Once upon a time, only the other day, when jovial King Kalakaua
established a record for the kings of earth and time, there entered into
his Polynesian brain as merry a scheme of international intrigue as ever
might have altered the destiny of races and places. The time was 1881;
the place of the intrigue, the palace of the Mikado at Tokio. The record
must not be omitted, for it was none other than that for the first time
in the history of kings and of the world a reigning sovereign, in his
own royal person, put a girdle around the earth.
The intrigue? It was certainly as international as any international
intrigue could be. Also, it was equally as dark, while it was precisely
in alignment with the future conflicting courses of empires. Manifest
destiny was more than incidentally concerned. When the manifest
destinies of two dynamic races move on ancient and immemorial lines
toward each other from east to west and west to east along the same
parallels of latitude, there is an inevitable point on the earth’s
surface where they will collide. In this case, the races were the
Anglo-Saxon (represented by the Americans), and the Mongolian
(represented by the Japanese). The place was Hawaii, the lovely and
lovable, beloved of countless many as “Hawaii Nei.”
Kalakaua, despite his merriness, foresaw clearly, either that the United
States would absorb Hawaii, or that, allied by closest marital ties to
the royal house of the Rising Sun, Hawaii could be a brother kingdom in
an empire. That he saw clearly, the situation to-day attests. Hawaii Nei
is a territory of the United States. There are more Japanese resident in
Hawaii at the present time than are resident other nationalities, not
even excepting the native Hawaiians.
The figures are eloquent. In round numbers, there are twenty-five
thousand pure Hawaiians, twenty-five thousand various Caucasians,
twenty-three thousand Portuguese, twenty-one thousand Chinese, fifteen
thousand Filipinos, a sprinkling of many other breeds, an amazing
complexity of intermingled breeds, and ninety thousand Japanese. And,
most amazingly eloquent of all statistics are those of the race purity
of the Japanese mating. In the year 1914, the Registrar General is
authority for the statements that one American male and one Spanish male
respectively married Japanese females, that one Japanese male married a
Hapa-Haole, or Caucasian-Hawaiian female, and that three Japanese males
married pure Hawaiian females. When it comes to an innate antipathy
toward mongrelization, the dominant national in Hawaii, the Japanese,
proves himself more jealously exclusive by far than any other national.
Omitting the records of all the other nationals which go to make up the
amazing mongrelization of races in this smelting pot of the races, let
the record of pure-blood Americans be cited. In the same year of 1914,
the Registrar General reports that of American males who intermingled
their breed and seed with alien races, eleven married pure Hawaiians,
twenty-five married Caucasian-Hawaiians, three married pure Chinese,
four married Chinese-Hawaiians, and one married a pure Japanese. To sum
the same thing up with a cross bearing: in the same year 1914, of over
eighteen hundred Japanese women who married, only two married outside
their race; of over eight hundred pure Caucasian women who married, over
two hundred intermingled their breed and seed with races alien to their
own. Reduced to decimals, of the females who went over the fence of race
to secure fathers for their children, .25 of pure Caucasian women were
guilty; .0014 of Japanese women were guilty—in vulgar fraction, one out
of four[1] Caucasian women; one out of one thousand Japanese women.
King Kalakaua, at the time he germinated his idea, was the royal guest
of the Mikado in a special palace which was all his to lodge in, along
with his suite. But Kalakaua was resolved upon an international intrigue
which was, to say the least, ethnologically ticklish; while his suite
consisted of two Americans, one, Colonel C. H. Judd, his Chamberlain,
the other, Mr. William N. Armstrong, his Attorney-General. They
represented one of the race manifest destinies, and he knew it would
never do for them to know what he had up his kingly sleeve. So, on this
day in 1881, he gave them the royal slip, sneaked out of the palace the
back way, and hied him to the Mikado’s palace.
All of which, between kings, is a very outré thing to do. But what was
mere etiquette between kings?—Kalakaua reasoned. Besides, Kalakaua was
a main-traveled sovereign and a very cosmopolitan through contact with
all sorts and conditions of men at the feasting board under the ringing
grass-thatched roof of the royal canoe house at Honolulu, while the
Mikado had never been off his tight little island. Of course, the Mikado
was surprised at this unannounced and entirely unceremonious afternoon
call. But not for nothing was he the Son of Heaven, equipped with all
the perfection of gentleness that belongs to a much longer than a
nine-hundred-years-old name. To his dying day Kalakaua never dreamed of
the _faux pas_ he committed that day in 1881.
He went directly to the point, exposited the manifest destinies moving
from east to west and west to east, and proposed no less than that an
imperial prince of the Mikado’s line should espouse the Princess
Kaiulani of Hawaii. He assured this delicate, hot-house culture of a man
whose civilization was already a dim and distant achievement at the time
Kalakaua’s forebears were on the perilous and savage Polynesian
canoe-drift over the Pacific ere ever they came to colonize Hawaii—this
pallid palace flower of a monarch did he assure that the Princess
Kaiulani was some princess. And in this Kalakaua made no mistake. She
was all that he could say of her, and more. Not alone was she the most
refined and peach-blow blossom of a woman that Hawaii had ever produced,
to whom connoisseurs of beauty and of spirit like Robert Louis Stevenson
had bowed knee and head and presented with poems and pearls; but she was
Kalakaua’s own niece and heir to the throne of Hawaii. Thus, the
Americans, moving westward would be compelled to stop on the far shore
of the Pacific; while Hawaii, taken under Japan’s wing, would become the
easterly outpost of Japan.
Kalakaua died without knowing how clearly he foresaw the trend of
events. To-day the United States possesses Hawaii, which, in turn, is
populated by more Japanese than by any other nationality. Practically
every second person in the island is a Japanese, and the Japanese are
breeding true to pure race lines while all the others are cross-breeding
to an extent that would be a scandal on any stock farm.
Fortunately for the United States, the Mikado reflected. Because he
reflected, Hawaii to-day is not a naval base for Japan and a menace to
the United States. The _haoles_, or whites, overthrew the Hawaiian
Monarchy, formed the Dole Republic, and shortly thereafter brought their
loot in under the sheltering folds of the Stars and Stripes. There is
little use to balk at the word “loot.” The white man is the born looter.
And just as the North American Indian was looted of his continent by the
white man, so was the Hawaiian looted by the white men of his islands.
Such things be. They are morally indefensible. As facts they are
irrefragable—as irrefragable as the facts that water drowns, that frost
bites, and that fire incinerates.
And let this particular haole who writes these lines here and now
subscribe his joy and gladness in the Hawaiian loot. Of all places of
beauty and joy under the sun—but there, I was born in California, which
is no mean place in itself, and it would be more meet to let some of the
talking be done by the Hawaii-born, both Polynesian and haole. First of
all, the Hawaii-born, unlike the Californian, does not talk big. “When
you come down to the Islands you must visit us,” he will say; “we’ll
give you a good time.” That’s all. No swank. Just like an invitation to
dinner. And after the visit is accomplished you will confess to yourself
that you never knew before what a good time was, and that for the first
time you have learned the full alphabet of hospitality. There is nothing
like it. The Hawaii-born won’t tell you about it. He just does it.
Said Ellis, nearly a century ago, in his _Polynesian Researches_: “On
the arrival of strangers, every man endeavored to obtain one as a friend
and carry him off to his own habitation, where he is treated with the
greatest kindness by the inhabitants of the district; they place him on
a high seat and feed him with abundance of the finest food.”
Such was Captain Cook’s experience when he discovered Hawaii, and
despite what happened to him because of his abuse of so fine
hospitality, the same hospitality has persisted in the Hawaiians of this
day. Oh, please make no mistake. No longer, as he lands, will the latest
beach-comber, whaleship deserter, or tourist, be carried up among the
palms by an enthusiastic and loving population and be placed in the high
seat. When, in a single week to-day, a dozen steamships land thousands
of tourists, the impossibility of such lavishness of hospitality is
understandable. It can’t be done.
But—the old hospitality holds. Come with your invitations, or letters
of introduction, and you will find yourself immediately instated in the
high seat of abundance. Or, come uninvited, without credentials, merely
stay a real, decent while, and yourself be “good,” and make good the
good in you—but, oh, softly, and gently, and sweetly, and manly, and
womanly—and you will slowly steal into the Hawaiian heart, which is all
of softness, and gentleness, and sweetness, and manliness, and
womanliness, and one day, to your own vast surprise, you will find
yourself seated in a high place of hospitableness than which there is
none higher on this earth’s surface. You will have loved your way there,
and you will find it the abode of love.
Nor is that all. Since I, as an attestant, am doing the talking, let me
be forgiven my first-person intrusions. Detesting the tourist route, as
a matter of private whim or quirk of temperament, nevertheless I have
crossed the tourist route in many places over the world and know
thoroughly what I am talking about. And I can and do aver, that, in this
year 1916, I know of no place where the unheralded and uncredentialed
tourist, if he is anything of anything in himself, so quickly finds
himself among friends as here in Hawaii. Let me add: I know of no people
in any place who have been stung more frequently and deeply by chance
visitors than have the people of Hawaii. Yet the old heart and _hale_
(house) hospitality holds. The Hawaii-born is like the leopard; spotted
for good or ill, neither can change his spots.
Why, only last evening I was talking with an Hawaii matron—how shall I
say?—one of the first ladies. Her and her husband’s trip to Japan for
Cherry Blossom Time was canceled for a year. Why? She had received a
wireless from a steamer which had already sailed from San Francisco,
from a girl friend, a new bride, who was coming to partake of a
generally extended hospitality of several years before. “But why give up
your own good time?” I said; “turn your house and servants over to the
young couple and you go on your own trip just the same.” “But that would
never do,” said she. That was all. She had no thought of house and
servants. She had once offered her hospitality. She must be there, on
the spot, in heart and _hale_ and person. And she, island-born, had
always traveled east to the States and to Europe, while this was her
first and long anticipated journey west to the Orient. But that she
should be remiss in the traditional and trained and innate hospitality
of Hawaii was unthinkable. Of course she would remain. What else could
she do?
Oh, what’s the use? I was going to make the Hawaii-born talk. They
won’t. They can’t. I shall have to go on and do all the talking myself.
They are poor boosters. They even try to boost, on occasion; but the
latest steamship and railroad publicity agent from the mainland will
give them cards and spades and talk all around them when it comes to
describing what Hawaii so beautifully and charmingly is. Take
surf-boarding, for instance. A California real estate agent, with that
one asset, could make the burnt, barren heart of Sahara into an oasis
for kings. Not only did the Hawaii-born not talk about it, but they
forgot about it. Just as the sport was at its dying gasp, along came
one, Alexander Ford, from the mainland. And he talked. Surf-boarding was
the sport of sports. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the
world. They ought to be ashamed for letting it languish. It was one of
the Island’s assets, a drawing card for travelers that would fill their
hotels and bring them many permanent residents, etc., etc.
He continued to talk, and the Hawaii-born smiled. “What are you going to
do about it?” they said, when he button-holed them into corners. “This
is just talk, you know, just a line of talk.”
“I’m not going to do anything except talk,” Ford replied. “It’s you
fellows who’ve got to do the doing.”
And all was as he said. And all of which I know for myself, at first
hand, for I lived on Waikiki Beach at the time in a tent where stands
the Outrigger Club to-day—twelve hundred members, with hundreds more on
the waiting list, and with what seems like half a mile of surf-board
lockers.
“Oh, yes,—there’s fishing in the Islands,” has been the customary
manner of the Hawaii-born’s talk, when on the mainland or in Europe.
“Come down some time and we’ll take you fishing.”—Just the same casual
dinner sort of an invitation to take pot luck. And, if encouraged, he
will go on and describe with antiquarian detail, how, in the good old
days, the natives wove baskets and twisted fish lines that lasted a
century from the fibers of a plant that grew only in the spray of the
waterfall; or cleared the surface of the water with a spread of the oil
of the kukui nut and caught squid with bright cowrie shells tied fast on
the end of a string; or, fathoms deep, in the caves of the coral-cliffs,
encountered the octopus and bit him to death with their teeth in the
soft bone between his eyes above his parrot-beak.
Meanwhile these are the glad young days of new-fangled ways of
fish-catching in which the Hawaii-born’s auditor is interested; and
meanwhile, from Nova Scotia to Florida and across the Gulf sea shore to
the coast of California, a thousand railroads, steamship lines,
promotion committees, boards of trade, and real estate agents are
booming the tarpon and the tuna that may occasionally be caught in their
adjacent waters.
And all the time, though the world is just coming to learn of it, the
one unchallengeable paradise for big-game-fishing is Hawaii. First of
all, there are the fish. And they are all the year round, in amazing
variety and profusion. The United States Fish Commission, without
completing the task, has already described 447 distinct species,
exclusive of the big, deep-sea game-fish. It is a matter of taking any
day and any choice, from harpooning sharks to shooting flying-fish—like
quail—with shotguns, or taking a stab at a whale, or trapping a
lobster. One can fish with barbless hooks and a six-pound sinker at the
end of a drop-line off Molokai in forty fathoms of water and catch at a
single session, a miscellany as generous as to include: the six to eight
pound _moelua_, the fifteen pound _upakapaka_, the ten-pound _lehe_, the
_kawelea_ which is first cousin to the “barricoot,” the _hapuupuu_, the
_awaa_, and say, maybe, the toothsome and gamy _kahala mokulaie_. And
the bait one will use on his forty-fathom line will be the fish called
the _opelu_, which, in turn, is caught with a bait of crushed pumpkin.
But let not the light-tackle sportsman be dismayed by the foregoing
description of such crass, gross ways of catching unthinkable and
unpronounceable fish. Let him take a six ounce tip and a nine-thread
line and essay one of Hawaii’s black sea bass. They catch them here
weighing over six hundred pounds, and they certainly do run bigger than
do those in the kelp beds off Southern California. Does the light-tackle
man want tarpon? He will find them here as gamy and as large as in
Florida, and they will leap in the air—ware slack!—like range mustangs
to fling the hook clear.
Nor has the tale begun. Of the barracuda, Hawaiian waters boast twenty
species, sharp-toothed, voracious, running to a fathom and even more in
length, and, unlike the Florida barracuda, traveling in schools. There
are the albacore and the dolphin—no mean fish for light tackle; to say
nothing of the ocean bonita and the California bonita. There is the
_ulua_ pound for pound the gamest salt-water fish that ever tried a rod;
and there is the _ono_, half way a swordfish, called by the ancient
Hawaiians the father of the mackerel. Also, there is the swordfish, at
which light-tackle men have never been known to sneer—after they had
once hooked one. The swordfish of Hawaii, known by its immemorial native
name of _a’u_, averages from three to four hundred pounds, although they
have been caught between six and seven hundred pounds, sporting swords
five feet and more in length. And not least are those two cousins of the
amber jack of Florida, the yellow tail and the amber fish, named by
Holder as the fish of Southern California par excellence and by him
described for their beauty and desperateness in putting up a fight.
And the tuna must not be omitted, or, at any rate, the _thunnus
thynnus_, the _thunnus alalonsa_, and the _thunnus macrapterus_, so
called by the scientists, but known by the Hawaiians under the generic
name of _ahi_, and, by light-tackle men as the leaping tuna, the
long-fin tuna, and the yellow-fin tuna. In the past two months, Messrs.
Jump, Burnham and Morris, from the mainland, seem to have broken every
world record in the tuna line. They had to come to Hawaii to do it, but,
once here, they did it easily, even if Morris did break a few ribs in
the doing of it. Just the other day, on their last trip, Mr. Jump landed
a sixty-seven pound yellow-fin on a nine-thread line, and Mr. Morris
similarly a fifty-five pound one. The record for Catalina is fifty-one
pounds. Pshaw! Let this writer from California talk big, after the
manner of his home state, and still keep within the truth. A yellow-fin
tuna, recently landed out of Hawaiian waters and sold on the Honolulu
market, weighed two hundred and eighty-seven pounds.
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[1] Statistics compiled in 1921 by the Bishop Museum, of Honolulu, show
that one out of every six women of Caucasian birth in the Territory of
Hawaii marries a Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian; and other figures prove that
a large percentage of part-Hawaiian women marry either Hawaiians or
part-Hawaiians. Still another large proportion marries Caucasians or
Chinese. Further, the figures illustrate that the new stock is better
able to withstand disease and is, in that sense, more vigorous than its
Hawaiian ancestors, as well as more prolific. It is the creation of a
new race, strong, virile, and productive; while the pure-blooded
Hawaiians steadily decrease in numbers.