The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai

by John Tayman

Overview

In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea, The Colony, “an impressively researched” (Rocky Mountain News) account of the history of America’s only leper colony located on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, is “an utterly engrossing look at a heartbreaking chapter” (Booklist) in American history and a moving tale of the extraordinary people who endured it.

Beginning in 1866 and continuing for over a century, more than eight thousand people suspected of having leprosy were forcibly exiled to the Hawaiian island of Molokai -- the longest and deadliest instance of medical segregation in American history. Torn from their homes and families, these men, women, and children were loaded into shipboard cattle stalls and abandoned in a lawless place where brutality held sway. Many did not have leprosy, and many who did were not contagious, yet all were ensnared in a shared nightmare.

Here, for the first time, John Tayman reveals the complete history of the Molokai settlement and its unforgettable inhabitants. It's an epic of ruthless manhunts, thrilling escapes, bizarre medical experiments, and tragic, irreversible error. Carefully researched and masterfully told, The Colony is a searing tale of individual bravery and extraordinary survival, and stands as a testament to the power of faith, compassion, and the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416551928
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	05/11/2010
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	253,741
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

John Tayman is editor at large of Men's Health. The former deputy editor of Outside magazine, he is an award-winning editor and writer, and has served as executive editor of New England Monthly, editor at large of Men's Journal, and contributing editor to Life, GQ, People, Business 2.0, and other publications. He lives in Northern California. Visit his website at www.johntayman.com.

Read an Excerpt

The Colony

The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai

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By John Tayman

Scribner

Copyright © 2006 John Tayman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-3300-X

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Preface

At 8 A.M. on Friday, September 26, 1947, a thirty-nine-year-old Honolulu physician named Edwin Chung-Hoon began to examine his second patient of the day. Chung-Hoon was a graduate of the Washington University School of Medicine, and his specialty was dermatology. He was currently on active duty with the U.S. Army Medical Corps and had been since the first days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, almost six years earlier. Much of the doctor's time, however, was spent on behalf of the Territory of Hawaii's board of health.

His patient that morning was a sweet-natured twelve-year-old boy. Chung-Hoon noted a slight inflammation of the child's right cheek, and minor thickening of the flesh at several sites on his face and body. Laying his hand on the boy's cool cheek, Chung-Hoon traced his fingertips upward from the jaw, gently searching for the area where the highway of facial nerves flowed together and then branched away. After a moment the doctor took hold of the child's right ear, then his left, and with the corner of a fresh razor blade cut a small incision a few millimeters in length at their base. The boy was silent during the first slice; when the doctor nicked the second lobe, his patient let out a wounded gasp. Chung-Hoon then made a bacteriological examination of the material he had excised. The process took about an hour. He entered the waiting room and told the boy's father the results: leprosy. One week later, the twelve-year-old was exiled.

For 103 years, beginning in 1866, the Hawaiian and then American governments forcibly removed more than eight thousand people to a remote and inaccessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and into one of the largest leprosy colonies in the world. The governments did so in the earnest belief that leprosy was rampantly contagious, that isolation was the only effective means of controlling the disease, and that every person it banished actually suffered from leprosy and was thus a hopeless case. On all three counts, they were wrong.

With the establishment of the colony on Molokai, officials initiated what would prove to be the longest and deadliest instance of medical segregation in American history, and perhaps the most misguided. In 1865, acting on the counsel of his American and European advisers, Lot Kamehameha, the Hawaiian king, signed into law "An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy," which criminalized the disease. In the first year, 142 men, women, and children were captured. The law in various forms remained in effect through the annexation of Hawaii by America in 1898, the adoption of Hawaii as the fiftieth American state in 1959, and until mid-1969, when it was finally repealed. Under the law, persons suspected of having the disease were chased down, arrested, subjected to a cursory exam, and exiled. Armed guards forced them into the cattle stalls of interisland ships and sailed them fifty-eight nautical miles east of Honolulu, to the brutal northern coast of Molokai. There they were dumped on an inhospitable shelf of land of the approximate size and shape of lower Manhattan, which jutted into the Pacific from the base of the tallest sea cliffs in the world. It was, as Robert Louis Stevenson would write, "a prison fortified by nature." Three sides of the peninsula were ringed by jagged lava rock, making landings impossible, and the fourth rose as a two-thousand-foot wall so sheer that wild goats tumbled from its face. In the early days of the colony, the government provided virtually no medical care, a bare subsistence of food, and only crude shelter. The patients were judged to be civilly dead, their spouses granted summary divorces, and their wills executed as if they were already in the grave. Soon thousands were in exile, and life within this lawless penitentiary came to resemble that aboard a crowded raft in the aftermath of a shipwreck, with epic battles erupting over food, water, blankets, and women. As news of the abject misery spread, others with the disease hid in terror from the government's bounty hunters, or violently resisted exile, murdering doctors, sheriffs, and soldiers who conspired to send them away. Some already banished tried to escape, only to fall from the cliff or get swept out to sea. "The pit of hell," Jack London wrote, as he undertook a tour of the colony, "the most cursed place on earth." The mortality rate for patients in the first five years of exile was a staggering 46 percent.

Leprosy is not a fatal disease. Neither is it highly infectious. It is a chronic illness caused by a bacterium, and communicable only to persons with a genetic susceptibility, less than 5 percent of the population. Transmission takes place much as it does with tuberculosis, through airborne particles expelled by someone with leprosy in an active state. Among untreated patients, only a minority have the disease in its active state; the majority are not contagious. For cases that are active, a multidrug therapy has been developed that quickly renders their leprosy noncommunicable, after which they pose no risk of infection and are, in essence, cured. Every city in America has such cases; in the New York metropolitan area, for instance, more than a thousand people have or have had the disease. There are currently eleven federally funded outpatient clinics in the United States treating approximately seven thousand patients, although health officials believe many sufferers go untreated because of the powerful stigma attached to the disease. Though modern medicine has stripped the illness of its horrors, on a social level leprosy remains among the most feared of all diseases, since untreated leprosy can result in deformity, its precise mode of transmission was until recently unknown, and a cure remained undiscovered for thousands of years. The greatest factor in the stigmatization, however, was the historical intertwining of leprosy with religious notions of divine punishment, which gave rise to the corrosive idea that victims of the disease were sinful, shameful, and unclean. The preferred method of dealing with such people was obvious: banishment.

At its height in 1890, the population in the Molokai colony reached 1,174, and it was arguably the most famous small community in the world. The colony commanded intense scrutiny in the American press, and became the subject of presidential inquiries, heated congressional debate, and irrational public fear. Segregation laws gave the local government the right to arrest and imprison any person suspected of having the disease, regardless of nationality, and the rolls soon included not only Hawaiians and Americans, but also individuals from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and China. Correspondents came from all over the globe, seeking scenes of thrilling grotesquerie. Physicians and scientists entered, some to offer help, others to indulge their own ambitions, an ethically suspect pursuit that led to one of the nineteenth century's most notorious episodes of human experimentation. Famous authors also secured a visiting pass: Stevenson spent seven days in the colony; London stayed six. "He returns and sits by his lamp and the crowding experiences besiege his memory," Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of the typical visitor, "sights of pain in a land of disease and disfigurement, bright examples of fortitude and kindness, moral beauty, physical horror, intimately knit." As the place grew infamous, celebrity sightseers flocked to it, among them Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, and Shirley Temple, although she lasted only several hours. Other visitors stayed years, and the stories of their self-sacrifice transformed them into worldwide figures. One was a bullheaded young Belgian priest who fell victim to the disease and in so doing secured sainthood. Another was a fallen Civil War hero, seeking atonement for his dissolute past. Yet another was a modest, well-meaning nun from New York, who arrived to lend aid and quickly found herself the unwilling object of a most unlikely romantic obsession.

The most affecting stories, however, belong to the exiles themselves. Many had been mistakenly diagnosed and spent decades locked away before the error came to light. Thousands were needlessly isolated, their leprosy of a form that did not pose a danger to others. Some exiles were sent away as young children and suffered sixty and even seventy years in isolation before becoming free. Banishment continued well into the modern age. Even as man ventured into space and prepared to walk on the moon, the government kept watch over the colony of exiles, still imprisoned by ancient fears. Their struggle to maintain faith, form a loving community, and help one another stay alive is one of the most extraordinary acts of enduring heroism in American history.

Twenty-eight people remain in the community, passing quiet days in cottages at the base of the cliff. A few hundred yards from their simple homes is the spot where the first twelve exiles straggled to shore, cast away on the morning of January 6, 1866. Within three years all but two were dead. Their swift demise was expected - it was a key component of the segregation plan. But in time the exiles began to defy the policy and accomplished something profoundly stirring and remarkable. They survived.

One final note: This is a work of nonfiction. It is based on more than eight thousand pages of documents, including news accounts, medical records, congressional transcripts, government publications, personal letters, memoirs, interviews, and observations. Anything between quotation marks is taken directly from these sources, and the thoughts and feelings of characters as described in the narrative arise from the same material. No names have been changed.

Today the terms leper and even leprosy are considered objectionable. As the chronology of the book progresses, all terminology is kept appropriate to its time, and thus when the word leper appears I have used it in historical context, or as part of a direct quote. An alternative modern term for the condition is Hansen's disease, named after the Norwegian bacteriologist who first identified the germ that causes leprosy. The medical community is split on the adoption of the term, however, and some physicians and patients prefer the older name. For the sake of clarity, I refer to the disease as leprosy throughout the book.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Colony by John Tayman Copyright © 2006 by John Tayman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface     1
Part 1
Run (Population 1,143     7
Scattered Seeds (Population 0)     20
Almost-Island (Population 0)     29
"A Kind of Colony" (Population 13)     40
Order (Population 106)     54
Ready to Believe (Population 214)     69
A Far Different Position (Population 385)     81
Part II
Rush Slowly (Population 749)     89
"Be Ambitious and Bold" (Population 742)     100
Escape (Population 673)     108
The Likes of Us (Population 824)     115
Strange Objects (Population 632)     126
Human Soil (Population 680)     133
"A Strange Place to Be In" (Population 1,144)     158
Part III
Kindred Dust (Population 1,123)     177
Civic Duty (Population 857)     186
Good Breeze (Population 810)     197
A Terrible Mistake (Population 791)     205
All a Man Holds Dear (Population 510)     220
Olivia (Population 459)     228
Part IV
Attack (Population 349)     243
Like a Pebble Thrown (Population 312)     251
Makia (Population 290)     257
When You Start to Make a Fist (Population 243)     266
StandUp Straight (Population 174)     274
Orientation (Population 146)     285
Softer Notes (Population 116)     293
A Long Road (Population 74)     299
Stay (Population 28)     311
Notes     319
Selected Bibliography     387
Photo Credits     397
Acknowledgments     399
Index     401

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Tayman's crisp, flowing writing and inclusion of personal stories and details make this an utterly engrossing look at a heartbreaking chapter in Hawaiian history." —-BooklistStarred Review

Editorial Reviews

Tayman never makes an appearance in his text or even directly states an opinion. He lets the facts condemn and the details amaze and appall; and his work is by far the stronger.
— The New York Times

Mary Roach

From 1866 through 1969, the Hawaiian and American governments banished nearly 9,000 leprosy sufferers into exile on a peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Former Outside editor Tayman crafts a tale of fear, endurance and hope in telling the story of these unfortunate victims of ignorance (leprosy is caused by a simple bacteria and isn't nearly as contagious as was long believed). After a smallpox epidemic wiped out a fifth of the Hawaiian population in the 1850s, leprosy was seen as the next cataclysmic threat, and drastic measures were taken. For more than 100 years, anyone diagnosed with the disease was taken to the remote colony. Initially, conditions were horrible, with few services or proper medical treatment. Pushed to their limit and fueled with potent moonshine, the internees frequently rioted, causing overseers to enforce cruel laws. Later, as science and social thinking evolved, conditions improved and many in the settlement lived lives of near normalcy. Drawing on contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts of the still surviving members of the colony, Tayman has created a fitting monument to the strength and character of the castoffs in particular, and human beings as a whole. B&w photos. Agent, David McCormick. (Jan. 3) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In 1865, Hawaii criminalized the disease of leprosy and began the longest and harshest episode of medical segregation in American history. The Colony is the tragic tale of the thousands of men, women, and children determined (sometimes erroneously) to have leprosy and who were sent into forced exile on Hawaii's remote Molokai peninsula owing to a radical miscomprehension about the disease. Journalist and first-time author Tayman re-creates this poignant history, telling a tragic and heart-stopping tale filled with vivid descriptions of important policymakers, governmental officials, and writers such as Jack London who oversaw or visited the banished people. Tayman exposes the medical ignorance of the period and the desperate measures a frightened Hawaiian society employed to combat what was perceived as an epidemic of a highly contagious illness. In fact, leprosy, now referred to as Hansen's disease, is not easily spread. Since Hawaii's law was not appealed until 1969, Tayman was able to interview the colony's last living residents. His book would be enriched by highlighting native Hawaiian cultural perspectives such as Kokua (helping those who are suffering), as many native Hawaiians were the Kokua or helpers who accompanied their banished loved ones to be able to care for them. Informative for public library patrons; recommended.-Jane Levy, Marin Community Fdn., Novato, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Veteran magazine editor Tayman debuts with a cold-eyed account of the Hawaiian government's century-long forced quarantine and effective imprisonment of lepers. Leprosy, called by the Hawaiian people "the sickness that is a crime" because it leads to gross disfigurement, probably arrived with the whaling ships to the islands by the early 1800s. It was believed to be incurable and wildly infectious; in fact, it is caused by a bacteria and communicable only to persons with a genetic susceptibility. After the islands' decimation by a smallpox epidemic in 1853, King Kamehameha V pledged to preserve the health of his subjects, and the Board of Health, prodded by the alarms sounded by Dr. William Hillebrand, moved to criminalize those showing symptoms of leprosy. Beginning in 1866,victims were arrested, isolated and exiled to the rocky, barren island of Molokai. The first dozen were deposited in a deserted village with no medical facilities and inadequate food; as incurables, they were expected to die. Many did indeed perish as the population swelled: Patients split into factions, fought for food and rebelled against the beleaguered superintendent. During the colony's most populous era, in the late 1880s, Molokai was home to 1,144 inmates and had 432 buildings; it became habitable, even comfortable, according to Robert Louis Stevenson and other famous observers. Tayman offers numerous fascinating personal stories of people arrested and exiled to Molokai, sometimes with mistaken leprosy diagnoses. He profiles the tireless Flemish priest Father Damien, who caught the disease himself and died in 1889, and gives chilling details about medical experiments performed to isolate the leprosy bacilli.The author does not neglect the political ramifications of a leper colony growing in size at a time when America had its eye on annexing Hawaii and turning it into a vacation paradise. He hauntingly depicts the devastation of an ill-understood disease and helps demystify its victims, too often viewed as "sinful, shameful, and unclean."Rigorous, tenacious research uncovers a grim story of human suffering.

Kirkus Reviews

"Tayman's noble account makes you want to stand and applaud." — Mary Roach, The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating book about disease and the startling responses to it, ranging from terror to love." — Paul Theroux

"Riveting. Tayman can stand toe-to-toe with Erik Larson (Devil in the White City) in his ability to weave meticulously researched material into a fascinating narrative. He certainly can keep a reader up at night." — Detroit Free Press

"Tayman reconstructs a fascinating history." — The New Yorker

"A must-read." — Time

"Impressively researched . . . at once eye-opening, shocking, and inspiring . . . the kind of book readers are sure to tell their friends about." — Rocky Mountain News

From the Publisher

From 1866 to 1969, the remote island of Molokai was home to all Hawaiian leprosy patients. This chronological story follows the history of the institution from its shameful beginnings through its development into a decent medical facility by the tireless Father Damien. It is also a testament to human will--the stories of the patients are compelling. Patrick Lawlor is empathetic and clear, differentiating the narrative from the many quotations from diaries, letters, and interviews. He develops a myriad of realistic accents for a multitude of people, ranging from visiting Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson, doctors from all over the world, and Flemish priests to dozens of Hawaiian patients. A.B. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

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