EPIDEMIC DISEASES
While the great island groups of Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand,
Tonga, and the Solomons had been known to Europe for many years--some of
them for nearly two centuries--the Fijians lived their lives unconscious
that there was another world beyond the reefs that encircled their
islands. They planted food sufficient for their needs, they obeyed the
rigid code of laws with which custom had bound them, they intermarried
with their friends and fought their enemies, but without the carnage
that followed the introduction of fire-arms. It is still unknown who was
the first European to enter the group.[84]
For the evils innocently produced by the first visitors we must turn to
native traditions, those irresponsible records that can lay claim to
historical value in respect of their irresponsibility, recording what
the historian would have forgotten, and omitting nearly everything to
which written histories attach value.
The Rev John Hunt,[85] writing in 1843, says:--
"The first white people with whom the Fijians had any intercourse
were four or five shipwrecked mariners, one or two of whom were
dressed something like ministers of religion: probably the master
and a passenger. The vessel was wrecked on a reef near Oneata
called Mbukatatanoa, and the party referred to were either killed
at Oneata or Lakemba, and, I fear, eaten also. Shortly after their
death a dreadful distemper scourged the natives. It appears, from
the description given of it, to have been a very acute dysentery,
or a form of cholera. Its progress through the group was fearfully
rapid and destructive; in many places it was with the greatest
difficulty that persons could be found to bury the dead. Those who
were seized died in the most excruciating agonies."
The native version, given nearly fifty years later, one was that
morning after a great gale from the eastward the men of Oneata, looking
towards the islet Loa on the great reef Mbukatatanoa, saw red streamers
waving in the wind; strange beings, too, moved about among them. It
chanced that some men of the Levuka tribe in Lakemba, off-shoots from
distant Mbau, holding special privileges as ambassadors, who linked the
eastern and the western islands, were visitors in Oneata. Two of these,
bolder than the natives of the place, launched a light canoe and paddled
near to Loa. The report they brought back ran, "Though they resemble
men, yet must they be spirits, for their ears are bound about with
scarlet and they chew burning sticks." After anxious discussion the
double canoe _Tai-walata_ was launched, and when they drew near Loa the
spirits beckoned to them, and persuaded them to draw near and carry them
to the main island. One of these they proved to be mortal as themselves
for he was buried on Loa, being dead of violence, exposure, or disease.
Here the tradition becomes confused. Muskets and ammunition were taken
from the wrecked ship, but the men of Oneata knew nothing of their uses,
else perhaps the native history of Fiji had been different. The powder
they kept to be used as a pigment for their faces, and the ramrods to be
ornaments for the hair. One warrior, relates the tradition, smeared the
wet pigment over hair and all, and when it would not dry, but lay cold
and heavy on the scalp, he stooped his head to the fire to dry the
matted locks. There was a sudden flash, very bright and hot, and a
tongue of flame leaped from the head and licked the wall, and the
warrior sprang into the square with a head more naked than when he was
born.
[Pageheader: A TERRIBLE EPIDEMIC]
The red-capped sailors had scarce landed when a pestilence broke out
among the people. Here is a literal translation of the poem that
describes it:--
The great sickness sits aloft,
Their voices sound hoarsely,
They fall and lie helpless and pitiable,
Our god Ndengei is put to shame,
Our own sicknesses have been thrust aside,
The strangling-cord is a noble thing,[86]
They fall prone; they fall with the sap still in them.
* * * * *
A lethargy has seized upon the chiefs,
How terrible is the sickness!
We do not live, we do not die,
Our bodies ache; our heads ache,
Many die, a few live on,
The strangling-cord brings death to many,
The _malo_ round their bellies rots away,
Our women groan in their despair,
The _liku_ knotted round them they do not loose,
Hark to the creak of the strangling-cords,
The spirits flow away like running water, _ra tau e_.
The strangers never left Oneata alive. One tradition ascribes their
death to the pestilence, another to the vengeance of the men of Levuka,
and as the natives believed them to have brought the scourge, we may
accept the more tragic of the two. At any rate, though various strange
plunder from the wreck was carried westward to Mbau, there is no record
of any foreigner accompanying them.
It is not certain that this was the only visitation of the epidemic
called _lila_. The traditions are so confused, and the versions so
different in detail, that there is some reason to believe either that
there were two visitations or that infection travelled so slowly that
the disease only reached the western portion of the group some years
after it had decimated the islands to the eastward. The traditional
poetry of every district records the disease, and there are several data
that enable us to fix the visitation within the limits of a few years.
Most accounts refer to the appearance of a large comet with three tails,
the centre tail coloured red and the outer white, that it rose just
before dawn and was visible for thirty-seven nights in succession. Here
is the native account of it:--
Sleeping in the night I suddenly awake,
The voice of the pestilence is borne to me, uetau,
I go out and wander abroad, _uetau_,
It is near the breaking of the dawn, _uetau_,
Behold a forked star, _uetau_,
We whistle with astonishment as we gaze at it, _uetau_,
What can it portend? _uetau_,
Does it presage the doom of the chiefs? _e e_.
Now, as I have already said, the great chief of Mbau, Mbanuve, died of
the _lila_, and was thereafter known as Mbale-i-vavalangi--the victim of
the foreign disease. When the comet of 1882 appeared, the old men
declared that it presaged the death of Thakombau, for that a larger
comet had foretold the death of King Mbanuve, and a smaller one the
destruction of Suva in 1843. We know that the successor of Mbanuve,
Na-uli-vou, or Ra Mate-ni-kutu, was reigning in 1809, when Charles
Savage, the Swede, arrived in the group. The only comet recorded about
the beginning of the century--Donati's, which appeared in 1811, was too
late for Mbanuve's death--was the comet of 1803, and this date
corresponds exactly with the other traditions we have of Na-uli-vou's
reign, which we know lasted until 1829.
It is perhaps worth noting that on the day of the installation of
Na-uli-vou, while the sickness was still raging, there was a total
eclipse of the sun. "The birds went to roost at high noon, thinking from
the darkness that night had fallen." In the same year, says the
tradition, there was a hailstorm that broke down the yam-vines, followed
by a great hurricane which flooded the valley of the Rewa, swept
hundreds of the sick out to sea, and purged the land of the pestilence.
I have already given reasons for identifying this eclipse with that of
February 1803. There seems to be evidence enough for the belief that a
great epidemic was introduced by a vessel wrecked on the Argo
(Mbukatatanoa) reef in 1802-3.
And now for the symptoms. Mbanuve, it seems clear, died of acute
dysentery, but tradition also speaks of a lingering disease with
headache, intense thirst, loss of appetite, stuffiness of the nose, and
oppression of the chest. The second visitation, if indeed the two were
not raging together, seems to have been a very acute form of dysentery.
[Pageheader: CONTACT PRODUCES EPIDEMICS]
"Before white men came," says the oldest of the natives, "no one died of
acute diseases; the people who died were emaciated by lingering
infirmities. Coughs came with white men; so did dysentery, for Ratu
Mbanuve died of a foreign disease resembling dysentery soon after it was
brought here. This we have always heard from our elders." In attributing
the diminution of their race to infectious diseases introduced by
foreign ships, the Fijians do not limit their meaning to such illnesses
as measles, whooping-cough, or other zymotic epidemics, but they include
diseases now endemic among them, such as dysentery and influenza--not a
specific influenza which has overspread the world since 1889, but the
annual recurrent febrile catarrh or severe cold in the head and chest
which is now one of the commonest ailments in the country, and which
often terminates fatally in the case of the aged, infants, and those
already affected by pulmonary disease.
Fijians are not the only islanders who assert that dysentery and
influenza have been introduced among them by foreigners. The late Dr.
Turner[87] of Samoa says that this is the general belief of the natives
of Tanna and most other Pacific islands. Writing of Tanna in the New
Hebrides fifty years ago, he says:--
"Coughs, influenza, dysentery, and some skin diseases, the Tannese
attribute to their intercourse with white men, and call them
'foreign things.' When a person is said to be ill, the next
question is, 'What is the matter? Is it Nahac (witchcraft), or a
foreign thing?' The opinion there is universal that they have had
tenfold more diseases and death since they had intercourse with
ships than they had before. We thought at first that it was
prejudice and fault-finding, but the reply of the more honest and
thoughtful of the natives invariably was, 'It is quite true;
formerly here people never died until they were old, but now-a-days
there is no end of this influenza, coughing, and death.'"
Turner himself, with every member of his Mission, was obliged to flee
from Tanna because an epidemic of dysentery was ascribed to his
presence. A worse fate befell the missionary family of Samoans living on
the neighbouring island of Futuna for the same reason; others were
killed at the Isle of Pines and at Niue and the Mission teachers on
Aneiteum were threatened with death.
On May 20, 1861, the Rev. G. N. Gordon and his wife were murdered by
the natives of Eromanga in consequence of an outbreak of measles which
had been introduced by a trading vessel.
Referring to Samoa, Dr. Turner writes that:--
"Influenza is a new disease to the natives. They say that the first
attack of it ever known in Samoa was during the Aana War in 1830,
just as the missionaries Williams and Barth with Tahitian teachers
first reached their shores. The natives at once traced the disease
to the foreigners and the new religion; the same opinion spread
through these seas, and especially among the islands of the New
Hebrides, has proved a serious hindrance to the labours of
missionaries and native teachers. Ever since, there have been
returns of the disease almost annually ... in many cases it is
fatal to old people and those who have been previously weakened by
pulmonary diseases."
At Niue, the natives, whose demeanour earned for them from Cook the
designation of Savage Islanders, persistently repelled strangers who
attempted to land among them. Captain Cook[88] says: "The endeavours we
used to bring them to a parley were to no purpose; for they came with
the ferocity of wild boars and threw their darts."
Dr. Turner, who visited Niue in 1848 and again in 1859, says:--
"Natives of other islands who drifted there in distress, whether
from Tonga, Samoa, or elsewhere, were invariably killed. Any of
their own people who went away in a ship and came back were killed;
and all this was occasioned by a dread of disease. For years after
they began to venture out to our ships, they would not immediately
use anything obtained, but hung it up in the bush in quarantine for
weeks."
He had great difficulty in landing a teacher. A native of Niue, whom he
had found and trained in Samoa, could not be left, as armed crowds
rushed upon him to kill him. The natives tried to send back his canoe
and sea-chest to the Mission ship, saying that the foreign wood would
cause disease among them. John Williams, a missionary, during his
memorable voyage in 1830, recruited two Niue lads and subsequently
brought them back to their island; but influenza breaking out a short
time after their return the two men were accused of bringing it from
Tahiti: one of them was killed, together with his father, and the other
escaped on board a whaler with a man who returned to the island in 1848.
[Pageheader: MURDEROUS QUARANTINE]
Dr. Turner states that in 1846 an epidemic broke out in the island of
Lifu in the Loyalty Group. Towards the end of 1846, the teachers who had
just arrived were accused of having brought it. "Kill them," said their
enemies, "and there will be an end to the sickness."
In New Caledonia, as elsewhere, the natives believed white men to be
spirits of the dead and to bring sickness; and they gave this as a
reason for killing them.
The Tahitians accused the Spaniards of introducing a disease like
influenza during the visit of a Peruvian ship in 1774-5. In Tonga there
is a tradition of a destructive epidemic breaking out shortly after
Cook's first visit in 1773. The only symptom now recorded was a severe
headache resulting in death after a few days' illness, and the native
name for the disease, _ngangau_, is the word used for headache. It does
not appear, however, that the Tongans associated this visitation with
the arrival of Captain Cook's ships.
The crew of the brig _Chatham_, wrecked on Penrhyn Island in 1853, were
the first Europeans to land on the island. Some three months after their
arrival an epidemic, accompanied by high fever and intense headache and
generally ending fatally, broke out among the natives. Mr. Roser, one of
the survivors, has assured me that none of the crew were suffering from
the disease when they arrived, but that some of them caught it in a
milder form from the natives afterwards. Besides this fever an epidemic
of sores had previously broken out among the natives shortly after the
wreck, but this the Europeans attributed to the unaccustomed animal food
which they had obtained from the ship. Speeches were made against the
visitors. "Why had we come to their land? They had never any sickness
like this before we came, and if we remained we should be bringing them
other complaints to carry them off. Better for us to leave. They would
furnish us with canoes and we must return to our own land."[89]
The islanders of the Kau Atolls, named on the charts the Mortlock or
Marqueen Group (lat. 4 deg. 45'S., long. 156 deg.30'E.), when the epidemic was
prevalent on shore disinfected, or disenchanted, the crew of the
barquentine _Lord of the Isles_ while parleying with them at sea. One
man in each canoe had a handful of ashes done up in leaves, which he
scattered in the air when closing the interview.[90]
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 passengers, 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 L40 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 assembled
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 exactitude, that 40,000 persons died from
measles, and the famine and dysentery that followed, within the space 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 principal 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 principal 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 shore 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 grass 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._]