[Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas by Herman Melville]@TWC D-Link book
Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas

CHAPTER XLIX
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Nay, as a race, they cannot otherwise long exist.
The following statement speaks for itself.
About the year 1777, Captain Cook estimated the population of Tahiti at about two hundred thousand.

By a regular census, taken some four or five years ago, it was found to be only nine thousand.

This amazing decrease not only shows the malignancy of the evils necessary to produce it; but, from the fact, the inference unavoidably follows that all the wars, child murders, and other depopulating causes, alleged to have existed in former times, were nothing in comparison to them.
These evils, of course, are solely of foreign origin.

To say nothing of the effects of drunkenness, the occasional inroads of the small-pox, and other things which might be mentioned, it is sufficient to allude to a virulent disease which now taints the blood of at least two-thirds of the common people of the island; and, in some form or other, is transmitted from father to son.
Their first horror and consternation at the earlier ravages of this scourge were pitiable in the extreme.

The very name bestowed upon it is a combination of all that is horrid and unmentionable to a civilized being.
Distracted with their sufferings, they brought forth their sick before the missionaries, when they were preaching, and cried out, "Lies, lies! you tell us of salvation; and, behold, we are dying.


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