User:FilthyAtFive/Discovery and settlement of Hawaii

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A high level of uncertainty surrounds the size of the Hawaiian population at the time of first European contact in 1778. Estimates range from 200,000 to 1,000,000.

Interpolating between the 1780 and 1770 estimates yields an estimated 683,200 Hawaiians in 1778. Another finding is that the population reaches stability (a constant relative age structure over time) by 1820.

It is not surprising that uncertainty would surround the number of Hawaiians, a preliterate population, at the time of first European contact in 1778. No known census of the Hawaiian population at that time exists. Without a full count, the only recourse is to estimate the size of the population.

These estimates include the use of counts of houses in villages visited or observed by Europeans, their estimates of average household size, and extrapolation of these estimates to all of Hawaiʻi. In addition, Europeans estimated the size of the population by multiplying estimates of the land area of Hawaiʻi by assumed levels of population density, a technique also applied retrospectively. Sometimes a variation of this method was used, by multiplying estimates of cultivated land at the time of first contact by assumed levels of population supported by the cultivated areas

Hommon (2008) presents an empirically supported, well-researched argument for a plateau reached around 1550 with a Hawaiian population of 500,000, which, by 1778, had declined by 10 percent to 450,000.

The sudden appearance of a constellation of such diseases in 1778 may have caused a decline of nearly 6 percent in the population of Native Hawaiians within a two-year period—that is, about one in every seventeen Hawaiians alive in 1778 may have been dead by 1780.

"Historical accounts by missionaries and other Westerners who first arrived in the 1820s frequently predicted the complete eradication of the Hawaiian race from the planet by the early 20th century. Indeed, by 1920, the Native Hawaiian population had dwindled to just under 24,000, according to the U.S. Census."

The Kamehameha Schools, an educational organization for Native Hawaiian youth, place the 1778 population at around 300,000, but recent estimates used by sociologist David Swanson place them much higher, at around 683,000.

A new demographic analysis, using an innovative technique, estimates that there were 683,000 Native Hawaiians on the island in 1778, when British explorer Capt. James Cook arrived. That’s on the higher range of the highly disputed historical estimates, which have ranged from as low as 200,000 to as high as 1 million.

The author, David Swanson of the University of California, Riverside, presented his new estimate of the “pre-contact” population at the University of Hawaii in February. Swanson used an approach called “backcasting” to reach his historical estimate of the Hawaiians’ population decline. It’s essentially the reverse of what demographers more commonly do: forecasting population growth.

In this case, Swanson took a detailed look at the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Census’s Native Hawaiian counts, tracking the survival rate of each five-year age group from one census to the next. For example, he looked at how many children who were newborns to age 4 in 1910 were counted as 10- to 14-year-olds in 1920, then did the same for each successive age group. For each group, he created a “reverse cohort change ratio,” which he used to go back in time and estimate the size of each age group for each decade until he got to 1770.

By 1800, the population had declined by 48% since Cook set foot on Hawaii. By 1820, it had declined 71%; by 1840, it declined 84%.

Swanson’s paper acknowledges that these figures are not likely to end the debate over the pre-contact Hawaiian population. “It is not likely that any estimate, no matter how transparent and methodologically sound, will ever satisfy all parties,” he wrote.

Even so, historians and demographers agree that the devastation of the population was swift and dramatic. Historical accounts by missionaries and other Westerners who first arrived in the 1820s frequently predicted the complete eradication of the Hawaiian race from the planet by the early 20th century. Indeed, by 1920, the Native Hawaiian population had dwindled to just under 24,000, according to the U.S. Census.

But its author, UH American Studies professor David Stannard, makes some startling claims that, if true, will force us to revise our cozy and perhaps sentimental views of the Hawai'i that existed before Captain Cook happened upon the Islands in 1778 -- and also to come to grips with the destruction visited upon native Hawaiians by Western contact.

For more than a century, the population of Hawaii when Cook arrived was presumed to be 100,000 to 300,000 people. The first published estimate was made by one of Cook's lieutenants, James King, who set the population of Hawai'i at 400,000. Most scholars felt King's estimate was too high.

Not so, argues Stannard, King's 400,000 estimate was too low by half. King, a careful observer, explained the assumptions on which his estimate was based. In the most powerful part of his book, Stannard simply demolishes those assumptions, point by point.

Once he destroys the low estimates, Stannard constructs his own. Hawaii -- he says -- had 800,000 to 1 million native Hawaiians in 1778, half of whom were dead 25 years later from the syphilis, tuberculosis and other diseases they caught from Cook's crewmembers. A century (and numerous epidemics) later, less than 50,00O Hawaiians remained. That "great dying" is the horror to which Stannard refers in his title.

According to Dr. Francis Black, professor of epidemiology at Yale's School of Medicine, Stannard's view of the horror of Western diseases is entirely reasonable. One reason we tend to underestimate the indigenous populations all over the world is our reluctance to believe what seems unbelievable. It's hard to imagine that much loss."