that showed no mean originality and talent.
In the silvering light across the dewy hemisphere a cavalcade of pa’u
riders took shape, coming on larger and larger with a soft thunder of
hoofs, wild draperies straight out behind in the speeding rush, and
drawing up with a flourish, horses on haunches, before the
Superintendent’s house. The vivid hues of the long skirts intensified in
the increasing daylight—some of them scarlet, some blue, or orange,
while one proud equestrienne sued for favor with a flaunting panoply of
Fourth of July red, white, and blue.
Many of the girls were mercifully still comely, even pretty, and rode
superbly, handling their curvetting steeds with reckless grace and ease.
All forenoon these gala-colored horsewomen trooped singing and calling
over the rises and hollows of the countryside, to incessant blaring of
the bands of both villages combined. The whole was a picture of old
Hawaii not to be composed elsewhere in the Territory, and certainly
nowhere else in the world. For no set reproduction of the bygone customs
could equal this whole-souled exhibition, costumed from simple materials
by older women who remembered days of the past, carried out in the
natural order of life in one of the most beautiful spots in the Islands,
if not on the globe. No description can depict the sight that was ours
the forenoon long.
To our distress, we were appointed to award prizes at the race track. We
feared hurting the contestants by injudicious choices. But Jack McVeigh
pooh-poohed our diffidence, and insisted that we serve on the committee.
Horseback we went to the races, and found the track like any other, with
its grand stand, its judges, its betting and bickering—the betting
running as high as $150—its well-bred horses, and wild excitement when
the jockeys came under the wire.
Jack tied his fractious pony, and I saw him on foot over by the judges’
stand, waving arms and cowboy hat and yelling himself hoarse, just as
crazy as the crowd of lepers he jostled, who were as crazy as he. Later,
he was conversing soberly with a Norwegian and his wife, both patients,
who told us we had no idea what it meant to them all for us to come here
and mingle among them as friends, and that people were very happy about
it. This was good tidings, for the lepers are so little forward in
manners that invariably we must accost them first, whereupon they break
into the smiling Aloha of their land.
Between heats, there were footraces, and screaming sack races, and races
to the slowest, in which McVeigh figured on the rump of a balking
donkey, and won; then followed a wahine contest of speed, and a wahine
horse race.
But the most imposing event of the afternoon, as of the morning, was
enacted by the pa’u riders, who paced leisurely in stately procession
once around the course, then circled once in a swinging canter, and,
finally, with mad whoopings, broke into a headlong stampede that swept
twice and a half around before the Amazons could win control of their
excited animals. A truly gorgeous spectacle it was, the flying horses
with their streaming beribboned tails, the glowing riders, long curling
hair outblown, and floating draperies painting the track with brilliant
color—all mortal decay a thing forgot of actors and onlookers alike, in
one grand frolic of bounding vitality and youth.
The three prizes were for $5, $3, and $2, and it would not be guessing
widely to say that they came out of the private pocket of the
Superintendent, along with numerous other gifts during the day. He is
not the man to go about with his heart’s good intentions pinned on his
sleeve—indeed, a supersensitive character would be out of place as
manager of such an institution; but hand in hand with iron will and
executive ability, he carries a heart as big as the charge he keeps, and
a keen gray eye quick to the needs of his children, as he calls them.
The three beaming winners galloped abreast once around the track, and
then rode out; but suddenly the buxom wahine, bright and bold of eye and
irresistible of smile, who had taken second, wheeled about and came to
attention before the judges’ stand with the request, to our surprise,
that I ride once around with her. “Oh, do, do!” Jack under his breath
instantly prompted, fearing I might hesitate. Of course I mounted
forthwith, and together we pranced the circuit, to deafening cheers.
But I was not riding with a leper, for it turned out that this inviting
girl is a kokua, an assistant at the surgery, from whom the bid to ride
with her was in the best Kalaupapa social usage.
The Superintendent’s big dinner was a signal triumph, and he handled the
mixed company with rare tact, several factions being represented. But
even the grave Bishop Liebert and the Fathers warmed to his kindly and
ready humor, and soon all were under the spell of Kalama’s perfumed
garlands and the really sumptuous feast.
Following several merry toasts, Mr. McVeigh rose and raised his glass to
“The Londons—Jack and Charmian, God bless them!” And went on to confess
to a warm regard that affected us deeply. For he has given us of his
confidence during the past day or two in a way that has mightily pleased
us. At the end of the little speech, breaking into his engaging smile,
he announced that he knew all present would wish us well upon our
departure, which was approaching all too soon etc., etc., and which
would be via the pali trail; and that Mrs. London should ride the best
horse on Molokai—his mule Makaha!
By the time we arrived at Beretania Hall for the evening entertainment,
it was crammed to suffocation with a joyful crowd of lepers, orchestra
in place, resting on their violins, banjos, guitars and ukuleles. After
they had opened with Star-Spangled Banner and several Hawaiian
selections, a willowy young woman, graceful as a nymph but with face as
awful as her body was lovely, rendered a popular lightsome song in tones
that had lost all semblance to music. Half-caste she is, traveled and
cultured, once a beauty in Honolulu, whose native mother’s bank account
is in seven figures. And this girl, in the blossom-time of life, with
death overtaking in long strides, bereft of comeliness, shocking to
behold, and having known the best that life has to bestow, rises
superior to life and dissolution, and, foremost in courage, surpasses
the gayest of her sisters in misfortune. What material for a Victor
Hugo!
At the end of an hour, we left the fantastic company dancing as lustily
as it had sung and laughed and ridden the gladsome day through. No one,
listening outside to the unrestrained merrymaking, could have guessed
the band of abbreviated human wrecks, their distorted shadows monstrous
in the flickering lamplight, performing, unconcernedly for once, their
Dance of Death.
July 5.
Let none say that great men, capable of noble sacrifice, have ceased
from the earth in this day and age. And Dr. William J. G. Goodhue, with
his exceeding modesty, would be the first to protest any association of
his pleasant name with such holy company. But no outsider, entering upon
the scene of his wonderful and precarious operations in tissue and bone
diseased with the mysterious curse of the ages, could doubt that he had
come face to face with one who spares himself not from peril of worse
than sudden death. Although the world at large recks as little of him as
it does of leprosy, great surgeons know and acclaim his work, performed
bi-weekly at his clinics, where remedial and plastic operations of
incalcuable importance take place. His tracheotomies in lepral stenosis
have saved many, and have cured or improved conditions of the nose and
throat which no other treatment, so far, has been known to relieve.
[Illustration: (1) The Forbidden Pali Trail, 1907. (2) Landing at
Kalaupapa, 1907. (3) Coast of Molokai—Federal Leprosarium on
shore. (4) American-Hawaiian. (5) Father Damien’s Grave, 1907.]
Ungloved, his sole protection vested in caution against abrading his
skin, and an antiseptic washing before and after his work, the man of
empirical science waded elbow-deep into the unclean menace upon the
operating table. He was assisted by two women nurses, one Hawaiian, one
Portuguese, and both with a slight touch of anæsthic leprosy.
The first subject to-day was a middle-aged wahine, jolly and rolling
fat, who was borne in laughing and borne out laughing again. In between
were but a few self-pitying moans when she raised her head to watch the
doctor. We had every proof that she knew no pain, nor even discomfort;
but the sight of copiously flowing blood caused her to weep and wail
“Auwe!” until one of the nurses said something that made her laugh in
spite of herself. The sole of her foot had thickened two inches, and she
had not stepped upon it for a couple of years. Into this dulled pad,
lengthwise, the cool surgeon cut clean to the diseased bone, which he
painstakingly scraped, explaining that the blood itself remains pure,
only the tissues and bone being attacked by the _bacillus lepræ_.
But the second patient, a good-looking lad who came on the _Noeau_ with
us, was victim of the most loathsome and agonizing sort, which made it
necessary to anæsthetize him—Dr. Hollman using the slow and safe “A. C.
E.” (Alcohol, one part; Chloroform, two parts; Ether, three parts). The
only visible spot was a running sore forward of and below the left
shoulder; but what appeared on the surface was nothing to that which the
knife divulged.
Although the details are not pretty, and I shall not harrow with more of
them, I wish I could picture the calm, pale surgeon, with his intensely
dark-blue eyes and the profile of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose kinsman he
is, working with master strokes that cleansed the deep cavity of
corruption; for it was an illustration of the finest art of which the
human is capable.
And now this boy may possibly be quite healthy for the rest of a natural
life, and die of some other cause or of old age. Again, the bacillus at
any time may resume its destructive inroads elsewhere in his system.
There are myriad unknown quantities about leprosy. All that Dr. Goodhue,
with his pensive smile, can say about it with finality, is:
“The more I study and learn about leprosy, the less assurance I have in
saying that I know anything about it!”
By this evening all troubadour spirit was quenched, and no minstrelsy
greeted our postprandial lolling on the lanai. No voice above a
night-bird’s disturbed the quiet of tired Kalaupapa. And we also were
weary, for seeing the operations, though not our first, claimed a
certain measure of nervous energy; besides, we had ridden hard to
another rugged valley in the late afternoon, goat-hunting on the crags,
and were ready for early bed. In passing, I must not forget to relate
that we were shown some black-and-white-striped mosquitoes up-valley,
the proper carriers of yellow fever—though Heaven forbid that these
ever have a chance to carry it!
Mr. and Mrs. Myers to-day ascended the baking pali on foot, to prepare
for our coming on the morrow, when we shall have accomplished the
hair-raising exit from Kalaupapa. Now that permission has been
graciously accorded, our witty host enlarges continually upon the
difficulties and dangers of the route.
Waikiki, Sunday, July 7.
At eleven o’clock yesterday, on our diminutive beasts, we bade farewell
under the cluster of kukuis where our friends had accompanied us on the
beginning of the ascent, and proceeded to wage the sky-questing, arid
pathway, for this section of the pali is almost bare of vegetation.
Short stretches as scary we have ridden; it is the length of this climb
that tries—angling upon the stark face of a 2300-foot barrier.
They told me, when I bestrode the short strong back of the mule Makaha,
to “stay by her until the summit is reached. She never fails.”
Implicitly I obeyed, for the very good reason that I would have been
loath to trust my own feet, let alone my head. Never a stumble did her
tiny twinkling hoofs make, even where loose stony soil crumbled and fell
a thousand feet and more into the sea that wrinkled oilily far below;
and the hardy muscle and lungs of her seemed to put forth no unusual
effort. But Jack and the Hawaiian mail carrier, who led the way, were
obliged several times to dismount where the insecure vantage was too
much for the quivering, dripping ponies, though they are accustomed to
the work. Once, from the repairing above, some rubble came down,
fortunately curving clear. Makaha, who has a few rudimentary nerves,
shied, but instantly recovered, only to shy again at a bag of tools by
the trailside.
Sometimes an angle was so acute that she and the ponies were forced to
swing on hind legs to reach the upper zigzag, where poised front hoofs
must grip into sliding stones or feel for hold among large, fixed rocks,
and the rider lie forward on the horse’s neck. A miss meant something
less than a half mile of catapultic descent through blue space into the
blue ocean. Once Jack glimpsed destruction from the guide’s horse that
slipped and scrambled and almost parted from the zigzag immediately
overhead. There were places where it seemed incredible that anything
less agile than a goat could stick.
“I don’t wonder McVeigh won’t let malihinis go out this way,” Jack
called down, craning his neck to see the base of the sea-washed rampart,
and failing. “It is worse than its reputation!”
The Settlement lay stretched in the noonday sun, like the green map of a
peninsula in a turquoise sea. And we amused ourselves, while resting the
animals, picking out familiar landmarks.
A short distance from the summit we joined the rebuilt portion of the
trail, and passed the time of day with the stolid Japanese laborers. Six
feet wide, some parts railed, to our pinched vision it appeared a
spacious boulevard. Our sensations, now speedily at the top and looking
over, may have been something like those of Jack of Beanstalk fame when
he found a verdant level plain at the end of his clambering. Here was a
rolling green prairie browsed by fat cattle, and threaded by a red road.
A family carriage waited, driven by a stalwart son of the Myers’.
The restful two-mile drive through rich pasture land dotted with guava
shrub brought us to his home in the midst of a 60,000-acre ranch. There
are no hotel facilities on Molokai, which is forty miles long by ten in
breadth, and the visitor without friends and friends of friends on the
island will see little unless equipped for camping. The climate at this
elevation is mild and cool, the hills and ruggeder mountains
interspersed with meadows, where spotted Japanese deer have become so
numerous that shooting them is a favor to the ranchers.
High Molokai—and the top of it, Mt. Kamakou, is nearly 5000
feet—should be a paradise for sportsmen, and it is surprising the
Territory does not get together with the owners and try to develop
facilities at Kaunakakai for housing, and transportation into the back
country which is surpassingly beautiful and interesting. Somewhere on
the coast there is an old battlefield where countless human bones still
whiten; and on the rocky coast to the south can be seen in shallow water
the ruins of miles of ancient fish ponds equaled nowhere in the group.
To the northwest Oahu disturbs the horizon, cloud-capped and shimmering
in the blue; while Haleakala bulks ten thousand feet in air on Maui to
the east.
This ranch home is buried in flowers, and my unbelief in begonias a
dozen feet high underwent rude check. A fairy forest of these surrounds
the guest cottage, casting a rosy shadow on window and lanai. I should
have been content to remain here indefinitely.
On the ten-mile gradual descent mid-island to the port, Kaunakakai,
there was ample chance to observe this aspect of the supposedly
melancholy isle, and noticing dry creeks and the general thirsty
appearance of the lower foothills, we descanted upon its rich future
when irrigation schemes are worked out and applied. As it is now, only
in the rainy season do the streams flow, while the amphitheatre-shaped
valleys on the other side of the island, set as they are almost directly
across the path of the northeast tradewinds, are drenched with tropical
rains. Some day these waters will be controlled to make fertile these
rich but parched lands.
Dashing native cowboys, bound for a wedding luau, passed us on the road,
teeth and eyes flashing, gay neckerchiefs about their singing brown
throats, and hatbrims blown back from vivid faces, out-Westing the West.
Kaunakakai itself is not especially attractive, and during two hours’
waiting for the _Iwalani_, we occupied ourselves keeping as comfortable
as possible, for July is hot on the leeward sides of the “Sandwich
Islands.”
Once aboard, and our luggage, taken on at Kalaupapa, safely located, we
watched the loading of freight and live-stock on the little steamer.
Between the deep rolling of the ship and the din and odor of seasick
swine for’ard, there was little rest the night. And the Steamship
Company has a very unceremonious way of dumping its passengers ashore in
Honolulu at heathenish hours. The car lines had not yet started when we
stood yawning and chill beside our bags and saddles on the wharf, and we
were obliged to wake a hackman to drive us to Waikiki. The city might
have been dead but for an occasional milk-wagon; but after all we did
not grudge ourselves the dawning loveliness of the morning—an unearthly
gray-silver luminance wherein a large lemon-tinted moon melted in a
lilac sky. It was like a miracle, this swift awakening of the growing
earth. Birds stretched into song, the water-taro rustled in a fitful
wind, young ducks stirred and fluffed their night-damp feathers on the
margins of the ponds, where lilies opened to the brightening waves of
light, while the broken slate-blue mountains in the background shifted
their graying curtains of shimmering rain. Diamond Head developed slowly
into the scene, like a photographed mountain in a dark-room, and took
opalescent shades of dove and rose. Creation might have been like this!
I recalled Mascagni’s “Iris,” for all living things burgeoned visibly on
the warm awakening earth.
All through the busy morning hours, and the surf-boarding and swimming
and romping of the afternoon, of all the remarkable impressions of that
astounding week on Molokai, the pali endured. Again and again I seem to
cling to the incredible face of it, creeping foot by foot, alert, tense,
unafraid except for each other...[5]
Waikiki, July 11.
In a fine frenzy to give a just presentation of the Leper Settlement,
Jack has lost no time finishing the promised article, “The Lepers of
Molokai.”
In it he pictures himself having a “disgracefully good time,” yelling at
the track-side with the lepers when the horses came under the wire, and
presently branches off into a serious consideration of the situation,
interspersed with bright items of life in the Settlement. The article is
highly approved by Mr. Pinkham, and Mr. Lorrin A. Thurston avers it is
the best and fairest that has ever been written.
Although the President of the Board of Health is entirely satisfied with
himself and with the article, as well as with Jack’s press interviews
regarding the trip, several prominent citizens have expressed themselves
to the official as highly indignant that we should have been allowed in
the Settlement. But the imperturable Pinkham has told them with asperity
that it does not profit them or Hawaii to imitate ostriches and simulate
obliviousness of the fact that the world knows of leprosy in Hawaii. And
why should Hawaii be supersensitive? Leprosy is not unknown in the large
cities even of America; and Hawaii should be proud to advertise her
magnificent system of segregation, unequaled anywhere in the world, and
be glad to have it exploited by men of conscience and intelligence.
Wailuku, Maui, Sunday, July 14.
Two evenings gone, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Thurston, we boarded the
_Claudine_, which though much larger than the _Noeau_, pitched violently
in the head-sea of Kaiwi Channel, and took more than spray over the
upper deck for’ard where were our staterooms.
A swarm of Japanese sailed steerage and outside on the lower deck, each
bearing a matted bundle exactly like his neighbor’s. The women carried
their possessions wrapped in gorgeously printed challies in which a
stunning orange was most conspicuous among vivid blues and greens and
intermediate purples. Early in the trip all were laid low in everything
but clamor and from our deck we could see the poor things in every stage
of disheartened deshabille, pretty matron and maiden alike careless of
elaborate chignon falling awry, the men quite chivalrously trying to
ease their women’s misery in the pauses of their own.
Kahului, our destination, on Maui, the “Valley Isle,” is on the northern
shore of the isthmus connecting West Maui with the greater Haleakala
section of this practically double island; but Mr. Thurston’s sea-going
emotions had increased to such intensity that around midnight he crept
to our latticed door and suggested we disembark at Lahaina, the first
port, finish the night at the hotel, and in the morning drive around the
Peninsula of West Maui to Wailuku.
Nothing loath to escape the roughest part of the passage, doubling the
headland, we dressed and gathered our hand-luggage; and at half past one
in the morning dropped over the _Claudine’s_ swaying side. As we clung
in the chubby, chopping boat, manned by natives with long oars, we could
make out towering heights against the star-bright sky, and on either
side heard the near breakers swish and hiss warningly upon the coral.
And all about, near and far, burned the slanting flares of fishermen,
the flames touching the inky tide water with elongated dancing sparkles.
Voices floated after from the anchored steamer, and ghostly hoof-beats
clattered faint but distinct from the invisible streets of the old, old
town. As at Molokai, shadowy hands helped us upon the wharf—and the
tender witchery of the night fled before the babble of hackmen, stamping
of mosquito-bitten horses, a lost and yelping dachshund pup that
insisted on being trod upon, and the huge red-headed hotel proprietor of
an unornamental wooden hostelry, its uninviting entrance lighted with
smoking kerosene lamps.
“Beautiful Lahaina,” warbles Isabella Bird Bishop, in her charming book
“Hawaii”; “Sleepy Lahaina,” she ecstatically trills—and she is not the
only writer who has sung the praises of this town of royal preference,
once the prosperous capital of the kingdom, and the oldest white
settlement, where touched the whaling ships that sometimes anchored
fifty strong off shore. But this prosperity entailed disease and death,
since the sailors were given free run by their unscrupulous captains.
The village dwindled to less than a wraith of its former opulence, much
of the original site now being planted to cane.
A short distance above the town, at an altitude of 700 feet, the old
Lahainaluna (“upper Lahaina”) Seminary, founded in 1831 by the
missionaries, still flourishes, maintaining its reputation as an
excellent industrial school. The land on which it stands was a gift from
Hoopili Wahine, wife of Hoopili, governor of Maui. The original school
opened in a temporary lanai shed of kukui poles with grass roof. Tuition
was free; but the scholars did what work was required, and raised their
own food. Among the pupils of The Reverend Lorrin Andrews were some of
the finest young men from the islands, many of whom were married. During
the next year a stone building with thatched roof was raised by the
scholars. In 1833 a very much worn printing outfit was obtained and
placed in charge of Mr. Ruggles, with the aid of which school books were
printed; and the very first Hawaiian newspaper was published, the _Lama
Hawaii_ (“Hawaiian Luminary”), preceding the _Kumu Hawaii_, at Honolulu.
Mr. Andrews prepared the first Hawaiian Grammar, and later the Hawaiian
Dictionary.
The reader of Isabella Bird longs for Lahaina above all bournes;
Lahaina, Seat of Kings! He cannot wait to test for himself its spell of
loveliness and repose. But this repose is of the broad day, or else the
gallant lady’s mosquito net was longer than ours, which did cruelly
refuse to make connection with the coverlet. Jack’s priceless
perorations will ever be lost to posterity, for I shall repeat them not.
In the morning, Mrs. Thurston peeped laughingly in and asked if I knew
my husband’s whereabouts; and I, waking solitary, confessed that I did
not, though I seemed to recall his desertion in a blue cloud of
vituperation against all red-headed hotel hosts and stinging pests. Mrs.
Thurston, viewing the blushing morn from the second-story veranda, had
come upon the weary boy fast asleep on the hard boards, blanket over
head and feet exposed, as is the wont of sailors and tramps, and led me
to where he lay. But none more vigorously famished than he, when we sat
in an open-air breakfast room, table spread with land fruit and sea
fruit; for Mr. Thurston had been abroad early to make sure the repast
should be an ideal one after our hard night—fish from the torchlight
anglers, alligator pears dead-ripe out of the garden, mangoes of
Lahaina, the best in the Islands, and coffee from the Kona Coast.
Mrs. Bishop, in the seventies, spoke of Lahaina as “an oasis in a
dazzling desert.” The dazzling desert has been made to produce the cane
for two great sugar mills whose plantations spread their green over
everything in sight to the feet of sudden mountains, rent by terrific
chasms that rise 6000 feet behind the village. Once this was a
missionary center as well as the regular port of call for the
devastating whale ships. The deserted missionary house, fallen into
decay these long years, is still landmark of a Lahaina that but few live
to remember. But the blood of the missionaries has neglected not to make
hay, or, more properly, sugar, under the ardent sun.
The streets of the drowsy town are thickly shaded by coconuts,
breadfruit with its glossy truncated leaves and green globes,
monkey-pod, kukui, bananas, and avocados; and before we bade farewell to
Lahaina, Mr. Thurston drew up beside an enormous mango tree, benefactor
of his boyhood, where an obliging Hawaiian policeman, in whose garden it
grows, with his pretty wife threw rocks to bring down a lapful of the
ripe fruit—deep yellow, with crimson cheeks, a variety known as the
“chutney” mango.
It is some twenty-three scenic miles from Lahaina to Wailuku, and the
road runs for a distance through tall sugar cane, then begins an easy
ascent to where it is cut into the sides of steep and barren volcanic
hills above the sea. There was a glorious surf running, and for miles we
could gaze almost straight down to the water, in places catching
glimpses of shoals of black fish in the blue brine where there was no
beach and deep ocean washed the feet of the cliffs.
Jack has blue-penciled my description of the capital luncheon arranged
in advance by Mr. Thurston, holding that though I write best on the
subject of food, my readers may become bored. So I pass on to Iao Valley
(E-ah-o—quickly E-ow) where we drove in the afternoon, following the
Wailuku River several miles to the valley mouth. On the shelving banks
of this river, near the town, many Hawaiians have their homes and live
in native style for the most part.
Iao has been pronounced by travelers quite as wonderful in its way as
Yosemite. I should not think of comparing the two, because of their wide
dissimilarity. The walls of Iao are as high, but appear higher, since
the floor, if floor it can be called, is much narrower. Most gulches in
Hawaii draw together from a wide entrance, but in Iao this is reversed,
for, once the narrow ascending ingress is passed, the straight walls
open like the covers of a book which Dore might have illustrated, the
valley widening into an amphitheater of surpassing grandeur. On the
ferned and mossed walls of the entrance hang festoons of deep-trumpeted,
blue convolvulæ between slender dracena palms and far-reaching branches
of silvery kukuis, quivering or softly swaying in passing airs.
It is foolish to try to extend any impression of the prodigious
palisades with their springing bastions; the needled peaks; shimmering
tropical growth of tree and vine; bursting, sounding falls of
watercourses rushing headlong over mighty bowlders; the rolling glory of
clouds, casting showers of gold upon joyous green pinnacles or with deep
violet shadow turning these into awful fingers pointing to the zenith.
Nor can one fitly characterize the climate—the zephyrs warm and the
wind-puffs cool that poured over us where we lay on a table-land,
reached by trail through a sylvan jungle of ferns, in matted grass so
deep and dense that we never felt the solid earth.
Long we rested, speaking little, surrounded by impregnable fastnesses,
marveling at this superlatively grand and beautiful cleft, at its head,
lord of all lesser peaks and spires and domes, Puu Kukui piercing nearly
6000 feet into the torn sky. There are other valleys back of Puu Kukui,
as beautiful as Iao, but more difficult of access. It is said by the few
who have ascended that the view from the top of Puu Kukui is away and
beyond anything they have ever seen.
There is but one way out of Iao, as with most of these monster gulches
of Hawaii, and that is the way in. Old warriors learned this to their
rue, caught by Kamehameha in the sanguinary battle that completed his
conquest of Maui, when their blood stained the waters of the stream as
it flowed seaward, which henceforth bore the name of Wailuku, “Water of
Destruction.”
From our high post, looking seaward, down past the interlacing bases of
beryl-green steeps eroded by falling waters of æons, the vision included
the plains country beneath, rose and yellow and green with cultivated
abundance, bordered at the sea-rim by white lines of surf inside bays
and out around jutting points and promontories, the sapphire deep
beyond; and upon the utmost indigo horizon pillowy trade clouds
lowlying—all the splendor softened into tremulous, mystic fairyland.
“Hawaii herself, in all the buxom beauty, roving industry ... with all
the bravery and grace of her natural scenery.”
One pursues one’s being in Hawaii within an incessant atmosphere of
wonder and expectation—ah, I have seen Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the
Alps, the Swiss lakes; but Hawaii is different, partaking of those and
still different, and more elusively wonderful. Even now, as I write of
what my eyes have gloried in, they behold mighty roofless Haleakala,
ancient House of the Sun, its ragged battlements ranging two miles into
the ether, above the cloud-banners of sunset.
Haleakala Ranch, Maui, Monday, July 15.
Except one be deaf, dumb, and blind, there is no boredom in these
Islands. Indeed, one must avoid bewilderment among the attractions that
fill the days. Little opportunity was ours to become acquainted with the
old town of Wailuku, with its picturesque population of natives and
immigrants, for yesterday’s program included a private-car trip over the
Hawaiian Commercial and Kihei Sugar Companies’ vast plantations. We were
the guests of the superintendent of the Kahului Railroad Company, who
entertained us at Kahului, where we went aboard the car. There was a
bustling air of activity and newness about the port—track-laying,
boat-loading, house-building; and in the harbor swung at anchor a big
freighter of the American-Hawaiian Line, unloading on lighters and
receiving sugar by the same means.
Waving fields of cane occupy practically all the broad neck between the
two sections of Maui, spreading into the slopes of Haleakala’s foothills
and extending well around to the “windward” side of the island. Our trip
included one of the mills and a descent three hundred feet into the
shaft of Kihei’s pumping station, where we were conducted by a young
football giant from Chicago.
At the village of Paia, with its alluring Japanese shops, we transferred
to carriages for an eight-mile drive to this stock ranch 2000 feet up
Haleakala. From afar, the mountain appears simple in conformation,
smooth and gradual in rise. The rise is gradual, to be sure, but varied
by ravines that are valleys, and level pastures, and broken by ancient
blowholes and hillocks that are miniature mountains as symmetrical as
Fujiyama. It is almost disappointing—one has a right to expect more
spectacular perpendicularity of a 10,000-foot mountain. Even now, from
where we sit on a shelf of lawn, under a tree with a playhouse in its
boughs, it is impossible to realize that the amethyst summit, free for
once of cloud, is still 8000 feet above, so lazily does it lean back.
And looking downward, never have I taken in so much of the world from
any single point.
Louis von Tempsky, English-Polish, son of the last British officer
killed in the Maori War, handsome, wiry, military of bearing and
discipline, is manager of this ranch of sixty thousand-odd acres, owned
by Lorrin A. Thurston, James B. Castle, and H. P. Baldwin. He came to
Hawaii years ago on a vacation from his New Zealand bank cashiership,
and he never went back—“Shanghaied,” says Jack. One cannot blame the
man. Here he is able to live to the full the life he loves, with those
he loves—the big free life of saddle and boundless miles, with his own
fireside (and one needs a fireside up here of an evening) at the end of
the day. His wife, Amy, was born in Queen Emma’s house in Honolulu, of
English parentage. Her father, Major J. H. Wodehouse, was appointed
English Minister to Hawaii about three years before annexation to the
United States took place, and now, home in England, is retired upon a
pension.
The climate is much like California’s in the mountains, and refreshing
after the sea-level midsummer heat. This bracing air makes one feel
younger by years. Life here is ideal—a rambling old house, with a
drawing-room that is half lanai, furnished with a good library and
piano, and fine-matted couches deep in cushions; a cozy dining-room
where one comes dressed for dinner, and a commodious guest-wing where
Jack and I have two rooms and bath, and he can work in comfort.
The lawn is in a two-sided, sheltered court, intersected with red-brick
walks, and lilies grow everywhere. From our books on the lawn beside a
little fountain under tall trees where birds sing and twitter, we rise
and step past the lilies to the edge of the garden where the rich red
earth, grass mantled, slopes to the ocean. Standing as if in a green
pavilion, we seem detached from the universe while viewing it. Terrace
upon terrace of hills we trace, champaigns of green speckled with little
rosy craters like buds turned up to sun and shower; and off in the blue
vault of sea and sky, other islands mirror-blue and palpitating like
mirages. One hears that Maui, the second largest island, contains 728
square miles and that it is 10,000 feet high; but what are calculated
confines when apparently the whole world of land and sea is spread
before one’s eyes on every hand! Hand in hand, we look, and look, and
strive to grasp the far-flung vision, feeling very small in its midst.
“Beautiful’s no name for it,” breathes Jack; and through my mind runs a
verse of Mrs. Browning’s, a favorite of my childhood:
“We walk hand in hand in the pure golden ether,
And the lilies look large as the trees;
And as loud as the birds sing the bloom-loving bees—
And the birds sing like angels, so mystical-fine,
While the cedars are brushing the Archangel’s feet.
And Life is eternity, Love is divine,
And the world is complete.”
This morning early we were out looking over our mounts and seeing that
our saddles were in good shape. “I love the old gear!” Jack said,
caressing the leather, well worn on many a journey. A cattle-drive and
branding, with colt-breaking to follow, were the business of the day. At
ten we cantered away from the corrals, and Jack and I went right into
the work with Mr. Von Tempsky and his girls, Armine and Gwendolen, and
the native cowboys, to round up the steers. Oddly enough, although born
and raised in the West, we two have sailed over two thousand miles to
take part in our first _rodeo_.
To my secret chagrin, I was doomed to be tried out upon an ambitionless
mare, albeit Louisa is well-gaited and goodly to the eye. But I dislike
to spur another person’s animal, so took occasion to look very rueful
when my host, coming alongside, inquired: “Are you having a good time?”
He could see that I was not, and sensed why; so he advised me not to
spare the spur, adding: “There isn’t a better cattle pony, when she
knows you mean business!”
And oh, these “kanaka” horses, with their sure feet! And oh, the wild
rushes across grassland that has no pit-falls—gophers and
ground-squirrels are unknown—thudding over the dustless, cushioned
turf, hurdling the taller growth, whirling “on a cowskin” to cut off
stray or willful stock, and making headlong runs after the racing herd.
All the while taking commands from General Daddy, and sitting tight our
eager horses, streaking the landscape in ordered flight to head off the
runaways, the young girls with hair flying, sombreros down backs, cheeks
glowing, eyes sparkling, utterly devoted to the work in hand.
Miles we covered, doubling back and forth, searching out the bellowing
kine; up and down steep canyons we harried them, along narrow
soft-sliding trails on stiff inclines, turning to pathless footing to
keep them going in the right direction. And the farther afield we rode,
the farther beckoned the reaches of that deceptive mountain.
At last the droves were converged toward a large gate not far from the
outlying corrals, and after a lively tussle we rounded up all but one
recalcitrant—a quarter-grown, black-and-white calf that outran a dozen
of us for half an hour before we got him.
Promptly followed the segregation of those to be marked; the throwing of
calves in the dusty corral, and their wild blatting when the cowboys
trapped them neck and thigh, with the lasso; the restless circling of
the penned victims waiting their turns; the trained horses standing
braced against lariats thrown from their backs into the seething mass;
the rising, pungent smoke of burning hair and hide as the branding irons
bit; then frantic scrambling of the released ones to lose themselves in
the herd.
We sat fence-high on a little platform overlooking the strenuous scene,
and when the branding was finished, the colt-breaking began, in which
the Von Tempsky children took intense interest, as did we. Their father
superintended his efficient force of native trainers in the work of
handling three-year-old colts that had never known human restraint,
which made a Buffalo Bill show seem tame indeed. For breathless hours we
watched the making of docile saddlers, all being finally subdued but
one, which threatened to prove an “outlaw.” After the “buck” has been
taken out of the young things, they are tied up all night to the corral
fence, and in the morning are expected to be tractable, with all
tendency to pull back knocked out of them forever.
“And some are sulky, while some will plunge,
(_So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!_)
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge,
(_There! There! Who wants to kill you!_)
Some—there are losses in every trade—
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made;
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.”
Ukulele, on Haleakala, July 16.
Thirteen strong, we rode out from the ranch house this morning,
beginning a week’s trip in the crater and on around through the Nahiku
“Ditch” country. Besides the cowboys, gladsome brown fellows, overjoyed
to go along, there were seven in the party, with a goodly string of pack
animals trailing out behind. And bless my soul! if there wasn’t Louisa,
meekly plodding under a burden of tent-poles and other gear. For Mr. Von
Tempsky had now allotted me his own Welshman, “the best horse on the
mountain.”
Fifty-four hundred feet above sea level, we stopped here at Ukulele, the
dairy headquarters of the ranch. Why Ukulele, we are at loss to know,
for nothing about the place suggests that minute medium of harmony.
However, there is a less romantic connotation, for the definition of
ukulele is literally “jumping louse,” which name was given by the
natives to the first fleas imported. Let us hope the place was called
after the instrument!
The ascent was steeper than below the ranch house, but it worked no
hardship on horse or rider. We were in good season to “rustle” supper,
and went berrying for dessert. Of course, there had to be a berry-fight
between Jack and the two husky girls, who soon became weird and
sanguinary objects, plastered from crown to heel with the large juicy
_akalas_, which resemble our loganberries. Jack asserts that they are
larger than hens’ eggs; but lacking convenient eggs, there is no proving
him in error. Nothing does him more good than a whole-hearted romp with
young people, and these were a match that commanded his wary respect.
After supper, we reclined upon a breezy point during a lingering sunset
over the wide, receding earth, lifted high above the little affairs of
men, and, still high above, the equally receding summit. We felt light,
inconsequential, as if we had no place, no ponderability, no
reality—motes poised on a sliver of rock between two tremendous
realities.
Louis Von Tempsky recounted old legends concerning the House of the Sun,
and the naming thereof, and the fierce warfare that is ever going on
about its walls, between the legions of Ukiukiu and Naulu, the Northeast
Trade and the Leeward Wind; and until we were driven indoors by the
chill, we lay observing the breezy struggle beneath among opposing
masses of driven clouds.
There is a continual temptation to digress and dwell upon the rich
folk-lore. I am glad to note that Thomas G. Thrum, of Honolulu, has
compiled a book entitled Hawaiian Folk Tales.
It will fascinate many an older person than a child in years to learn,
whatever we know or do not know about fairies, that in truth there is a
foundation, in the lore of Hawaii, for the belief in Brownies. Tradition
says that they were the original people of these Islands—an adventurous
and nomadic tribe known as Menehunes, sprightly, cunning, and so
industrious that it was their rule that any work undertaken must be
entirely accomplished in one night. If it were not, it would never be
finished, since they would not put their hand twice on one task. An
ancient uncompleted wall of a fish-pond, on Kauai, is by credulous
natives laid to the fact that the Menehunes neglected to begin work
until midnight, and dawn found them but half done. To those who may
smile at this legend, I can only point out the Little Peoples whom
Martin Johnson has but lately discovered in both the Solomons and New
Hebrides, moving-pictures of which I have seen: veritable Brownies, if
better-proportioned than our fairy-tale books would have us believe of
Menehunes.
We are going to rest upon our _hikie_ (hik-e-a), the same being a
contrivance of hard boards, seven feet square, laid deep, native
fashion, with lauhala mats, and haole quilts made to measure, with
warmer covering at hand for the crisp small hours.
Paliku, Crater of Haleakala, July 17.
And it’s ho! for the crater’s rim, to look over into the mysterious
Other Side from the tantalizing skyline that promises what no other
horizon in all the world can give. Hail, Haleakala! It’s boots and
saddles for the unroofed House of the Sun, the largest extinct crater in
existence! What will it be like? (“Nothing you’ve ever seen or dreamed,”
assures one.) Shall we be disappointed? (“Not if you’re alive!” laughs
another.) Jack gives me a heaving hand into the saddle, and my Welshman
strikes a swinging jog-trot that plays havoc with the _opu_-full—opu
being stomach—with which my terrible mountain appetite has been
assuaged.
Rolling grasslands give place to steep and rugged mountain, with sparse
vegetation. Here and there gleams a sheaf of blades, the “silver-sword,”
with a red brand of blossoms thrusting from the center; or patches of
“silver verbena,” a velvet flower that presses well and serves as
_edelweiss_ for Haleakala. Stopping to breathe the horses, we nibble
_ohelo_ berries, like cranberries, but with a mealy-apple flavor, like
the manzanita-berries of California. There is wild country up here,
where sometimes cattle and ranging horses are pulled down by wild dogs;
and back in the fastnesses, even mounted cowboys, rounding up the stock,
have been attacked.
Somebody is singing all the time. If it is not Mr. Von’s tenor, one
hears Mr. Thurston’s pleasant voice on the breeze, attempting a certain
climacteric note that eludes his range at the end of “Sweet Lei Lehua.”
Over the sharp, brittle lavas of antiquity our horses, many barefooted,
their hoofs like onyx, scramble with never a fall on the panting steeps;
on and on, up and up, we forge, with a blithe, lifting feel in the thin
and thinner air, while the great arc of the horizon seems ever above eye
level. Rings a thrilling call from ahead that the next rise will land us
on the jagged edge of the hollow mountain. I am about to join the charge
of that last lap when a runaway packhorse—none other than
Louisa—diverts my attention to the rear. When I turn again, the rest
are at the top—all but Jack, who faces me upon his Pontius Pilate,
until I come up. “I wanted to see it with you,” he explains, and
together we follow to Magnetic Peak—so-called what of its lodestone
properties. And then...
More than twenty miles around its age-sculptured brim, the titanic rosy
bowl lay beneath; seven miles across the incredible hollow our eyes
traveled to the glowing mountain-line that bounds the other side, and,
still above, across a silver sea, high in the sky ... we could not
believe our vision that was unprepared for such ravishment of beauty.
Surely we beheld very Heaven, the Isles of the Blest, floating above
clouds of earth—azure, snow-crowned peaks so ineffably high, so
ungraspably lovely, that we forgot we had come to see a place of ancient
fire, and gazed spellbound, from our puny altitude of ten thousand feet,
upon peaks of snow all unrelated to the burned-out world on which we
stood.
It was only Mauna Kea—Mauna Kea and its twin, Mauna Loa, on the Big
Island of living fire, half again as high as our wind-swept position;
but so remote and illusive were they, that our earthborn senses were
incapable of realizing that their sublimity was anything more than a
day-dream, and that we looked upon the same island, the loftiest on the
globe, that had greeted our eyes from the _Snark_.
“It never palls,” Armine whispered solemnly, the dew in her
forget-me-not-blue eyes. And her father, who had stood here uncounted
times, soberly acquiesced. I knew, with certitude birthed of the magic
moment, that my memory, did I never return, would remain undimmed for
all my days.
[Illustration: (1) Hana. (2) The Ruin of Haleakala. (3) Von and Kakina.]
And then we devoted ourselves to hanging upon the glassy-brittle brink
and peering into the crater’s unbelievable depths, which are not sheer
but slope with an immensity of sweep that cannot be measured by the eye,
so deceptive are the red and jet inclined planes of volcanic sand.
Pointing to an inconsiderable ruddy cone in the floor of the crater, Mr.
Thurston said: “You would hardly think that that blowhole is taller than
Diamond Head, but it is!” And before there was time to readjust our
dazzled minds, he was indicating an apparent few hundred feet of
incurving cinder-slope that looked ideal for tobogganing, with the
information that it was over a mile in length. A dotted line of hoof
prints of some wayward goat strung across its red-velvet surface, and we
tossed clinkers of lava over-edge upon unbroken stretches immediately
below, to watch the little interrupted trails they traced until the wind
should erase them. Only when the men loosened bowlders into the chasm,
and we saw them leaving diminishing puffs of yellow ocher dust as they
bounded upon the cindrous declivity, could we begin to line up the
proportions of the immediate crater-side. Whole minutes were consumed,
and minutes upon minutes for those swift projectiles to pass beyond
sight.
“And why,” queried Jack, “are we the only ones enjoying this
incomparable grandeur? Why aren’t there thousands of people climbing
over one another to hang all around the rim of ‘the greatest extinct
crater in the world’? Such a reputation ought to be irresistible. Why,
there’s nothing on earth so wonderful as this! I should think there
wouldn’t be ships enough to carry the tourists, if only for Iao and
Haleakala. Perhaps Hawaii doesn’t want them, or need them.....
Personally,” he laughed, “I’m glad my wife and I are the only tourists
here to-day. And we’re not tourists, thank God!”
Two broad portals there are into the House Built by the Sun, and through
them march the warring winds, Ukiukiu and Naulu. In at the northern
portal, Ukiukiu drives the trade clouds, mile-wide, like a long line of
silent, ghostly breakers, only to have them torn to shreds, as to-day,
and dissipated in the warm embrace of the rarefied airs of Naulu.
Sometimes Ukiukiu meets with better fortune, and fills the castle with
cloud-legions; but ours was the fortune this day, for the crater was
swept of all but remnants of floating cloud-dust, and the view was
superb.
At last, tearing from the absorbing spectacle, we descended a short way
to a stone-walled corral, where the bright-eyed, quiet-mannered cowboys
had lunch waiting—a real roughing-it picnic of jerked beef and salt
pork, products of the ranch; and hard-poi, called _pai’ai_, thick and
sticky, royal pink-lavender, in a roomy sack. Into this we dug our
fists, bringing them out daubed with the hearty substance. It came to
me, blissfully licking the pai’ai from my fingers, that this promiscuous
delving for poi into one receptacle which obtains among the natives, and
which the real kamaaina hesitates not to emulate, is far from the
unfastidious custom it is sure to appear upon first sight. “Why, yes—”
Jack caught the idea, “you stick your finger into a thick paste, and the
finger is withdrawn coated with it. Ergo, your finger has touched
nothing of what remains in the pot—or sack.”
Having lunched, we mounted a disgorged litter of bowlders and sharp
lava, to the meager crumbling ruins of what are thought to be
fortifications built into the side of the mountain by Kamehameha the
Great; then, overtopping the verge, slowly we sank into the ruddy
depths, by way of the cinder declivities we had speculated upon from our
soaring perch. They proved entirely too rough with loose rubble for
tobogganing. The horses left sulphur-yellow tracks as they pulled their
pasterns from out the bottomless burnt sands, and a golden streamer flew
backward from each hoof-fall. So swift was our drop that riders strung
out ahead speedily grew very, very small, though distinct, as if seen
through the wrong end of a telescope. In the crystal-pure atmosphere
each object stood out clean-cut, while an insidious sunburn began to
spread over lips and cheeks and noses. Apart from slightly shortened
breathing at the summit, we had felt no inconvenience from the
elevation.
Thus our caravan straggled into the depths of Haleakala, sometimes a
horseman galloping springily across a dark cinderslope in a halo of
tawny sun-shot dust, then dropping steeply, his mount nearly sitting;
while overhead and behind, on the evanescent path of our making, came
the picturesque pack horses and cowboys, and one small patient mule
laden with camp comforts. From farthest below rose quaint reiterative
chants of hulas, as Louis von Tempsky rode and sang, loose in the
saddle, reins on his cow-pony’s neck, debonair and tireless, with a
bonny daughter to either side.
Strange is the furnishing of this stronghold of the Sun God. And few are
the nooks in it that would invite the tired and parched wayfarer to
tarry. For all the beauty of its rose and velvet of distance, there
reigns intense desolation, With something sinister in the dearth of
plant or animal life. Passing an over-toppling crimson Niagara of dead
lava frozen in its fall, we reinvested the silent bleakness with fire
and flow and upheaval, until, suddenly whooping into a mad race up the
flanks of a big blowhole that had earlier presented its dry throat to
our downward scrutiny, we hesitated to look over into the soundless pit,
half expecting we knew not what. Nothing happened, of course, though
dead volcanoes have been known to resurrect; and we slanted back into
the floor of the House, and went on our burning, arid course.
It gives an odd sensation to realize that one is traversing miles
literally inside a high mountain. We thought of friends we should have
liked to transport abruptly into this unguessable cavity. Oddly enough,
as we progressed, it turned out that the warm color, so vivid from the
summit, flushes only one side of the cones, like a fever not burned out;
although ahead, on the opposite wall, there is a giant scar of perfect
carmine.
At last we commenced to wind among crateresque hillocks, clothed with
rough growths by the healing millenniums, until, far on, we could just
glimpse the Promised Rest of verdure—clustered trees and smiling
pasture, where our tents were to be pitched for two nights, while the
beasts should graze. But the distance was as deceptive as a mirage, and
we had still to endure many a sharp trail across fields of clinking
lava, black and fragile as jet, swirled smoothly in the cooling process,
and called _pahoehoe_; while the _a-a_ lava, twisted and tormented into
shapes of flame, licked against the blue-enamel sky. I never cease to
feel a sense of aghastness before these stiff, upstanding waves of the
slow, resistless molten rock, flung stark and frozen like the stilled
waters of the Red Sea of old; and here, at the bases of the carven
surges, are smooth sandy levels, dotted with shrubs, where one may
gallop in and out as if at the bottom of a recessant ocean.
Involved in a maze of lava-flows among small gray cones, the vast aspect
of the crater was lost. Still, turning, we could yet discern Magnetic
Peak. In every direction the vistas changed from moment to moment; and
wonder surged as we tried to grasp the immensity of the moribund volcano
and its astounding details. Once we halted at the Bottomless Pit
itself—a blowhole in the ground that had leisurely spat liquid rock,
flake upon flake, until around its jagged mouth a wall piled up, of
material so glassy light that large pieces could easily be broken off.
And one must have a care not to lean too heavily, for judged by its
noiseless manner of swallowing dropped stones, a human body falling into
the well would never be heard after its first despairing cry.
There is but one chance to water animals until camp-ground is reached,
and we found the pool dry—auwe! But the kanakas, carrying buckets,
scaled the crater wall to a higher basin, from which they sent down a
thin stream. One by one the horses drank while we rested in an oasis of
long grass, cooling our flaming faces in the shade.
A mile or two more, and we reined up, to the cracking of rifle-shots,
under the cliff at Paliku, a fairy nook of a camping spot where Mr. Von
and the cowboys, having outdistanced us, were bringing down goat-meat
for supper. I was guilty of inward treacherous glee that only one was
killed, as that was plenty for our needs; and the spotted kids looked so
wonderful upon a wall where we could see no foothold.
Camp had been planned in a luxuriant grove of _opala_ and _kolea_ trees
close to the foot of the pali; but the ground being soggy from recent
rains, we found better tent-space in the open, where sleek cattle grazed
not far off, getting both food and drink from lush grass that grows the
year round in this blossoming pocket of the desert. There are sections
on the “dry” side of Maui where herds flourish entirely upon prickly
cactus, having no other food or moisture. Only the weaker ones succumb
to the spines of the cactus, and it is said that there are no finer
cattle on the islands than the survivors.
All took a hand in settling camp, we women filling sacks with ferns, to
serve as mattresses. The change of exercise was the best thing that
could happen to us malihinis, else we might have stiffened from the many
hours in saddle.
It was a starved company that smacked its lips at Von’s jerked beef
broiling on a stick over a fire at the open tent-flap, behind which the
rest of us sat and made ready the service on a blanket. For it is right
cold of an evening, nearly 7000 feet in the air—a veritable
refrigerating plant in the mansion of the Sun.
I hope, if ever I land in heaven, and it is anything half as attractive
as this earth I go marveling upon, that it will not be incumbent upon me
to keep a journal. Seeing and feeling are enough to keep one full
occupied.
Paliku, to Hana, Maui, July 18.
Too burned and tired to fancy goat-hunting in the rain, Mrs. Thurston
and I spent yesterday resting, reading, sleeping, and playing cards in
the dripping tent, while our men went with Mr. Von and the girls. The
drenching clouds drifted and lifted on the pali, where the sun darted
golden javelins through showers until the raindrops broke into a glory
of rainbows. Then the brief splendor waned, leaving us almost in
darkness at midday, in an increasing downpour.
The hunters returned in late afternoon, wet and weary, but jubilant and
successful, eager for supper and a damp game of whist on the blankets.
After we had tucked under those same blankets, with shrewdly placed cups
to catch the leaks in our soaked tent-roof, we listened to the mellow
voices of the Hawaiians singing little hulas and love-songs and laughing
as musically.
This morning it was down-tent, and boot and saddle once more; but ere we
made our six o’clock get-away, I found a half hour to go prowling to the
feet of the pali, to an alluring spot that had been in my eyes since the
moment of arrival—a green lap in the gray rock where a waterfall had
been. Winning through a thicket, I peeped into a ferny, flowery corner
of Elfland at the base of a vertical fall, down which the water had
furrowed a shining streak on the polished rock amid fanning ferns and
grasses and velvet mosses—a grotto fit for childhood’s imaginings to
people with pink and white fairy-folk and brown and green gnomes.
They were slippery trails that led out of the crater and down through
Kaupo Gap, chill with Naulu’s drafty onslaught, where Pélé, Goddess of
Fire, once broke through the ramparts of the crater and fled forever
from Maui to take up her abode on Mauna Loa’s wounded side. But soon out
of the clouds we rode and went steaming in the horizontal rays of a
glorious sunrise. Again there were glimpses of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa,
supernal in the morning sky, though a trifle more plausible seen from
this level.
Down our sure-footed animals dropped into lush meadows, where fat cattle
raised their heads to stare; up and down, across crackling lava beds,
like wrecked giant stairways balustraded by the cool gray-and-gold
palisades of the Gap, from between which we could make out the surfy
coast line. Once we had struck the final descent, there were no ups,
only downs, for 6000 feet; and several times our saddles, sliding over
the withers of the horses, obliged us to dismount and set them back.
On a rocky cliff above the sea we found an early lunch ready and
waiting, at the house of a Portuguese-Hawaiian family; and by eleven
were cantering easily along green cliffs, past old grass-houses still
occupied by natives—a sight fast becoming rare. From one weirdly
tattered hut, there rushed a nut-brown, wrinkled woman, old, but with
fluffy black hair blown out from wild black eyes, flinging her arms
about and crying “Aloha! Aloha!” with peal upon peal of mad sweet
laughter.
For several miles the coast was much like that of Northern California,
with long points, rimmed by surf, running out into the ocean; but soon
we were scrambling up and down gulch-trails. In olden times these clefts
were impassable on account of the tremendous rainfall on this eastern
shore; and around on the north, or Nahuku side, it averages two hundred
inches yearly. (Three years ago it registered as high as four hundred
and twenty inches.) So the wise chiefs, somewhere around the sixteenth
century, with numerous commoners at their command, had the curt zigzags
paved with a sort of cobblestone, without regard to suavity of grade. So
the rises and falls of this slippery highway are nothing short of
formidable, especially when one’s horse, accustomed to leading, resents
being curbed midway of the procession and repeatedly tries to rush past
the file where there is no passing-room.
But the animals quickly proved that they could take care of themselves,
and we advantaged by this assurance to look our fill upon the beautiful
coast and forested mountain. Tiny white beaches dreamed in the sunlight
at the feet of the deep indentations, where rivers flowed past banana
and cocoanut palms that leaned and swayed in the strong sea breeze, and
brown babies tumbled among tawny grass huts; while gay calicoes, hung
out to dry, gave just the right note of brilliant color.
Some of the idyllic strands were uninhabited and inviting; and I thought
of the tired dwellers of the cities of all the world, who never heard of
Windward Maui, where is space, and solitude, and beauty, warm winds and
cool, soothing rainfalls, fruit and flowers for the plucking, swimming
by seashore and hunting on mountain side, and Mauna Kea over there a
little way to gladden eye and spirit. Then, “Mate, are you glad you’re
alive?” broke upon my reverie as Jack leaned from his horse on a zigzag
above my head.
It would not have seemed like Hawaii if we had not traversed a cane
plantation, and halt was made at the Kipahulu Sugar Mill, where one of
the horses must have a shoe reset. It would appear that the onyx feet of
the unshod horses, that have never worn iron in their lives, stand the
wear and tear of the hard travel over ripping lava better than the more
pampered ones.
All of the eager train knew from experience that at Hana waited their
fodder; and we, in like frame of mind, restrained them not. We had done
thirty-five miles when we pulled up before the small hotel—and such
miles! Mr. Cooper, manager of Hana Plantation store, called upon us with
extra delicacies to eke out the plain hotel fare—avocados, luscious
papaias, and little sugary bananas. “Gee!” murmured Jack from the
buttery depths of a big alligator pear, “I wish we could grow these
things in the Valley of the Moon!”
This village of Hana lies high on the horseshoe of a little blue bay
embraced by two headlands, and is fraught with warlike legend and
history. In the eighteenth century, King Kalaniopuu, of the old dynasty,
whose life was one long bloody battle with other chiefs of Maui for the
possession of these eastern districts, held the southern headland of the
bay, Kauiki, for over twenty years; then the great Kahekili deprived the
garrison of its water supply, and retook the fort, which is an ancient
crater. In the time of Kamehameha, it withstood his attacks for two
years, after the remainder of Maui had been brought to his charmed heel.
To-night, I know, I shall fall unconscious with, in my ears, the ringing
of iron hoofs on stony pathways and the gurgle and plash of waterfalls.
Hana, to Keanae Valley, Maui, July 20.
The Ditch Country—this is the unpoetical, imageless name given to a
wonderland that eludes the power of language. An island world in itself,
it is compounded of vision upon vision of heights and depths, hung with
waterfalls. It is of a gentle grandeur withal, clothed softly with
greenest green of tree and shrub and grass, ferns of endless variety,
fruiting guavas, bananas, mountain-apples—all in a warm, generous,
tropical tangle. It is a Land of Promise for generations to come. All
who can sit a Haleakala horse—the best mountain horse on earth—must
come some day to feast eyes upon this possession of the United States of
America, whose beauty, we are assured of the surprising fact, is unknown
save to a few hundred white men exclusive of the engineers of the trail
and ditch and those financially interested in the plantations of
Windward Maui. And undoubtedly no white foot previously trod here.
The Ditch Country—untrammeled paradise wherein an intrepid engineer
yclept O’Shaughnessy, overcame almost unsurmountable odds and put
through an irrigation scheme that harnessed the abundant water and
tremendously increased the output of the sugar plantations. And to most
intents it remains an untrammeled paradise, for what little the
transient pilgrim marks of the fine achievement of the Nahiku Ditch is
in the form of a wide concrete waterway running for short, infrequent
distances in company with a grassy trail before losing itself in Mr.
O’Shaughnessy’s difficult tunnels, through which most of its course is
quarried.
All manner of Hawaiian timber goes to make up the splendid foresting of
this great mountainside, whose top is lost in the clouds; huge koa
trees, standing or fallen, the dead swathed in vines, the quick embraced
by the _ie-ie_, a climbing palm that clings only to living pillars, its
blossoming tendrils depending in curves like cathedral candelabra; the
ohia ai, lighting the prevailing green with its soft, thistle-formed,
crimson-brushed blossom, and cherry-red fruit; the ohia lehua, prized
for its dark-brown hardwood, but bearing no edible fruit; and the kukui,
silver-green as young chestnuts in springtime, trooping up hill and down
dale. More than half a hundred varieties of bananas grow from beach to
summit of this exotic region. Especially ornamental are the luxuriant
tree ferns on their chocolate-hued, hairy pedestals. Many of the ground
ferns were familiar—even the gold- and silver-back flourish in Hawaii.
Indeed, a collector of _Filicales_ would be in his element in these
islands, which own to a large number known nowhere else. Maui alone has
a hundred and thirty-odd different kinds.
We nooned on a rubber plantation, where we were entertained at a
hospitable luncheon, served by two kimino’d Japanese maids—little bits
of pictures off a fan, Jack observed. He, by the way, well-nigh
disgraced himself when, replying to a query from the hostess whether or
not he liked foreign dishes, he assured her he enjoyed all good food of
all countries, with one exception, “nervous” pudding, which he declared
made him tremble internally. The words and accompanying gestures were
still in the air when a maid entered bearing the dessert, a quivering
watermelon-hued dome of gelatine! A horrified silence was broken by a
shout of laughter, in which every one joined with relief. But Jack
consistently declined any part of the “nervous” confection, saying that
he always preferred coffee alone for his dessert.
Armine, to the surprise of father and sister, and my speechless delight,
offered to let me ride her superb Bedouin, a young equine prince with
movement so springy that he seemed treading in desert sand. We had
traveled nearly all day in heavy showers, and were convinced of the
accuracy of the figures of Windward Maui’s annual rainfall; for no
saddle-slicker was able to turn the searching sky-shot water. But the
discomfort of wet garments was lost in rapt attention to the splendor
round about. Rightly had our guides assured us that yesterday’s scenery
was as nothing compared to this, where the waterfalls ever increased in
height and volume, thundering above and sometimes clear over the trail
quarried into a wall of rock that towered thousands of feet overhead and
a thousand sheer below the narrow foothold. Our brains swam with the
whirling, shouting wonder of waters, the yawning depths that opened
beneath our feet, filled with froth of wild rivers born of the fresh
rains. Jack’s warning was right: I have saved no words for this stunning
spectacle.
We reached Keanae Valley tired in body, in eye, in mind—aye, even
surfeited with beauty. Once in dry clothing, however, weariness fell
from us, and we reclined in rattan chairs on a high lanai, leisurely
counting the cataracts that fringed the valley amphitheatre, upon whose
turrets the sunset sky, heavy with purple and rose and gold, seemed to
rest. We made out thirty-five, some of them dropping hundreds of feet,
making hum the machinery in great sugar mills elsewhere. Commercialism
in grand Keanae! And yet, it is not out of the way of romance to
associate the idea of these natural forces with the mighty enginery that
man’s thinking machinery has evolved for them to propel in the
performance of his work.[6]
Keanae Valley, to Haleakala Ranch, July 21.
Mr. Von had us stirring by half-past six, after ten hours in bed. So
soundly had we been sunk in “the little death in life,” that even a
driven rain which soaked our dried riding togs, hanging on chairs in the
middle of the room, failed to disturb. We had the novel sensation of
shivering in a tropic vale, the while pulling on water-logged corduroy
and khaki, even hats being soggy.
Our amiable host and hostess, Mr. and Mrs. Tripp, after serving a
breakfast of wild bananas, boiled taro, poi, broiled jerked beef, and
fresh milk, bade us Godspeed with tiaras and necklets of
ginger-blossoms, and we fared from the mist-wreathed valley and up-trail
on horses spurred with knowledge of this last stretch to home stables.
The air was ineffably clear, as if from a cleansing bath, with light
clouds in the sunny sky to rest the eyes.
More ditch trails and jungle of unwithering green, sparkling wet, and
steaming rainbows in the slanting sun-gold of the morning; more and
still more stupendous gulches, to make good Mr. Von’s overnight
prophecy. And we traversed a succession of makeshift bridges that called
for the best caution of the horses who knew every unstable inch. Jack,
pacing behind on many-gaited Pontius Pilate, told me afterward that his
heart was in his throat to see the slender spans give to the weight and
swinging motion of my stout charger, who, never ceasing to fret at being
withheld from the lead, pranced scandalously in the most unwise places.
At length we approached a promised “worst and last gulch,” a
flood-eroded ravine of appalling beauty, down the pitch of which we slid
with bated breath, to the reverberation of hurtling waters on every
hand. Obeying Mr. Von’s serious behest, we gathered on the verge of a
roaring torrent overflung by a mere excuse for a bridge, not more than
four feet wide, about fifty feet long, and innocent of railing. To our
left the main cataract sprayed us in its pounding fall to a ledge in the
rocky defile where it crashed just under the silly bridge, thence
bursting out in deafening thunder to its mightiest plunge seaward.
“Now, hurry and tell Von what you want,” Jack shouted in my ear above
the din. And what I wanted was to be allowed to precede the others over
this bridge;—oh, not in bravado, believe—quite the contrary. Fact was,
I feared to trust the Welshman, justly intolerant of his enforced
degradation to the ranks, not to make a headlong rush to overtake his
rival, Mr. Von’s horse, should he lead; for a single rider at a time was
to be permitted on the swaying structure.
Mr. Von appreciated and consented; and when the order of march was
arranged, the Welshman proved his right to leadership; without
hesitation, wise muzzle between his exact feet, sniffing, feeling each
narrow plank of the unsteady way. It was an experience big with
thought—carrying with it an intense sense of aloneness, aloofness from
aid in event of disaster, trusting the vaunted human of me without
reserve to the instinct and intelligence of a “lesser animal.” The
blessed Welshman!—with chaos all about the insecure foothold, trembling
but courageous, he won slowly step by step across the white destruction
and struck his small fine hoofs into firm ground once more.
With brave, set face Harriet Thurston, who was little accustomed to
horses, came next after Mr. Von, and her ambitious but foolhardy steed,
midway of the passage, began jogging with eagerness to be at the end,
setting up a swaying rhythm of the bridge that sent sick chills over the
onlookers, and it was with immense relief we watched him regain solid
earth. Pontius Pilate bore Jack sedately, followed by the little girls.
A conception may be gained of the scariness of this adventure through an
incident related by Mr. Von. One of his cowboys, noted on Maui for his
fearlessness, always first in the pen with a savage bull, and first on
the wildest bucking bronco off range, absolutely balked at riding this
final test of all our nerve: “I have a wife and family,” he
expostulated; then led his horse across.[7]
Kaleinalu, Maui, July 23.
Kaleinalu (Kah-lay-e-nah’-lu), “Wreath of Surf,” the seaside retreat of
the Von Tempskys, is but another illustration of the ideal conditions
that compose existence in these fabulous isles. We become almost
incoherent on the subject of choice of climates and scenery and modes of
living to be found from mountain top to shore. One may sleep none too
warmly under blankets at Ukulele and Paliku, with all the invigoration
of the temperate zone; enjoy mild, variable weather at 2000 to 3000
feet, as at the Ranch house; or lie at sea level, under a sheet or none,
caressed by the flowing trade wind. “Watch out, Mate,” Jack warns; “I’m
likely to come back here to live some day, when we have gone round the
world and back—if I don’t get too attached to the Valley of the Moon.”
One ceases not to marvel that the shore-line is not thronged with globe
trotters bickering for sand lots. It is an enviable place for old and
young, with finest of sand for the babies to play in, and exciting
surfing inside protecting reef, for swimmers.
And here we malihinis are resting, after one day of tennis and
colt-breaking up-mountain, from our six days in the saddle. Nothing more
arduous fills the hours than swinging in hammocks in a sheltered ell of
the beach-house, reading, playing whist, swimming in water more
exhilarating than at Waikiki, romping, sleeping—and eating, fingering
our poi and kukui-nut and lomi’d salmon with the best.
To-morrow we bid good-by to these new friends, who must have sensed our
heart of love for them and their wonderland, for they beg us to return,
ever welcome, to their unparalleled hospitality. By now we have proudly
come into our unexpected own, with a translation of our name into the
Hawaiian tongue, worked out by Kakina (Mr. Thurston) and Mr. Von, who
speak like natives with the natives, and sometimes with each other,
while the speech of the lassies abounds in the pretty colloquialisms of
their birth-land.
Always they say _pau_ for connotation of “finish,” “that will do,”
“enough”; _kokua_ for help, noun or verb—or, in the sense of approval,
or permission; _hapai_ is to carry; _hiki no_, as we should say “all
right,” “very well”; _hele mai_, or _pimai_, come here, or go up; one
oftenest hears _pilikia_ for trouble, difficulty, or _aole pilikia_ for
the harmonious negative; the classic _awiwi_, hurry, has been superseded
by expressive and sharply explosive synonym, _wikiwiki_; and when the
hostess orders a bath prepared, she enunciates _auau_ to the Japanese
maids. Most commands, however, are given in mixed English-Hawaiian. The
old pure word for food, and to eat, _paina_, is never heard, for the
Chinese kowkow—_kaukau_ in the Hawaiian adaptation—has likewise come
to stay.
Peremptory commands often trail off into the engaging _eh?_ that charmed
our ears the first day at Pearl Lochs. And so, as I say, upon us has
been bestowed the crown of all graciousness accorded upon Maui—the
Hawaiian rendering of London, which is _Lakana_; although how London can
be transmuted into Lakana is as much a mystery as the mutation of
Thurston into Kakina. At any rate, my pleased partner struts as Lakana
Kane (Kane means literally _male_), while meekly I respond to Lakana
Wahine.
Aboard _Claudine_, Maui to Honolulu, July 24.
From Kahului the passengers were towed on a big lighter to the
_Claudine_ rocking well offshore; and, watching Louis von Tempsky’s
lean, military figure growing smaller on the receding wharf, we felt a
surge of emotion at parting. “He’s all man, that Von,” Jack said,
hastily turning away and lighting a cigarette. And in my ears still rang
the quaint cadences of his voice, rising from the cinder-slopes of
Haleakala, or heard from smoking corral, or hammock on the beach, in
little hulas of his own devising.
From the deck we saw his fine beef-cattle towed swimming to the steamer
and crowded in the main-deck forward, bound for the Honolulu market. And
when the _Claudine_ swept out of the roadstead, we gazed our last,
through daylight into dark, upon hoary Haleakala, whose stern head only
once looked out from a red sunset smother.
The moon came up like a great electric globe, spilling pools of
brilliant light in the pitchy water. At Lahaina the steamer lay off to
take aboard a few passengers, and again we saw the infrequent lights of
the little quiet town. We could have wished nothing better than once
more to disembark at Sleepy Lahaina, and repeat the whole holiday.
Nuuanu Valley, August 1.
It seems that we are to know many homes in Hawaii Nei. Now it is with
Mr. and Mrs. Thurston, who have lifted us, bag and baggage, from the
August fervency of Waikiki to a cooler site within the “first shower”
level of Nuuanu. Here, at the end of a short side street, their roomy
house[8] juts from the lip of a ravine worn by a tumultuous watercourse
from the Koolau Mountains. And here, on the edge of the city, from the
windows, we can see, across fertile plains broken with green hillocks,
the blue, velvet masses of the Waianae Range, and, below, can pick out
Pearl Lochs and the silvered surf-line of the coast around to Honolulu
Harbor.
[Illustration: (1) Prince Cupid. (2) Original “Monument.” (3) The
Prince’s Canoe. (4) At Keauhou, Preparing the Feast. (5) Jack at Cook
Monument. (6) King Kalakaua and Robert Louis Stevenson. (7) Kealakekua
Bay—Captain Cook Monument at +.]
At table, on a broad lanai, morning, noon and night, can be observed the
life of the port, the movement of ships to and from the storied harbors
of all the world. One cannot rave too earnestly over this lanai
existence, in the ideal climate of Hawaii. Jack, at work, must needs sit
with back resolute against the distracting windows that set him dreaming
of the future of the _Snark_.
We are accorded the perfect entertainment of freedom to come and go at
our own sweet will, which is the way of the land. At meals, and
afterward lounging in hanging-couches and great reclining chairs, we
listen rapt to Kakina’s memories of the old regime, from his missionary
childhood on through the variable fortunes of the doomed monarchies, in
which he bore his important part. And he, wisely reticent except with
those he knows are deeply appreciative of the romance and tragedy of the
Hawaiian race and dynasties, delves into his mine of information with
never a relaxing of attention from us.
Of a late afternoon, Mrs. Thurston and I drive down palmy Nuuanu avenue
into the architectural jumble of the business center, picturesque
despite its unbeautiful buildings, what of foreign shops and faces and
costumes. Here we abstract her husband from the _Advertiser_ editorial
sanctum, and Jack from the barber’s shop; afterward driving for an hour
in the bewilder of wandering hibiscus byways and narrow streets, where
hide, in a riot of foliage, the most exquisite old cottages of both
native and foreign citizens. Thus we become acquainted with the city
known and loved until death by travelers like Isabella Bird, whose book
still holds place, with me, as the sweetest interpretation of the Hawaii
we have so far seen.
One evening we left behind the homes that stray over the lower slopes of
the purple-rosy, time-worn crater of Punch Bowl, Puowaina; wound up past
the Portuguese settlement that hangs, overgrown with gayest flowers, on
haphazard rock terraces, and ascended through a luxuriant growth of
blossoming, fruiting cactus, to the height of five hundred feet, where
we stood at the mouth of the perfect crater basin that had suggested the
name of Punch Bowl. This cone, blown out by a comparatively recent,
final upheaval between the spurs of the older peaks and the Pacific,
standing isolated as it does, we now realize should be visited early in
one’s sojourn in Honolulu, for it is a remarkable point from which to
orient oneself to the city’s topography. And lo, a white speck on the
water-front, we could make out the _Snark_, moored opposite a leviathan
black freighter. From the mauka edge of the Bowl we looked up Pauoa, one
of the wooded vales that rend Honolulu’s lofty background, flanked with
sharp green ridges.
For the present, although we miss the convenient swimming of Waikiki,
welcome indeed is this chance to acquaint ourselves with other phases of
this Paradise at the cross-roads of the Pacific.
August 4.
“Mate, you know, or I think you know, how little figure fame cuts with
me, except in so far as it brings you and me the worth-while things—the
free air and earth, sky and sea, and the opportunities of knowing
worth-while people.” Thus Jack, descanting upon some of the rare
privileges that money cannot buy but which his work has earned him in
all self-respect. This leads to the observation that in this community
composed of groups of the closest aristocracies in the world, bar none,
to quote Jack’s sober judgment, mere wealth cannot buy the favor of
their hospitality. It is a well-recommended tourist who ever sees behind
into the kamaaina social atmosphere of Honolulu. And of all the
exclusive spirit manifested by the kamaainas, none is more difficult to
conquer than that of the elder Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian families.
So it was with quiet gratification that we two set out upon an
invitation to the out-of-town retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Macfarlane,
members of the same family with whom we have come in contact from time
to time, since the day we first shook the Commodore’s hand in Pearl
Lochs.
Our way lay over the Pali, and this second view lost none of the
glamorous memory of the former. Now that I have seen other parts of
Hawaii, I find that no comparison can be made. Nuuanu Pali stands
unique.
Descending the zigzags to the main drive, we soon turned off to the left
and rolled over the red loops of a branch road to the very base of the
Mirrored Mountains, where nestles Ahuimanu, “Refuge of Birds.” It is a
beauteous spot, more than faintly Spanish in suggestion, where an old
house, in sections connected by arbors, rambles about a court of green
lawn that terraces down to the hospitable gate. The Spanish-mission
effect of the low architecture is enhanced by the fact that it occupies
the site of a Catholic institution, built by the first French Bishop of
Honolulu as a place where he might retire for meditation and prayer. A
short distance behind the present buildings the precipitous mountain
rises until its head is lost in the clouds. Somewhere on its face,
reached by a stiff trail, hides a pocket, a small, green solitude,
called the Bishop’s Garden. From this the climb is so steep that it is
said none but the olden natives could surmount it, and one young priest
lost his life making the attempt.
Adown the terraced walk, with this background of romance and stern
beauty, stepped our part-Hawaiian hostess with the inimitable stately
bearing of her chiefly kind, clad in flowing white holoku; and a little
behind walked her daughter, Helen, as stately and graceful if more
girlishly slender. Our welcome was of a warmth and courtesy that still
further bore out the Spanish air of the place. But Hawaiian manners and
hospitality were never patterned upon the Spanish nor any other; they
are original, and as natural to these gracious souls as the breath of
their nostrils.
In bathing attire we all emerged from our rooms that opened upon a low
flagged veranda, and went barefoot along a grassy pathway wet with a
fresh rain shot from the near clouds which hid the upstanding heights,
to a large cement pool fed from a waterfall. The sun had dropped
untimely behind the valley wall, while the air was anything but summery
in this nook where daylight is of short duration; but the shock of cold
water sent blood and spirit a-tingling. Before we had finished a game of
water-tag, there was a merry irruption of young cousins from the city,
several of whom we greeted as acquaintances. Boys and girls, in haole
swimming suits or muumuus, they turned the tranquil late-afternoon into
a rollicking holiday, some making directly for the pool, others playing
hand ball, and all wasting no moment of their youth and high spirits
while the light lasted.
In the absence of her husband, Mrs. Macfarlane presided at the head of a
long table that nearly filled the low-ceilinged, oblong room in a wing
of the old house, and the more racket the hungry swarm raised, the more
benignly she beamed. The greater the number of guests and their
appetite, the greater the content of the Hawaiian-born.
Following dinner, we sat or lay about in the soft-illumined living-room,
gone all the bashful reserve that unknowing ones mistake for
superciliousness in the Hawaiian. Mrs. Macfarlane we coaxed from smiling
confusion to talk of her family’s interesting present and past, members
of whom, Cornwells and Macfarlanes, served in honored capacities under
the crowned heads of the country, as late as Queen Liliuokalani’s
interrupted reign.
In a comprehensive window seat some of the young men sprawled reading
magazines, and a quartet at the card-table was oblivious to all comforts
of deep easy-chairs, pillowed floor-nooks, and indoor hammocks. One
golden-eyed boy on a scarlet hassock strummed an ukulele to a low song
to his lady-love. She, from the cushioned recess of a hanging-chair,
gazed back langurously out of great soft Hawaiian eyes—lovely as an
exotic blossom, in her long, clinging holoku of rose-flowered silken
stuff. Oh, we were very Spanish this night—and all-Hawaiian.
And yet, there is but a trace of the Hawaiian stock in any of
these—like Jack’s French, or my own Spanish strain—an eighth, perhaps,
a sixteenth, a thirty-second; but the modicum of native blood that they
are heir to lends them their pleasant lack of sharp edges. Among such
one is gentled and loved into thinking well of oneself and all mankind.
“I have _Aloha nui loa_ for them, forever,” Jack murmured as we pattered
over the brick pave of the fragrant arbor to the quaint bedroom whose
small-paned windows might have looked out upon a New England landscape.
At six we were roused by the shouting clan trooping to the pool, and the
indefatigable Jack rose to write for a couple of hours before breakfast,
on his Maui article, “The House of the Sun.” By nine, with dewy cables
of roses about our shoulders, unwillingly we bade farewell to the
household, and drove under a lovely broken sky to the foot of the Nuuanu
Pali. Here, as much for the experience of climbing the up-ended ridges
as to ease the burden of the horses, we left the carriage to meet it at
the pass. Except for a short climb I once made at Schynige Platte in
Switzerland, this wet path, lying straight up an extremely narrow
hog-back, was the steepest and most difficult of my life. The ground
drops with startling suddenness on either hand—or foot; and for me it
was not infrequently both hand and foot. But we won over the horses, and
had leisure at the drafty platform once more to feast our unsatiated
eyes on the wide beauty of that scene which never can tire.
My husband, who holds that it is a waste of valuable effort to shave
himself when he might be enjoying the soothing ministrations of a
specialist, went to the barber in town while I shopped in the
fascinating Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and East Indian stores,
always with an eye to the fine Filipino and other embroideries, pina or
pineapple cloth, of exquisite tints, and unusual and gorgeous stuffs
worn by the oriental women in Honolulu—silk and wool and mysterious
fibers impossible to buy in the States, as there is no demand. And the
heart feminine thrills not in vain over kimonos and mandarin coats, for
the prices are absurdly cheap, and the colors food for the eye, with
untold possibilities for household as well as personal decoration.
From little houses and huts on the rolling fields, parties of natives,
men, women, old and young, and naked brown imps of babies, gather to
bathe—always the favorite sport—in a rocky basin of the verdant
ravine. From the balconies of the big house often we watch them playing,
in gaudy, wet-clinging muumuus, unaware of any haole observer—their
carefree, childlike selves, splashing, diving, laughing and singing,
laundering their hair, and calling to one another in wild, sweet
gutturals. This afternoon we were struck with a new note—a strange,
savage chanting. In it there was distinct, accentuated rhythm, but no
music as we understand the term—only the harsh, primitive voicing of a
man with the noble, grayed head of the old Hawaiians. Listening to the
curious untamed note, the like of which we had never heard, Mr. Thurston
said: “You are lucky to hear it under these circumstances—when the old
fellow thinks no one but his own people are listening. He is probably
intoning the _oli_, genealogy of one of the swimmers. There _was_ no
music, what we would call music, until the missionaries brought it
here.”
In the sudden transition from the ancient tabu system to an entirely
changed order that came with the death of Kamehameha I in 1819, followed
by the arrival from Boston a year later of the first missionaries, the
old “singing” became obsolescent. The new music, with its pa, ko, li,
conforming to our do, re, mi, was taken up by everyone, soon becoming
universal with these people who learned with such facility; and out of
the simple, melodious Christian hymning, the natives evolved a music
inoculated with their primal rhythms, that has become uniquely their
own. Captain James King, who sailed with Captain Cook on his disastrous
last voyage, makes the interesting statement that the men and women
chanted _in parts_.
The predominance of vowel and labial sounds lends a distinct character
to the tone-quality of Polynesian language, lacking, as it does our
consonants, _b_, _c_, _s_ and _d_, _f_, _g_, _j_, _q_, _x_, and _z_, so
that the upper cavities of the throat are not called into full play.
Therefore the voice, with its Italian vowels, developed a low and
sensuous quality that, when strained for dramatic or passional
expression, breaks into the half-savage, barbaric tones that stir the
ferine blood lying so close to the outer skin of the human. Sometimes
there is a throaty musical gurgle that seems a tone-language out of the
very tie-ribs of the human race.
The phrasing was made by old Hawaiians to suit the verse of the _mélé_,
a sort of chanted saga, and not to express a musical idea. The cadencing
was marked by a prolonged trilling or fluctuating movement called _i’i_,
in which the tones rose and fell, touching the main note that formed the
framework of the chant, repeatedly springing away for short intervals—a
half-step or even less. In the hula the verses are shorter, with a
repetitional refrain of the last phrase of each stanza. That
full-throated, lissom-limbed girl at the christening feast on the
peninsula illustrated much of the foregoing when she sang for the
dancers.
* * * * *
With a pleasant thrill I looked forward to meeting Alice Roosevelt
Longworth at a dinner and dance given this evening at the Seaside. In
one’s imagination she seems the epitome of the American Girl, and I
found her far more beautiful than her pictures, with eyes wide apart,
unafraid and level, looking like topazes from across the table in a glow
of yellow candleshades upon yellow roses. And when “Princess Alice”
smiles, she smiles, with eyes as well as lips. There is inner as well as
outer poise about her brown-golden head, and she is straight as a young
Indian and fair as a lily.
She and Jack were in no time cheek-by-jowl in a heated argument upon
“nature-faking” that would have delighted, by proxy, her illustrious
father, with whom Jack has all these weeks been tilting in the press;
and I heard him offering to back a bull-dog against the Colonel’s
wolf-dog, in the latter’s back yard!
I sat between Nicholas Longworth and “Jack” Atkinson, and our talk at
table—strange subject for a banquet—was largely concerned with the
welfare of the Leper Settlement, in which both Mr. Longworth and Mr.
Atkinson are extraordinarily interested.
The Longworths were scheduled to serve on the committee receiving
Secretary Strauss and his party from Washington; and though Jack and I
first begged off from attending the formal occasion, when we learned it
was to be in the old throne room of the Palace, we decided to go. Mr.
Atkinson whirled us away to the Executive Building, standing in its
illuminated gardens, and soon we were passing along the dignified line
of those receiving, out of which Mrs. Longworth, who is refreshingly
unbound by convention, temporarily strayed to bombard Jack with a new
argument in favor of the wolf-dog she had essayed to champion against
his imaginary bull-pup.
But what snared our fancy on this occasion was not the gathering of
American statesmen and their bejeweled ladies, nor the impressive
meeting between Secretary Strauss from Washington and Governor Carter of
Hawaii. Our eyes were most often with the throng of high-caste Hawaiians
in the lofty hall, more especially the queenly women, gowned in their
distinguishing and distinguished white holokus, standing proud-bosomed,
gazing with their beautiful eyes of brown at the white-and-gold girl who
is the daughter of their alien ruler, President Theodore Roosevelt. We
wondered what memories were in their brains as they recalled other
brilliant occasions when they had filed by the imposing crimson throne
yonder, to bow kissing the hands of their hereditary kings, and their
last queen. She, H. R. H. Liliuokalani, has resolutely declined all
invitations whatsoever to this house of her royal triumph and her
humiliating imprisonment, since 1895, the year of her formal
renouncement of all claim to the crown, and her appeal for clemency to
those who had taken part in the insurrection.
Honolulu, August 6.
A few kamaainas of Honolulu have long since discovered the climatic and
scenic advantages of Tantalus, Puu Ohia, one of the high, wooded ridges
behind the city, more particularly in the sultry summer months. Tantalus
is ideal for suburban nests, overlooking as it does the city and Waikiki
District, well-forested, with opportunity for vigorous exercise on the
steep sides of Makiki and Pauoa valleys, and to their rustic eyry at the
head of Makiki Valley, the Thurstons carried us by saddle.
One afternoon, while I languished with a headache, Jack returned
gleefully from a tramp, bringing me some of the wild fruits and nuts of
the mountain, among them water-lemons and rose-apples. The former are
round balls of about two-inch diameter, with greenish-brown, crisp rind
full of tart, pulpy, spicy seeds. Although quite different in flavor and
color, the formation reminds one of pomegranates and guavas. But the
rose-apple!—evergreen native of the West Indies, it is too good to be
true, for the edible shell has a flavor precisely like the odor of attar
of roses, which is my favorite perfume. Almost it makes one feel native
to the soil of a strange country, to nourish the blood of life with its
vegetation.
Last night, back in town, Jack, at the request of Mr. Thurston and the
Research Club of which he is a member, delivered his much-bruited
lecture, “Revolution.”
This paper of Jack’s, an arraignment of the capitalist class for its
mismanagement of human society, was originally a partly extempore flare
of the spirit delivered in 1905 before an audience of nearly five
thousand at the University of California, where he himself had studied
during part of a Freshman year.
Hawaii knows little of socialism, for she lacks the problems that
confront the United States and other great countries. Sugar is her
backbone, labor is almost entirely imported, and handled in a
patriarchal way that makes for comparative contentment, especially in so
rigorless a climate. Feudal Hawaii is; but the masters are benevolent.
And Jack, who stepped before the Research Club with the blue fire of
challenge in his eyes, his spirited head well back, and a clarion in his
voice, found these gentlemen to be their own vindication of the name
they had chosen for their Club. For with open minds they hearkened to
this passionate youngster, insolent with righteous certitude of his
solution of the wrongs of the groaning old earth; and presently, sensing
unexpected atmosphere of intelligent and courteous attention, Jack muted
his trumpets.
Discussion lasted into the small hours, and Lorrin Thurston, no mean
antagonist with his lightning-flash arguments, who laid every possible
gin and pitfall for Jack’s undoing, beamed upon the rather startling
guest he had introduced among his tranquil fellows, and whispered to me:
“That boy of yours is the readiest fellow on his feet in controversy
that I ever laid eyes upon!”
Honolulu, August 14.
To-morrow we embark once more upon our Boat of Dreams, for the Big
Island. Thence, if the engines prove satisfactory, and our new skipper,
Captain James Langhorne Warren of Virginia, measures up to Jack’s
judgment, we shall sail from Hilo in earnest for the South Seas. Captain
Rosehill and the crew had failed to assimilate.
And now, a few notes upon these latter days on Oahu.
No one interested should fail to visit the Entomological and Sugar Cane
Experiment Station, where the clear-eyed and sometimes weary-eyed
scientists are glad to explain the remarkable work being done in coping
with all pestiferous enemies of profitable agriculture in the Territory.
Mr. “Joe” Cooke, midway in a drive to the polo field, allowed us a
fascinating hour or two with our eyes glued to wondrous microscopes that
showed us an undreamed world of infinitesimal life.
In the open air once more, we set out for Moanalua Valley, to see the
polo ponies that were being conditioned for the great game, which we
attended two days later. The players of Hawaii cherish a widespread and
enviable reputation for their keen, clean game.
Saturday dawned clear and fine, after a hard rain. The beautiful course
around the slippery field was lined with automobiles, while an upper
terrace furnished the parked carriages an unobstructed view. Miss Rose
Davison, astride a mighty red roan, officer of the S. P. C. A., and a
splendidly efficient character, marshaled the crowd, with the assistance
of a staff of mounted Hawaiian police—magnificent fellows all. Every
one loves the Hawaiian police for their ability, courtesy, and
distinguished appearance.
Mr. and Mrs. Longworth declared that this tournament, set in the
exquisite little valley, and played so inimitably, was quite the most
exciting they had ever witnessed anywhere.
We had heard of the Bishop Museum as being one of the world’s best,
embracing exhibits from every isle in the Pacific Ocean, historical,
geographical, ethnological, zoological; and hither one afternoon we
went. Despite the exalted repute of this storehouse of antiquity, we had
passed it by, for the idea of wandering through a stuffy public building
on a hot day, concerning ourselves with lifeless relics, when we might
be out in the open-air world of the quick, had never appealed.
Once inside the portals of koa wood, as ornamental as precious marbles,
we knew no passing of time until the hour of their closing for the day.
The building alone is worthy of close inspection, finished as it is
throughout with that incomparable hardwood. In the older sections, the
timber has been fantastically turned, much of its splendid grain being
lost in convolutions of pillar and balustrade; but modern architects
have utilized the timber in all its beauty of rich gold, mahogany-red,
maple-tints, and darker shades, with sympathetic display of its
traceries that sometimes take the form of ships at sea, heads of
animals, or landscapes.
The Curator of the Museum, Dr. William T. Brigham, spends his learned
years in the absorbing work of sustaining and adding to the excellence
of his charge.
Of all the treasures of this passing race, we lingered most enchanted
before the superb feather cloaks, or capes, long and short, of almost
unbelievable workmanship; as well as helmets, fashioned of wicker and
covered with the same tiny feathers, yellow or scarlet, of the _oo_,
_mamo_, _iiwi_, and _akakani_, birds now practically extinct, and
modeled on a combined Attic and Corinthian pattern. The cloaks, robes of
state, called _mamo_, were the costly insignia of high rank; a wondrous
surface of feathers, black, red, red-and-black, yellow,
yellow-and-black, upon a netting of _olona_, native hemp. Some notion of
the value of these kingly garments may be gained by the statement that
nine generations of kings lapsed during the construction of one single
mantle, the greatest of all these in the Bishop Museum, that fell upon
the godlike shoulders of the first Kamehameha. Among the others,
remarkable though they be, this woof of _mamo_, of indescribable
flame-yellow, like Etruscan gold, stands out “like a ruby amidst
carrots.”
All this royal regalia, blood-inherited by Mrs. Pauahi Bishop, together
with the kahilis, formed the starting point for the Museum. And the
kahilis! Their handles are inlaid cunningly with turtle shell and ivory
and pearl, some of them ten to thirty feet in height, topped by
brilliant black or colored feather cylinders fifteen or eighteen inches
in diameter. In 1822, one of the second party of missionaries went into
ecstacies over these feather devices of Hawaii royalty:
“So far as the feather mantles, helmets, coronets and kahilis had an
effect, I am not fearful of extravagance in the use of the epithet
(splendid). I doubt whether there is a nation in Christendom which at
the time letters and Christianity were introduced, could have presented
a _court dress_ and insignia of rank so magnificent as these; and they
were found here, in all their richness, when the islands were discovered
by Cook. There is something approaching the _sublime_ in the lofty
noddings of the kahilis of state as they tower far above the heads of
the group whose distinction they proclaim; something conveying to the
mind impressions of greater majesty than the gleamings of the most
splendid banners I ever saw unfurled.”
Dr. Brigham comments upon the foregoing:
“Not in the least does the excellent missionary exaggerate in his eulogy
on the grand kahilis. Those of us who, in these latter days of the
degeneration of all good native works and customs, have seen the kahilis
wave above royalty, however faded—the finely built and naked bronze
statues that bore the kahilis replaced by clumsy, ill-dressed,
commonplace bearers of neither rank nor dignity—even the withered rose,
most of its fragrance gone, has yet appealed strongly to our admiration
and sympathy. The powerfully built chiefs, head and shoulders above the
common crowd, free from all sartorial disfigurements, sustained easily
the great weight of these towering plumes; but the modern bearer,
stranger alike to the strength and virtue of his predecessors, has to
call in the aid of stout straps of imported leather to bear the much
smaller kahilis of the modern _civilized_ days.”
A bit of heraldry would not be out of place here. I borrow Mary S.
Lawrence’s description of the Royal Hawaiian coat-of-arms. The device is
extensively reproduced in jewelry, its colors pricked up in enamel, and
is a handsome souvenir of these islands.
“It is divided into quarters. The first and fourth quarters of the
shield contain the eight red, white and blue stripes which represent the
inhabited islands.
“Upon the yellow background of the second and third quarters are the
_puloulou_, or tabu sticks—white balls with black staffs. These were a
sign of protection, as well as of tabu.
“In the center is found a triangular flag, the _puela_, lying across two
_alia_, or spears. This also was a sign of tabu and protection.
“The background represents a mantle or military cloak of royalty. At the
sides are the supporters in feather cloaks and helmets. Kameeiamoku on
the right carries an _ihe_, or spear, while Kamanawa, his twin brother,
on the left, holds a _kahili_, or staff, used only upon state occasions.
“Above the shield is the crown, ornamented with twelve taro leaves.
Below is the national motto taken from the speech of the king upon
Restoration Day: ‘The life of the land is perpetuated by
righteousness.’”
The coat-of-arms has not been used by the government since the islands
have been a territory of the United States.
No tapa “cloth” is made in Hawaii to-day, though these people formerly
excelled all Polynesia for fineness of the almost transparent,
paper-like tissue, beaten from bark of the _wauke_, paper-mulberry. It
was worn, several deep, for draping the human form. Now, for the most
part, Hawaiian tapa can be seen only in the Museum, where rare samples
are pasted carefully upon diamond-paned windows. Yards of it are stored
in drawers. There is little resemblance between this delicate stuff and
the handsome but heavy modern tapas of Samoa, with which one grows
familiar in the curio shops of Honolulu.
A replica of the volcano Kilauea claimed especial attention, in view of
our visit in the near future to the vent in Mauna Loa’s 14,000-foot
flank; and we lingered over a model, worked out in wood and grass and
stone, of an ancient temple and City of Refuge, or _heiau_, with its
place of human sacrifice at one end of the inclosure. A gruesome episode
took place shortly after this model was installed. A young Hawaiian,
repairing the roof, lost balance and crashed through, breaking a gallery
railing directly above the imitation sacrificial altar, where his real
blood was spilled—Fate his executioner, _ilamuku_.
One more of the countless exhibits, and I am done. Here and there in the
building, stages are set with splendid waxen Hawaiians engaged in olden
pursuits, such as basket-weaving and poi-pounding. The figures,
full-statured, are startlingly lifelike, except in the unavoidable
deadness of the coloring. It is impossible to imitate the living hue, of
which the natives say, “You can always see the blood of an Hawaiian
under his skin.” The model for one of the best of these figures died
some time ago; and to this day his young widow comes, and brings her
friends, to admire the beautiful image.
No matter how the very thought of a museum aches your feet, and back,
and eyes, do not pass by the Bishop Museum.
* * * * *
It was our good fortune to be bidden, with the Thurstons, to a New
England breakfast at the Diamond Head seaside residence of Judge and
Mrs. Sanford B. Dole. Judge Dole, who was President of the Provisional
Republic (often called the Dole Republic) that followed the collapse of
the monarchy, is a busy man; and so, rather than visit and be visited
during the week, at eleven of a Sunday he and Mrs. Dole welcome their
friends to déjeuner.
Imposingly tall, benignant and patriarchal, blue-eyed and
healthy-skinned, with silver-white hair and long beard, the Judge is
unaffectedly grand and courteous, making a woman feel herself a queen
with his thought for her every comfort. He must have been another of the
courtly figures of the old regime, and Jack always warms to the instance
of the gallant resistance made by him and another man, holding the
legislative doors against an infuriated mob during an uprising incident
to a change of monarchs. “Can’t you see them? Can’t you see the two of
them—the glorious youth of them risking its hot blood to do what it saw
had to be done!” he cries in appreciation of the sons of men.
Anna Dole, the Judge’s wife, is a forceful, stately woman of gracious
manner, with handsome eyes rendered more striking by her shining white
hair and snowy garb—a diaphanous holoku of sheerest linen and rare
lace.
And groaning board is just what it was, from alligator pears and big
spicy Isabella grapes, papaias, luscious Smyrna figs, mangoes,
pineapples, and “sour-sop,” a curious and pleasant fruit, of the
consistency of cotton or marshmallow, and of a taste that might be
described as a mixture of sweet lemonade and crushed strawberries.
Also we sampled our first breadfruit, roasted over coals, although not
at its best in this season. I concluded that upon closer acquaintance I
should like it as well as taro or sweet potatoes, for it resembles both
potato and bread, broken open and steaming its soft shellful of tender
meat, of the consistency of moist potato. The breadfruit has no seeds,
being propagated by suckers.
But this exotic menu was not the half. We were expected to partake, and
more than once, of accustomed as well as extraordinary breakfast
dishes—eggs in variety, crisp bacon, and delicious Kona coffee from
Leeward Hawaii—and, as if to bind us irrevocably to New England
tradition, brown-bread and baked pork and beans!
This leisurely breakfasting was done to the animated conversation of two
of the most representative of kamaainas, who talked unreservedly of
their vivid years and their ambitions for the future of the Islands.
Always and ever we note how devoted seem the “big” men of the Territory,
old and young alike, above personal aggrandizement, to the interests of
Hawaii. It looks to be an example of a benevolent patriarchy.
Following this matin banquet, which, it scarce need be urged, one should
approach after a fast, we reclined about the awninged lanai, talking or
listening to the phonographic voices of the world’s great singers, the
while a high tide, driven by the warm Kona wind, broke upon coral
retaining walls in a rhythmic obligato.
“The Doctorage,” Holualoa, Hawaii, August 21.
Long ago, when the building and purpose of the _Snark_ were first
reported in the press, Dr. E. S. Goodhue, brother of our noble Dr. Will
Goodhue on Molokai wrote to Jack, bidding us welcome when we should put
in at Kailua, in the Kona District of the west coast of Hawaii. And here
we are, surrounded with the loving-kindness of his family, in their home
nestled a thousand feet up the side of Hualalai, “Child of the Sun,” a
lesser peak on this surpassing isle of mounts—merely eight thousand
feet in height, and an active volcano within the century.
There was a touching gathering of Honolulu acquaintance on the 15th, to
bid the _Snark_ Godspeed for the Southern Seas, by way of Kailua and
Hilo on Hawaii. Piled to the eyes with sumptuous leis, we waved farewell
while the little white yacht, under power, moved out in response to the
new skipper’s low, decisive commands. She was a very different craft, or
so we thought, from the floating wreck that, praying to be unnoticed of
yachtsmen, slipped by the same harbor four months earlier.
With the exception of Nelson, a Scandinavian deep-water sailor, we all
fell seasick in the rough channel. Next day, with a dead calm of which
we had been warned, in Auau Channel between Maui and the low island of
Lanai, the big engine was started, with high hopes of reaching Kailua by
nightfall. But auwe! Something went immediately wrong, despite the
months of expensive repair.
At sunset Haleakala vouchsafed a glimpse of its head two miles in the
flushing ether, and on Sunday we sighted the island of Hawaii above a
cloud-bank. Crippled with neither engine nor wind-power, we could only
wonder when the few remaining miles would be covered; for still in our
ears rang tales of schooners long becalmed off the Kona coast, and of
one that drifted offshore for a sweltering month.
Monday night, four days from Honolulu, the _Snark_ wafted into Kailua.
There Kamehameha died in 1819, at the age of eighty-two, his active
brain to the last filled with curiosity about the world even to an
interest in rumors of the Christian religion, which had found their way
from the Society group. Three years after his death, Kaahumanu, favorite
of his two wives (a remarkable woman whose career would make a great
romance), together with her second husband, held a grand midsummer
burning of idols collected from their hiding places.
Kailua is the first port into which our boat has made her own way under
sail. It was an occasion of sober excitement, in a moonless night
lighted softly by large stars that illumined the shifting cloud vapors.
The enormous bulk of the island appeared twice its height against the
starry night-blue sky, and a few unblinking lights strewn midway of the
darkling mass hinted of mouths of caverns strewn in a savage wilderness.
When at last the searchlight was manned, fed by the five-horse-power
engine that had been driving our blessed electric fans, we discovered
the palm-clustered village on the shore, and, sweeping the water with
the shaft of radiance, made out a ghostly schooner in our own
predicament.
“Do you know where you are?—do you like it?” Jack breathed in the
almost oppressive stillness, where we sat in damp swimming-suits, in
which we had spent the afternoon, occasionally sluicing each other with
canvas bucketfuls of water from overside. Ah, did I like it! I sensed
with him all the wordless glamour of the tropic night; floating into a
strange haven known of old to discoverer and Spanish pirate, the land a
looming shadow of mystery; our masts swaying gently among bright stars
so low one thought to hear them humming through space, and no sound but
the tripping of wavelets along our imperceptibly moving sides, with a
dull boom of breakers not too far off the port bow. As we drew closer in
the redolent gloom, dimly could be seen melting columns and spires of
white, shot up by the surf as it dashed against the rugged lava shore
line.
Little speech was heard—the captain alert, anxious, the searchlight
playing incessantly to the throbbing of the little engine, anchor ready
to let go at an instant’s notice. Suddenly the voice of Nelson, who
handled the lead-line, struck the tranquility, naming the first
sounding, and continued indicating the lessening depth as we slid
shoreward in a fan of gentle wind, until “Twelve!” brought “Let her go!”
from the skipper. Followed the welcome grind of chain through the hawse
pipe, the yacht swung to her cable as the fluke laid hold of bottom, the
breakers now crashing fairly close astern; and we lay at anchor in a
dozen fathoms in Kailua Bay, all tension relaxed, half-wondering how we
had got there.
Hardly could we compose ourselves to sleep, for curiosity to see in
broad daylight our first unaided landfall. And it was not disappointing,
but quite our tropic picturing, simmering in dazzling sunlight. One
could not but vision historical enactments in the placid open bay, say
when the French discovery-ship _Uranie_ put in, the year of Kamehameha’s
death, yonder, past the wharf, where heavy stone walls mark his
crumbling fortifications. The _Uranie_ was received by a chief, Kuakine,
popularly called Governor Adams, from a fancied resemblance to President
Adams of the United States. The “palace” built by Kuakine still is to be
seen, across from the stone church with its memorial arch to the first
missionaries, who stepped ashore near the site of the wharf where we of
the _Snark_ landed, with their three Hawaiian associates, Thomas Hopu,
William Kenui, John Honolii, all returning from Connecticut. Besides the
Thurstons, the other first missionaries were: Mr. and Mrs. Bingham, Mr.
and Mrs. Chamberlain with their five children, Mr. and Mrs. Holman, Mr.
and Mrs. Loomis, Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles, Mr. and Mrs. Whitney. George
Kaumalii, son of the king of Kauai, was also with them, returning home.
“Kuakine,” says the late Dr. Sereno E. Bishop in his _Reminiscences of
Hawaii_, “was disposed to monopolize such trade as came from occasional
whalers.... He possessed large quantities of foreign goods stored up in
his warehouses, while his people went naked. I often heard my father
tell of once seeing one of Kuakine’s large double canoes loaded deep
with bales of broadcloths and Chinese silks and satins which had become
damaged by long storage. They were carried out and dumped in the ocean.
Probably they had been purchased by the stalwart Governor with the
sandalwood which in the twenties was such a mine of wealth to the
chiefs, but soon became extirpated.” And, later, the brig _Thaddeus_,
long months from Boston Town with her pioneer missionaries, was greeted
by the welcome tidings that the tabus were abolished, temples and fanes
destroyed, and that peace reigned under Kamehameha the Second, Liholiho,
who, among other radical acts, had broken the age-long tabu and sat at
meat with his womenkind.