Excerpted from Chapter Eight, “Rush Slowly.”

Damien had decided that he would visit each exile at least once a week. The circuit required five days. He usually began at the hospital. Inside the lamp-lit ward, patients lay on woven grass mats and rusted cots, sporadically attended by untrained kokuas. Some weeks after Damien arrived, the board exiled William Williamson, a brick mason from England who had been studying nursing with Edward Hoffmann. Joining Williamson in exile was his twenty-two-year-old wife, Hannah, and their son; all three had the disease. “Mr. Williamson,” wrote the president of the board, “has been appointed by the Board as overseer of the hospital and in charge of the medicines.” The board maintained low expectations. Williamson was simply to see to patients’ “ordinary ailments and to the relief of their miserable condition.” This meant changing bandages. Williamson had learned the art from Dr. Hoffmann: fill a metal basin with medicinal water, soak the cotton bandages, then wrap them tight over the cleaned wound. After several hours, use shears to slice away the poultice, pat dry the wound, and cover the open sores with fresh clean cloth. The next day, do it all again.

When Dr. Trousseau came to Kalawao for a routine inspection, along with several other official visitors, he noted that the hospital had improved, a change he attributed to Williamson and also Damien. One of the visitors later wrote of the wards, “I expected to be sickened . . . but these are so well kept, and are so easily ventilated by the help of the constantly blowing trade-wind, that the odor was scarcely perceptible in them.” The visitor noted the “astonishing tenacity of life” exhibited by the patients—although he also reported that forty-two had recently expired.

That spring, Damien’s first season in the colony, someone died every twenty-four hours on average. Both William Williamson and Damien helped make coffins for the dead, which Williamson presold to the faltering patients. The fee covered the wood, with a tiny profit besides. If lumber was scarce, the deceased was buried in his sleeping mat. Animals dug at fresh graves, and so Damien split pickets and strung a fence around the main cemetery, a bit of enterprise that was not wholly appreciated. When the Protestant minister in the colony noticed the enclosure, he fired a complaint to the board: the fence was the priest’s net, he charged. Damien was catching souls.

The assertiveness with which Father Damien took to his perceived duties rankled some in the colony. Several men in the community considered themselves leaders, including the settlement sheriff and the other clergymen. Officially, Jonathan Napela, the Mormon priest, was resident superintendent, and thus the settlement’s administrative head. Yet Damien swiftly became the primary force in the colony, a development that worried his superiors. One Sacred Hearts official wrote that Damien “acts as though he were director, doctor, fac-totum, and gravedigger of the Settlement . . . and he’s none of them.” Damien suggested otherwise in a letter to Pamphile: “Picture to yourself a collection of huts with eight hundred lepers. No doctor . . . A white man, who is a leper, and your humble servant do all the doctoring work.” He then described to his brother how he lent spiritual aid to all the exiles. “Consequently,” Damien wrote, “everyone, with the exception of a very few bigoted heretics, look on me as a father.” Damien implied that he was also the community’s lone civic force: “You may judge by the following fact what a power the missioner has. Last Saturday some of the younger people, discontented with their lot, and thinking themselves ill-treated by the government, determined on an attempt to revolt. All, except two, were Calvinists or Mormons. Well, I only had to present myself and say a word or two, and all heads were bowed, and all was over!”

By the end of Damien’s second month in the settlement his ministry was booming. St. Philomena now overflowed at mass. He could hear the faithful following along from outside the chapel, the men peeking in the windows on one side, women watching from the other. Damien typically preached without a script, although he carried a small book in which to record ideas for the sermons, scratched down with a carpenter’s pencil stub. Themes came to Damien as he worked. “The earth is only a place of temporary exile,” Damien wrote on one page of the notebook, and on another declared, “We shall be transfigured, happy and beautiful in proportion to our patience in bearing our trials here below.”

On boat days Damien would hurry from his tasks and travel to the waterfront, to see what the ships had brought. Exiles landed every week, arriving onshore damp and often in shock. Damien attempted to greet each newcomer personally. He made notes on which of the banished seemed willing to embrace his lessons, and which seemed poised to fall astray and possibly founder in drink and vice. These received unannounced visits from the priest. “Almost from one house to the next I have to change my tone,” Damien wrote, describing his outreach methods. “Here I give words of sweetness and consolation; there I mix in a little bitterness, because it is necessary to open the eyes of a sinner; finally the thunder sometimes rumbles, and I threaten an impenitent with terrible punishments, which often produces a good effect.”

His days began before dawn, when he woke, said prayers, and ate a breakfast of boiled rice, dried biscuits, and strong coffee. Then he stepped out into the colony. If someone was dying he anointed them with the oil of last rites, and if someone had already passed he slipped on a clean cassock and performed the burial service. During a good week he might bury as few as three people; during the bad stretches, amidst rain and cold, several died every day. When he had a spare moment, Damien would hurry to the hospital to work alongside William Williamson, spinning bandages, dressing sores, and passing out medicine: protiodide of mercury, half-grains of opium, potassium arsenite, and swigs of watered laudanum. He took the settlers’ confessions, scolded them, and gave them praise. He performed baptisms, played games with the children, and conducted lessons in carpentry. He gave detailed advice, often unwanted, about gardens and crops and the state of an exile’s home. He knelt with people in prayer, so frequently that the fabric at his knees turned to tissue. By the time his rounds were finished, Damien had circled on foot for ten miles. The cliff overshadowed the colony, and the early moon had risen. In the chalky light Damien would find his way to the small white rectory he was building and light a candle, and then begin to write. He penned dutiful reports to the mission house, lists of the supplies he needed, snippets of sermons, and many letters home. He expended the last of the guttering candlelight writing messages to himself in the margins of the notebook: things he wanted to accomplish, things he must remember to do. One evening not long after he landed in the colony Damien scribbled, Festina lente.

Rush slowly.