The Fijians Part 22

In October 1888, when the present writer was with the Administrator of British New Guinea in his exploration of Normanby Island in the D'Entrecasteaux Group, the natives in one of the bays would not consent to hold intercourse with the party until the old men had chewed a scented bark and spat it over each of the visitors and his own following.

The people of the island of St. Kilda charge visitors from Scotland with bringing disease, and call their ailment the "stranger's cold" or "boat cough."

Instances might be multiplied of the intercourse between different races resulting in mysterious epidemic disease from which neither were suffering before the meeting. The Pacific Islanders, believing that all disease is due to the malevolence of an enemy, often resorted to the one effective method of quarantine, and murdered their visitors; and it is probably to this instinct of self-preservation that many of the hostile receptions of visitors, for which they have been from time to time severely punished, was due. In the matter of skin diseases we know as a fact that European ships introduced _tinea desquamans_ into Fiji from the Tokalau Islands in the persons of native pa.s.sengers, and that yaws was carried to these islands from Fiji and Samoa about the year 1864, within the recollection of Europeans still living there.

[Pageheader: DYSENTERY PROVED CONTAGIOUS]

The Fijians recognize the infectious nature of some diseases, though they have hardly learned as yet to separate the idea of physical contagion from that of supernatural agency--the _mana_, or occult influence of the disease. If it be true that dysentery, colds and coughs were unknown until foreign ships visited the islands, their opinion that these diseases were imported by Europeans would have a strong probability to support it. Modern bacteriological research tends to show that almost every acute disease results from infection. This law may apply to fluxes and catarrhs. Dysentery is well known to be capable of spreading by contagion, varying, of course, with the conditions of the place and people, but still sufficiently catching to be sometimes a distinct epidemic traceable to contagion derived from persons or excreta. "Dysentery," says Gliezgra[91] "is an inflammatory infection of the large intestine, due to specific virus. The exact nature of the virus is unknown, but it is probably bacterial. The infection is epidemic, endemic, or sporadic in its occurrence." In quite recent times a bacterium of dysentery has actually been isolated, and we have evidence enough both in Fiji and in Futuna (New Hebrides), where in February, 1893, the _Empreza_, a labour ship from Queensland, landed a child suffering from dysentery, and caused the death of nearly a third of the population by dysentery during the following six months,[92] to show that dysentery is highly contagious.

To those who may contend that tropical dysentery is a malarial disease, and therefore unlikely to be conveyed across the wide stretch of ocean which ships must traverse to reach these islands, the case of Mauritius may be cited. Malarial fever was there unknown until the year 1867, when an epidemic of that nature ravaged the island to such an extent that the price of quinine rose from 21s. to 40 per ounce. Malarial fever has remained endemic there ever since.

Besides the great epidemics of dysentery and _lila_ there is a tradition of a less serious disease about the year 1820, called by the natives _vundi-thoro_, from the fancied resemblance between the skin of the patient and a scalded banana. This visitation does not appear to have caused many deaths. There have been several smaller epidemics in various parts of the group since 1820, but none of these approached in importance the terrible visitation of measles in 1875.[93] The measles were introduced by H.M.S. _Dido_ in the persons of Rata Timothe, the Vunivalu's son, and his servant returning from Sydney, and was communicated to the members of a great native meeting that had a.s.sembled in Lavuka to welcome the _Dido_. They scattered to their own homes with the seeds of the disease upon them and spread it broadcast through the country. The people at that time numbered about 150,000, and it is recorded, probably with fair exact.i.tude, that 40,000 persons died from measles, and the famine and dysentery that followed, within the s.p.a.ce of four months. The great mortality was due partly to the suddenness with which the infection spread. Unprotected by any previous attack, every person was susceptible to infection; whole communities were stricken down at the same time, there was no one left to procure food and water, to attend to the necessities of the sick, or even in many cases to bury the dead. Many, therefore, died of starvation and neglect, of disregard of the simplest nursing precautions, of apathy and despair. They became what is so well expressed by their own word "_tankaya_" overwhelmed, dismayed, cowed--incapable of any effort to save even their own lives.

So deep an impression did the measles leave upon the race that it has become their princ.i.p.al date mark; whether it left behind it physical effects in lowering the stamina of the survivors is a matter for conjecture.

Since the measles the princ.i.p.al foreign epidemics to which the natives have been exposed are whooping-cough in 1884, 1890, 1891; dengue, 1885; cerebro-spinal meningitis, 1885; influenza, 1891-2.

Of these whooping-cough has proved the most fatal, being now permanently domiciled in the colony. It appeared in Samoa in 1849, but eventually died out there.[94] It is worth recording that in 1893 the measles reached Samoa and Tonga from New Zealand, and destroyed nearly one-twentieth of the Tongan population; but although the disease was raging in every port from which steamers sailed for Fiji, the Government succeeded in preventing it from being communicated to those on sh.o.r.e by a rigid system of quarantine.

[Pageheader: BLIGHTING INFLUENCE OF FOREIGNERS]

Many Fijians believe that the white race always brings death to coloured people, saying that they have heard it from Europeans. When the Commission on the native decrease was sitting in August, 1893, I received from a native of Thithia the following letter, accompanied by a rude sketch of a Fijian grasping a Bible and retreating before a European from whose body were drawn a series of radiations to indicate his pernicious influence.

_Translation._

"The decrease of the natives.

"I wish, sir, to make a few remarks. There has been much consideration and discussion on this matter. There appears to me to be only one reason for the decrease of the natives: it is the white chiefs living among us. It is this:--

"(1) They blight us--they are blighting us, the natives, and we are withering away. It is not possible for a chief to live with his inferiors, to wear the same clothes, to use the same mat or the same pillow. In a few days the neck or the belly of the low-born man will swell up and he will die; his chief has blighted him. It is so with the white chiefs and us the natives. If we live near them for long, we, the natives, will be completely swept away.

"(2) They are great and we are insignificant. A plant cannot grow up under the great Ivi tree, for the great Ivi overshadows it, and the gra.s.s or plant beneath withers away. It is thus with the chiefs from the great lands who live among us. This is the reason why we Fijians are decreasing. 'Let us move gently: we stand in the glare of the light' (Fijian proverb): let us practice religion."

"Josefa Sokovangone."

Such a belief must naturally be accompanied by bitter feelings, and for Europeans to foster this belief is cruel, and not devoid of danger for the future. There is proof enough that the first contact of voyagers with indigenous people or peoples who have been isolated for generations is fraught with danger for the latter, and it is natural enough that even without such promptings the Fijians should blame the Europeans of the present day for the harm that has resulted from the introduction of foreign epidemics; but to remind them of this, as some Europeans are fond of doing, is not only to afford them an excuse for neglecting all efforts of sanitary reform, but to give them justification for feeling a resentment that may some day take the form of reprisals.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: See Chapter II.]

[Footnote 85: Memoir of Rev. William Cross, missionary to the Fiji Islands, by Rev. John Hunt. London.]

[Footnote 86: An allusion to the custom of strangling the sick.]

[Footnote 87: _Nineteen Years in Polynesia_, by Rev. George Turner.

London, 1861.]

[Footnote 88: _A Voyage towards the South Pole and round the World_, by James Cook, Book iii, chapter i. London, 1779.]

[Footnote 89: _Wild Life in the Pacific Islands_, by H. E. Lamont.]

[Footnote 90: Official Journal of Government Agent on _Lord of the Isles_, 1882.]

[Footnote 91: _Text-book of Pathological Anatomy and Pathogenesis_ (English edition). London, 1885.]

[Footnote 92: Letter from Dr. William Gunn, Presbyterian missionary at Futuna, dated September 14, 1893.]

[Footnote 93: Parliamentary Paper C. 634, and _Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London_, N.S., Vol. iii, 1884.]

[Footnote 94: _Nineteen Years in Polynesia._]

CHAPTER XVII

LEPROSY (_Vukavuka_ or _Sakuka_)[95]

No less than one per cent. of the native population of Fiji are lepers, and, if native tradition is to be believed, the decay of customary law has not affected the people in this respect either for better or for worse. All the old men are familiar with the disease; they can diagnose it with surprising accuracy; and they generally concur in stating that it has neither spread nor decreased since heathen times.

The history of leprosy in the Pacific is remarkable. The Maoris have had the disease ever since their arrival in New Zealand--certainly not less than four centuries ago;[96] with the Fijians it is ancient enough to have taken its place in their mythology. In Hawaii, on the other hand, it seems to have been unknown before 1848, in New Caledonia before 1865, and in the Loyalty Group before 1882.[97] It is impossible to speak with certainty about the other groups, because the early voyagers did not stay long enough to make accurate observations, and were p.r.o.ne to mistake the disfigurements of scrofula and syphilis for the symptoms of leprosy; the naval surgeons of the last century were generally men of inferior attainments; and the missionaries, traders, and runaway sailors who had the opportunity for leaving valuable information regarding native diseases did not possess the necessary medical knowledge.

Moerenhout, who wrote in 1837, is the first to make undeniable reference to it. In enumerating the diseases of the Society Islanders, he gives an excellent description of the symptoms of leprosy under the native name _Hobi_, which is identical with _Supe_[98] (H and B being interchangeable with S and P), the Samoan term for leprosy, without a suspicion of the real nature of the disease he was describing. It may, therefore, be a.s.sumed that leprosy was endemic in Tahiti and the adjacent islands long before the arrival of Europeans. Native tradition seems to indicate that it was so in Tonga, and its history in islands into which it has been recently introduced suggests that it was not a recent arrival in any of the Polynesian groups except Hawaii. For, whereas in Tahiti, New Zealand and Fiji it is no commoner now than it was a century ago, in Hawaii it has increased so rapidly that in forty years after its introduction it had infected one in every thirty of the native population; in New Caledonia in twenty years it had infected 4000; and in the Loyalty Islands six years of the disease in Mare alone had produced seventy lepers. If the other Polynesian groups had been virgin soil the crop of lepers should have been no less fruitful.

Among the Maoris, with whom it was formerly common, it has now died out.

Their traditions relate that among the immigrants who arrived from Hawaiki in the canoe _Tuwhenua_ there was a leper who infected all his companions. They landed at Te Waka Tuwhenua (Cape Rodney), a little to the south of Whangarei, and scattered among the immigrants of the Tainui and Ngapuhi parties. Leprosy is still called Tuwhenua in the Whangarei district, but whether the disease was called after the canoe, or the canoe after the disease, it is difficult now to determine. In other districts it is called Puhipuhi and Ngerengere.

[Pageheader: LEPROSY IN ANCIENT TIMES]

The fact that leprosy was endemic among some branches of the Malayo-Polynesian stock would be another argument, if any other were needed, for tracing it to a Western rather than an American origin, for we may infer from the silence of the Spanish historians, that leprosy was unknown among the aborigines of the American continent. The primitive home of the disease was Asia and North Africa, and there is negative evidence that it was introduced into Europe somewhere between 400 and 345 b.c., in the fact that Hippocrates barely mentions the subject, and that Aristotle is the first to give an unequivocal description of the disease. On the other hand, the frequent allusions in the oldest Chinese, Syrian and Egyptian writings to a disease bearing all the marked characteristics of leprosy, seem to show that it was as common in the East in times of remote antiquity as it is at the present day. The Roman conquests carried it far and wide through Europe, until it became so terrible a scourge that nearly all the European states of the Middle Ages were driven to enact stringent laws for the segregation of lepers, which so far fulfilled their object that after the fourteenth century, when leprosy had touched its culminating point, it began to decline. The last British leper died in Shetland in 1798, and, though indigenous lepers are still occasionally met with in most of the countries of Southern Europe, the disease is extinct in all the northern states except Norway, where there were still 11,000 known lepers in 1890.

Though there are lepers in Iceland, in the Aleutian peninsula and in Kamschkatka, leprosy may be said to be a disease of tropical and subtropical countries. With the exception of a few insignificant islands, no country in the tropic zone seems to be entirely free from it. In India--the only large country in which accurate statistics have been taken--the proportion of lepers to the total population is estimated at 5 to 10,000, though errors of diagnosis and concealment have doubtless combined to make the estimate merely approximate. In China, judging from the numbers observed in the southern treaty ports, the proportion is probably higher, but both fall far short of the Fijian figure of one per cent., and the Hawaiian of one in thirty.

Nothing was known of the specific cause of leprosy until 1874, when Armauer Hansen isolated the _Bacillus leprae_, a discovery which has cleared the way for formulating precise ideas on the subjects of heredity and contagion, and the proper treatment of the leper as a public danger.

It is, of course, impossible for any organism, however small, to create itself _de novo_. It must come from some pre-existing germ whose habitat may be earth, air, water, beast or man, and since leprosy has never been found in any animal except man, nor in any virgin country to which a human leper has not had access, and since the arrival of a leper in such a country is followed by an outbreak of leprosy among those who have a.s.sociated with him, there is little room for doubt that man acquires the germ of the _Bacillus leprae_ from man, and not from other animals, nor from local or climatic conditions. The most ancient, and, as it now turns out, the most correct belief, was that leprosy is contagious; the leper was unclean. Driven out from the society of men, he was compelled under heavy penalties to warn wayfarers of his approach by voice or bell. In comparatively recent times the belief arose that leprosy was hereditary, and even that it could be acquired from the soil of certain countries. The latter belief has been disproved absolutely by the behaviour of leprosy when introduced into virgin countries. The hereditary theory is also on the wane, although the Indian Commission on leprosy in the early nineties did not absolutely disprove it. If leprosy be hereditary, how explain the striking fact brought out by Hansen, the discoverer of the bacillus, that of the numerous offspring of 160 Norwegian lepers who emigrated to America none have developed the disease, or again the equally well-attested fact that children sometimes become lepers first, and their parents afterwards. Another strong argument against heredity is to be found in the fact that lepers become sterile at an early stage of the disease; unless, therefore, leprosy finds recruits in some other way than by heredity, the disease would inevitably die out in one or at the most in two generations. Moreover, leprosy is often developed quite late in life, and if the germ had been received into the system at birth, one would have to suppose that it had remained latent for thirty, forty, or even seventy years, a circ.u.mstance without parallel in pathology. In one respect, however, leprosy, like tubercle, is hereditary; that is to say, it often shows a preference for the members of a single family, whose const.i.tutions have some predisposing family characteristic, and who are living together, breathing the same air, and eating the same food.

[Pageheader: LEPROSY NOT HEREDITARY]

The opinion of students of the disease is now almost universal--that leprosy is communicated by contagion, and by contagion alone, though it has not yet been determined how the contagion is communicated. Very few of the nurses and doctors in leper asylums acquire the disease, and, except in one doubtful instance, every attempt to inoculate man and the lower animals with the _Bacillus leprae_ has failed. It may be that the leper-germ is sterile except in certain phases of the disease, and that only in favourable conditions in the recipient's health, combined with intimate contact with the leper, can the disease take hold.

Modern opinion, therefore, holds that leprosy is contagious, and, in a sense, hereditary also in so far as it tends to cling about certain families whose members show a const.i.tutional readiness to receive it. I have dwelt upon this opinion at some length in order to show that this is precisely the view which the Fijians themselves take of the disease.

A man is said to come of a _kawa ni vukavuka_ (leprosy-stock), which implies no disgrace except among the highest families, and if he develops the disease his misfortune is regarded as one of the family traits as inevitable as the shape of his nose. At the same time he is believed to have the power of infecting others (not necessarily by actual contagion), and he was generally made to live alone or with other lepers, at a distance from the village. In Tonga the contagious nature of leprosy was fully recognized, and the lepers were isolated on separate islets or uninhabited parts of the larger islands. It is there a grave breach of good manners to apply the word leprosy (_kilia_) to any one in polite society, and many ingenious shifts are resorted to in order to express the meaning without using the word. In the session of the native parliament of 1891, when a member of the upper house was discovered to be suffering from the disease, and a resolution to a.s.sign an island to him as asylum was pa.s.sed, I covered myself with shame by unwittingly p.r.o.nouncing the forbidden word after other speakers had been skirmishing round it for fully half-an-hour after this fashion--"Havea's friends were pining for him at home, and therefore it was but right that he should be excused further attendance at the house; nay, more, to the westward lay many delightful little islands which Havea was longing to visit, where his every wish would be gratified, and where--well--the prevailing wind would blow pleasantly from them to him, and he would be supremely happy."

The Fijians are no exception to other primitive races in believing that neither death nor disease can overtake a man naturally. Their first reflection on seeing the condition of the patient is, "An enemy hath done this!" their second, that the enemy must be discovered and punished, and his malignity neutralized by counterspells. It is not a logical theory of infection, because in their simple creed it is generally not necessary that the infecting agent should himself be suffering from the disease. But in the case of leprosy, as in their laws for the s.e.xual abstinence of parents and for securing the sanitation of villages, they arrive at right conclusions from wrong premises. Leprosy, they argue, is inherent in certain families, therefore the evil spirit of leprosy, which is their equivalent for contagion, is a sort of family retainer, ever obsequious to the commands of his hereditary masters.

And, since a living spirit must live somewhere, certain stones in various parts of the country are pointed out as his shrines, and are hedged about with a tabu that is never in danger of infraction, inasmuch as to touch them is to meet Gehazi's fate. The existence of these stones was discovered by Dr. Bolton Glanvill Corney, C.M.G., the Chief Medical Officer of Fiji, who is not only the princ.i.p.al authority on all medical questions in the Pacific Islands, but has a very accurate knowledge of the Fijian language and character. He has visited and described the stones himself, and has elicited from their owners on the spot such traditions concerning them as they still remembered or cared to tell.

[Pageheader: STONES THAT IMPART LEPROSY]