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, supposed that these curses were inflicted upon them by the God of the foreigners and by the missionaries, who said that they were his servant.  In their misery, they not only refused to listen to the gospels, but accused the missionaries in prayer before their own god, begging to be saved from them.  Often when the missionaries appeared to speak to the people, the deformed and dying were brought out and laid in rows before them, as evidences of the evilness and cruelty of their white god.

But after one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious, intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others.  The coming of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere in the world.  The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of America perished or are going fast.  The numbers of those dead from war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the fearful facts.  Seek as far as you will, pile up figures and causes and prove them correct; there still remains to take into account the shadow of the white on the red.

Prescott says: