Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands Part 7

For farming, in the American sense of the word, the Islands are, as these facts show, entirely unfit. I asked again and again of residents this question: "Would you advise your friend in Ma.s.sachusetts or Illinois, a farmer with two or three thousand dollars in money, to settle out here?"

and received invariably the answer, "No; it would be wrong to do so."

Transportation of farm products from island to island is too costly; there is no local market except Honolulu, and that is very rapidly and easily overstocked; Oregon or California potatoes are sold in the Islands at a price which would leave the local farmer without a profit. In short, farming is not a pursuit in the Islands. A farmer would not starve, for beef is cheap, and he could always raise vegetables enough for himself; but he would not get ahead. Moreover, perishable fruits, like the banana, have but a limited chance for export. The Islands, unluckily, lie to windward of California; and a sailing vessel, beating up to San Francisco, is very apt to make so long a pa.s.sage that if she carries bananas they spoil on the way. Hence but 4520 bunches were shipped from the Islands in 1872--which was all the monthly steamer had room for.

These circ.u.mstances seem to settle the question of annexation, which is sometimes discussed. To annex the Islands would be to burden ourselves with an outlying territory too distant to be cheaply defended; and containing a population which will never be h.o.m.ogeneous with our own; a country which would neither attract nor reward our industrious farmers and mechanics; which offers not the slightest temptation to emigration, except a most delightful climate, and which has, and must by its circ.u.mstances and natural formation continue to have, chiefly a mixed population of Chinese and other coolies, whom it is a.s.suredly not to our interest to take into our family. I suppose it is a proper rule that we should not enc.u.mber ourselves with territory which by reason of unchangeable natural causes will repel our farmers and artisans, and which, therefore, will not become in time Americanized. If this is true, we ought not to annex the Hawaiian Islands.

Moreover, there is no excuse for annexation, in the desire of the people.

The present Government is mild, just, and liked by the people. They can easily make it cheaper whenever they want to. The native people are very strongly opposed to annexation; they have a strong feeling of nationality, and considerable jealousy of foreign influence. Annexation to our own or any other country would be without their consent.

As to the residents of foreign birth, a few of them favor annexation to the United States; but only a few. A large majority would oppose it as strenuously as the native people. Most of the planters see that it would break up their labor system, demoralize the workmen, and probably for years check the production of sugar.

One thing is certain, however. If the Islands ever offer themselves to any foreign power, it will be to the United States. Their people, foreign as well as native, look to us as their neighbors and friends; and the king last summer blurted out one day when too much wine had made him imprudent, this truth: that if annexation came, it must be to the United States.

As I write a negotiation has been opened with the United States Government, for the purpose of offering us Pearl River in exchange for a reciprocity treaty. Pearl River is an extensive, deep, and well-protected bay, about ten miles from Honolulu. It would answer admirably for a naval station; and if the United States were a second-rate power likely to be bullied by other nations, we might need a naval station in the Pacific Ocean. In our present condition, when no single power dares to make war with us, and when, unless we become shamelessly aggressive, no alliance of European powers against us for purposes of war is possible, the chief use of distant naval stations appears to me to be as convenient out-of-the-way places for wasting the public money. Pearl River would be an admirable spot for a dozen pleasant sinecures, and the expenditure of three or four millions of money. It seems to me, therefore, that it would be a dear bargain. For the accommodation of merchant steamers and ships and their repair, Honolulu offers sufficient facilities. There are ingenious American mechanics there who have even taken a frigate upon a temporary dry-dock, and repaired her hull.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HULA-HULA, OR DANCING-GIRLS.]

But justice, kindly feeling, and a due regard for our future interests in the Pacific Ocean ought to induce us to establish at once a reciprocity treaty with the Hawaiian Government. We should lose but little revenue; and should make good that loss by the greater market which would be opened for our own products, in the Islands. Such a treaty would bring more capital to the Islands, increase their prosperity, and, at the same time, bind them still more closely and permanently to us. It would pave the way to annexation, if that should ever become advisable.

The politics of the Hawaiian Kingdom are not very exciting. In those fortunate Isles the Legislature troubles itself chiefly about the horse and dog tax. The late king, who was of an irascible temper, did not always treat his faithful Commons with conspicuous civility. He sometimes told them that they had talked long enough and had better adjourn; and they usually took his advice. The present king, who belonged to "his majesty's opposition" during the late reign, has yet to develop his qualities as a ruler. He has shown sound judgment in the nomination of his cabinet; and he is believed to have the welfare of the people at heart. He is unmarried; but is not likely to marry; and he will probably nominate a successor from one of the chief or ruling families still remaining. The list from which he can choose is not very long; and it is most probable, as this is written, that he will nominate to succeed him Mrs. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, wife of the present Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mrs.

Bishop is a lady of education and culture, of fine presence, every way fit to rule over her people; and her selection would be satisfactory to the foreign residents as well as to the best of the Hawaiian people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAWAIIAN STYLE OF DRESS.]

CHAPTER VII.

THE LEPER ASYLUM ON MOLOKAI.

So much has been said and written of late about the disease called leprosy and its ravages in the Sandwich Islands that I had the curiosity to visit the asylum for lepers at Molokai, where now very nearly all the people suffering from this disease have been collected, under a law which directs this seclusion.

The steamer _Kilauea_ left Honolulu one evening at half-past five o'clock, and dropped several of us about two o'clock at night into a whale-boat near a point on the lee side of Molokai. Here we were landed, and presently mounted horses and rode seven or eight miles to the house of a German, Mr. Meyer, who is the superintendent of the leper settlement, and also, I believe, of a cattle farm which belongs to the heirs of the late king.

Mr. Meyer has lived on Molokai since 1853. He is married to a Hawaiian, and has a large family of sons and daughters who have been carefully and excellently brought up, I was told. Mrs. Meyer, who presided at breakfast, is one of those tall and grandly proportioned women whom you meet among the native population not infrequently, who enable you to realize how it was that in the old times the women exercised great influence in Hawaiian politics. She seemed born to command, and yet her benevolent countenance and friendly smile of welcome showed that she would probably rule gently.

From Mr. Meyer's we rode some miles again, until at last we dismounted at the top or edge of the great precipice, at the foot of which, two thousand feet below, lies the plain of Kalawao, occupied by the lepers. At the top we four dismounted, for the trail to the bottom, though not generally worse than the trail into the Yosemite Valley, has some places which would be difficult and, perhaps, dangerous for horses.

From the edge of the Pali or precipice the plain below, which contains about 16,000 acres, looks like an absolute flat, bounded on three sides by the blue Pacific. Horses awaited us at the bottom, and we soon discovered that the plain possessed some considerable elevations and depressions. It is believed to have been once the bottom of a vast crater, of which the Pali we clambered down formed one of the sides, the others having sunk beneath the ocean, leaving a few traces on one side. It has yet one considerable cone, a hill two hundred feet high, a well-preserved subsidiary crater, on whose bottom gra.s.s is now growing, while a little pool of salt water, which rises and falls with the tide, shows a connection with the ocean. A ride along the sh.o.r.e showed me also several other and smaller cones.

The whole great plain is composed of lava stones, and to one unfamiliar with the habits of these islanders would seem to be an absolutely sterile desert. Yet here lived, not very many years ago, a considerable population, who have left the marks of an almost incredible industry in numerous fields inclosed between walls of lava rock well laid up; and in what is yet stranger, long rows of stones, like the windrows of hay in a gra.s.s field at home, evidently piled there in order to secure room in the long, narrow beds thus partly cleared of lava which lay between, to plant sweet-potatoes. As I rode over the trails worn in the lava by the horses of the old inhabitants, I thought this plain realized the Vermonter's saying about a piece of particularly stony ground, that there was not room in the field to pile up the rocks it contained.

Yet on this apparently desert s.p.a.ce, within a quarter of a century more than a thousand people lived contentedly and prosperously, after their fashion; and this though fresh water is so scarce that many of them must have carried their drinking water at least two or even three miles. And here now live, among the lepers, or rather a little apart from them at one side of the plain, about a hundred people, the remnant of the former population, who were too much attached to their homes to leave them, and accepted sentence of perpetual seclusion here, in common with the lepers, rather than exile to a less sterile part of the island.

When we had descended the cliff, a short ride brought us to the house of a luna, or local overseer, a native who is not a leper; and of this house, being uncontaminated, we took possession.

By a law of the kingdom it is made the duty of the Minister of the Interior, and under him of the Board of Health, to arrest every one suspected of leprosy; and if a medical examination shows that he has the disease, to seclude the leper upon this part of Molokai.

Leprosy, when it is beyond its very earliest stage, is held to be incurable. He who is sent to Molokai is therefore adjudged civilly dead.

His wife, upon application to the proper court, is granted a decree of absolute divorce, and may marry again; his estate is administered upon as though he were dead. He is incapable of suing or being sued; and his dealings with the world thereafter are through and with the Board of Health alone.

In order that no doubtful cases may be sent to Molokai there is a hospital at Kalihi, near Honolulu, where the preliminary examinations are made, and where Dr. Trousseau, the skillful physician of the Board of Health, son of the famous Paris physician of the same name, retains people about whom he is uncertain.

The leper settlement at Molokai was begun so long ago as 1865; but the law requiring the seclusion of lepers was not enforced under the late king, who is believed to have been himself a sufferer from this disease, and who, at any rate, by constantly granting exemptions, discouraged the officers of the law. Since the accession of the present king, however, it has been rigidly enforced, and it is this which has caused the sudden and great outcry about leprosy, which has reached even to the United States, and has caused many people, it seems, to fear to come to the Islands, as though a foreigner would be liable to catch the disease.

You must understand that the native people have no fear of the disease.

Until the accession of the present king lepers were commonly kept in the houses of their families, ate, drank, smoked, and slept with their own people, and had their wounds dressed at home. If the disease were quickly or readily contagious, it must have spread very rapidly in such conditions; and that it did not spread greatly or rapidly is one of the best proofs that it is not easily transmitted. When I remember how commonly, among the native people, a whole family smokes out of the same pipe, and sleeps together under the same tapa, I am surprised that so few have the disease.

There are at this time eight hundred and four persons, lepers, in the settlement, besides about one hundred non-lepers, who prefer to remain there in their ancient homes. Since January, 1865, when the first leper was sent here, one thousand one hundred and eighty have been received, of whom seven hundred and fifty-eight were males and four hundred and twenty-two females. Of this number three hundred and seventy-three have died, namely, two hundred and forty-six males and one hundred and twenty-seven females. Forty-two died between April 1 and August 13 of the present year. The proportion of women to men is smaller than I thought; and there are about fifty leper children, between the ages of six and thirteen. Lepers are sterile, and no children have been born at the asylum.

So great has been the energy and the vigilance of the Board of Health and its physician, Dr. Trousseau, that there are not now probably fifty lepers at large on all the islands, and these are persons who have been hidden away in the mountains by their relatives. In fact if there was ever any risk to foreign visitors from leprosy, this is now reduced to the minimum; and as the disease is not caused by the climate, and can be got, as the widest experience and the best authorities agree, only by intimate contact, united with peculiar predisposition of the blood, there is not the least ground for any foreign visitor to dread it.

When a leper is sent to Molokai, the Government provides him a house, and he receives, if an adult, three pounds of paiai or unmixed poi, per day, and three pounds of salt salmon, or five pounds of fresh beef, per week.

Beef is generally preferred.

They are allowed and encouraged to cultivate land, and their products are bought by the Health Board; but the disease quickly attacks the feet and hands, and disables the sufferers from labor.

There are two churches in the settlement, one Protestant, with a native pastor, and one Catholic, with a white priest, a young Frenchman, who has had the courage to devote himself to his co-religionists.

There is a store, kept by the Board of Health, the articles in which are sold for cost and expenses. The people receive a good deal of money from their relatives at home, which they spend in this store. The Government also supplies all the lepers with clothing; and there is a post-office.

The little schooner which carried me back to Honolulu bore over two hundred letters, the weekly mail from the leper settlement.

For the bad cases there is a hospital, an extensive range of buildings, where one hundred patients lay when I visited it. These, being helpless, are attended by other lepers, and receive extra rations of tea, sugar, bread, rice, and other food.

Almost every one strong enough to ride has a horse; for the Hawaiians can not well live without horses. Some of the people live on the sh.o.r.e and make salt, which you see stored up in panda.n.u.s bags under the shelter of lava bubbles. When I was there a number were engaged in digging a ditch in which to lay an iron pipe, intended to convey fresh water to the denser part of the settlement.

Such is the life on the leper settlement of Molokai; a precipitous cliff at its back two thousand feet high; the ocean, looking here bluer and lovelier than ever I saw it look elsewhere on three sides of it; the soft trade-wind blowing across the lava-covered plain; eternal sunshine; a mild air; horses; and the weekly excitement of the arrival of the schooner from Honolulu with letters. There is sufficient employment for those who can and like to work--and the Hawaiian is not an idle creature; and altogether it is a very contented and happy community. The Islander has strong feelings and affections, but they do not last long, and the people here seemed to me to have made themselves quickly at home. I saw very few sad faces, and there were mirth and laughter, and ready service and pleasant looks all around us, as we rode or walked over the settlement.

And now, you will ask, what does a leper look like? Well, in the first place, he is not the leper of the Scriptures; nor, I am a.s.sured, is the disease at all like that which is said to occur in China. Indeed, the poor Chinese have been unjustly accused of bringing this disease to the Islands. With the first shipload of Chinese brought to these Islands came two lepers "white as snow," having, that is to say, a disease very different from that which now is called leprosy here. They were not allowed to land, but were sent back in the ship which brought them out.

The Hawaiian leprosy, on the other hand, has been known here for a quarter of a century, and men died of it before the first Chinese were brought hither. The name Mai-Pakeh was given it by an accident, a foreigner saying to a native that he had a disease such as they had in China. There are but six Chinese in the Molokai leper settlement, and there are three white men there.

The leprosy of the Islands is a disease of the blood, and not a skin disease. It can be caught only, I am told, by contact of an abraded surface with the matter of the leprous sore; and doubtless the familiar habit of the people, of many smoking the same pipe, has done much to disseminate it.

Its first noticeable signs are a slight puffiness under the eyes, and a swelling of the lobes of the ears. To the practiced eyes of Dr. Trousseau these signs were apparent where I could not perceive them until he laid his finger on them. Next follow symptoms which vary greatly in different individuals; but a marked sign is the retraction of the fingers, so that the hand comes to resemble a bird's claw. In some cases the face swells in ridges, leaving deep furrows between; and these ridges are shiny and without feeling, so that a pin may be stuck into one without giving pain to the person. The features are thus horribly deformed in many instances; I saw two or three young boys of twelve who looked like old men of sixty.

In some older men and women, the face was at first sight revolting and baboon-like; I say at first sight, for on a second look the mild sad eye redeemed the distorted features; it was as though the man were looking out of a horrible mask.

At a later stage of the disease these rugous swellings break open into festering sores; the nose and even the eyes are blotted out, and the body becomes putrid.

In other cases the extremities are most severely attacked. The fingers, after being drawn in like claws, begin to fester. They do not drop off, but seem rather to be absorbed, the nails following the stumps down; and I actually saw finger-nails on a hand that had no fingers. The nails were on the knuckles; the fingers had all rotted away.

The same process of decay goes on with the toes; in some cases the whole foot had dropped away; and in many the hands and feet were healed over, the fingers and toes having first dropped off. But the healing of the sore is but temporary, for the disease presently breaks out again.

Emaciation does not seem to follow. I saw very few wasted forms, and those only in the hospitals and among the worst cases. There appears to be an astonishing tenacity of life, and I was told they mostly choke to death, or fall into a fever caused by swallowing the poison of their sores when these attack the nose and throat.

Those diseased give out soon a very sickening odor, and I was much obliged to a thoughtful man in the settlement, who commanded the lepers who had gathered together to hear an address from the doctor to form to leeward of us. I expected to be sickened by the hospitals; but these are so well kept, and are so easily ventilated by the help of the constantly blowing trade-wind, that the odor was scarcely perceptible in them.