Note 7 — Chapter XXV

It was a common thing in those days for travellers to find skeletons in the coast caves and the forests of the Hawaiian Isles, and in many of the surrounding isles of the North Pacific. Some, maybe, were the skeletons of shipwrecked white men and natives, or escapes from the convict settlements of Noumea. More often they were the remains of the stricken, who had fled from the leper-hunters, preferring to cast themselves adrift in a canoe or raft, and risk the terrors of the ocean to the dreadful exile to the lazaretto on Molokai. Often the fugitives were accompanied by a wife, husband, child or lover. And often those who shared their sorrows died by their own hand when the tragedy had ended in the death of the afflicted. It may be some will think that I have overdrawn the horrors of leprosy and its effects physically and mentally. I can assure my readers that, in my attempt to depict the scenes of leprosy and its consequences in those times, I am obliged to leave out a good deal. The full truth were too terrible to write about in a book that only touches on the matter so far as it concerns Waylao.