In the Marquesas Islands, in 1813, Porter calculated there were 19,000 warriors, giving a population of from 70,000 to 80,000. In 1858 M. Jouan found 2,500 or 3,000 warriors and about 11,000 inhabitants, a decrease of 86 per cent.
From a comparison of the estimates of Cook and Forster, it appears that the population of Tahiti must have been at least 240,000. In 1857 the official census only gave 7,212, that is to say, a little more than 3 per cent. of the original population.
These facts would be equally strange, were they purely local. But they are universal, appearing even in the most isolated islands, in the Bass islands, which form the extreme limit of Polynesia on the south-east. At the beginning of the century Davies counted 2,000 inhabitants; in 1874, Moerenhout only found 300, 15 per cent. of the former population.
The preceding calculations have all been taken from eastern Polynesia, which, as we know, was the first to attract Europeans. A few years ago, however, the western archipelagoes were in their turn invaded, and the population is already sensibly decreasing in the islands of Tonga, Vavau, Tongatabou, etc. The case seems to be the same in the Fijis.
Not only does the rate of mortality increase in this unfortunate Polynesian race; there is also a decrease in the number of births. The fact has long been noticed in a general manner. The following figures give it a strange precision. In the Marquesas Archipelago, at Taïo-Hae, M. Jouan saw the population fall in three years from 400 to 250, during which time only three or four births were registered. In the Sandwich Islands, from among 80 women legitimately married, M. Delapelin found that only 39 had children. There were only 19 children in the twenty principal families of chiefs. Finally, in 1849, the official statistics quoted by M. Remy, give 4,520 deaths, and only 1,422 births. The case is the same at the other extremity of Polynesia. In New Zealand, says M. Colenso, marriages are rarely fertile. The seven principal chiefs of Ahuriri are without children, with the exception of Te-Hapuku; but of the four married sons of the latter, three are as yet without a family. Nine out of eleven marriages were here barren.
Many causes have been proposed in order to explain these melancholy phenomena. Wars, famines, and epidemics have been suggested in turn, but these scourges are only local in their effects. Some have mentioned syphilis, but they forget that the mother of Œdidée had died of this disease before even Wallis undertook his voyage. The blame has been laid on drunkenness introduced, it is said, by Europeans; but before the importation of our spirits the Polynesians were quite able to inebriate themselves with their kava, more terrible even than our brandy. As to debauchery, we know to what an extent it was carried by the natives, who had, in that respect, nothing to learn from Europeans.
Can it be that a higher civilization bears within itself something which is incompatible with the existence of inferior races? Do the dominion exercised by the stranger, the invasion of the land, and the violence done to religion and customs inspire these men, once so free and proud, with such despair that they refuse to have any posterity? We may allow some consideration to these moral causes in the phenomena which occur in Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand. But how can we apply this explanation to those archipelagoes where the local race has remained dominant, and where, with its ancient mode of life, it has preserved all the traditions of its ancestors? Now this was the case in the Marquesas during the time that M. Jouan and P. Mathias were there; European inhabitants are still rare in the Samoan and Tongan Islands.
Two naval surgeons, MM. Bourgarel and Brulfert, have alone been able to throw some light upon this melancholy problem. The former found that tubercles were invariably present in the lungs of bodies submitted to post-mortem examination. The latter tells us that almost all Polynesians suffer from an obstinate cough, and that in eight cases out of ten tuberculosis follows these bronchial catarrhs. Now phthisis does not appear in the list of diseases drawn up by the old voyagers. Have we, then, imported it into these islands? Developing in a new region, in a race to whom it was formerly unknown, has this disease assumed a more terrible form, with examples of which we are acquainted? Already hereditary in our own case, has it become endemic or epidemic in Polynesia? If it is so, we may say that it is all over with the Polynesian race. In another half century, or at most a century, it will have disappeared, at least as a pure race; it will have been replaced by a cross, which in the Marquesas Islands has already begun to increase the population.