Summary

In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea, The Colony reveals the untold history of the infamous American leprosy colony on Molokai and of the extraordinary people who struggled to survive under the most horrific circumstances.<

Preface

(6)

Part I

Run (Population 1,143)

(13)

Scattered Seeds (Population 0)

(9)

Almost-Island (Population 0)

(11)

"A Kind of Colony" (Population 13)

(14)

Order (Population 106)

(15)

Ready to Believe (Population 214)

(12)

A Far Different Position (Population 385)

(8)

Part II

Rush Slowly (Population 749)

(11)

"Be Ambitious and Bold" (Population 742)

100

(8)

Escape (Population 673)

108

(7)

The Likes of Us (Population 824)

115

(11)

Strange Objects (Population 632)

126

(7)

Human Soil (Population 680)

133

(25)

"A Strange Place to Be In" (Population 1,144)

158

(19)

Part III

Kindred Dust (Population 1,123)

177

(9)

Civic Duty (Population 857)

186

(11)

Good Breeze (Population 810)

197

(8)

A Terrible Mistake (Population 791)

205

(15)

All a Man Holds Dear (Population 510)

220

(8)

Olivia (Population 459)

228

(15)

Part IV

Attack (Population 349)

243

(8)

Like a Pebble Thrown (Population 312)

251

(6)

Makia (Population 290)

257

(9)

When You Start to Make a Fist (Population 243)

266

(8)

Stand Up Straight (Population 174)

274

(11)

Orientation (Population 146)

285

(8)

Softer Notes (Population 116)

293

(6)

A Long Road (Population 74)

299

(12)

Stay (Population 28)

311

(8)

Notes

319

(68)

Selected Bibliography

387

(10)

Photo Credits

397

(2)

Acknowledgments

399

(2)

Index

401

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

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 battl