"Annum Mortuum: The Years of Death" (1820-1850)
Prior to Western contact in 1778, the native Hawaiian population thrived. However, as more Westerners arrived in the islands, more Hawaiians died from measles, whooping cough, influenza, and diarrhea. Within a thirty-year span, approximately 60,000 Hawaiians died, worrying the Hawaiian monarchs, who became wary about the future of their people.
Hsu, P., & Nielson, J. (2010). Population update 2010: The R&E annual update series.
"The following statistics will show that the decrease has been rapid; population estimated in 1823 --142,050; and according to the census of 1832--130,315; and according to the census of 1836--108,597. The decrease appears to have been in progress almost from the very date of [Hawai'i's] discovery...It should be borne in mind that [these] years were 'annum mortuum,' the [years] of death!"
-Honolulu Friend, Daily Southern Cross, Volume V (1850)
Table courtesy of Robert C. Schmitt's Demographic Statistics of Hawaii: 1778-1965 (1968).
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Table courtesy of "Census of the Hawaiian Islands" (Nov. 15, 1969).
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"The 1850 census...found only 82,035 unmixed Hawaiians and 558 part Hawaiians, compared with 107,354 natives in 1836 and perhaps 300,000 in 1778."
-Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke, "Death in Hawaii: The Epidemics of 1848-1849" (2001)
Western missionaries tried to convert Hawaiians to Christianity by convincing them that their suffering was God’s retribution, but many Hawaiians did not understand Western culture and refused to convert. As a result of the close contact with the ill and the lack of proper medicine, foreign epidemics continued to ravage the population, prompting government intervention in 1850 when cholera threatened the surviving natives.
"Among the native population some cases have proved fatal, owing to exposure and improper treatment." "[The Hawaiians] have seen that, compared with their white neighbors, they are but a feeble race; and the probability of their fading away, and of being blotted out from among the nations of the earth, has stared them in the face, as it never did before." Photo courtesy of Needham School's "Hawai'i."
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Photo courtesy of William Castle Jr.'s "Hawai'i Past and Present" (1925).
"The dying multiplied around us; and, from every part of the Islands, we heard only tidings of suffering and death. Missionaries devoted themselves, day and night, to efforts for staying the plague, by counsels, by warnings, and by the distribution of medicines...We could not encourage the people to come to us, nor minister effectually to the bodily wants of those who did come. We could only point them to the great remedy, which saves the soul from death beyond the grave." |