A quick note: Today some people, including many survivors of the disease leprosy, consider the word leper to be objectionable. When the word appears in The Colony it does so only in its historical context, or as part of a direct quote; the same is true of this website.

An alternative modern term for leprosy is Hansen’s disease, named after the Norwegian bacteriologist who first identified the germ that causes the illness. The medical community is split on the adoption of the term, however, and some physicians and patients prefer the older name.

A postcard of the colony circa 1910, showing the original
village of Kalawao and the ill-fated U.S. Leprosy Investigation Center,
which closed shortly after it was completed due to the patients’ fears
that they were to be used for human experimentation.

About the Disease

Contrary to myth, leprosy is among the least communicable infectious diseases known to man, as this short passage from the Preface of The Colony explains:

[Leprosy] is a chronic illness caused by a bacterium, and communicable only to persons with a genetic susceptibility, less than 5 percent of the population. Transmission takes place much as it does with tuberculosis, through airborne particles expelled by someone with leprosy in an active state. Among untreated patients, only a minority have the disease in its active state; the majority are not contagious. For cases that are active, a multidrug therapy has been developed that quickly renders their leprosy noncommunicable, after which they pose no risk of infection and are, in essence, cured. Every city in America has such cases; in the New York metropolitan area, for instance, more than a thousand people have or have had the disease. There are currently eleven federally funded outpatient clinics in the United States treating approximately seven thousand patients, although health officials believe many sufferers go untreated because of the powerful stigma attached to the disease.

There are an abundance of online resources available to anyone interested in learning more about the disease. These are among the most helpful:

World Health Organization
Infolep
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
National Hansen's Disease Programs

About the Place

Currently, the National Park Service and the Hawaii Department of Health jointly administer Kalaupapa. In 1980 the federal government established the Kalaupapa peninsula as a Historical National Park, and a maximum of 100 outsiders a day is allowed into the community on guided tours. The cliffs separating Kalaupapa from the rest of Molokai are acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records as the highest sea cliffs in world, rising at spots to almost 3,000 feet; the only overland route into the community is down these cliffs, a three-mile long descent along a treacherous switchback trail, which most outsiders tackle with the aid of a mule. Less-adventurous types can arrange a flight into Kalaupapa’s tiny airport; the community is about twenty minutes by air from downtown Honolulu. Persons interested in visiting this hauntingly beautiful place can find details at the National Park Service website.

A view of the village of Kalaupapa circa 1890; the population
in the colony exceeded 1,000 about this time.

A surviving patient’s beach house guards Kalaupapa’s
western shore. The graves of an estimated 7,000 deceased
patients—many unmarked—are scattered throughout the peninsula.

About the People

The road into Kalawao.

The first group of exiles was left ashore in the colony on January 6, 1866, and the last permanent resident arrived in 1969, the same year that the law requiring mandatory isolation of persons with the disease was repealed. During those 103 years of segregation policy, more than 8,000 people were banished to the Kalaupapa peninsula. The youngest person to be exiled was one year old, and the oldest was 90; about half were between the ages of 11 and 25. It is estimated that of the thousands of men, women, and children exiled to the colony, less than one-third had the illness in its communicable form—the majority posed no health threat to the general population. Over the years, persons of almost every nationality were caught in the government net and banished to Kalaupapa, including citizens of the United States, England, France, Germany, Canada, Spain, Portugal, China, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, among others. Twenty-seven surviving patients, most of whom were sent away as children, remain in the community. Their average age is 76.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s the colony was one of the most famous communities in the world, and its existence often overshadowed virtually every other aspect of Hawaiian life. (For a period at the end of the century clerks compiling the yearly index of The New York Times articles would leave the entry beneath the heading “Hawaiian Islands” blank, with the notation “see ‘Leprosy.’”) Such infamy drew many curious visitors, among them the writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. Both later published non-fiction accounts of their time in the colony, and used details from their visits to inform their fiction. London’s “The Lepers of Molokai” can be read in its entirety read in its entirety here.

London’s visit in 1905 coincided with the Fourth of July festivities,
an event that London documented with his camera.

After being initially rebuffed by the Board of Health, Robert Louis Stevenson finally gained access to the colony by exploiting an alcohol-fueled friendship with David Kalakaua, the last Hawaiian king. The writer landed at Kalaupapa just a few weeks after the death of Father Damien de Veuster, whose contracting of the disease had brought the priest—and Kalaupapa—worldwide attention.

Father Damien, shown circa 1880, near his steepled church, St. Philomena.

Father Damien with members of the church choir.

Stevenson’s visit is described in The Colony, in “A Strange Place to Be In”:

Robert Louis Stevenson reached the settlement on May 14, 1889. He arrived aboard one of two whaleboats that bucked toward the Kalaupapa landing from the weekly steamer. A dozen patients crowded the first craft; the second held a pair of Franciscan sisters and Stevenson. As the shore drew near, one of the nuns began to weep. Stevenson noticed the nun’s fright and also burst into tears. Later that day he wrote, “My horror of the horrible is about my weakest point.”

“A great crowd, hundreds of (God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human flesh [were] waiting to receive the sisters and the new patients,” Stevenson reported. Residents milled around the arriving sisters, welcoming them to the settlement. Although he had earlier insisted to Dr. Emerson that he was no tourist, Stevenson suddenly felt like one: “Shame seized upon me to be there, among the many suffering and few helpers, useless and a spy.” He slipped away from the pier, carrying his bag, a camera, and a small black flute.

The road skirted Kalaupapa village and then looped east, as Stevenson later described: “Beyond Kalaupapa the houses became rare; dry stone dykes, grassy, stony land, one sick pandanus; a dreary country; from overhead in the little clinging wood shogs of the pali chirruping of birds fell; the low sun was right in my face; the trade blew pure and cool and delicious; I felt as right as ninepence.” Patients on horseback raced past, to join the celebration at the wharf. Stevenson waved. A man rode up, leading a second horse. Stevenson saw that his face was mildly damaged by disease, his mouth slightly crooked.

“Are you Stevenson?” Ambrose Hutchison asked.

Hutchison helped the writer into the saddle. When they reached the guesthouse, Stevenson let the horse loose in the garden, stumbled inside, and collapsed on the bed. He woke after dark. “As yet, you see, I have seen nothing of the settlement,” Stevenson wrote that evening to his wife, Fanny. In his journal he remarked, “This is a strange place to be in. A bell has been sounded at intervals while I wrote, now all is still but a musical humming of the sea, not unlike the sound of telegraph wires; the night is quite cool and pitch dark, with a small fine rain . . . one cricket whistling in the garden, my lamp here by my bedside, and my pen cheeping between my inky fingers.”

Later, when a critic of Father Damien launched an attack on his character, Stevenson wrote a furious defense of the late priest in the form of a public letter—a tactic that further elevated the fame of Damien and the colony. Stevenson’s “Father Damien, an Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu” can be read in its entirety here.

For additional images, links, and back-stories on characters and episodes from The Colony, be certain to frequently check John Tayman's blog.