Dental Panic16 Feb 2006

'then hiked back to the camp
with meat and tin, his knife – the usual things.'

And germs too. "Syphilis, gonorrhea, tubercilosis, and influenza arriving with Captain Cook in 1799, followed by a big typhoid epidemic in 1804 and numerous 'minor'diseases, reduced Hawaii's population from around half a million in 1779 to 84,000 in 1853, the year when smallpox finally reached Hawaii and killed around 10,000 of the survivors."
Sorry, I'm deep into Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' at the moment.