indiscriminate in receiving to church communion, and remiss in looking
after wandering members, so that our church statistics are in so
confused a state as to be past remedy. Out of more than 70,000 who have
been received to the churches, our last report returns only 7,459, or
about one in ten of those received. Is our case so much like the ten
lepers healed by Christ, of whom only one “returned to give glory to
God”? Or are the shepherds in fault? Do we come under the searching
rebuke of the prophet: “My sheep wandered through all the mountains,
and upon every high hill: yea my flock was scattered upon all the face
of the earth and none did seek after them”?
But it is right to add that the present low state of the Hawaiian
churches must not all be laid at the door of the pastors. These
are times of trial on account of material prosperity. There is an
opportunity to gain money and luxuries, and the world seems to be in
most men’s hearts, so that we are all passing through a struggle and a
strait.
We hope for a brighter day. There has been a renewed effort to train up
a class of young men for the ministry, who will, we trust, be better
qualified for the office than many of their predecessors have been.
To accomplish this, and at the earnest request of our Evangelical
Association, the American Board has selected and sent to our aid the
Rev. C. M. Hyde, D.D., a minister and pastor of ripe experience, to
become president of our North Pacific Missionary Institute in Honolulu.
In this institute he has been laboring, with several assistants, with
a wise and earnest zeal, for about three years, during which time the
school has been gaining steadily in reputation.
XVII.
_The Hawaiian Character--Its Amiability--Island
Hospitality--Patience, Docility--Indolence, Lack of Economy,
Fickleness--Want of Independence--Untruthfulness--Decrease of the
Population._
That the Hawaiians are amiable and gentle in disposition is, I
think, admitted by all candid observers who are well acquainted with
them. They are not excessively vindictive, but easily pacified when
offended. In this trait they excel most of the other Polynesian tribes,
especially the Marquesans and the New Zealanders.
They are naturally generous and hospitable. Of old, they welcomed
the weary and hungry traveler to their huts, sheltered and fed him
to the best of their ability, and without charge. And this generous
hospitality was extended to all without respect to nationality, color,
wealth, or rank. Wherever night fell upon the traveler, he found
shelter and welcome in the nearest cabin. I speak of them as they were.
Our civilization has greatly, if not happily, modified their natural
habits in this respect.
[Sidenote: _Some Hawaiian Traits._]
They are docile. Few, if any, of the races of men would believe with
such simple faith, or, if I may so call it, credulity. This trait,
though it exposes them to deceitful wiles, also disposes them to listen
to correct and useful teachings. Until wicked and infidel foreigners
came among them, a Hawaiian could hardly be found who would deny the
existence and character of the true God, or the truth of the Bible
revelation. But they are too ready to receive false teachings as well
as true, to be beguiled by fallacious arguments, and attracted by false
leaders. This is why so many accept the old or the modern error.
As a rule they are patient under sufferings, losses, and poverty.
Sometimes we look upon them as stolid and without brain or heart. I
have seen many lingering and wasting away under a painful disease, and
die with little or no emotion or regret. It would seem as if their
indifference to life were a reason why they succumb so easily to
disease.
They are superstitious, of course. What savage or barbarous race is
not? And we might be amazed, were the facts published, at the amount
of foolish and false signs, relics of heathenish superstitions, which
still exist among enlightened nations. Many natives believe in ghosts,
incantations, demons, and the power to take the life of one’s enemy
by prayer (_pule anaana_); but I think that these superstitions are
yielding faster than in most other countries.
They are naturally indolent. This has been fostered into a national
trait by circumstances. A warm climate does not require energy in
labor. A perpetual summer gives no occasion to lay up stores for a
fruitless winter. A native’s wants are few. These satisfied, why labor?
To him it would be like beating the air or felling the forest without
motive. When a want is felt, he will work for it as earnestly as other
men. Civilization has increased their wants, and their houses and
horses and clothing, their boats and carriages and money have come of
labor.
But they lack economy. This is true, personally, socially, and
politically. They lack the gift of order and frugality; and this
applies to time, to talent, to industry, and to the use of property of
every kind. As a rule, they know not how to “gather up the fragments,
that nothing be lost.” It is now easy for natives to get money; even
the children, if they will work, can earn from twenty-five cents to
fifty cents a day, while the wages of laboring men are from one dollar
to three dollars a day, according to their skill and fidelity; but few
of them know how to keep or use money wisely. And so it is of houses,
furniture, tools, clothing, horses, lands, etc. Such things are lost or
ruined by neglect, or slip out of their hands to pay unwise debts. They
gather and scatter; few accumulate for permanent use. We teach them
industry, economy, frugality, and generosity; but their progress in
these virtues is slow. They are like children, needing wise parents or
guardians.
[Sidenote: _Hawaiian Changeableness._]
They are changeable, or, it may be said, fickle. They love variety;
they often take new names. In cases where divorce is pending, the
lawyer sometimes sends to the pastor who married the couple for a
certificate of marriage, that given at the time of the ceremony having
been lost, and perhaps the long search for their names in the marriage
records is all in vain, when, at last, it is ascertained that they are
now known by different names. Some build comfortable houses at the
cost of all they have, and in a little while leave them desolate, and
remove to other districts or islands. To seek after and to find them
in their frequent removals is often like searching for lost sheep upon
the mountains. Some take letters of dismission to another church, and
return without delivering them. Some go without letters, not intending
to stay away, but never return; and when the name is changed, as well
as the place of residence, it adds a heavy burden to the pastor’s care
in looking after his church members. About five hundred of the members
of the Hilo church are now absent in different places.
They are amorous. Climate, lack of education, want of full employment
of mind and body on matters of superior importance, and the seductions
of vile men from foreign lands, endanger the morality, the piety, and
the life of this infant race. With the examples of the rich, and of
men of office and rank, the temptations of gold acting upon yielding
natures, how can a pure morality and virtue be preserved among a people
like the Hawaiians? Some of our laws are so framed by unprincipled men
as to offer a premium to licentiousness, and even wholesome laws are so
nearly a dead-letter for want of execution, that the villain is oftener
protected in sin than punished. What can be done when vice is bold and
shameless, and only virtue blushes?
They are followers, not leaders. Few, if any, of them are able to
head any important secular enterprise. In agriculture, commerce, the
mechanic arts, education, traffic, and in all things which require
clear thought, sound judgment, tact, patience, and a deep sense of
responsibility, they are deficient. Hence they are mostly servants or
subordinates. The Chinaman goes ahead of them in all business matters.
If a Hawaiian holds office, the office is a sinecure, and its duties
are usually committed to foreign clerks.
[Sidenote: _Faults of the Native Character._]
Naturally they are untruthful. They go astray as soon as they are born,
speaking lies. This is a severe charge, but it is a trait probably in
all savage races. To lie under slight provocation is to a native as
natural and as easy as to breathe. The fact is patent, and it is one
of the traits in the Hawaiian character which costs us the greatest
pain, and the most earnest and persistent labor, to eradicate. The sin
seems like an instinct; but by “eternal vigilance” it gradually gives
way, and is succeeded by better habits. The Hawaiian begins to build a
house which should be done in two weeks, and it may not be completed
in six or twelve months; it will then be years before it is supplied
with doorsteps. The servant tells you the flour or the potatoes are
all gone, and you find several pounds remaining. Or he pronounces the
work assigned him as “all done,” when it is only two-thirds done. One
informs you that all the people in a given village are drunk. You make
farther inquiries and find only two out of fifty who have fallen. The
washerwoman must have the same wages when she washes for the family
that is reduced to half its numbers, as when it was full. Their
character is not rounded and fully developed in anything. The Hawaiian
is an unfinished man.
Their piety is of course imperfect. Their easy and susceptible natures,
their impulsive and fickle traits, need great care and faithful
watching. But we have seen many cases that have become steadfast in
faith and fidelity--broken out of the “Rock” by the hammer, and formed
into symmetry and beauty by the chisel of the Almighty. I believe
that thousands have been converted, and that many thousands are in
heaven. And if bad men would let the Hawaiians alone for one or two
generations, the land would be filled with an enlightened and godly
nation.
What is the cause of the decrease in the population? This is an old
question, and its answers have been various, sometimes vague, and
seldom satisfactory. This is not surprising, as some of the causes are
occult and complex. Tradition informs us that long before the arrival
of the missionaries, a pestilence like a plague swept off multitudes.
Foreigners introduced a vile disease, of which many died, and the blood
of many was poisoned. Inherited diseases weakened many others. The
too rapid change of national habits especially produced barrenness.
Unguarded and early habits of children were highly injurious. There
were many Magdalens who came to the Saviour after the introduction of
the Gospel, and were made whole in spirit, and prepared for a higher
and purer life, while their bodies were deeply marked with the scars
of sin. But to this day the artful wiles of a certain class of foreign
visitors and residents have not ceased to ensnare and ruin many.
Ignorance of the laws of physical life was universal among the natives,
and the missionaries have labored hard and continuously from the
beginning to enlighten the people on this subject. In my ministry
among the thousands of Hilo and Puna, I have witnessed not only scores
who have died in early life from the effects of bad habits, but also
hundreds whose days have been shortened from sheer ignorance of
physiological law.
[Sidenote: _The Decay of the Population._]
It may be surprising to some to be told, that the sudden and great
changes brought on by civilization check the population. The changes
in dress, in food, in dwellings, and in the occupations of life, often
bring on consumption, fevers, and other diseases which almost decimate
a community. Natives that once lived almost as nude as the brutes, and
were yet hardy, because adapted to their surroundings, often succumb to
new habits of life. Instead of wearing the _maro_ and the loose bark
tapa, they often put on two pairs of pantaloons over a thick woolen
shirt, with tight boots, and a thick coat or heavy overall, and thus
appear in church or in a public gathering, panting with heat and wet
with perspiration. On returning to their homes they doff all but a
shirt or maro, and sit or lie down and fall asleep in the coolest place
to be found, rising with a cold and a cough which may end in disease
and the grave. Even the civilized houses of some prove charnel houses,
for instead of ventilating them wisely, they often close every door and
window of a small and close room, lie down, cover their head with a
woolen blanket, and thus sleep all night, the air growing more and more
impure.
In 1848 a fearful epidemic of the measles carried off 10,000 of our
people, a tenth of the whole population. Five years later, the
small-pox took 3,000 more. These were days of darkness and sorrow.
The natives were strangers to these diseases; physicians were few,
and lived mostly in Honolulu. The natives had no remedies for these
burning plagues, no wise and faithful nurses, and no food suited to
their condition. Tormented with heat and thirst, they plunged by scores
and hundreds into the nearest water, salt or fresh, they could find,
and the eruption being suppressed, they died in a few hours. The scene
was awful. The Government did what it could in its inexperience, and
missionaries and all benevolent foreigners lent a helping hand to those
in distress around them. But the masses of the people were beyond their
reach; and the angel of death moved on by night and by day, amidst the
groans and dying agonies of households and villages. The fiery darts of
the destroyer flew thick over all the land, and there was no effective
shield to protect the multitudes from their poisoned barbs.
[Sidenote: _The Leprosy._]
And now, for many years, that persistent, unrelenting plague, the
leprosy, has been poisoning the blood and lowering the vitality of
thousands of our people. We have a humane government, a competent board
of health, and wholesome sanitary regulations, and yet the plague is
not stayed. Notwithstanding a crowded leper settlement on Molokai,
there are hundreds dying inch by inch, scattered all over the Islands,
some of them hiding from the public eye, some concealed by friends,
and some not yet pronounced upon by physicians. The leper question is
one of the gravest before the nation.
Thus the decrease of the Hawaiians goes on slowly, surely,
irresistibly. They are not an exceptional case; many other races
originally savage have melted away and disappeared before the
unrelenting march of civilization.
XVIII.
_Kilauea--Changes in the Crater--Attempt to Measure the Heat of
its Lavas--Phenomena in Times of Great Activity--Visitors in the
Domains of Pele._
The volcano of Kilauea is always in action. Its lake of lava and
brimstone rolls and surges from age to age.
Sometimes these fires are sluggish, and one might feel safe in pitching
his tent upon the floor of the crater. Again the ponderous masses of
hardened lava, in appearance like vast coal-beds, are broken up by the
surging floods below, and tossed hither and thither, while the great
bellows of Jehovah blows upon these hills and cones and ridges of
solidified rocks, and melts them down into seas and lakes and streams
of liquid fire.
As the great volcano is within the limits of my parish, and as my
missionary trail flanks it on three sides, I may have observed it a
hundred times; but never twice in the same state.
[Sidenote: _Varying Action in Kilauea._]
Its outer wall remains nearly the same from age to age, but all within
the vast cauldron undergoes changes. I have visited it when there
was but one small pool of fusion visible, and at another time I have
counted eighty fires in the bottom of the crater. Sometimes I have seen
what is called Halemaumau, or South Lake, enlarged to a circuit of
three miles, and raging as if filled with infernal demons, and again
domed over with a solid roof, excepting a single aperture of about
twenty feet in diameter at the apex, which served as a vent to the
steam and gases. On my next visit I would find this dome broken in, and
the great sea of fiery billows, of near a mile in diameter, rolling
below.
On one occasion, when there with a party of friends, we found the door
of entrance to the floor of the crater closed against us. A flood of
burning fusion, covering some fifty acres, had burst out at the lower
end of the path, shutting out all visitors, so that we spent the day
and night upon the upper rim of the abyss.
On another occasion I found the great South Lake filled to the brim,
and pouring out in two deep and broad canals at nearly opposite points
of the lake. The lava followed these crescent fissures of fifty or more
feet deep and wide until they came within half a mile of meeting under
the northern wall of the crater, thus nearly enclosing an area of about
two miles in length and a mile and a half in breadth.
A pyrometer, sent out by Professor J. D. Dana, was put into my hands
to measure the heat of melted lava. I had taken it with me twice to
the crater unsuccessfully, the fusion being too deep in the lake to be
reached. I had also sent it up by others, with instructions, hoping
to get it inserted; but failing, I went up again with my friend, Dr.
Lafon. We descended the crater and traveled south about two miles, when
a vast mound like a truncated cone rose before us. Not recognizing
this elevation, I said to my companion, “This is a new feature in the
crater; I have not seen it before. It is about where the lake used
to be; but let us pass over it, and we shall probably find the lake
on the other side.” With the instrument in hand, we began to ascend
the elevation on an angle of about twenty degrees. When half-way
up, there came over a splash of burning fusion, which fell near our
feet. Our hair was electrified, and we retreated in haste. Going to
a little distance, we mounted an extinct cone which overlooked the
eminence we had left, when, lo! to our amazement, it was the great
South Lake of fire, no longer, as often, one to two hundred feet
below us, but risen to a level of about twenty-five feet above the
surrounding plain, and contained by a circular dam of cooled lava some
three miles in circumference. The scene was awful. Over all that high
and extended surface the fiery billows were surging and dashing with
infernal seething and mutterings and hissings. The whole surface was
in ebullition, and now and then large blisters, many feet in length,
viscous films, of the consistency of glutinous matter, would rise in
gigantic bubbles created by the lifting gases, and then burst and
disappear.
[Sidenote: _The Lost Pyrometer._]
We were struck with amazement; and the question was, Shall we again
venture near that awful furnace? We could frequently see the lava
flood spilling over the rim like a boiling cauldron, and what if the
encircling dam should burst and pour its deluge of fiery ruin over
all the surrounding area! But unwilling to fail in our experiment we
came down from the cone, and carefully, and with eyes agaze, began to
ascend the wall; again and again we were driven back by the splashes of
red-hot lava. We persevered, and watching and dodging the spittings, I
was at last able to reach so near the top of the dam as to thrust the
pyrometer through the thin part of the upper rim, when out burst a gory
stream of lava, and we ran down to wait the time for withdrawing the
instrument. The shaft of the pyrometer was about four feet long, with a
socket into which I had firmly fastened a ten-foot pole. When at last
we grasped the pole and pulled, the strength of four strong arms could
not dislodge the pyrometer. We pulled and pulled until the pole was
wrenched from the socket. The instrument was fast beyond recovery, and
with keen regret we left it in the hardened lava.
We turned to retreat from the crater, and before we had reached the
upper rim, we looked back and saw that awful lake emptying itself at
two points, one of which appeared to be in the very place where we
had stood only half an hour before. The whole southern portion of the
crater was a sea of liquid fire, covering, as I estimated, about two
square miles, with a probable depth of three feet.
This circular dam which enclosed the elevated lava-lake was formed
gradually by successive overflowings upon the rim, depositing stratum
upon stratum, until the solidified layers had raised the dam some
twenty-five feet; when the lateral pressure became so great as to burst
the barrier and give vent to this terrific flood.
I have heard great avalanches of rocks fall from the outer walls
of the crater some eight hundred feet into the dread abyss below
with thundering uproar. At the distance of two miles I have heard
the soughing and sighing of the lava waves, and upon the surface of
that awful lake I have seen as it were gory forms leaping up with
shrieks, as if struggling to escape their doom, and again plunging and
disappearing beneath the burning billows. To stand upon the margin of
this lake of fire and brimstone, to listen to its infernal sounds,
the rolling, surging, tossing, dashing, and spouting of its furious
waves; to witness its restless throbbings, its gyrations, its fierce
ebullitions, its writhing, and its fearful throes as if in anguish,
and to feel the hot flushes of its sulphurous breath, is to give one
sensations which no human language can express.
[Sidenote: _The House of Pele._]
Sometimes an indurated film, two to four inches thick, will form over
all the central part of the lake, while its periphery is a circle of
boiling lava, spouting, leaping, and dancing as if in merry gambols.
All at once the scene changes, the central portion begins to swell and
rise into a grayish dome, until it bursts like a gigantic bubble, and
out rushes a sea of crimson fusion, which pours down to the surrounding
wall with an awful seething and roaring, striking this mural barrier
with fury, and with such force that its sanguinary jets are thrown back
like a repulsed charge upon a battle-field, or tossed into the air
fifty to a hundred feet high, to fall upon the upper rim of the pit in
a hail-storm of fire.
This makes the filamentous vitrifaction called “Pele’s hair.” The
sudden sundering of the fusion into thousands of particles, by the
force that thus ejects the igneous masses upward, and their separation
when in this fused state, spins out vitreous threads like spun glass.
These threads are light, and when taken up by brisk winds, are often
kept floating and gyrating in the atmosphere, until they come into a
calmer stratum of air; when they fall over the surrounding regions,
sometimes in masses in quiet and sheltered places. They are sometimes
carried a hundred miles, as is proved by their dropping on ships at
sea. This “hair” takes the color of the lava of which it is formed.
Some of it is a dark gray, some auburn, or it may be yellow, or red, or
of a brick color.
Another mode of action in this lake is to encrust nearly all the
surface with the hardened covering, while active boiling is kept up
at the margin on one side only. When this ebullition becomes intense,
the fusion rises on that side, while the other side is quiet. After
a little, this agitated lava will rise and fall over upon the crust,
pressing or breaking it down, and rolling in a fiery wave across the
lake, and thus covering its whole surface with an intense boiling and
surging, so fierce and so hot that the spectator withdraws from the
insufferable heat to a cooler and safer position.
To be struck with this heat in its intensity, is to be death-struck,
and to inhale a full draught of this sulphurous acid gas in its
strength would be to extinguish life. All visitors must keep on the
windward side of the lake and avoid all currents of hot steam and gases.
[Sidenote: _Visitors to Kilauea._]
Some visitors are too daring. Others are too timid. I have known
several gentlemen who have ventured into places of peril, and escaped
death as by a miracle; and I have known one at least so timid as
to turn back to Hilo as soon as he saw smoke and steam, and smelt
sulphur, though he was still more than a mile distant from the volcano.