Shaped rather like a slipper, Moloka’i is the northernmost island in the Hawaiian chain. Things there haven’t changed much in centuries, and it’s not likely anyone will ever build a Moloka’i Hilton. It is the island that the travel brochures rarely mention.
Jutting out from the midpoint of the north shore, like the dorsal fin of a shark, is Kalaupapa. The result of a long-ago volcanic eruption, it is not large, just about two or three square miles. It is very low, barely inches above sea level, and contrasts with the eighteen-hundred-foot cliffs that are typical of this side of Moloka’i. The cliffs, on the one hand, and the extremely low elevation, on the other, mean that Kalaupapa is nearly impossible to reach either by land or sea, and of course, once you are there, it is almost impossible to escape the place. Early on, it became known as “the loneliest place on earth”.
(Today there is a trail, a bit less than three miles long and some 18 inches wide, that zigzags across the cliff face. Visitors can ride donkeys down this vertiginous path while contemplating their chances of falling to the Pacific coast below. Then they can consider what the ride back up will be like, especially after it has begun to rain!)
In 1865, when leprosy began to scourge the Hawaiian Islands, Kalaupapa was seized upon by a native government desperate to avoid further infection. The little peninsula would provide the perfect place to dispose of people with what today we call Hansen’s Disease -- disposal being the only apparent solution available in the 19th century. Patients were brought out in sailing vessels from Honolulu and other Hawaiian population centers, then transferred to rowboats that would carry them to within hailing distance of the shore. Then these victims would be simply be tipped into the shallow water and told to make it ashore as best they could. Those who had already lost limbs from leprosy’s devastation often drowned before making it the last few hundred feet.
Once on land, those who survived encountered the arrangements that had been made for them, which were next to nothing at all. There was no food and no shelter. People slept under trees, if they could find a tree, and provided their own food, enough to last them till death, which the government figured was not that far off.
In Honolulu, members of the Belgian community of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, had charge of the Catholic mission to the islands. One of them was now a bishop, and he had ordained several young men who had studied in Belgium and then come to Hawaii as missionaries. One of these was Joseph DeVeuster, born in Belgium in 1840 and ordained in 1864 in Honolulu with the religious name of Damien. The missionaries were vaguely aware of what the government was doing on Moloka’i, and they decided to go and offer the consolations of religion to the unfortunate lepers. It was decided that the young priests, all of them volunteers, would take turns, each going for three months. They drew straws, and Father Damien had the honor of being the first to go. So it happened that on May 10, 1873, wearing his long cassock and his shovel-brim hat, the stocky young man waded ashore, then turned to watch his only transport sail away.
By this time, conditions on Kalaupapa were horrific. With no food and no medicine -- quinine was by no means a cure, but it seemed to offer minimal relief from the pain -- people lay next to the water and simply begged to die. The stronger among them set upon the weaker, and rape, theft and murder were common. Damien had been raised on a farm, he was no stranger to hard work, and he quickly pitched in to alleviate, as best he could, the appalling conditions he found everywhere on the little peninsula.
As his term was coming to an end, a boat bringing more patients to Kalaupapa brought also a letter from the bishop. A strange thing had happened, Damien learned. Somehow news that a priest had gone to Kalaupapa had gotten into the papers and had been flashed around the world by telegraph. People everywhere were inspired, and Damien was already famous. There was a down side, though. It would be a public relations disaster, the bishop wrote, if Damien were to come back to Honolulu after only a few months. He would just have to stay at Kalaupapa, at least until the excitement died down. He had already written for supplies, donations were pouring in, and the bishop would send whatever was needed.
The excitement never really died down, of course, and Damien remained at his mission for another 16 years. With the materials that began arriving, he built houses and an orphanage, planted crops, celebrated the sacraments and preached the gospel, nursed the dying, buried the dead and set up an infrastructure for the patients’ self-government.
In 1886 a 43-year-old American, Ira Dutton, came to Kalaupapa, adopted the name Brother Joseph, and spent the rest of his long life (he died in 1931) working for the lepers. Two years later, Mother Marianne Cope, born in Germany and an immigrant to the United States, came with two sisters from her Franciscan community to establish a home at Kalaupapa for “unprotected women and girls”. She remained there until her death in 1918. She was beatified in 2005.
In spite of its reputation, Hansen’s Disease is not terribly easy to catch. If Damien had been careful about sanitation, keeping his distance from the lepers and sterilizing everything before he touched it, he would probably never have become a victim himself. As it was, however, he was shaving one morning in 1885 when he knocked over a pitcher of scalding water. As it splashed on him and he did not feel it, he knew instantly what had happened. At Mass that morning, he began his homily with the words, “We lepers…”
He died on the Monday of Holy Week, April 15, 1889. (Seven days later, on the other side of the world, there would occur the great horse race that opened Oklahoma to white settlement.) The day before, Palm Sunday, a doctor from the Kalaupapa sanatarium -- a lot had happened in those 16 years -- had brought his big box camera to photograph Damien on his deathbed. Feverish, dazed, and exhausted, Damien stared out from under the covers, probably not sure what this final intrusion was all about. Later, when death had occurred and they had laid him out in vestments for one more picture, people noticed that the swellings that had disfigured his face and body had disappeared; but this was not a miracle, simply a phenomenon characteristic of the disease. They buried him in a simple grave next to his little church of St Philomena. You can see the grave today, though it has been empty since 1936, when the Belgian government returned his body to the land where he was born. It lies now in a shrine church in Brussels.
The lepers who still live at Kalaupapa -- medical science has made it possible for them to leave, but the little peninsula has become their home and many of them have stayed on -- hope that one day Damien’s remains will return to Hawaii. He is honored with a statue in front of the state Capitol in Honolulu, a copy of which stands in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. But perhaps his most poignant memorial is the small brick pillar that was erected by British admirers on Kalaupapa itself. Damien’s idealized profile is shown in bas-relief, with the simple inscription, “Greater love than this no one has, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
Father James D. White is the retired historian and archivist for the Diocese of Tulsa. He is in residence at St. Theresa Parish in Palm Springs, Calif. A onetime visitor to Kalaupapa National Historical Park and Moloka’i, he wrote this history in anticipation Pope Benedict XVI’s canonization of Blessed Damien Oct. 11 in Rome.
