CONTACT PRODUCES EPIDEMICS
"Before white men came," says the oldest of the natives, "no one died of acute diseases; the people who died were
emaciated by lingering infirmities. Coughs came with white men; so did dysentery, for Ratu Mbanuve died of a foreign disease resembling dysentery soon after it was brought here. This we have always heard from our elders." In attributing the diminution of their race to infectious diseases introduced by foreign ships, the Fijians do not limit their meaning to such illnesses as measles, whooping-cough, or other zymotic epidemics, but they include diseases now endemic among them, such as dysentery and influenza—not a specific influenza which has overspread the world since 1889, but the annual recurrent febrile catarrh or severe cold in the head and chest which is now one of the commonest ailments in the country, and which often terminates fatally in the case of the aged, infants, and those already affected by pulmonary disease.
Fijians are not the only islanders who assert that dysentery and influenza have been introduced among them by foreigners. The late Dr. Turner[87] of Samoa says that this is the general belief of the natives of Tanna and most other Pacific islands. Writing of Tanna in the New Hebrides fifty years ago, he says:—
"Coughs, influenza, dysentery, and some skin diseases, the Tannese attribute to their intercourse with white men, and call them 'foreign things.' When a person is said to be ill, the next question is, 'What is the matter? Is it Nahac (witchcraft), or a foreign thing?' The opinion there is universal that they have had tenfold more diseases and death since they had intercourse with ships than they had before. We thought at first that it was prejudice and fault-finding, but the reply of the more honest and thoughtful of the natives invariably was, 'It is quite true; formerly here people never died until they were old, but now-a-days there is no end of this influenza, coughing, and death.'"
Turner himself, with every member of his Mission, was obliged to flee from Tanna because an epidemic of dysentery was ascribed to his presence. A worse fate befell the missionary family of Samoans living on the neighbouring island of Futuna for the same reason; others were killed at the Isle of Pines and at Niué and the Mission teachers on Aneiteum were threatened with death.
On May 20, 1861, the Rev. G. N. Gordon and his wife were
murdered by the natives of Eromanga in consequence of an outbreak of measles which had been introduced by a trading vessel.
Referring to Samoa, Dr. Turner writes that:—
"Influenza is a new disease to the natives. They say that the first attack of it ever known in Samoa was during the Aana War in 1830, just as the missionaries Williams and Barth with Tahitian teachers first reached their shores. The natives at once traced the disease to the foreigners and the new religion; the same opinion spread through these seas, and especially among the islands of the New Hebrides, has proved a serious hindrance to the labours of missionaries and native teachers. Ever since, there have been returns of the disease almost annually ... in many cases it is fatal to old people and those who have been previously weakened by pulmonary diseases."