We came back, as we had always known we should.
The _Snark’s_ voyage ended untimely in 1909—because we paid too little
heed to Dr. E. S. Goodhue’s warnings against “speeding up” in the
tropics. Jack’s articles, collected under the title of “The Cruise of
the _Snark_” and my journal book, “The Log of the _Snark_,” tell the
story of the wonderful traverse as far as it attained. To this day,
friend and stranger alike occasionally write from the South Seas that
the little _Snark_, now schooner-rigged, has put in at this bay or that
in the New Hebrides, under the flag of our French Allies—_Snark_ Number
One of a fleet of _Snarks_ trading and recruiting in the cannibal isles.
We came back: and on the wharf at Honolulu that morning of the
_Matsonia’s_ arrival, March 2, 1915, in the crowd we thrilled to meet
the eyes of many friends who had kept us a-tiptoe for days aboard ship
with their welcoming wireless Alohas and invitations.
An amusing incident did much to mellow the pleasure-pang of our meeting.
Nearest the stringer-piece of the pier stood a brown-tanned girl in an
adorable bonnet of roses, her dark eyes searching the high steamer rail.
“Gee! what a pretty girl!” exclaimed a voyage acquaintance at our elbow.
“Wouldn’t you take her for at least half-white?” Jack, following the
directing gesture, enthusiastically agreed that she must be “all of
hapa-haole,” and added:
“Furthermore, I’ll show you something; I’ll throw her a kiss, see? and
I’ll bet you ‘even money’ that she’ll respond. Is it a go?—you just
watch.”
And the conspicuous wafted caress arresting her eye, the young woman
answered with blown kisses and outstretched brown arms.
“Gee!” was the awed whisper. “Are they all like that?”
It was Beth Wiley, my cousin from California—who is as much or as
little Spanish as I, but shows it more. By several months she had
preceded us, and had become well-tanned by unstinted sunning on the
beach at Waikiki.
The malihini’s confusion was almost pathetic when Jack introduced “Mrs.
London’s cousin—I taught her to swim when she was a gangly kid!” and he
continued mischievously, “I’ll leave it to you, Beth, to convince him
that _part_ of that color of yours has been acquired since last I saw
you!”
* * * * *
Tremulous with memory of those hack-drives in the silver and lilac dawns
of eight years gone, we entered an automobile in the crush outside the
wharf’s great sheds, and proceeded to the Alexander Young Hotel for one
night. Kilauea being in eruption, we were to return aboard the
_Matsonia_ next day for the round trip to Hilo.
On this short voyage, for the first time from sea vantage, we saw the
Big Island’s green cliffs, stepped in dashing surf and fringed with
waterfalls, Mauna Kea’s fair knees and lap of sugar cane extending into
the broad belt of clouds—and, glory of glories, Mauna Kea’s wondrous
morning face white and still against the intense blue sky.
At Hilo, we were met by Mr. R. W. Filler, manager of Mr. Thurston’s
concrete dream of a Hilo Railroad, over which, in an automobile on car
wheels, we made the thirty-four miles to Paauilo in the Hamakua
District, and knew it to be one of the most scenically beautiful rail
journeys we had ever had the good fortune to travel. It was hard to
realize the accomplishment of these trestles, one horseshoe of which, we
understood, is the most acute broad gauge in existence. And thus, high
in a motorcar, upon steel tracks, we looked fascinated into the depths
of the same gulches, unbridged and perilous in Isabella Bird’s time, and
laboriously journeyed by ourselves nearly a decade ago. Sections of the
railroad, instead of imitating the bluff coast line, run through passes
that have been sliced deep through the bluffs themselves, the narrow
cuts already blossoming like greenhouses.
Beaching the terminal, Paauilo, a pretty spot on the seaward edge of a
sugar plantation, we lunched in a rustic hotel, before starting on the
return. Part-way back, we left the train, at a station where Mr. Filler
had been especially urged by Kakina to have an automobile waiting to
take us mauka to the Akaka Fall, seldom visited and rather difficult of
access. A muddy tramp in a shower brought us to the fall—a streaming
ribbon five hundred feet long, trailing into an exquisitely lovely
cleft, earth and rocks completely hidden by maiden-hair and other small
ferns. The origin of Akaka is told in a charming legend.
Strange it seemed to speed over the red road to Hilo in a “horseless
carriage,” reminiscent as we were of the four-mule progress of yore.
Good it was to meet up once more with the Baldings, Mrs. Balding
dimpling at Jack’s reminder of her pessimism concerning the _Snark_; and
with Jack’s First Lady of Hawaii, “Mother” Shipman, her Hawaiian curls
perhaps more silvery, but her face beaming as ever. And there was Uncle
Alec, smiling only more benignly.
Next morning, in an unyieldingly new hired machine, up mountain we
fared, noting a lessening of the forestage along the route, due to the
encroachment of sugar cane. In some of the cleared areas we recognized
the familiar ’ava plant of the South Seas. Still remained untouched
stretches, as of a dream within a dream for beauty, and again I could
vision the evanescent minarets and airy spans of the Palace of Truth I
had once liked to fancy growing before my eyes in the delicate tracery
of parasite foliage. Nothing seen in all the _Snark’s_ coming and going
among the isles under the Line had surpassed this enchanted wood.
Saving the Volcano for evening, we spent the day horseback, visiting
Kilauea’s environs of sister craters, some still breathing and others
dead and cold, shrouded in verdure. Kalauea-iki, one of the nearest to
the Volcano House and the new Crater Hotel, is an 800-foot deep sink,
with a diameter of half a mile. The neighborhood is pitted with these
void caldrons, and one could spend wonderful weeks in the jungle trails.
The Thurstons have made a study of the region, and find it one of the
most interesting in the Islands. Into a number of the more important
craters we peered, and our native guide finally led the way up
Puuhuluhulu around whose mellifluous name we had been rolling our
tongues from Honolulu, where Kakina’s last adjuration was not to miss a
sight of this particular blowhole.
Leaving the animals with the sandwich-munching guide, we carried our own
lunch to the summit, where, prone, we lay with faces over the edge of
the bewitching inverted cone. For an hour, like foolish children, we
played with our fantasy, planning the most curious of all contemplated
Hawaii dwellings, this time in the uttermost depths of Puuhuluhulu’s
riotous natural fernery, with a possible glass roof over the entire
crater!
Already, as we returned, low-pressing clouds above Kilauea were alight
with the intense red-rose glow of Halemaumau. And no remembered volcano
of Tana or Savaii made me any less excited at prospect of at last
beholding Pélé’s boiling well.
[Illustration: (1) Kahilis at Funeral of Prince David Kawananakoa. (2)
Kamehameha the Great. (3) and (4) Sport of Kings.]
Not by the old trans-basin trail did we pilgrimage to the House of
Everlasting Fire, but upon a new road graded through veriest
stage-scenery of ohia and tree ferns, a fairyland in the brilliant
headlights. One encircles nearly half of the great sink until, on the
southeastern section, the road winds down westerly and across the floor
to Halemaumau.
It was weird; and weirder still it became when, within a few minutes’
walking distance of the pit, the car, making for a walled parking
circle, ran into a waft of steam like a tepid pink fog. Out of this, or
into it, the eyes of an oncoming machine took form, burning larger and
brighter through the downy smother, and safely passing our own.
A well-defined pathway is worn in the gritty lava to the southeast edge.
Soon we were settled there waiting for the warm mists to incline the
other way and disclose the disturbance of liquid earth that we could
hear hissing softly, heavily, hundreds of feet beneath, like the sliding
fall of avalanches muffled by distance and intervening masses of hills.
Then, suddenly, the mist drafted in a slanting flight toward the western
crags, sucked clear of the inland sea of incredible molten solids.
Open-mouthed we gazed into the earth and saw nothing akin to the colored
representations of Halemaumau, but a tortured, crawling surface of
grayish black, like a mantle thrown over slow-wrestling Titans in a
fitful, dying struggle. Then a crack would show—not red, but an
intensely luminous orange flame-color—a glimpse of earth’s hot blood.
As our eyes became accustomed to the heaving skin of the monstrous tide,
they could follow the rising, slow-flowing, lapsing waves that broke
sluggishly against an iron-bound shore. And never a wave of the fiery
liquid but left some of itself on the black strand, its ruthless,
heavy-flung comb resistlessly imposing coat upon coat of rocky gore that
cooled, at least in comparison to its source, in upbuilding process.
Once in a while a bubble would rise out in the central mass, and burst
info a fountain of intolerably brilliant orange fluid, its scorching
drops fading on the dense black surge.
From the seduction of its merest smoke display to this deep-sunk
eruption of 1915, the House of Fire is all one in its confounding
marvel.
That night, when the first vivid crack broke the oily dark surface,
Jack, with a gasp of delight, seized my hand, lighted a match above it,
and peered closely at a big black opal, precious loot of Australia’s
Lightning Ridge, that I had named “Kilauea” before ever we had seen
Pélé’s colors. Tipping the stone from slanting plane to plane, its
blue-gray dull face cracked into flaming lines for all the world like
the phenomenon before us in the wounded side of Mauna Loa—a truer
replica of Halemaumau than any painting.
Upon our return, Mr. Demosthenes had the old guest book lying open in
the same long glass room, and again we read the page written years
before.
“Be sure, now, Lakana,” had been another final behest of Kakina’s, “to
call up Col. Sam Johnson in Pahoa, when you get to Hilo. I’m writing him
to expect to take you from the Volcano down to Puna. Never saw such a
man for _punch_.”
Next morning the Colonel arrived at the Volcano House, and drove us by
way of Hilo to Pahoa, where he is in charge of the lumber mill.
Nine miles from Hilo, at the mill of the enormous Olaa Sugar Plantation,
we branched off southwest on the picturesque Puna Road. Once clear of
certain beautiful miles of jungle, it crosses an interesting if
monotonous desert of aged lava, supporting a sparse growth of lehua and
ohia, and pasturage for cattle of the Shipmans and others. Mauna Kea and
her sister mountain were good to us that day, for both going and
returning we had fair view of their snowy springtime summits.
The mill at Pahoa demonstrated to us how the forests of lehua, koa, the
ohia, and all the valuable hard timber of the rich woods is converted
into merchantable lumber. And we came away with a handsome souvenir, a
precious calabash of kou wood (now almost extinct, owing to an insect
that deprives the tree of its leaves, heavy and polished like mottled
brown marble), a product of the mill.
After luncheon there were summoned three part-Hawaiian sisters, cultured
and modest-mannered, to sing. And there, my initial time in the District
of Puna—scene of Tully’s “Bird of Paradise,”—quite unexpectedly I
learned something of what these isles of the _Snark’s_ first landfall
meant to me. While the contralto and treble of their limpidezzo voices
sang the beloved old “Sweet Lei Lehua,” “Mauna Kea,” the “Dargie Hula,”
and the heart-compelling “Aloha oe,” suddenly I fell a-weeping, quite
overwhelmed with all the unrealized pent emotion of what I had seen and
felt the preceding days, and the gracious memories that flooded back
from the older past. And _auwé_, murmured the dusky sisters, hovering
about me in solicitude.
Once more at Hilo Harbor, the _Matsonia_, out in the stream, her siren
sounding the warning hour, was reached by launch from the pretty
oriental waterside at the mouth of the Waiakea. Our eyes were more than
a little wistful as in memory we sailed out with the _Snark_. But we did
it! “With our own hands we did it,” thus Jack; and the glamorous voyage
was now an accomplished verity, from which we had come back very much
alive and unjaded.
* * * * *
Back in Honolulu at daybreak, Jack declined to be ousted by any
officious steward until the final period was dotted to his morning’s ten
pages. Eventually he issued upon deck almost into the arms of Alexander
Hume Ford, whom we were no end glad to see, buoyant and incessant as
ever, brimful of deeds for the advantage of Hawaii as ever he had been
of their visioning.
The first responsibility, not to be neglected for a single hour, was the
hunting of a habitation that we might call our own for the time being.
Beth had reported the total failure of her exhaustive search. Honolulu
was chock-a-block with tourists. “Beginning to realize what they’ve
got,” Jack observed with satisfaction, though a trifle put out that his
prophesied appreciation of the Islands by the mainlanders should
interfere with his own getting of a roof-shelter.
We learned from one of the large Trust Companies that a cottage on Beach
Walk, a newly opened residence street not far from the Seaside Hotel,
was to be let a couple of months hence. We found it eminently suitable
for our little household of four, for Beth was to be one of us, and
Nakata, as usual, was our shadow. Next we devoted all our powers to
persuade the somewhat flustered owners that they needed an earlier visit
to the Pan-American Exposition than they had planned; and proceeded to
move in before they could change their minds, while Jack wirelessed to
the Coast for Sano, our cook.
Not a day passed, before, in swimming suits, we walked down Kalia Road
to the old Seaside Hotel, and once more felt underfoot the sands of
Waikiki. But such changes had been wrought by sea and mankind that we
could hardly believe our eyes, and needed a guide to set us right.
The sands, shifting as they do at irregular periods, had washed away
from before the hotel, leaving an uninviting coral-hummock bottom not to
be negotiated comfortably except at high tide, and generally shunned. A
forbidding sea-wall buttressed up the lawn of the hotel while the only
good beach was the restricted stretch between where the row of cottages
once had begun, and the Moana Hotel.
And what had we here? In place of those little weather-beaten houses and
the brown tent, the Outrigger Canoe Club had established its bathhouses,
separate club lanais for women and men, and, nearest the water, a large,
raised dancing-lanai, underneath which reposed a fleet of great canoes,
their barbaric yellow prows ranged seaward. At the rear, in a goodly
line of tall lockers, stood the surf-boards, fashioned longer and
thicker than of yore, of the members of the Canoe Club.
A steel cable, whiskered with seaweed, anchored on the beach, extended
several hundred yards into deeper water where a steel diving-stage had
been erected. Upon it dozens of swimmers, from merest children with
their swimming teachers, to old men, were making curving flights inside
the breakers. Several patronesses of the Club give their time on certain
days of the week, from the women’s lanai inconspicuously chaperoning the
Beach.
The only landmark recognizable was the date-palm still flourishing where
had once been a corner of our tent-house, now become a sheltering growth
with yard-long clusters of fruit, and we were told it was known as the
“Jack London Palm.” For it might be said that in its shadow Jack wove
his first tales of Hawaii.
All this progress meant Ford! Ford! Ford! Everywhere evidence of his
unrelaxing brain and energy met the eye. But he, in turn, credits Jack
with having done incalculably much toward bringing the splendid Club
into existence, by his article on surf-board riding, “A Royal Sport.”
Largely on the strength of the interest it aroused, Mr. Ford had been
enabled to keep his word to Jack that he would make surf-boarding one of
the most popular pastimes in Hawaii. Upon his representations the Queen
Emma estate, at a lease of a few dollars a year to be contributed to the
Queen’s Hospital, which her Majesty had established, had set aside for
the Club’s use this acre of ground, which, with the revival of
surf-boarding, was now become almost priceless.
Queen Emma was the wife of Kamehameha IV, mother of the beautiful
“Prince of Hawaii,” who died in childhood, herself granddaughter of John
Young, and adopted daughter of an English physician, Dr. Rooke, who had
married her aunt, Kamaikui. The Queen owned this part of the Beach, from
which her own royal canoes were launched in the good old days, and where
she also used the surf-board.
“Her estate holds this land,” Ford had said in 1907, “and I’m going to
secure it for a Canoe Club. I don’t know how; but I’m just going to.”
Honolulu had of course altered, and grown. New streets, like this our
Beach Walk, had been laid on filled marshlands at Waikiki, and bordered
with bungalows set in unfenced lawns, while the lilied area of
duck-ponds along Kalakaua Avenue had shrunken to the same populous end.
Beyond the Moana, Heinie’s, an open-air café chantant—and
dansant—beguiled the up-to-date residents and tourists, and a
roof-garden, with like facilities, was bruited for the Alexander Young.
The Country Club, out Nuuanu, boasted what we heard many a mainlander
term “the finest golf-links anywhere.” Diamond Head’s rosy cradle had
become unapproachable as a heavily fortified military position.
Residential districts of beautiful homes had extended well into the
valleys; some of the vernal ridges of Honolulu’s background had
blossomed into alluring building-sites, such as Pacific Heights; and
Tantalus was developing its possibilities. Kaimuki, on the rolling
midlands beyond Kapiolani Park, formed quite a little city by itself.
Kaimuki’s red lands, on the side of the gentle, seaward-tipped bowl that
holds Honolulu, seemed always to be brushed by the raveled ends of
rainbow-opal scarves. Never in the minds of living men, due to the
continuous storms that year, were there such rainbows over Oahu. We lay,
Jack and I, floating on the green hills of water beyond the inshore
surges, and bathed our very souls in heavenly color. To mauka, out of
deep blue skies pearled with magnificent clouds, out of the warm
palpitant chaos of reflected sunset over against the eastern mountains,
came the miracle, the rainbows, formless, generous, streaming banners of
immaterial, loosely-banded colors, frayed with melting jewels that
softly drenched the ruby and emerald vale and foothills. If I should
have to live in a house for the rest of my days, I should call upon my
memory of Oahu’s rainbow-tapestried skies, and dwell within that memory.
* * * * *
Automobile traffic had drawn the island closer together, and a drive
around Oahu, by the route we had formerly traveled, was more often
accomplished in one day. Once we spent a night on Kahuku Plantation, and
visited the huge Marconi Wireless Station near by. Our return to
Honolulu was made by way of the railroad around the extreme western end
of the island. This trip should not be missed, for it shows a remarkable
coast line, and splendid valleys of the mountain ranges, on the slopes
of which one may still see the ruins of stone walls and habitations of
long-dead generations. Automobile picnics from Diamond Head to Koko
Head, and others over the Nuuanu Pali to points on the eastern shore,
like Kailua and Waimanalo bays, together with a visit to Kaneohe Bay and
its wondrous coral gardens, with swimming and sailing in pea-green water
over jet-black volcanic sands, nearly completes the circuit one may make
of this protean isle.
That summer of 1915, during a warm spell in town, bag and baggage we
moved for a week to the little hotel at Kaneohe Bay. Each time we
emerged over the Pali into the valley of the Mirrored Mountains, Jack
would exclaim at the vast pineapple planting that had flowed over the
carmine hillocks below. Instead of bemoaning this encroachment of man
upon the natural beauty of the landscape, Jack hailed it with acclaim.
To those who deprecated the invasion he would cry:
“I love to see the good rich earth being made to work, to produce more
and better food for man. There is always plenty of untouched wild that
will not produce food. Every time I open up a new field to the sun on
the ranch, there is a hullabaloo about the spoiling of natural beauty.
Meantime, I am raising beautiful crops to build up beautiful
draft-animals and cattle—improving, improving, trying to help the
failures among farmers to succeed. _And_, don’t you see? don’t you
see?—there’s always plenty of wild up back. To me the change is from
one beauty to another; and the other, in turn, goes to make further
beauty of animal life, and more abundance for man.”
Indeed, from its small beginnings of but a few years before, the
pineapple industry had risen to the second in importance in the Islands,
giving place only to sugar. The exported product alone, for 1914, had
been valued at $6,000,000.00.[10]
Mr. Thurston took us horseback on one of the most interesting and least
known jaunts on Oahu. From Kaneohe we held east a quarter-mile to the
sandy mouth of the Kaneohe River, across a spit of mountain-washed
debris, through abandoned fishing villages and little tufts of groves;
thence along an arm of the bay, outside the ancient barrier of a fish
pond nearly half a mile in diameter, where the tide washed our horses’
flanks.
We attained to a plain partially covered with sand and sand hills
drifted up out of the ocean, and rode upon a dead coral bed formerly
undersea, which had been elevated several feet by volcanic action.
Northwest to the point at the entrance to Kaneohe Bay, from a small
fishing village we climbed a low cone to see the ruins of an old heiau,
where some seventy years ago a church was erected by the pioneer
Catholics. It is now in ruins, for the inhabitants, numbering several
hundreds, have passed away. The pathetic remains of their little rocky
homes can still be seen scattered about the slopes of the green hills
and upon surrounding levels, where plover run, with skylarks soaring
overhead. And for the first time in our lives, in this lonely deserted
spot we listened to the celestial caroling of those lovely flying
organisms, English skylarks, which our old friend, Governor Cleghorn,
now dead, first imported from New Zealand. Ainahau, auwe and ever auwe,
had been broken up into town lots, and was become the site of a
boarding-house! Never, once, did Jack or I, in passing along Kalakaua
Avenue, glance that way. Too sorrowful and indignant we were, that the
home of Likelike and Kaiulani should not have been held inviolate. A
distinguished architect, later passing through Honolulu, complained:
“One thing regarding Honolulu I would say is damnable: that is the
three-deck tenement on part of the old gardens of the Princess Kaiulani
at Ainahau. This three-deck fills me with amazement, disgust and
apprehension. This class of construction is not desirable under any
consideration and should be stopped in this extraordinarily beautiful
city.” He went on to say: “During my drive around the Island I came to
the belief, after a matter of conclusion extending over thirty-five
years of travel in Europe and Asia, that the Island of Oahu is the most
beautiful place on earth. You have here the home of absolute beauty, and
you should conserve it.”
On the seashore, inside a glorious surf, in view of Namoku manu, or Bird
Islands, where we could see myriad seabirds nesting and flying about in
clouds, we lunched under grotesque lava rocks, carved by the seas of
ages; and Jack and I studied the green and turquoise rollers that
thundered close, driven by the full power of the trans-Pacific swell,
figuring how we should comport ourselves in such waters if ever we
should be spilled therein. Again in the saddle, we let the horses run
wild over a continuous, broad sand-beach, for a mile and a half; to our
right a line of glaring sand hills, called Heleloa. Mounting these,
Kakina led us to the battle field of a century before, where the Mauis,
landing, had fought with the Oahus. The winds had uncovered a scattering
of bleached bones, whiter than the white sand, and we found one perfect
jawbone, larger than Jack’s, with several undecayed molars firm in their
sockets, and, curiously enough, no provision for “wisdom teeth.”
Near the shore at one point we turned aside and dismounted to hunt for
land-shells in the bank of a small gulch. For Lorrin A. Thurston was
become a land-shell enthusiast, and by now had, by personal searching,
amassed a fascinating collection of over 200 varieties, laid out like
jewels in shallow, velvet-lined drawers.
Following the northerly shore of Mokapu Point, the trail mounted the
outer shell of the little mountain, until, entering at the open south
side, we were in a half-crater where cattle and horses grazed. Tying our
animals, we lay heads-over the sea wall of the broken bowl, looking down
and under, two hundred feet and more—“Kahekili’s Leap”—where the ocean
surged against the forbidding cliff, from which our scrutiny frightened
nesting seabirds.
So far, we have met no one who has taken this journey of a day; but it
is easily accessible and more than worth while. Nothing can surpass the
view one has of the blue Pacific, white-threshed by the glorious trade
wind; and the prospect, landward to the Mirrored Mountains, is
indescribably uplifting.
Returning to Honolulu by motor a few days later, after heavy rains, we
thrilled to the sight of those same mountains curtained with rainbowed
waterfalls. Once in the pass, the mighty draft of the trades revealed
fresh cataracts behind torn cloud-masses, and looped and dissipated them
before ever they could reach the bases of the dark-green palisades.
One of the most attractive means of recreation here is under the
auspices of the Trail and Mountain Club of Hawaii, founded by Alexander
Hume Ford. It is allied with the local activities of the Pan-Pacific
Union, and associated with the American Mountaineer Club of North
America, central information offices in New York City. It is proposed to
establish a center of information in Honolulu, to act as a clearing
house so that a member of one Pacific outing club may automatically
become a visiting member of any other similar Pacific organization,
should he travel in other lands than his own. Mr. Ford pursues a
commendable if rather startling course in promoting this branch of his
work for the Islands. When a new trail is required, it is projected,
named for some citizen of means, who is then notified that it will be
his duty to bear the expense of building. Once completed, the Club keeps
the trail in order, the actual labor being done by the Boy Scouts, who
are advised which particular patriotic member of society will pay them
for their work. It is understood that the money goes toward the
equipment expenses of the Scout troop which clears the path and puts it
in order.
The outcome of all this agitation is that there are scores of different
mountain trails on the island of Oahu alone. Officers of the project
have spent thousands of dollars in erecting rest-houses, some of which,
as on the rim of Haleakala, contain bunks and camp accommodations. Mr.
Ford explains his method of drafting money and personal interest by the
fact that the Club’s annual dues of $5.00 are not adequate for its
upkeep and expansion, and so well has he presented his arguments that
his fellow citizens are convinced of the worth to the territory of his
unremitting drive to open up the lofty wonders of its interior to the
world at large.
Auto buses are used to transport hikers to points from which they may
radiate into the fastnesses, and steamers are sometimes chartered to
convey them to other islands, as say to a strategic harbor for the
reaching of Haleakala’s crater.
Occasionally a patron of the Club, alive to the opportunity for
increased health, mentally and physically, in a latitude wherein the
sea-level climate does not induce muscular effort except for water
sports, places funds at the disposal of the officers. And it may be the
Chinese, Filipino, or Japanese branch of the organization that is eager
to cut the trail. The animating spirit among these inter-racial limbs of
the body proper is one of mutual service.
The Associated Outing Clubs of Hawaii have selected Haleiwa—Waialua—as
the location for the first of their rest houses. To the dabblers in
sugar stocks, I have it from Mr. Ford, Haleiwa means little, and Waialua
everything. For Waialua means “two waters,” and the length of the
streams of Oahu that pour from the mountains to the sea at Waialua
spells millions of dividends; for here there is never a drought. So, to
the kamaaina Haleiwa is Waialua. He loves both. Waialua dividends make
Haleiwa, “House Beautiful,” week ends possible for him. On the bank of
the Anahula river, that flows into the sea near by, where the swimming
is so fine, there is left a wing of the old Emerson homestead, built of
coral in a grove of breadfruit. This has been secured by the Outing
Clubs to fit up for a camping place; and none lovelier can be imagined.
A fleet of canoes will be maintained upon the river. At the head of
navigation are the rapids where the natives net the _opae_ which they
use for bait in the ocean a few hundred yards away.
From Waialua there are splendid motor trips. One in especial leads
uphill at an unvarying five per cent grade through canefields to
Opaeula, nearly 2000 feet above the sea on the edge of a great canyon,
in the bottom of which there is a well-ordered rest-house in a tropical
grove by a large natural swimming pool. From this point one may follow
the well-cut ditch trails into the heart of the range. And this is but a
sample of the opportunities offered the visitor to Oahu and its
neighboring isles.
One evening we became acquainted with Colonel and Mrs. C. P. Iaukea,
part-Hawaiian, and looking aristocrats to their finger tips. He had been
Chamberlain to King Kalakaua, and accompanied Kalakaua’s queen Kapiolani
(probably named after the illustrious defier of Pélé), to London at the
time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. At present Colonel Iaukea is one of
the trustees of Liliuokalani’s estate. He stated that the Queen had
expressed a wish to meet London, and Jack, pleased that the meeting
should come about in this way, arranged to be present at a private
audience the following Thursday, March 11.
The Royal Hawaiian Band, conducted by the venerable Henri Berger, now in
his seventy-first year, after forty years’ conducting, was in full
attendance in the Queen’s Gardens at Washington Place, which, in this
city of notable gardens, is cited as the finest. Berger, owing to age
and failing health, was later retired upon a pension, and has since
died.
The dignified white mansion is as beautiful in its own way as the
gardens, and tastefully tropical, surrounded as it is by broad lanais,
with large pillars, supporting the roof in Southern colonial style. As
one Kamaaina has it: “The whole has an air of retirement expressive of
the attitude of the Queen herself.”
On the columned veranda, robed in black holoku, tender old hands folded
in her silken lap, Her Majesty sat in a large armchair, at her back
certain faithful ladies—Mrs. Dominis, wife of Aimoku Dominis, the
Queen’s ward, with her cherubic little son; Mrs. Irene Kahalelaukoa Ii
Holloway; and Mrs. Iaukea, all of them solicitous of their Queen’s every
word and gesture. Their veneration is a touching link to the close and
vivid past.
Liliuokalani’s fine face, as we saw it that day, was calm and lovable,
as if a soothing hand had but lately passed over it.[11] She raised
quiet, searching eyes, and upon Colonel Iaukea’s introduction, smiled
and extended her hand, which it is the custom to kiss, and which we
saluted right gladly. A few low-voiced questions and answers concerning
work Jack had done on Hawaii; the listening to a number or two from the
Band; and we were free to wander among the treasures of the house, than
which are no better specimens of royal insignia outside the Museum. At
length, Hawaii’s National Anthem, rising from under the palms, brought
us all to the lanai again, where the men stood uncovered.
Queen Liliuokalani’s own book, “Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen,”
published in 1906, by John Murray, London, should be read not only for
her viewpoint, but also because it is piquantly entertaining in its
lighter humors, and her naive descriptions of travel and characters in
the United States and England are delicious.
Returning from a luncheon given by that vital institution, the Honolulu
Ad Club, Jack burst into the house:
“Guess whom I met today! Two men, both of whom you have known, one here
and one in Samoa—and now risen to different positions and titles. I
give you three chances. Bet you ‘even money’ you couldn’t guess in a
thousand years.”
That was “easy money” for him, and I threw up my hands. Our fearless old
friend, Lucius E. Pinkham, once president of the Board of Health, was
now become Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, appointed in 1913 by
President Wilson, for a term of four years; and the other we had known
in Tahiti and Pago-Pago, C. B. T. Moore, erstwhile Governor at the
latter American port, and Captain of the _Annapolis_, now Rear Admiral,
stationed at Pearl Harbor. Later we exchanged visits with Admiral and
Mrs. Moore, and colorful were our reminiscences of days and nights under
the Southern Cross.
It would require a book in itself to tell of the revolutionary
alterations in Pearl Lochs, now possessed of all the circumstance of a
thoroughgoing naval station. On September 28, 1917, the Pearl Harbor
Radio Station was formally opened. In 1919, the drydock was completed,
at a cost exceeding $5,000,000.00. The opening was attended by the
Secretary of the Navy.
As for the old Elysian acre, we were informed it had changed hands and
the bungalow had been replaced by a more ambitious one. It would be
difficult to express why we never went back. Perhaps it had been a
perfect thing in itself, that experience, finished and laid aside in
heart’s lavender.
So much, briefly, for naval activity on Oahu. As for the Army, in
addition to the older forts, and the new fortifications on Diamond Head,
Schofield Barracks had sprung up, a city in itself, over against the
Waianae Mountains on the table-land, and we could hardly believe our
eyes, motoring from Haleiwa Hotel by way of Pearl Harbor, when they
rested on the modern military post that spread over the grassy plain to
the mountain slopes. Oahu, as if overnight, had become the largest
military station of the United States.
* * * * *
One Sunday we spent outside Honolulu Harbor on the famous racing yacht,
_Hawaii_; and in our hearts and on our lips was the wish that again we
were “down, hull down on the old trail,” with a hail and farewell to
every glamorous link of the _Snark’s_ golden chain of ports, thence on
and on through the years, from the Solomon Isles to the Orient, beyond
to the seas and inland waterways of Europe. “You never did gather all
that lapful of pearls I promised you,” Jack mused regretfully.
Four days after this yachting party, Honolulu and the rest of the Union
shuddered to the loss of the Submarine F-4. They went out merrily in the
morning—F-l, F-2, F-3, F-4—and all emerged but the last. For weeks and
months, during the work of raising, under supervision of the U. S. S.
_Maryland_, Captain Kittelle, there was a subtle gloom over the gayest
life of the capital. Outside the Harbor channel, where the submarine had
eventually slipped off coral bottom into deep ocean, from steamer and
sailer, canoe and fishing boat and yacht that passed in or out, leis
were dropped upon the mournful waters.
With the incursion of gasolene-driven craft and vehicle, the old-time
yachting has nearly lapsed. No more does one see the racing fleets
outside the reef. One can only hope that the matchless sport will be
revived.
Upon the Beach at Waikiki it was seldom we missed the long afternoon.
“I’m glad we’re here _now_,” Jack would ruminate; “for some day Waikiki
Beach is going to be the scene of one long hotel. And wonderful as it
will be, I can’t help clinging, for once, to an old idea.”
Under the high lanai of the Outrigger, we lay in the cool sand between
canoes and read aloud, napped, talked, or visited with the delightful
inhabitants of the charmed strand, until ready to swim in the later
afternoon. One special diversion was to watch several Hawaiian youths,
the unsurpassed Duke Kahanamoku among them, performing athletic stunts
in water and out. And that sturdy little American girl, Ruth Stacker,
with records of her own, could be seen instructing her pupils in the
wahine surf. George Freeth, we heard, was teaching swimming and
surf-boarding in Southern California. Our own swims became longer from
day to day. Still inside the barrier reef, through the breakers we would
work, emerging with back-flung hair on their climbing backs while they
roared shoreward. Beyond the combing crests, in deeper water above the
coral that we could see gleaming underfoot in the sunshafts, lazily we
would tread the bubbling brine or lie floating restfully, almost
ethereally, on the heaving warm surface, conversing sometimes most
solemnly in the isolated space between sky and solid earth.
The newest brood of surf-boarders had learned and put into practice
angles never dreamed of a decade earlier. Now, instead of always
coasting at right-angles to the wave, young Lorrin P. Thurston and the
half-dozen who shared with him the reputation of being the most skilled
would often be seen erect on boards that their feet and balance guided
at astonishing slants. Surf-boarding had indeed come into its own. And
it never seems to pall. Its devotees, as long as boards and surf are
accessible, show up every afternoon of their lives on the Beach at
Waikiki. When a youth must depart for eastern college-life, his keenest
regret is for the loss of Waikiki and all it means of godlike conquest
of the “bull-mouthed breakers.” No athletic-field dream quite
compensates. Surfing remains the king of sports. Young Lorrin, indeed,
at Yale, has captained his swimming team, the fastest that college has
ever put out in the east, to more than one world’s record and several
intercollegiate ones.
* * * * *
One night in early May, Mayor John C. Lane of Honolulu gave a great luau
in Kapiolani Park, where some fifteen hundred sat under a vast tent-roof
and listened to the flowery eloquence of Senators and Congressmen from
Washington. And it was to the venerable but sprightly “Uncle Joe” Cannon
we awarded the triumphal palm for the most sensible, logical
speechifying of the event. This magnificent luau, presided over by the
handsome Mayor, surpassed any in our experience the South Seas over.
“Mayor Lane ought to be re-elected indefinitely,” Jack would say, “to do
the honors of his office!”
The following day we sailed from Honolulu for Hawaii, but on separate
ships. The _Mauna Kea_ was chartered to take the Congressional party
junketing about the Islands, and Jack was bidden to be one of the
Entertainment Committee. Owing to the fact that the _Mauna Kea_ was full
to overflowing, so that many of the Committee bunked on deck, we
resident wives were blandly uninvited. But I, through a timely
invitation from the Big Island, was enabled to come in contact with the
august picnic party.
And so, with “_Aloha nui oe_” one to the other, Jack saw me off for Hilo
on the _Kilauea_, sister of the smart _Mauna Kea_, while twelve hours
later he was headed for Maui. My roommate on the crowded steamer was an
Englishwoman, busily knitting socks for her brothers fighting in France.
She told me how her husband, who had worked on the _Snark’s_ machinery
eight years before, when confronted with difficult or unsurmountable
obstacles or problems, had ever since declared: “This is as hard as
repairing Jack London’s engines!”
On Maui, Jack became much interested in the experiment that had been
made in small homesteading on government land; but he did not foresee
success in the venture. “You can’t turn the clock back,” he said. But
his reasons for his opinion in the matter are set forth in “My Hawaiian
Aloha,” his own articles which preface this book of mine.
And so I next saw Jack at Napoopoo, on Kealakekua Bay, with the Blue
Flush for background, and we agreed warmly that never anywhere had we
seen anything like it, and nothing to surpass. Here the Congressional
party disembarked to see the Cook Monument, and from Napoopoo were
whirled south and around through the Kau District, over a new, lava
highway, to the Volcano House. It was during this day’s ride, at
luncheon by the way, that the wires flashed to us the stunning news of
the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and a stricken look was upon the faces
of all for a time.
The machine carried a full and very jolly cargo back to Pahoa on the
Puna coast, for in addition to its driver, the exuberant Colonel, and us
two, there were Senator and Mrs. Warren, Mr. Roderick O. Matheson, long
a figure as editor of Kakina’s paper, and “Bob” Breckons, Hawaii’s
brilliant attorney and a unique personage in Islands affairs.
Again on the sulphurous brink of Halemaumau, Jack, who cared
comparatively little for spectacles of this ilk, remarked to me after a
long gazing silence at the increased flow and disturbance of the
mountain’s internal forces:
“I’m coming personally to understand your fondness for volcanoes—I
myself am getting the volcanic habit. I shall come here every time there
is a chance; and in future, if this pot boils up and threatens to boil
over, and we’re in California, we’ll take the first steamer down to see
it!”
The fame of Mrs. Johnson’s house party the next twenty-four hours, given
to her allotment of members of the junketing crowd and their
Entertainment Committee, is still talked in Hawaii. Among others from
Washington, besides Senator and Mrs. Warren, there were Senator and Mrs.
Shafroth and Mrs. Hamilton Lewis. Our two steamers arrived back in
Honolulu within an hour of each other. Mr. Thurston, who was aboard
mine, carried me up Nuuanu for breakfast on the well-remembered and
ideal lanai over the rocky stream; and I was led down into a magnificent
fernery connected to the lanai, roofed over a grotto hewn in great
bowlders on which the house rests—delightful and feasible arrangement
which I can well recommend to new residents. While still at breakfast,
we spied the _Mauna Kea_ entering harbor from Kauai 90 miles away, and a
taxicab delivered me on the dock exactly as my man, beaming at my
precise calculation, descended the gangway.
Shall I ever see Kauai? I had planned to do so; for this 1915 visit to
Hawaii I had expected to make alone, returning with my cousin. Meanwhile
Jack, for an eastern weekly, was to sail on a battleship with President
Wilson, attended by the Atlantic Fleet, through the Panama Canal to the
Exposition at San Francisco. But Jack repeatedly complained: “If you
knew how _much_ I’d rather go to Hawaii—but I need the money, if I’m to
carry out my schemes on the ranch!”
The official cruise being abandoned on account of war developments, he
contentedly declared:
“_Now_ I can go to Hawaii with you for a few weeks. And I’ll write a new
dog book while I’m there. And we’ll see Kauai, too.”
The few weeks became five months, and “Jerry of the Islands” was begun
and finished, to be followed by “Michael, Brother of Jerry.”
So it came to pass that Jack alone of our small family saw Kauai, the
“Garden Isle,” with its exquisite Hanalei Valley and bay, one of the
most beautiful in Hawaii; and Waimea Canyon, which he said beggared
description in grandeur and coloring, only comparable with the Grand
Canyon of Colorado. Jack came back promising that next trip to the
Islands we should together visit Kauai.
The president of the Board of Health, Dr. John S. B. Pratt, being absent
from the Territory, Governor Pinkham, always full of aloha toward us,
sent to Mr. D. S. Bowman, Acting, his earnest kokua (recommendation)
that we be granted a permit to revisit the Leper Settlement. We had long
since heard from Jack McVeigh, who affectionately assured us of his
personal welcome. He had lately asked Jack to give a lecture in
Honolulu, the proceeds to be applied toward erecting a new
motion-picture theater at Kalaupapa; but shortly the means came from
some other source, and the lecture did not take place.
Jack always disliked repeating even the most desired experience in
exactly the same manner; so this time, for the sake of variety, we were
to _descend_ the Molokai Pali. To this end, we landed from the
_Likelike_ one midnight, bag and saddle, at Kaunakakai, where waited
Henry Ma, a wizzled, clever little old Hawaiian, sent all the way from
Kalaupapa with horses. Miss Myers, a sister of Kalama of hearty memory,
going home from Honolulu, accompanied us up-mountain.
[Illustration: (1) Jack and Charmion London, Waikiki. (2) A Race around
Oahu. (3) Sailor Jack Aboard the Hawaii. (4) Pá-u-Rider.]
Thus, under a full moon, we retraced the road descended eight years
earlier in the heat of midday. The moonlight bewitched the remembered
landscape, and silvered the receding ocean floor; and very tenuous and
unreal it all seemed, as the eager horses forged lightly up, mile upon
inclining mile, into chill air, for which I, for one, was unprepared. To
Jack’s insistence that I wear his coat I refused to listen, until,
riding alongside, he pressed his warm hands to my cheek. “See—how warm
I am—you know _me_!” His circulation was always of the best, and never
have I known his hands to be cold. Even on frosty days, tobogganing or
sleighing, or long, damp hours at the _Roamer’s_ winter wheel up the
Sacramento or San Joaquin rivers, it was the same; “See—how warm my
hands are!”
Ten very short miles to ourselves and the home-bound animals lay behind
when we-reached the Myers’ house-gate. I shall always blame-sweet
Hawaiian backwardness that set a silence upon Kalama’s red lips. No word
she spoke except “Aloha,” as smiling she led the flagged way to the
guest-cottage. And how were we to know that this imperial-bodied,
full-blossomed Juno was molded on the frame of that tall, slim,
strapping cow-girl we had met nearly ten years ago? There was something
only vaguely familiar about her, and I dared to ask: “We knew you here
before?” Oh, shades of night, protect and hide! “Why, yes,” quietly, “I
am Kalama—don’t you remember?” Kalama! Kalama! Will you ever forgive?
Why were you so gorgeously, amply different that we knew you not?
“Do you know where you are?” this, when, after three hours’ sleep, Henry
Ma had tapped upon the begonia-screened window, and we had breakfasted
and mounted and were galloping over green pastures to Molokai’s great
falling-off place. Almost, as one hesitates to unlock a long-sealed box
of letters and pictures, I drew back from the imminent verge. How I
should like to have been the first who ever came suddenly upon this
unexpected void of disaster and gazed upon the incredible lapse of the
world below! We had yet to search for its equal.
A very different trail from the one we had never forgotten was that we
now descended—wider, and so depressed in the middle that the earth was
raised at the outer edge. Man nor beast could fall off the palisade
except he went out of his way to do so. But the action of water had on
the steepest declivities exposed large bowlders that were exceeding
disconcerting to horse and rider. Still hanging with hind-hoofs, while
feeling below with fore-, a grunt from the cheerfully alert buckskin
pony would advertise that its unprotected belly had come in contact or
impact with an equally rounded if less yielding object. Several times
our saddles slipped so far over-neck that the beasts almost overbalanced
to a somersault.
“It would be far simpler to walk and lead them,” Jack giggled. “But I
rode up the trail without getting off, and I’m going down the damned
thing the same way! What do you say?” And we did not dismount, save when
necessary to set back our saddles.
Once at the doubly luxuriant kukui cluster at the feet of the pali, we
saw a rider urging his flying steed in our direction—Jack McVeigh,
could it be? It was; and the handclasp and voice were the same, if more
than ever cordial. One of the first remarks was: “I wish you were going
to be here for the Fourth. We’re going to whoop it up in grander style
than ever. The Fourth you saw won’t be a patch on what’s going to happen
this time.”
Dr. Will Goodhue, a little heavier, and if anything more benign if that
could be, with his beautiful Madonna, in her arms their newest babe,
waited at the arbored gate to welcome us of the wayward feet. Dr.
Hollmann was now with the indefatigable Dr. George W. McCoy, at the
Kalihi Receiving Station in Honolulu, where subsequently we renewed
acquaintance.
The huge Belgian dairyman of old memory, good Van Lil, now a patient,
had married another, and the pair lived happily in a vine-hidden cottage
near Kalawao, making the most of their remaining time on earth. Beyond a
fleeting embarrassment in his vague blue eye, he met us on the Damien
Road with the undimmed buoyancy of other years, and our eyes could see
no blemish on his face. Probably we were the more affected, for in the
main the victim of leprosy is as optimistic as he of the White Plague.
Emil Van Lil was not the only one whom we saw who had perforce changed
his status toward society in the intervening eight years. The little
mail-carrier who had led us up out of the Settlement, we found in the
Bay View Home, cheerful as of yore, though far gone with the malefic
blight. And, auwe!—some of the men and women we had known here before
as extreme cases still lingered, sightless perhaps, but trying to smile
with what was left of their contorted visages, in recognition of our
voices. Others, whose closing throats had smothered them, breathed
through silver tubes in their windpipes. Strange is this will to
persist—tenacity of life!
To light the almost desperate gloom of pity that could not but overwhelm
me, Jack, with the shadow on his bright face too often there since the
Great War commenced, said:
“Dear child—awful it is; but awful as it is, think of how thousands of
healthy, beautiful human beings are making one another look in the
shambles of civilized Europe right now while we stand here looking at
these.”
Annie Kekoa, we were cheered to hear, had been discharged years before,
all tests having failed to locate further evidence in her of the
_bacillus lepræ_. Its depredations had ceased with her slightly twisted
hand.
With pardonable pride the Superintendent showed us through the new
“McVeigh Home,” for white lepers; and next forenoon, while Jack finished
writing a chapter of “Jerry,” I visited the Nursery, also new. There
behind glass, mothers may see their babes once a week until the tiny
things are removed to the Detention Home in Honolulu. Born as they are
“clean” of the disease, they are taken from their mothers immediately
after birth, since further contact is a peril most strictly to be
avoided.
Probably not one remained of the Bishop Home girls who had wrung our
souls with their plaintive singing; but for Mother Marianne, wraith-like
in her frail transparency, with blessings in her blue-veined hands and
old eyes that seemed to look through and beyond us, we endured, as in
the past, a concert. And it was no easier for them and for us than it
had been for us and those who had gone before. Again were the tender
things more sorrowful for my unconcealable grief than for their own.
But facts are facts, and joyous ones must overbalance the sorrowful. By
stern and sterner segregation, as was done in Europe, leprosy is slowly
being stamped out of the Hawaiian Islands. Eight years before, on
Molokai, there were nearly a thousand lepers, and the _Noeau_ made four
yearly trips to carry the apprehended victims of the Territory; now
there are a trifle over six hundred, and but one human cargo in the
twelve months disembarks at Kalaupapa. This diminution of roughly thirty
per cent of patients led Jack to prognosticate that fifty years hence
the good rich acres of the Molokai Peninsula will be clean farmland for
the clean, and moreover an accessible and unparalleled scenic wonder for
the travelers of the world.
“I am happier about this place than I ever hoped to be,” he imparted to
me. “Oh, don’t think for a moment that I minimize the dreadfulness of
leprosy. But I am certain now of the passing of it, if the Islands
persist in this rigid segregation.”
Jack ever stood reverent before the beyond-price work of Dr. Will
Goodhue toward freeing the inhabitants of the Settlement from their
thrall. Let me quote from his article, requested by the _Advertiser_
upon our return to Honolulu:
“I insist that I must take my hat off in salute to two great,
courageous, noble men: Jack McVeigh ... and Dr. Will Goodhue...
My pride is to say that I have had the vast good fortune to know
two such men. McVeigh, sitting tight on the purse-strings of the
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year appropriated by
the Territory, sitting up nights as well, begging money from his
friends to do additional things for the Settlement over and
beyond what the Territory finds itself able to-day to
appropriate, is the one man in the Territory to-day who could
not be replaced by any other man in his job. Dr. Goodhue, the
pioneer of leprosy surgery, is a hero who should receive every
medal that every individual and every country has ever awarded
for courage and life-saving... I know of no other place, lazar
house or settlement, in the world, where the surgical work is
being performed that Dr. Goodhue performs daily... I have seen
him take a patient, who, in any other settlement or lazar house
in the world, would from the complications of the disease die
horribly in a week, or two weeks or three ... and give it life,
not for weeks, not for months, but for years and years, to the
rounded ripeness of three score and ten, and give to it thereby
the sun, the ever changing beauty of the Pali, the eternal wine
of wind of the northeast trades, the body-comfort, the
brain-quickness, the love of man and woman—in short, all the
bribes and compensations of existence.”
But that is not all. Jack London’s hopeful prophecy did not take into
account the discovery of a positive cure for leprosy. Alas, that he
could not have read with me the glad, almost incredible tidings that
meet my eyes in newspaper and periodical. The latest is a quotation from
the lips of Dr. William J. Goodhue himself, speaking to members of the
legislature visiting Kalaupapa in 1921. Said he:
“With two years’ chaulmoogra oil treatment, I believe sixty-five per
cent of the chronic cases of leprosy on Molokai can be cured.” And
within ten years, he added, all cases should be cured, and Kalaupapa be
abandoned as a leper settlement. That same day, Dr. F. E. Trotter,
president of the territorial board of health, announced to the lepers
assembled in their amusement hall, that within a period of two years
probably not twenty-five of their number would be compelled to stay on
Molokai.
The feelings of those in the audience undoubtedly varied. To the
majority, the hope held out for a return to the outside world must have
been received with solemn thanksgiving; but there were some, I am sure,
who, suffering little, have been happy in the harmoniousness of life on
the peninsula, and who look with dismay upon being torn from its care
and kindness.
The astounding revelation, after many centuries, is based upon results
obtained at Kalihi, under Dr. J. T. McDonald, Director Leprosy
Investigation Station, from the use of chaulmoogra oil. The history is
brief. In 1918, the distinguished chemist, Dr. Arthur L. Dean, president
of the University of Hawaii, and head of its chemistry department, was
asked by the United States Public Health Service to add to the college
research work some scientific problems in relation to chaulmoogra oil,
which had enjoyed a good reputation with experimenters in different
parts of the world. Chaulmoogra, according to my Standard Dictionary, is
an East-Indian tree (Gynocardia odorata) of the Indian plum family, with
a succulent fruit yielding a fixed oil.
It seems that the ethyl esters of the fatty acids of the oil had been
reported by observers elsewhere to be ineffective on leprosy. Dr. Dean,
however, succeeded in producing a form of that derivative of the oil,
which in its curative effects on the patients of Kalihi Hospital has
surpassed, so far as known, anything ever attained in the line of
leprosy therapy.
It was in the beginning of the reign of Kamehameha V, Prince Lot, that
compulsory segregation was established by law and the process of
isolation commenced. And now, over half a century later, in no equal
period of the history of segregation in the Hawaiian Islands have there
been so many voluntary surrenders as since the “Dean Cure” has been
known to make headway. Not only have adults asked to be taken for
treatment, but children have been brought freely as soon as the nature
of their disease was guessed by parents and guardians. This is in
striking contrast to the necessity in past years of arresting suspected
lepers through deputy sheriffs.
The Kalihi Station is flooded with letters from all over the world,
requesting its remedies. The reply must perforce be that these are still
of an experimental nature, and not yet commercially available; also that
they are for hospital treatment, where the patient is under observation;
that they do not lend themselves to the practice even of the family
physician; and that they are impossible of self-administration.
Dr. Goodhue is using Dr. Dean’s derivatives of chaulmoogra oil at
Kalaupapa; and out of the five hundred and twelve patients, one hundred
and seventy-five have been taking regular treatment. Lack of oil is the
sole reason that all were not sharing in the capsules or the hypodermic
injections; but a full supply has been promised. At the meeting in
Kalaupapa, above referred to, Senator L. M. Judd, commenting upon the
willingness of the legislature to do everything possible for the
patients, remarked that the board of health budget is larger in 1921
than the territorial budget was eight years ago. Dr. Dean, called to
speak, was not to be found in the hall. Summoned from outside, he spoke
briefly, saying that the laboratory of the University of Hawaii, its
force supplemented by workers furnished by the board of health, is
working to turn out the oil in sufficient quantities for all needs.
But it was our friend Charles F. Chillingworth, president of the senate,
who brought up the problem of finding homes for the patients who would
be paroled after they had made Kalaupapa their home for years. He
suggested the homesteading by them of lands on Molokai, and voiced his
intention of taking the question before the governor and the
legislature. The Hawaiian Annual, issued by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau,
and the yearly Report of the Governor of Hawaii, trace the progress of
the Cure.
For those who have been measurably happy on that verdant cape, and are
loth to bid it farewell, how ideal it would be if their homesteads
eventually could be chosen from its grasslands, and the yielding valleys
of the pali, no longer a barrier to outside intercourse.
But to return:
In a machine, by way of a new boulevard on the coast, we sped to
Kalawao, and saw the faithful Brother Dutton, alert as ever among his
pupils; then passed on to the imposing Federal Leprosarium on the
windswept shore in view of the lordly front of promontories with their
feet in the deep indigo sea. This Leprosarium had been built at a cost
of $300,000, and was now abandoned and falling into the swift decay of
disuse in the tropics. Such a Leprosarium was never known. Jack McVeigh
almost wept as he fingered the full equipment of blankets molding in
their original wrappings: the beds, the washstands, the endless costly
paraphernalia of a hospital, lying inutile and deteriorating, which he
was unable to put into needful circulation in the Settlement. Even the
fine dynamo, which a caretaker was paid to keep from rusting—“Think how
this could furnish my people with electricity!” he mourned. O red, red
tape—what a curious institution dost thou create!
Jack London very shortly got himself into trouble by airing his views in
the _Advertiser_, which stirred up a tidy tempest of protest in
Washington, D. C.; but he was, after much hot correspondence in the
press, the means of Jack McVeigh finally getting his selflessly covetous
hands on the outfit of the ambitious edifice.
Eight months after Jack’s death, the _Pacific Commercial Advertiser_
contained a column stating that the Federal Leprosarium would probably
be torn down and the material used for building cottages in the
Settlement, which, J. D. McVeigh is quoted as saying, “it would be a
God-send to secure.” In that column Jack London is mentioned as having
been first to suggest such action.
For some reason the edifice has not been touched; and I notice that Dr.
Goodhue in 1921, has offered to use it as a hospital for the treatment
of patients taking chaulmoogra oil.
By a strange fatality, writes Dr. J. T. McDonald in the Journal of the
American Medical Association, of the four principal scientists who have
resided and worked in the Settlement, three are dead. But not of the
disease which they were investigating. One succumbed to pneumonia, two
from nephritis. The fourth, Dr. George W. McCoy, is now director of the
Hygienic Laboratory at Washington.
Mr. Thurston had long planned a Japanese sampan trip from Honolulu to
the non-leper valleys of windward Molokai, which lie between those
stately promentories beyond Kalawao. And so, early on Sunday,
“Decoration Day,” according to prearrangement by wireless and telephoned
to the Settlement, a smart blue sampan hove in sight around the pali
headland, and lying off-shore sent in a coffin-shaped tender with an
alarming freeboard that made it appear topheavy. Kakina possessed no
permit and therefore did not so much as step on the Kalaupapa
breakwater-landing.
Aboard the outlandish power-boat, we found Mr. W. L. Emory, an architect
of Honolulu, and his son Kenneth, and, to our hearty delight, Mr. Jack
Atkinson, who had not yet decided whether or not he would be seasick. We
decided for him, if unwittingly. A rainbow-and-silver sickle of an aku,
bonita, was presently seen tripping the wave-tops at the end of the
Japanese sailors’ trolling-line. This, promptly dispatched and prepared
with Japanese soyu—to Jack and me more toothsome than any raw
oysters—proved the last straw, not to mix metaphors, to Mr. Atkinson’s
camel of control.
Oh, the rich life we lived on our _via regia_ of happiness! Here were we
again, in a small boat, sixty feet over all—“Only five feet longer than
the _Snark_, Mate-Woman!” running before the big coastwise seas that
heaved and broke in jeweled fountains almost over the fleeing stern.
Again the “stinging spindrift” was in our faces, and I could have cried
for joy at being on even so small a portion of “the trail that is always
new.”
Skirting the black lava-bound peninsula, with its combing surf, we were
soon in calmer water off the mouth of the riotous valley where we had
ridden that long-ago day, its walls rising thousands of feet into the
blue. It gave us an adventurous, alert feeling to skim the glassy swell
under those overtowering somber cliffs, in the passes between shore and
the three dark-green abrupt islets, fragments left from old convulsions
of the riven island. The largest, Mokapu, over a hundred feet high, is
crowned with mosses and shrubs, and a species of stunted palm tree found
nowhere else in the world save, perhaps, on Necker, another islet of
Hawaii.
The air rustled with wings, around and overhead, and Jack and I thrilled
again to the call of the bosun bird, koae, and watched rapt its flight,
high, high, and higher, above the pure white waterfalls that, spent in
the wind, never reached the sunshot dark-sapphire brine.
Two miles or so beyond the last valley we had known, the sampan rounded
into Pelekunu, unknown to the tourist, and visited by no one we had ever
met. No vessel can approach the beach of its U-shaped bay, which shelves
steeply out of deep water, bluer than the staring-blue sampan. “Why, the
valley ran into the ocean,” Kenneth observed.
No possible landing place could we detect, and followed the slant eyes
of the Nipponese skipper and his men while the oriental launch chugged
steadily into mid-bay, presently making in closer to the beetling cliff
on our right. A ledge of volcanic rock, jutting into the ocean-deep
water, was indicated as the landing; but slow-surges swept rhythmically
across it. “Can’t help being glad we know how to swim,” Jack remarked,
every sailor-sense of him on the _qui vive_. Our problem lay in gauging
the leap from the top-heavy marine coffin at the exact right moment.
Only in quiet weather can any sort of connection be effected. If it be a
trifle rougher than on this day, a basket on a derrick is lowered into
the boat for passengers to climb into.
I decided to try both ways, and, once safely on the ledge, indicated to
several native youngsters who had run the half mile from the village at
the head of the U, to send down the rattan car. Swinging up in the air,
the cable manipulated by two mere children, I had a decided if
precarious advantage over my companions who clutched their way up a long
vertical ladder.
Our slight luggage disappeared villageward in the arms of the natives,
and we followed at leisure the tropic trail. It is a story in itself,
that night and the next day in the isolate valley of Pelekunu. The sea,
and this at rare intervals, is its sole egress, except by way of a
precipitous trail that attains to a height of nearly 4500 feet, and it
is accessible only to those who have clinging abilities second to none
but wild goats. The few inhabitants, living in weather-grayed houses
almost as picturesque as their hereditary lauhala huts, welcomed us with
wide arms, and, like souls of grace we had known so sweetly in the South
Seas, gave us their best. A Hawaiian pastor and a Belgian priest vie in
kindness to their limited flocks, and all proffered us the freedom of
the place.
Up wet and steaming paths we strove through hot-house plants that shook
perfumed raindrops upon us, into the short, mounting vale; and I, while
the men went landshell-hunting with and for the eager Kakina, idled in
deep grass like that remembered of Iao and Tantalus. I tried hard to
realize the earthly actuality of this amphitheater of greenest green
swishing with water-courses and long falls, and the intense inshore
peacock-green of the precipitously walled bay, turning to intenser
peacock-blue outside, clear to the low white wool-packs on the intensest
indigo horizon.
“We’ll return here some day, when we needn’t hurry; and then we’ll go
into Wailau, too,” Jack, who had been especially happy on this little
side-voyage, endeavored to compensate my regret in passing the next
lovely rent in the shore Wailau, “four hundred water-falls”—lovely as
Pelekunu, with an almost impregnable partition between the two. What we
saw from the resumed sampan trip, young Kenneth Emory, in Ford’s
_Mid-Pacific Magazine_, later on described too happily to omit:
“With each revolution of the propeller, scenes were laid open
whose magnificence and beauty surpassed all that we thought
impossible to surpass the day before. A plateau three thousand
feet high and a mile long ended in one vast pali—cut down as if
by a knife. Waterfalls, peaceful vales, lagoons hidden under
dark caverns, tropical birds floating above, vines swaying in
the wind, every form and color of beauty lay revealed upon the
grand precipice above us.”
Some of the finest scenery in this island, Molokai nui a Hina, “The
Lonely Isle,” is to be found in the valley of Halawa. “The traveler,”
wrote “A Haole,” in 1854, “stumbled upon its brink unawares.” At a depth
of nearly twenty-five hundred feet below, there spreads out a panorama
of exquisite beauty. Several large cascades spring hundreds of feet into
the valley. These, and scores of taro beds, with a scattering of native
dwellings, can all be seen in a sweeping glance. “It seems,” the old
writer said, “as if one leap would lodge the visitor at the foot of the
enormous walls which bound this earthly Eden.”
He tells how the scenes in Pilgrim’s Progress had stayed in his
consciousness since childhood, and how that “matchless allegory” welled
up in memory as here on Molokai he came upon the Delectable Mountains,
and the Land of Beulah, and explored their wonders.
Halawa is little changed in this day, they say, and is quite accessible.
Hawaii is awakening to the possibilities of this island so little known
by travelers; and hotels are planned at strategic points to enable the
visitor to reach novel sights in the “Paradise of the Pacific” which
have so far been unheard-of. I, for one, shall make my pilgrimage to
that Molokai, I have not seen; and I shall tarry at leisure until I have
known it all.
A correspondent writes me from Pukoo, on the southeast rim of Molokai:
“I live here in my house by the sea, as isolated as if I were in Tonga.”
But the years are few ere “the horn of the hunter,” to say nothing of
the honk of the gas-car and the strident explosion of aeroplane enginery
will daily contest the supremacy of the birds in the utmost fastnesses.
Regretfully enough, one must remember that the swarming of the white
sojourners means the gradual disappearance of the last indigenes, until
now practically undisturbed in their lovely retreats on the edge of the
world, by the gruelling march of events outside in that world.
Next we voyaged to Maui. How strange to ascend Haleakala in an
automobile!—oh, not to the summit, but even to the Von Tempsky’s and
some miles above.
Kahului had fulfilled its promise and become a lively young town.
Wailuku remained as if unchangeably serene; and fabulous Iao transcended
all recollection of it. Then we heard the voices of the Vons over the
telephone from Wreath of Surf, Kaleinalu by the sea, and next from their
smart motor car—the same debonair Von, and the two elder girls grown to
splendid womanhood. Lorna, thirteen, brought up as a girl in Hawaii may
gloriously be, to the free life of saddle and range, could rope cattle
with the best. At the races in Kahului, we saw Jubilee’s colt, Wallaby,
carry off honors for Gwendolen.
During the weeks spent there, I noticed with surprise and faint
misgiving that Jack stayed rather close to the house. “Oh, you girls run
along... I thing I won’t ride to-day. There’s so much to read—I can
never catch up. Perhaps I’m lazy; I’d rather lie around and read. We’ll
do Haleakala next time we come.” But he never looked into Haleakala
again. Even then the Shadow was upon him.
-----
[10] Report for 1918 showed an export of 20,000,000 cans of pineapple.
In March, 1920, the estimated pack for that year was 6,000,000 cases.
All this in face of certain discouragements, such as “pineapple wilt,”
“Kauai blight,” and the objection of large areas of plants to flourish
in manganese soil.
[11] During the World War, for the first time since her abdication, the
American flag floated over Washington Place, indicating the Queen’s
sympathy with our entry into the fight against Prussianism. On November
11, 1917, Liliuokalani, last sovereign of the Hawaiians, passed away.