Chapter XIV
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the islands in our part of the ocean, told the same story about all. He was in the Austral group in 1834. At Raivavae he found ninety or a hundred natives rapidly dying, where fully twelve hundred had been living only twelve or fourteen years before. At Tubuaihe found less than two hundred people among the ruins of houses, temples and tombs. At Rurutu and Rimitara, where a thousand or twelve hundred people had occupied each, hardly two hundred were left, and while nearly all the men had died at Rimitara, nearly all the women had been swept away at Rurutu. The story of the Easter Islanders is famous. That of the Marquesas is almost as pathetic as that of Tahiti or Hawaii. Everywhere the Polynesian perished, and to him it mattered little whether he died of some new disease, or from some new weapon, like the musket, or from the misgovernment caused by foreign intervention.
No doubt the new diseases were the most fatal. Almost all of them took some form of fever, and comparatively harmless epidemics, like measles, became frightfully fatal when the native, to allay the fever, insisted on bathing in cold water. Dysenteries and ordinary colds, which the people were too ignorant and too indolent to nurse, took the proportion of plagues. For forty generations these people had been isolated in this ocean, as though they were in a modern sanata-rium, protected from contact with new forms of disease, and living on vegetables and fish. The virulent diseases which had been developed among the struggling masses of Asia and Europe found a rich field for destruction when they were brought to the South Seas. Just as such pests as the lantana, the mimosa or sensitive plant, and the guava have overrun many of the islands, where the field for them was open, so diseases ran through the people.
For this, perhaps, the foreigners were not wholly responsible, although their civilization certainly was; but for the political misery the foreigner was wholly to blame, and for the social and moral degradation he was the active cause. No doubt the ancient
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Indigenous Histories |  |
© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 137, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/-marua-137.html