At Niué, the natives, whose demeanour earned for them from Cook the designation of Savage Islanders, persistently repelled strangers who attempted to land among them. Captain Cook[88] says: "The endeavours we used to bring them to a parley were to no purpose; for they came with the ferocity of wild boars and threw their darts."
Dr. Turner, who visited Niué in 1848 and again in 1859, says:—
"Natives of other islands who drifted there in distress, whether from Tonga, Samoa, or elsewhere, were invariably killed. Any of their own people who went away in a ship and came back were killed; and all this was occasioned by a dread of disease. For years after they began to venture out to our ships, they would not immediately use anything obtained, but hung it up in the bush in quarantine for weeks."
He had great difficulty in landing a teacher. A native of Niué, whom he had found and trained in Samoa, could not be left, as armed crowds rushed upon him to kill him. The natives tried to send back his canoe and sea-chest to the Mission ship, saying that the foreign wood would cause disease among them. John Williams, a missionary, during his memorable voyage in 1830, recruited two Niué lads and subsequently brought them back to their island; but influenza breaking out a short time after their return the two men were accused of bringing it from Tahiti: one of them was killed,
together with his father, and the other escaped on board a whaler with a man who returned to the island in 1848.
MURDEROUS QUARANTINE
Dr. Turner states that in 1846 an epidemic broke out in the island of Lifu in the Loyalty Group. Towards the end of 1846, the teachers who had just arrived were accused of having brought it. "Kill them," said their enemies, "and there will be an end to the sickness."
In New Caledonia, as elsewhere, the natives believed white men to be spirits of the dead and to bring sickness; and they gave this as a reason for killing them.
The Tahitians accused the Spaniards of introducing a disease like influenza during the visit of a Peruvian ship in 1774-5. In Tonga there is a tradition of a destructive epidemic breaking out shortly after Cook's first visit in 1773. The only symptom now recorded was a severe headache resulting in death after a few days' illness, and the native name for the disease, ngangau, is the word used for headache. It does not appear, however, that the Tongans associated this visitation with the arrival of Captain Cook's ships.
The crew of the brig Chatham, wrecked on Penrhyn Island in 1853, were the first Europeans to land on the island. Some three months after their arrival an epidemic, accompanied by high fever and intense headache and generally ending fatally, broke out among the natives. Mr. Roser, one of the survivors, has assured me that none of the crew were suffering from the disease when they arrived, but that some of them caught it in a milder form from the natives afterwards. Besides this fever an epidemic of sores had previously broken out among the natives shortly after the wreck, but this the Europeans attributed to the unaccustomed animal food which they had obtained from the ship. Speeches were made against the visitors. "Why had we come to their land? They had never any sickness like this before we came, and if we remained we should be bringing them other complaints to carry them off. Better for us to leave. They would furnish us with canoes and we must return to our own land."[89]