ABSTRACT
Officials understood the correlation between the arrival of the trans-Pacific galleons and epidemics, but the obvious remedies — dispersing the people or barring the galleons — were unthinkable. Some circumstances suggest that New Guinea and parts of the neighbouring archipelagoes experienced much less loss of life than the isolated islands of the eastern Pacific. To estimate the scale of depopulation, we need to establish the size of populations on the eve of European intervention. The epidemiologist Stephen Kunitz develops a more nuanced argument that, to understand morbidity and mortality, people must understand not only physiological processes and the natural history of parasites, 'but also the many ways in which human beings live on the land and with one another'. Within that general picture, Samoans and Tongans probably experienced less depopulation than most of Polynesia. Depopulation and re-population are matters of history in its most obvious sense.
