Hawaii

by James Michener

  From the wailing crowd some dozen Hawaiians, men and women alike, stepped forward and in a kind of spiritual daze groped for the clean handrails of the gangplank. They were the kokuas, that strange band of people who in Hawaii in the later years of the nineteenth century proved that the word love had a tangible reality, and as each kokua reached the deck of the Kilauea a police marshal asked carefully, "Are you sure you know what you are doing in volunteering for the lazaretto?" And one man replied, "I would rather go with my wife to the lazaretto than stay here free without her."

  No one, looking at the kokuas, could have predicted that these particular people would have been so moved by love. True, there were some old women whose lives were nearly spent and it was understandable that they should join the leprous men with whom they had lived so long; and there were older men who had married young women who had fallen prey to the disease, and it was also understandable that these men might prefer to remain with their girls; but there were also men and women of the most indiscriminate sort who climbed the gangplank to embrace other women and men of no apparent attraction whatever, so that the people on the dock had to ask themselves: "Why would a man in good health volunteer for the lazaretto in order to be with such a woman?" And to this question there was no answer except the word love.

  No kokua came to stand beside the little ten-year-old girl, and none came to be with the beautiful Kinau. But there was general surprise when the police dropped their arms and allowed the Chinese woman, Nyuk Tsin, to join her husband, and as she reached the gangplank, once more the two huge Hawaiians, Kimo and Apikela, stepped forward to embrace her, and Apikela placed about the sloping shoulders of her yellow-skinned friend a chain of maile, saying, "We will love your children."

  The gangplank was hauled aboard. The cattle tethered forward began lowing pitifully. The crowd ashore started shouting, "Auwe, auwe!” and the Kilauea stood out to sea with its horrible burden. When Dr. Whipple, inland in his study, heard the whistle blow farewell, he prayed, "Oh, may God have mercy upon them." For he alone, of all who heard the whistle blowing, understood what lay ahead for Nyuk Tsin and Mun Ki. He had seen the lazaretto.

  THE ISLAND of Molokai, to which the caged lepers were heading, was one of the most strangely beautiful islands in the Hawaiian group. It lay in the blue Pacific like a huge left-handed gauntlet, the open wristlet facing westward toward the island of Oahu, the cupped fingers pointing eastward toward Maui. The southern portion of Molokai consisted of rolling meadowland, often with gray and parched grasses, for rainfall was slight, while the northern portion was indented by some of the most spectacular cliffs in the islands. For mile after mile these towering structures rose from the crashing surf, sometimes reaching more than three thousand feet into the air, their faces sheer rock, their flanks marked by dozens upon dozens of shimmering waterfalls. These cliffs formed, at their bases, delectable valleys that probed inland half a mile to end in soaring walls of granite, but narrow and restricted though they were, these valleys were perhaps the finest in Hawaii. Upon the cliffs white goats ranged, so that a boat coasting the north shore of Molokai passed constantly beneath magnificent cliffs, trembling waterfalls and the antics of a thousand goats. Sailors, when the days were idle, would discharge guns aimlessly at the cliffs to make the goats scamper up walls of rock that no man could have negotiated. Thus, the uninhabitable north coast of Molokai was completely cut off from the gentle meadows of the south coast, where some two thousand normal islanders lived.

  Jutting out from the isolated yet magnificent northern coast stood the thumb of the gauntlet, a small, verdant peninsula that had been formed millions of years later than the main island, for when the initial volcanoes that accounted for Molokai had long since died away, an afterthought-eruption occurred offshore. It did not rise from a major volcano, nor did it build a major island; it was content merely to add a peninsula of lovely proportions, from whose grassy shores one could look west and east toward the towering cliffs. It was a majestic spot, a poem of nature, and from the earliest memories of Hawaiian history, fortunate fishermen had lived here, building themselves a good community and calling it Kalawao.

  Then in 1865, the year in which the Kees left China, the Hawaiian government tardily faced up to the fact that in the strange new disease called mai Pake it faced an epidemic of the most virulent sort. It was ironic that leprosy should have been named the Chinese sickness, for the scourge neither came from China nor did it especially affect the Chinese, but some kind of quarantine was necessary, and the heavenly peninsula of Kalawao was nominated to be the lazaretto. It was generally known that leprosy was contagious but no one knew of a cure; so in frenzied eagerness to take some kind of action, the government's medical advisers said: "At least we can isolate the afflicted." In desperation the lepers were hunted down; the Hawaiians living at Kalawao were exiled forever from their peninsula; and the Kilauea started its dismal voyages to the lazaretto. In the previous history of the world no such hellish spot had ever stood in such heavenly surroundings.

  On the first day of November, 1870, the ferry Kilauea stood off the eastern edge of the peninsula, dropped anchor some hundred yards from the cliff-lined shore and rolled with the surf beneath the leaping goats. The captain ordered one section of the deck railing removed, and sailors began shoving into the sea huge casks of salt beef, cured salmon and dehydrated poi. When the cargo was thus thrown into the waves, lepers from Kalawao swam out to the ship and started guiding the stores to shore, for the colony had no pier at which supplies could be landed in an orderly way.

  Now from the front of the ship cattle were led aft, and amidst great bellowing were shoved into the ocean where swimming lepers leaped upon their backs and guided them to shore. Occasionally a frightened cow would toss her rider and head for the open sea, but stout swimmers would overtake her and force her toward the land. A sailor, tiring of the sport provided by the swimmers, discharged his musket aimlessly at the cliffs, and from their cage the lepers saw wild goats leap up the cliffs like the flight of song, flying from crag to crag, and these white animals became the symbol of a freedom forever lost to them.

  A longboat was lowered, with three sailors at the oars, and the police marshal who had accompanied the lepers, ordered the cage opened, and called off names, and saw each afflicted man and woman into the boat. There the government's responsibility ended, for the policeman did not enter the boat himself. He watched it move toward the shore, dump its human cargo on the beach, and return. Then he checked off another complement, and in this way the forty lepers were thrown ashore with no stores of clothing, no money, no food and no medicine.

  When the condemned were all ashore, the marshal announced formally to the kokuas: "You are now free to accompany your husbands and wives, but you do so of your own free will. The government has no concern in what you are about to do. Is it your wish to go ashore and live with the lepers?"

  The kokuas, staring with horrified fascination at the lazaretto, could barely scrape their tongues with words. "I am willing," an old man rasped, and he climbed down into the boat. "I am willing," a young wife reported, and with trepidation she went down. Finally the marshal asked Nyuk Tsin, "Do you do this thing of your own free will?" and she replied, "I am willing." The longboat set out for shore, and Nyuk Tsin approached the leper settlement at Kalawao.

  She was surprised to see, as the green peninsula drew near, that it contained practically no houses, and she asked one of the rowers, in Hawaiian, "Where are the houses?" And he replied, unable to look her in the eyes, "There are no houses."

  And there were none ... to speak of. There were a few grass huts, a few remnants of homes left by the Hawaiians who had been expelled five years before, but there were no houses as such, nor any hospital, nor store, nor government building, nor functioning church, nor roads, nor doctors, nor nurses. In panic Nyuk Tsin stared at the inviting natural setting and looked for signs of community life. There were no police, no officials of any kind, no ministers, no mothers with fam
ilies, no one selling cloth, no one making poi.

  The prow of the longboat struck shore, but no one moved. The sailors waited and then one said, as if ashamed to be part of this dismal scene, "This is Kalawao." Appalled by what faced them, the kokuas rose and left the boat. "Aloha," the sailor cried as the boat withdrew for the last time. The Kilauea put back out to sea, and Nyuk Tsin, trying to find Mun Ki among the stranded lepers, cried to no one: "Where is the hospital?"

  Her plea was heard by a big, tall Hawaiian man known to the lepers as Kaulo Nui, Big Saul of the Bible. He had no nose and few fingers, but he was still a powerful man, and he came to Nyuk Tsin and shouted in Hawaiian, "Here there is no law. There is nothing but what I command."

  The newcomers were as frightened by this state of affairs as was Nyuk Tsin, but Big Saul ignored them, and pointing his mutilated hand at the Chinese couple, said, "You brought the mai Pake! You will live apart."

  "Where?" Nyuk Tsin asked boldly.

  "Apart," the big man said. Then his eye fell on the young wife Kinau, who still had flowers in her hair, and he moved toward her, announcing: "This woman is for me."

  Kinau drew back in horror from the huge, noseless man whose hands were so badly deformed. She shuddered, and Big Saul saw this, so to teach her the required lesson, he grabbed her by the left arm, pulled her to him, and kissed her on the mouth. "You're my woman!" he announced again.

  Nyuk Tsin expected to see someone--who, she could not guess-- step forward to knock the big man down, but when none did, the awful fact of Kalawao slowly dawned upon her, as it did upon all the others. Big Saul, holding onto the shuddering Kinau, glared at the newcomers and repeated the news: "Here there is no law."

  Nor was there any. In all of Kalawao there was no voice of government, no voice of God, no healing medicine. In the houseless peninsula there was not even a secure supply of water, and food was available only when the Kilauea remembered to kick into the sea enough casks and cattle. In truth, the lepers had been thrown ashore with nothing except the sentence of certain death, and what they did until they died, no man cared.

  If any of the newcomers thought differently, they were disabused by what happened next, for Kinau was an uncommonly pretty girl, and the fact that she had no open lesions made her extraordinary in the doomed community, so that Big Saul and his rowdier companions became excited by her beauty and could not wait till nightfall, when such things usually occurred, and three of them dragged her behind a wall that still stood, a remnant of a house where a family of fishermen had once lived, and the two who joined Big Saul were among the most loathsome of the group, for their bodies were falling away, but they thought: "We have been thrown away by Hawaii. No one cares and we shall soon be dead." So they dragged Kinau behind the wall and started, with their fragmentary hands, to tear away her clothes.

  "Please! Please!" she begged, but nothing could be done to interrupt the three hungry men, and when she was naked they admired her, and pinched her body and explored it and laughed, and then in turn two held her down while the other mounted her, and in time she fainted.

  For five days Big Saul and his cronies kept her to themselves, after which any others who thought themselves strong enough to force their way into the group were free to join, and when they saw the naked Kinau, as yet unblemished, they were hungry with old memories of the days when they were whole men, and they cared nothing about what they did.

  Occasionally Big Saul left the girl, to make decisions as to how the lepers should dispose themselves, and he was adamant that the Chinese must stay apart, so Nyuk Tsin and her husband were forced to live at the outer edge of the community of six hundred dying men and women. For the first six days they slept on bare earth; and they found an abandoned wall against which they built a rough lean-to, using shrubs and leaves, for there was no lumber of any kind. For their bed they had only raw earth, and when rain came it crept under them so that Mun Ki, already shivering with ague, came close to dying of pneumonia. Then Nyuk Tsin, using her bare hands, for there were no implements, scraped together a platform of earth and covered it with twigs and leaves, and this made a bed into which the water could not creep unless the rainfall was unusually heavy.

  The two outlawed Chinese were forbidden access to the food barrels until all others had partaken, and even then Big Saul decreed that they live on half-rations, and if it had not been for Nyuk Tsin's resourcefulness they would have starved. On the reef she found small edible snails, and in one of the deserted valleys she discovered dryland taro that had gone wild. With twigs she collected from the cliffs she built a small underground oven in which she baked the taro, so that life apart from the others had minor compensations. Certainly, the Kees lived better than the pathetic lepers who could no longer walk.

  In Kalawao in 1870 there were over sixty such unspeakable persons: their feet had fallen away, their hands were stumps, and they crawled about the settlement begging food which they themselves could neither obtain nor prepare. Horrifying echoes of humanity, they often had no faces whatever, excepting eyes and voices with which to haunt the memories of those who came upon them. There was no medicine for them, no bed, no care of any kind. They crawled along the beach of Kalawao and in God's due time they died. Usually they did not even find a grave, but were left aside until their bones were cleaned and could be laid in a shallow ditch.

  Sometimes the authorities in Honolulu forgot to send the Kilauea with replenishments of food, and then1 the settlement degenerated into absolute terror. Big Saul and his cronies commandeered whatever supplies remained, and protected their rights with violence. The death rate soared, four or five cases each day, and a legless woman might lie in the path all day screaming for food and water, and no one would listen to her, hoping that in the cold night she would die. And usually she did, and her tormented body might lie there, just as she had left it, for a day or even three, until Big Saul commanded someone to remove it.

  There was no law in Kalawao and there was almost no humanity. What made the situation doubly terrible was that regularly the ugly little ferryboat Kilauea appeared offshore with an additional cargo of lepers, and when they were thrown ashore with nothing, Big Saul would move among them telling them the ultimate, terrifying truth: "Here there is no law."

  After six weeks of keeping the beautiful young wife Kinau a prisoner, during which time more than eighteen men enjoyed her unmarked body, she was turned loose for whoever wanted her. She was allowed one flimsy dress, but the way in which she wore it proved that she had by God's grace lost her mind. She could remember nothing of what had happened to her, and she walked in a daze, unable to focus on the present, so that for a space of three or four months whatever man wanted her simply grabbed her and took her to where he slept on the cold earth and played with her for as long as he wished. Then he shoved her along, and she moved like a ghost, her dress askew and no flowers in her matted hair, until some other man wanted her, and then she was his. The women of Kalawao felt sorry for her, but each had her own problem, so that no one tended the poor crazy girl.

  In the fourth month, in February of 1871, that is, the virulent leprosy that abided in Kinau broke loose, and within the space of a few weeks she became a horribly riddled thing, a walking corpse with thick, bloated face, shivering lips about to fall away and sickening illness in her breasts. Now men left her alone, but in her dementia she took off her flimsy dress and exposed the sores of her body. She walked slowly from Big Saul to his first lieutenant and then on to his second, whimpering, "Now I should like to lie with you again." She became such a sore on the community that men could not stand seeing her approach, her body falling apart, and finally Big Saul said, "Somebody ought to knock that one on the head." So on a dark night, somebody did, and she lay dead in the path for two days before she was finally dragged away for burial.

  Of course, no woman was safe on Kalawao, for Big Saul and his men were free to take whom they liked, and those who arrived on the beach with no men to protect them suffered grievously, for they
were 'usually women not far advanced in the disease, and to be raped repeatedly by men with no faces or with hands eroded to stumps was unbearable, but there was no escape, and Kalawao was filled with women who fell into a kind of stupor, crying to themselves, "Why has God punished me?"

  It must not be assumed that women were blameless for the degeneration that overtook Kalawao, for there were many presentable women who felt: "I have been abandoned by society. There is no law here and no one cares what I do." Such women helped the men brew a raw and savage liquor from roots of the ti plant, or muddy beer from stewed sweet potatoes, and for weeks at a time, whole sections of the leper population stayed madly drunk, coursing loudly through the settlement, brawling, screaming indecencies at the general population and winding up in some public place naked and lustful, there to indulge themselves with one another to the applause of cheering witnesses. Those who inflamed these orgies and who seemed to enjoy them most were women, and it was not uncommon in those days, when no priests or ministers or government officials were present to protect order, to see a half-naked woman, at the end of a nine-day drunk, stagger into a public place and cry, "I can have intercourse with any four men here, and when I'm through with them, they'll be half dead." And volunteers would leap at the offer, and there would be a wild, insane testing to see if she could make good her challenge, and when she was finished, she would fall asleep in a drunken, exhausted stupor, right on the ground where she lay, and the night rains would come and no one would cover her, and after a few years she would die, not of leprosy, but of tuberculosis.

  If anyone in those years had wished to see humanity at its positive lowest, humanity wallowing in filth of its own creation, he would have had to visit Kalawao, for not only was the peninsula cursed by leprosy; it was also scarred by human stupidity. The peninsula had two sides, an eastern where cold winds blew and rain fell incessantly, and a western where the climate was both warm and congenial; but the leper colony had been started on the inclement eastern shore, and there the government insisted that it be kept while the kindly western shore remained unpopulated. The eastern location, being close to the towering cliffs, received its first sunlight late in the day and lost it early in the afternoon; but on the western slope there was adequate sun. Most ridiculous of all, even though the cliffs threw down a hundred waterfalls, none had been channeled into the leper settlement. At first a little had been brought down by an inadequate, tied-together pipe, but it had long since broken, so that all water had to be lugged by hand several miles, and often dying people with no kokuas to help them would spend their last four or five days pleading helplessly for a drink which they were never given. For six indifferent years no official in Honolulu found time to concern himself with such problems or allocate even miserly sums to their solution. In ancient times it had been said, "Out of sight, out of mind," and rarely in human history had this calloused apothegm been more concisely illustrated than at the Kalawao lazaretto. The government had decreed: "The lepers shall be banished," as if saying the words and imprisoning the leprous bodies somehow solved the problem.