When, in 1873, an obscure young Belgian missionary priest named Father Damien begged the Catholic Prefect Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands to send him to a leper colony 50 miles away, the name of Molokai meant nothing to the outside world. Molokai is an island to which the Hawaiian Government had exiled all its lepers after a frightful outbreak of the disease, a lawless chaos whose 800 foul inhabitants lived a slow death in huts, with only one another's company and the sweet intoxicating juice of the ki tree for distraction. Father...
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