have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me.
"All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some
day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations
and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of
the dead."

A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand
Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four
thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one
hundred.

A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand
fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where
three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I
visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago
hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.

Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One
of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent
ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals
received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and
breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of
their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.

The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The
Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land
of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was
brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native,
the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired
slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an
opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by
the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the
devastating narcotic. Too late!

Smallpox came with a Peruvian slave-ship that stole thousands of the
islanders and carried them off to work out their lives for the white
in his own country. This ship left another more dread disease, which
raged in the islands as a virulent epidemic, instead of running the
slow chronic course it does nowadays when all the world has been
poisoned by it.

The healthy Marquesans had no anti-toxins in their pure blood to
overcome the diseases which with us, hardened Europeans and
descendants of Europeans, are not deadly. Here they raged and
destroyed hundreds in a few days or weeks.

The survivors of these pestilences, seeing their homes and villages
desolated, their friends dying, their people perishing, suppose