So from every corner of the group came tidings that the plague was raging. Whole villages were stricken down—young men and maidens, old men and children, lay dead or dying. The handful of white people, as a rule, did their utmost to help, and gave all the food and medicine they possessed; but their own labourers and their own children were stricken, and needed more care than they could give; nor were there lacking bad white men who went about telling the natives that the disease had been purposely introduced to kill them and get their lands. So the plain medical directions which were at once published were ignored, and the white man’s medicine too often refused, from a conviction that it would cause certain death. Native medicines, and bad, ill-cooked food, made matters worse. Of course anything like isolation of the sick was impossible; nor could they be prevented from rushing to the nearest water to cool their burning fever. How could men who are continually bathing and swimming be persuaded that this could harm them? So the rash was thrown in, and congestion of the lungs and dysentery of the most malignant type were brought on in thousands of cases. Apart from this irresistible craving to lie down in cool streams, it would have been a hard task for the poor sufferers to keep themselves dry, for an unparalleled rainfall converted whole districts into dreary swamps, where dysentery and starvation completed the work of death. The people were too weak to go to their gardens (which are often far away on some steep hillside), and so there were none to carry food; besides, a cold wretched walk through the long wet reeds was almost certain doom. At last the few who were well began to herd together, forsaking the sick, and scarcely exerting themselves to give them a drink of water, or prepare such food as they had. In some districts, as in the isle of Ono, the people were literally starving, digging up wild roots, and eating old cocoa-nuts only fit for making oil. Then they lay down, all alike stricken, for the most part awaiting the fate they deemed inevitable, with that strange apathetic calm which characterises a race wholly indifferent to life. At last the living were unable to bury the dead, and there was good cause to dread lest a worse pestilence, in the form of typhus, should be produced by the horrible putrefaction which poisoned the air. On the king’s little island of Bau (the special home of the nobles, and which is small and overcrowded), all were ill at once. Canoes bearing the dead were ceaselessly crossing to the mainland, where the graveyards lie; the cries of mourners and the death-drums resounded day and night. There, too, the people were starving; they had no strength to go ashore to the mainland for food. Many of the finest chiefs and teachers died. At the Missionary Institute all the students were down; but thanks to unwearied nursing day and night, most of them recovered.