Dark side of paradise

Inspiring account details heroism tied to Hawaiian leper colony

Dan Danbom, Special to the News

Published February 17, 2006 at midnight

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"Leprosy" is truly a word of biblical proportions. Leviticus 13, 44-46 says, "Whosoever shall be defiled with the leprosy and is separated by the judgment of the priest . . . shall dwell alone without the camp."

Moses tells the Israelites that the policy of exile is heaven-sent. For centuries after that, the conventional wisdom was that if it was good enough for Moses, it was good enough for the rest of us.

"With that message of unsympathetic ostracism, Moses is considered by medical historians to have laid the foundation for lepraphobia. More than three thousand years later . . . the Bible remained the most useful authority on how to combat leprosy," writes John Tayman in The Colony, an impressively researched book that is at once eye-opening, shocking and inspiring.

The book is about a certain group of lepers on Molokai, Hawaii, and Tayman tells you more than you ever wanted to know about leprosy and more than you probably care to know about the power of the human spirit to be unspeakably cruel or incomprehensibly altruistic.

That's not to say that leprosy isn't terrifying. In the 1850s, a doctor named Edward Hoffman described the disease's progression: A victim first grew depressed. Fever followed. "The patients are not aware of being sick until spots . . . are visible on the skin."

Livid red marks appeared, first dotting the face and then the ears and nose. In some instances, the body became covered with a "scaly eruption." Itchiness ignited the spots, followed by insensibility within their shiny borders. In time, the markings darkened. Those on the face swelled, sometimes growing to the size of a chicken egg. The face became disfigured "similar to the skin of an elephant."

As it advanced, the disease attacked the nose and ears, enlarging and then collapsing them. The voice grew hoarse, and swallowing became so difficult that the victim often choked to death. The skin became gangrenous, leaving the muscles bare. Joints are attacked and destroyed in succession.

While leprosy was most common in Asia and Africa, it was unknown in Hawaii until seamen infected locals in the 19th century. "Hawaiians of the era had several descriptive phrases for leprosy, but perhaps the most apt was 'the sickness that is a crime.' " Hawaiians treated it just like that, exiling its victims to a remote part of Molokai that was isolated from the rest of the island by insurmountable cliffs.

People who had leprosy - or people even suspected of having leprosy - were rounded up at gunpoint, forcibly separated from their families and loaded onto boats where the accommodations were one step above slave ships. Some were brought in by bounty hunters, whose zeal was such that they even swept up some healthy people. The exiles were dumped on the beach at Molokai - some were even dumped at sea if the ship's captain thought the beach was too dangerous - and then faced a horrific existence.

Simultaneously, the government that sent them there complained about its obligation to feed, clothe and care for them. Not even seizing and selling lepers' property raised enough funds for the job. "Sympathy" and "lepers" weren't two words anyone spoke at the same time.

The colony on Molokai, besides its wretched food, inadequate shelter and awful medical care, became something reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. Lawlessness was rampant, which was probably to be expected from people already branded as criminals and reconciled to a fate of suffering. Twelve years after it was established, a visiting group of legislators reported that the colony was cold, wet and overcrowded. Many residents lacked lamp oil, soap, salt, bowls, buckets and utensils. Wood was so scarce that even caskets were nonexistent, yet that didn't stop authorities from jailing residents who dug graves too shallow.

Yet amid the squalor emerged some brave and remarkable people who made tremendous efforts to improve the lives of the Molokai exiles. I won't spoil who did what, but if you begin with the premise that the people who went to Molokai to help the lepers did so believing that they were signing their own death warrants, you begin to get an idea about the kind of commitment they had. And because of their good carried out in an atmosphere of such fear and ignorance, the history of Molokai in the end is less about the disease that can ruin the body and more about the drive that can lift the soul.

A line attributed to Hemingway is that there are no boring subjects, just boring writers. Tayman has taken a fascinating subject and a story that rivals fiction in its twists and turns, added his considerable skill as a researcher and writer and given us the kind of book readers are sure to tell their friends about.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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