leprosy comes to hawai’i--1/27/26

27 Jan 2026

leprosy comes to hawai’i--1/27/26

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Today's selection-- from Outcast by Oliver Basciano. Leprosy, along with smallpox, influenza, cholera and other diseases, were introduced to the idyllic islands of the Pacific by European explorers possibly as early as the 18th century voyages of Captain James Cook:

“For indigenous Hawaiians, leprosy arrived as Damien did, an unwanted visitor from across the sea. The disease may have stowed away as early as Captain Cook's colonial voyage, but it only became regarded as a public health issue eighty years later. 'The commander manifested a laudable humanity, in endeavouring to shield the population from the evil effects which so inevitably result from connection between foreign seamen and the native females,' wrote one sympathetic European account of Cook's trip. The evil effects weren't just moral turpitude, but disease too. 'But his efforts were in vain. If the discipline of his own crew could have been strictly enforced, the eagerness of the women was not to be repressed.' Historically, this genesis, regardless of whether the women were actually consenting, inextricably linked sickness with sex in the minds of Hawaiian and colonialist alike, with the former's lack of conformity to Western and Christian mores taking the brunt of the responsibility in the minds of the latter. The haole — the white incomers —- dodged blame from among Hawaiians for leprosy too. As cases multiplied, the disease became known as ma 'i pake, the 'Chinese sickness', named after the thousands of Chinese labourers who arrived on the islands at the invitation of American traders endeavouring to create an export market in sandalwood (a precursor to the sugar industry that would dominate the economy in years to come). 'There seems but one way to prevent the whole of Oceania from becoming leprous, and that is the exclusion or the rigid control of all Chinese coolies,' a Scottish physician warned. Wherever it came from, contact was devastating for the indigenous Hawaiian population, which plummeted from the healthy 683,000 people Cook first encountered to just under 40,000 Polynesian islanders left after a century of colonial enterprise and disease.

“By the mid-nineteenth century the Hawaiian throne, and the British, were both losing power as the growing cartel of US plantation bosses aggressively sought sway. Under the feudalist system, land was owned by the Hawaiian monarch and controlled by a hierarchy of chiefs, but before long two-thirds of the archipelago had been 'bought' by foreigners, mostly US sugar companies. A newly convened Board of Health, which worked far from the traditions of the medicine chiefs of indigenous Hawaiian society, tackled imported epidemics of smallpox, influenza and cholera; but under pressure from the new business interests, the issue of ma 'i pake became its most pressing concern. William Hillebrand, German-born and, like six out of seven of the Board of Health officers, white, warned that the disease was 'threatening to become more general'. A few months into 1864, the assessment grew graver, with the English-language Pacific Commercial Advertiser thundering, 'It appears that this terrible disease has commenced its slow [but] certain progress', upbraiding the government for its lack of action. 'One year ago there was but one case of Mai Pake in this district and that poor native is now in a state shocking to humanity, still no measures have been taken for his removal from amongst the people, but on the contrary, hundreds of natives have been compelled to go or send to the very house he lives in to pay their taxes!'

“It was a much remarked-upon puzzle for the white population of Hawaii that the original inhabitants of the islands seemed to have little fear of the disease and suffered none of the reflexive disgust towards patients that the Westerners had internalised. In a journal entry of 22 May 1823, Charles Samuel Stewart, travelling with a group of early English Protestant missionaries, described how he encountered a group of Hawaiians 'seated on the ground, eating poe— surrounded by swarms of flies, and sharing their food, with dogs, pigs and ducks, who helped themselves freely, from the dishes of their masters! The tout ensemble was almost too disgusting to be witnessed.' Even more distressing for Stewart was that people suffering from what he called the 'most infective, and loathsome cutaneous disease' were sitting within this party 'without reproach except in the eyes of a foreigner'. In disbelief, he reports that he again encountered 'the itch' when shaking hands with a senior member of the Hawaiian court. 'Few seem to regard it as an evil, or take any measure to divest themselves of [this] curse of a God of purity.' It became a chorus call over the ensuing decades: a Californian doctor claimed Hawaiians 'sleep with lepers without any suspicion of results'; an American naval medic complained that the Polynesians displayed none of the 'wholesome horror' of the disease that other ethnicities did. Worse still, a British doctor justified his experimentation on a healthy inmate from Honolulu's prison, inoculating him with leprosy in exchange for the man's freedom, because the 'Hawaiians view with ignorant contempt the fears of the foreigners'.

“At the same time as Hansen's segregation policies were coming into force in Norway, in Hawaii, in 1865,American lobbying resulted in a royal charter, signed by the largely compliant monarchy of King Kalakaua, establishing two sites for the segregation of 'any person alleged to be a leper'. These were a hospital near Honolulu that would assess suspected cases, and a colony, Kalawao, on the northern side of Molokai Island in which patients with confirmed leprosy would be marooned. The health authorities complained that many relatives of the patients attempted to shelter their loved ones from both doctors and the police who did their bidding, condemning themselves, they thought —like Verdi's Aida hiding in her beloved Radarnes' tomb — to a certain death out of sentimentality. The Hawaiians viewed the new rules as tyrannical; those with the disease were wont to hide in the hills of the islands, forever on the run. In the opera, the lovers die declaiming the 'valley of tears' in which they are imprisoned; the Hawaiian government failed to recognise the similar trauma enforced on the patients. Lifted out of context, Edward Said's damning verdict on Aida could be applied to the leprosy colony's role in Hawaiian society: 'an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience'.

Distribution of leprosy around the world in 1891

“On Kalakaua's death in 1891, his sister and successor, Liliuokalani, attempted to restore a degree of indigenous sovereignty, her efforts answered by a US-backed coup d'etat in 1893. Championed by the publisher of the Advertiser, a newspaper that carried the daily price per ton of sugar on its masthead alongside a weather summary, full annexation of the kingdom followed within five years (and in 1958 Hawaii became the fiftieth US state). It was widely believed, too, that leprosy prevention laws were a useful weapon the settler industrialists could wield against any Polynesian locals who baulked at colonisation. Chris O'Daywas an American doctor who had been physician to Liliuokalani. He claimed that dozens were spuriously diagnosed with the disease after they refused to sell up to the sugar farmers. Once they were shipped off to the leprosy colony, the businessmen would seize the land; stuck across the water as a patient on Molokai, the local person had no access to legal remedy. 'The last king of Hawaii stood with the sugar interests,' O'Day said during a series of condemnatory speeches. 'Once the victim was landed on Molokai the world closed its doors against him, and more effectively than in the tomb was he swallowed up.' The Advertiser called the claims 'spiteful perversions' — but his accusations chime with other Pacific Island narratives. There is a persistent belief among the indigenous islanders of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that Chilean colonialists injected them with leprosy in a genocidal act, paving the way for expropriation of the land by business and military directed from Santiago. Though there is no direct evidence to prove the veracity of either claim, O'Day's speeches caused waves in Hawaii and beyond. The case was taken up by Appeal to Reason, America's biggest socialist newspaper at the time, in which a correspondent decried that 'the spirit of greed has stifled the white man's conscience . . . Of all the damnable outrages ever inspired by greed for profits, I think this one stands clear and distinct as the most conscienceless.' O'Day was eventually granted access to Kalawao itself and found many perfectly healthy individuals stuck there, seemingly proving his theory. Under pressure, the government agreed to demands from almost two hundred Molokai residents that they be re-examined, with many consequently released. They were returned to their home towns and villages but found, Appeal to Reason reported, 'modern commercialism had gripped their islands. They were lost. Their lands were gone. Their families had disappeared.' Dwight Baldwin, a US medical missionary, was among those who championed institutionalisation: 'We have a foul and dangerous disease among us,' Baldwin wrote. 'The native population are not too much alarmed. In this region the healthy are often seen mingling with the leprous, which thing ought not so to be.' His son, Henry, went on to bankroll dormitories on Molokai, using a fortune founded on sugar cane. Today, the company Henry established, the New York Stock Exchange—listed Alexander & Baldwin Inc., is one of the largest landowners in Hawaii.”