Molokai

“ We are not insensible to the claims of military or naval heroism, but I confess I see much more to admire in Father Damien voluntarily surrendering himself to the slow and loathsome martyrdom of Molokai, more in the self-devotion of our "white slaves," as they must, alas! be called, who toil all the day and a deal of the night in a heavy, noisome, almost disease-laden atmosphere in the disgracefully crowded slums of our great cities, and all to earn a few pence wherewith to buy just enough bread to keep body and soul together in themselves and their children. ”

“ The old nobility of Molokai, the descendants of Maweke of Nuakea, of Keoloewa, circumscribed in territorial possessions certainly, but as lofty and as pure in its blue blood as any of Oahu or Kauai were, with the exception of one family destroyed, despoiled and exiled by Peleioholani of Oahu in vengeance for the death of his daughter, Kulanihonuaiakama, who was treacherously killed by some chiefs of windward Molokai. ”

“ Kersdale insisted. "And they are infinitely better off than their friends and relatives outside who have nothing the matter with them. The horrors of Molokai are all poppycock. I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any of the great cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse horrors. The living death! The creatures that once were men! ”

“ Struck with the sad condition of the lepers, whom it was the practice of the Hawaian government to deport to the island of Molokai, he conceived an earnest desire to mitigate their lot, and in 1873 volunteered to take spiritual charge of the settlement at Molokai. ”

“ And with them came the Chinese sickness—that which we suffer from and because of which they would imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the other islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to Hawaii, to Honolulu. Yet always did we come back to Kauai. Why did we come back? There must be a reason. Because we love Kauai. We were born here. Here we have lived. And here shall we die—unless—unless—there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want. They are fit for Molokai. And if there be such, let them not remain. Tomorrow the soldiers land on the shore. ”

“ We love Kauai. Let us live here, or die here, but do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not ours. We have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and the word of Rum brought the sickness with the coolie slaves who work the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know the law and the justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man’s land, to make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put that man in prison for life.”
“Life is short, and the days are filled with pain,” said Koolau. ”

“ I was interested in leprosy, and upon that, as upon every other island subject, Kersdale had encyclopedic knowledge. In fact, leprosy was one of his hobbies. He was an ardent defender of the settlement at Molokai, where all the island lepers were segregated. There was much talk and feeling among the natives, fanned by the demagogues, concerning the cruelties of Molokai, where men and women, not alone banished from friends and family, were compelled to live in perpetual imprisonment until they died. ”

“ Time only has been the proof whether his two stories, “The Sheriff of Kona” and “Koolau the Leper,” have made one tourist stay his foot from the shores of the Hawaiian Islands.
And yet, these stories, works of art that had nothing to do with his visit to Molokai, in no way counteracting, to his judgment, the admitted benefit of his article on the Settlement, were the cause of bitter feelings and recriminations from what of provincialism there was in Hawaii—and was ever island territory that was not provincial? ”

“ The character of Peleioholani has been variously described in the traditions that have come down from his time. The Hawaii and Maui traditions, or reminiscences, of Peleioholani describe him as proud, arrogant, overbearing—proud, even beyond the most exacting Hawaiian etiquette. Molokai traditions acknowledge his prowess as a warrior, but are merciless in the condemnation of him as a tyrant, whose cruelty went even a step beyond what those cruel times considered admissible. ”

“ We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles; ”

“ As a result, their minds are full-fed with every variety of deceit, from mere harmless fables to the most inexcusable lies, and to such an extent that the truth, even when shown to them, may find little room for lodgment. Nevertheless, I am optimistic enough to hope that a pinch of real fact may leaven a mountain of misrepresentation, and that, in time, the people of every civilised country will come to know just what sort of place Molokai is, and just what things take place there. ”

“ Christianity has achieved almost miraculous triumphs, and the conditions of modern life in crowded communities are helping to harden the native temperament. The leper colony in Molokai is one of several sad sights which are, perhaps, better left unseen. ”

“ In Molokai there are many tiny children, fatherless and motherless, parents without children, husbands without wives, wives without husbands, 'all condemned.' as Miss Bird says, 'to watch the repulsive steps by which each of their doomed fellows goes down to a loathsome death, knowing that by the same they too must pass.' A French priest has nobly devoted himself to the religious and secular instruction of the lepers, and up to the present time has enjoyed complete immunity from the disease ”

“ So poisonous was the wood that many died in cutting down the tree and carving the image, for all perished whose flesh was touched by the chips; but the workmen finally covered their bodies with kapa, including masks for their faces and wraps for their hands, and thus succeeded in completing the dangerous task without farther loss of life. But a single image was made. It remained with the ruling family of Molokai until the subjugation of the group by Kamehameha I., when it came into his possession, and at his death, in 1819, was divided among a few of the principal chiefs. ”

“ Their family affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent, circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the dwellers are well used in Molokai ”

“ The Portuguese, entirely devoted to slavery, have neglected the natives in religion, as in all other matters; and as the Makuas have not imbibed Mahometan principles from the Moors or Arabs, who do not here attempt any proselytism, there is an admirable opening at Mozambique for Protestant missionaries; but Moloch, in the shape of the slave-trade, must first be done away with, when a noble field for missionary labour will be laid open. ”

“ Moloko means milk; hence the name of the sect, whose adherents drank nothing else.
Improving upon the principles of liberty professed by the douchobortzi, the molokanes taught that "where the Holy Ghost is, there is liberty"; and as they believed the Holy Ghost to be in themselves they consequently needed neither laws nor government. Had not Christ said that His true followers were not of this world? Down, then, with all law and all authority! The Apostle Paul states that all are equal, men and women, servants and masters ”

“ The main difficulty to our success in Africa decidedly results from the extent and influence of the Mohamedan religion. From the period of its introduction as affecting the mode of African legislation, which is scarcely a century since, [354] the negroes, but particularly the chiefs, have lost the little of honesty or natural feeling which they before possessed. The doctrines of Mohamedanism are at right angles with those of Christianity, or if the doctrines be not so widely different, it is unquestionable that their influence produces the most melancholy and opposite results. ”

“ No kindness and no appeals avail to subdue their love of freedom or repress their struggles to escape. The Loobah and Abaka tribes are like them in this respect. The demand for slaves by the Mohammedan residents of the Western territories, as the Kredy Golo and Sehre, who greatly exceed the aboriginal population, is sufficient of itself to sustain a very considerable slave-trade. The number of the private slaves owned by the Moslems who have settled in various portions of Northern Africa Schweinfurth estimated to be about sixty thousand. ”

“ Again, men who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own agreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying "civilization" as a transformed tribal existence of which some lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native Australians. ”

“ Though the Mohammedans profess and appear to be strict in obeying the ordinances of the Koran, they most grossly violate one of its principal laws relating to Unbelievers. It is expressly said, that Moslems may take or destroy all those who do not believe in Islamism; but that they should first endeavour to instruct, and on their refusing to acknowledge the Koran, then make them slaves. The same law distinctly teaches that those who are already Moslems cannot be taken captive or sold. Nothing, however, is farther from the idea of a Mohammedan, than to instruct the Negroes ”

“ What the Turks are in Europe and Asia, the Arabs are in Africa. The spread of Mohammedanism is a partial civilization of some heathen tribes. But, alas, the poor natives come in contact with "civilization" and "religion" in another way—in the Arab slave-hunters, who, though they are Mohammedans, and devoutly pray toward Mecca, are the most merciless of human beings. One cannot read the pages of Livingstone without a shudder at the barbarities practised on defenceless natives, which have spread terror and desolation over a large part of the interior of Africa. ”

“ Divided into endless houses, the majority of the independent Oromo tribes, to the south of Shoa, are governed by hereditary chieftains; and it is only where the Moslem slave-dealer has successfully commenced the work of conversion to the creed promulgated by the Prophet, that this wild heathen race have been brought to bow the neck to the yoke of kings. Of this Enárea affords a most striking example, for there one-half of the entire population have abandoned idolatry, whilst despotism has taken root, and flourishes under a line of Mohammadan rulers. ”

“ The introduction [Pg xcviii] of Islám into Central and West Africa has been the most important, if not the sole, preservative against the desolations of the slave trade. Mohammadanism furnished a protection to the tribes who embraced it, by effectually binding them together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by their united efforts to baffle the attempts of powerful slave-hunters. Enjoying this comparative immunity from sudden hostile incursion, industry was stimulated among them; industry diminished their poverty ”

“ And when an African chief said in my presence to a Yahoo-like naval officer, "When so be I die, I come up for white man! When so be you die, you come up for monkey!" my suspicion is that he had distorted the doctrine of some missionary. Man would hardly have a future without a distinct priestly class whose interest it is to teach "another and a better,"—or a worse.
Certain missionaries in the Gaboon River have detected evidences of Judaism amongst the Mpongwe, which deserve notice but which hardly require detailed refutation. ”

“ The Africans in their pagan state were not liable to the same superstitions as they are and have been since their proselytism,—if it maybe so termed, because, their religion was not overloaded with ceremonies, and their priests had but a narrow and contracted influence. Mohamedanism has made them hypocrites as it keeps them slaves, and, while it prevails to its present extent, they must continue so. ”

“ There is no caste in Islam, not even in India, where it is at perpetual war with the castes of Hindooism. So as it spreads in the interior of Africa, it raises the native tribes to a degree of manliness and self-respect which they had not known before. It "levels up" the African race. Our missionaries in Liberia, who come in contact with certain Moslem tribes from the interior, such as the Mandingoes, will testify that they are greatly superior to those farther South, on the Gold Coast, the Ashantees and the people of Dahomey, who have filled the world with horror by their human sacrifices. ”

“ In fact, they are captives or prisoners taken in legal warfare, or who belonged to infidel peoples not in friendly alliance with Mohammedan princes, nor protected by treaties or covenants. But no Moslem is allowed to be taken as a slave. Moreover, if a person is an infidel, but belongs to a nation in peaceful treaty with a Mohammedan prince, he cannot be taken as a slave. Hence the Mohammedan religion not only does not oppose abolishing slavery as it is in modern time, but radically condemns its continuance. ”