Hawaiis history. as recounted by Senator AKAKA. is welldocumented. After Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii. other foreigners came to the islands. often as laborers. Over the ensuing years. like other Native people who carried no immunities to the diseases that accompanied the waves of immigrants to their shores. the Native Hawaiian population was reduced from estimates as high as several hundred thousand people at the time of first recorded western contact to a little over forty thousand. An 1854 smallpox epidemic. for instance. took the lives of 6.000 peoplealmost 10 percent of the population at that time. Along with the decimating diseases. the social and economic conditions of the Native Hawaiians deteriorated as well.
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immigrants