294 



HAWAII. 



dated with them in complete apathy or fatalism. However 

 bloated the face and glazed the eyes, or however swollen 

 or decayed the limbs were, the persons so afflicted appeared 

 neither to scare nor disgust their friends, and, therefore, 

 Hawaii has absolutely needed the coercive segregation of 

 these living foci of disease. When the search for lepers was 

 made, the natives hid their friends away under mats, and in 

 forests and caves, till the peril of separation was over, and if 

 they sought medical advice, they rejected foreign educated aid 

 in favour of the highly paid services of Chinese and native 

 quacks, who professed to work a cure by means of loathsome 

 ointments and decoctions, and abominable broths worthy of 

 the witches' cauldron. 



However, as the year passed on, lepers were " informed 

 against," and it became the painful duty of the sheriffs of the 

 islands, on the statement of a doctor that any individual was 

 truly a leper, to commit him for life to Molokai. Some, whose 

 swollen faces and glassy, goggle eyes left no room for hope of 

 escape, gave themselves up ; and a few, who, like Mr. Rags- 

 dale, might have remained among their fellows almost without 

 suspicion, surrendered themselves in a way which reflects much 

 credit upon them. Mr. Park, the Marshal, and Mr. Wilder, 

 of the Board of Health, went round the islands repeatedly in 

 the Kilauea, and performed the painful duty of collecting the 

 victims, with true sympathy and kindness. The woe of those 

 who were taken, the dismal wailings of those who were 

 left, and the agonised partings, when friends and relatives 

 clung to the swollen limbs and kissed the glistering, bloated 

 faces of those who were exiled from them for ever, I shall 

 never forget. 



There were no individual distinctions made among the suf- 

 ferers. Queen Emma's cousin, a man of property, and Mr. 

 Ragsdale, the most influential lawyer among the half-whites, 

 shared the same doom as poor Upa, the volcano guide, and 

 stricken Chinamen and labourers from the plantations. Before 

 the search slackened, between three and four hundred men, 

 women, and children were gathered out from among their 

 families, and placed on Molokai. 



Between 1866 and April 1874, eleven hundred and forty- 

 five lepers, five hundred and sixty of whom were sent from 

 Kahili in the spring of 1872, have arrived on Molokai, of 

 which number four hundred and forty-two have died, the ma- 

 jority of the deaths having occurred since the beginning of 



