn,, Mr Herd was supercargo on the Janet Nicoll; and knowing I had visited the lazaretto on Molokai, he called me in consultation. ‘lt is strange,’ said he, ‘ when I was here there was no such thing as leprosy upon the island; and now there seems a great deal. Look at that man, and toll mo 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 at Penrbyn, some say first at Maiuhiki, There are maty authentic boat voyages difficult to credit; but this, of thirty degrees due north and south, and from the one trade to the other, across the equatorial doldrums, ranks with the most extraordinary. We may suppose the westerly current to have been entirely intermitted, the easterly strong, and the fugitive well supplied with food. Or we may explain tho tale to be a legend, framed to conceal the complaisance of some illjudging 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 largo at Penrbyn. Mr Moore is not quite certain of the date, for he visited the atoll in ’B3 and again in 'Sit; but another of my neighbours, Mr Harper, was trading in Penrbyn all the first year : ho saw nothing of tho Hawaiian, and this pins us to the latter date. lam tediously particular upon this point, because the result is amazing. Seven years is supposed to be the period of leprous incubation ; and the whole of my tale, from the first introduction of tho 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 scarce looked for the appearance of the earliest case, the population 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 Polynesian left era the disease began and is now for the first time exposed to the contagion, or he has been so long sequestered, that Asiatic leprosy has had the time to vary, and finds in him a virgin soil—the facta are not clear. We are told on tho ono hand that some indigenous form of the disease was known in Samoa within the memory of man; we are assured on the other that there is not oven a name for it in any Island language. There is no doubt, at least, about the savage rapidity with which it spreads when introduced. And there is none that, when a 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 aredescribed in to him in words, tho Islander displays a high degree of horror and disgust. His stringent ideals of courtesy and hospitality, and a certain debilo 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 male is still considered in most parts of Polynesia a, rather unlovely rigour in the female ; and if a man be disfigured, I believe it would be held a sort of charity to console bis solitude. A kind island girl might thus go to a leper’s bed, in something of the same spirit as wa visit the sick at home with tracts and pounds of tea. Tho waif who landed on Penrbyn 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 harboured in the high woods and the rains, a spectral Robin Hood, armed to defend his wretched freedom; perhaps he was captured fighting, and of ono thing we may be sure, that he had escaped early from the lazaretto, still untamed, 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 for pleasure; for to certain shallow natures the imminence of death is but a whet. In his own eyes, he was an innocent prisoner escaped, the victim of a nameless and senseless tyranny. What did he ask 1 To taste the common lot of men, to sit with the housefolk, to hear the evensong, to share in the day’s gossip, to have a wife like others, and to see children around his knees. He landed in Penrbyn, enjoyed for awhile simple pleasures, died, and bequeathed to bis entertainers a legacy of doom. These were early warned. Mr Moore warned them in ’B4, and they made light of his predictions, the long incubation of tho malady deceiving them. The leper lived in their midst, no harm was seen. He died, andstill there was no harm. It would be interesting (it is probably impossible) to learn how soon the plague appeared. By the midst of 1890, at least, the island was dotted with lepers, and the Janet Nicoll bad not long gone by before the islanders awoke to an apprehension of their peril. I have alrdady mentioned traits which they share with their Faumotuan kindred; their conduct in this hour of awakening is another. There were certain families —twenty I was told, We may imply a corrective and guess ten—entirely contaminated ; the clean waited on these sick and bade them leave the settlement. Some six years befors they had opened their doors to a stranger ; now they must close them to their next of 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 re-considered 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 motu of some size, bard by the south entrance, was new named Molokai after

ite 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 home, 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 intervals, leaves food upon its seaward end, and goes again;—the lepers not entering on the pier till it be gone. Those on the beach, those in the boat, old friends and kinsfolk thus behold each other for a moment silently. The girl who bade Sir Herd flee from the settlei ment, 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 boat and see them from a distance on the beach, ‘Never !’ she cried; if she went, if she saw them, her heart would pluck her from the boat; 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. So sternly is the question of leprosy now viewed, under a native rule, in Fenrhyu, Long may it so continue! and X would I could infect with a like severity every isle of the Pacific. But self-indulgence and sentiment menance instead the mere existence of the island race—perhaps threaten our own with a new struggle against an enemy refreshed. So laaa rirnpod f.lian fills nAl*tl fft ftlll l .

Nothing is less proved than this peril to ourselves ; yet it is possible. To our own syphilis we are loured, but the syphilis of eastern Asia slays us; and a new variety of leprosy, cultivated in the virgin soil of Polynesian races, might prove more fatal than wo dream. So that 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 defaced chimscra sailed from Molokai, bringing sorrow and death to isles of singing, wc also and our babes may have been the target of his invisible arrows; but it needs not this. The thought of that hobgoblin boatman alone upon the sea, of the norils ho escaped, of the evil ho lavished on the world, may well strike terror in the minds even of the dfstaut and the unconcerned. In mine, at the memory of my termagant minstrel, hatred glows. (To be continued.)