“My dream is of an island place
Which distant seas keep lonely;
A noble island, in whose face
The stars are watchers only.
Those bright still stars! they need not seem
Brighter or stiller in my dream.”
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
In the nineteenth degree of north latitude, and one hundred and
fifty-five degrees west, lies a large and important island, one of
a group stretching for several hundred miles in a north-westerly
direction. At the date of this tale, it was wholly unknown, except to its
aborigines. Situated in the centre of the vast North Pacific, not another
inhabitable land within thousands of miles, it was quietly biding its
destiny, when in the circumnavigating advance of civilization westward
to its original seat in the Orient, it should become a new centre of
commerce and Christianity; and, as it were, an INN of nature’s own
building on the great highway of nations.
Up to this time, however, not a sail had ever been seen from its shores.
Nothing had ever reached them within the memories of its population, to
disprove to them that their horizon was not the limits of the world, and
that they were not its sole possessors. It is true, that in the songs of
their bards, there were faint traces of a more extended knowledge, but
so faint as to have lost all meaning to the masses, who in themselves saw
the entire human race.
Hawaii, for such was the aboriginal name of the largest and easternmost
island, was a fitting ocean-beacon to guide the mariner to hospitable
shores. Rising as it does fourteen thousand feet above the level of the
sea, snow-capped in places, in others shooting up thick masses of fire
and smoke from active volcanoes, it could be seen for a great distance
on the water, except, as was often the case, it was shrouded in dense
clouds. Generally, either the gigantic dome of Mauna Loa, which embosomed
an active crater of twenty-seven miles in circumference on its summit,
which was more than two and a half miles high, or the still loftier,
craggy and frost-clad peaks of Mauna Kea, met the sight long before
its picturesque coast-line came into view. As usually seen at a long
distance, these two mountain summits, so nigh each other and yet so
unlike in outline, seemingly repose on a bed of clouds, like celestial
islands floating in ether. This illusion is the more complete from their
great elevation, and coming as they do with their lower drapery of vapor,
so suddenly upon the sight of the voyager, after weeks, and, as it often
happens, months of ocean solitude.
Nowhere does nature display a more active laboratory or on a grander
scale. At her bidding, fire and water here meet, and, amid throes,
explosions, upheavings and submergings, the outpourings of liquid rock,
the roars of a burning ocean, hissing, recoiling and steaming at the base
of fiery mountains, which amid quakings and thunders shoot up high into
air, not only flame and smoke, but give birth to other mountains, which
run in fluid masses to the shore forming new coast-lines, she gradually
creates to herself fresh domains out of the fathomless sea, destined by
a slower and more peaceful process to be finally fitted for the abode of
man. For ages before the human race appeared, this fierce labor had been
going on. Slowly decreasing in violence as the solid fabric arose from
the sea, the vegetable and animal kingdom at last successively claimed
their right to colonize the land thus prepared for them. Nature, however,
had not yet finished the substructure; for although she had extinguished
a portion of her fires and allowed the forests to grow in some spots in
undisturbed luxuriance, yet there were others still active and on a scale
to be seen nowhere else on the globe. At intervals, rarer as they became
older, they belched forth ruin, to add in time greater stability and more
fertility to the new-formed earth.
Even to this day, Hawaii continues in a transition state. The vast
agencies to which the island owes its origin, not unfrequently shake it
to its centre, giving a new impetus to its geological growth. Sometimes
it rocks, so it seems, on its centre, and alternately rising and falling,
the ocean invades the land, sweeping from the coast by its fast rushing
tide,—piled up by its velocity into such a wall of water as in its recoil
overwhelmed Pharaoh’s host in the Red Sea,—whole villages, and carrying
off numbers of their struggling population to perish in its vortex. So
rapid is its reflux and over so vast a space, that it often leaves bare
its own bed, with the finny tribes stranded amid its coral forests, or
flapping helplessly on its sandy bottom. When this phenomenon occurs it
is generally in quick successive waves, without previous warning, and so
rapidly, that were it not for the amphibious habits of the islanders, the
destruction of life would be great.
The sister islands further to the west have long since ceased to fear
earthquake or volcanic eruption. Their surfaces are covered with extinct
craters, lined in general with verdure and melodious with the notes of
birds. Around each of the group, by the labors of the tiniest of her
creatures, as if to show how the feeblest agencies at her bidding can
control the strongest, Nature is slowly but surely constructing a coral
frame, a fit setting to her sunny picture. The busy little zoöphyte, by
its minute industry sets that bound to the ocean, which Canute in all his
power was unable to do. Over its barriers and through its vegetable-like
forms, trees and shrubs, blossoms and flowers, rich in every hue which
gives beauty to the land, the rushing wave can pass only by giving toll
to these water bees. They have not to seek their food, but they make the
everlasting waters bring it to their door, and pour over them, in their
struggle to reach the shore, a glad symphony of power and praise.
On the northeast of Hawaii lies a deep bay, fringed with coral reefs,
but in many places presenting high cliffs, precipitous masses of volcanic
rock, rent by deep chasms, or forming valleys through which pour streams
of fresh water along banks of surpassing fertility. Everywhere the
soil is good and the vegetation profuse. Numerous cascades tumble from
the hills in all directions, giving life and music to the scene. Some
are mere threads of water lost in spray amid rainbow arches, before
reaching the rocky basins underneath. Others shoot from precipices,
waving, foaming torrents, which thunder over stream-worn rocks, far
away beneath in sunless and almost inaccessible dells. Emerging from
these into placid rivers, they flow quietly on till meeting the incoming
surges of the ocean, which, as they struggle over the coral bars at
their mouths, whiten their surfaces with foam and break into eddies and
uncertain currents, creating trying navigation for the frail canoes of
the islanders.
The vegetation was unequal in luxuriance. In some spots it pushed its
verdure quite into the brine, which not unfrequently watered the roots
of trees that overhung it. In others, broad belts of sand came between
the grasses and the water. These glistened in the sun’s rays in contrast
with the back ground of dense green, like burnished metal. Earth, the
provident mother, had not, however, so overdone her good works, as in
some of the more southern groups to provide a meal without other labor
than plucking. There were fine groves of the different species of
food-bearing palms,—orchards of bread-fruit and other kinds of trees,
from which man could derive both sustenance and material to clothe and
house him; but for these purposes and the culture of the taro plant,
which was his main resource, no little labor and skill were necessary.
Metals were unknown. The animal and feathered creature were scanty
in species and numbers, and much of the island surface was still a
wilderness of basaltic rock or fields of lava and cinders. But such
was the salubrity of the climate and the activity of nature, that
its resources for the comfort, and to a considerable degree of the
civilization of man, were making rapid development; not sufficient as yet
to release him from the active exercise of his faculties, and thus induce
a sensual repose, but just enough to reward him for exertion, while
indolence was sure to beget actual want.
The little caravel with her famished and sickly crew that we left in
the midst of the North Pacific, rolling before a fresh breeze from the
northeast, which proved to be the regular trade-wind, had continued her
course for several days in the same direction. During this time, several
others of the ship’s company had died and been cast overboard. Frequent
showers, and the occasional catching of flying-fish, and now and then a
dolphin or porpoise, did somewhat to restore the physical energies of
the survivors, while the balmy condition of the air, the exhilaration of
rapid motion, and the prospect of novel adventure, had much weight in
raising the spirits of all.
Still there were no indications of land. The sun had set for the tenth
time behind the same purple canopy of clouds; the same birds screamed
and flew overhead; the waves rose and toppled after them with gushing
foam, just so high and no higher; the sails bellied out with monotonous
fulness; not a rope was stirred nor oar moved; on, on, rolled the
caravel, now dipping this bulwark, now that, surging aside the water and
trailing it in her wake with the noise of a mill-course; no variety,
except that the north-star sank lower each night, until the very evenness
of their way, hour answering to hour and day to day, began to beget
in them a feeling of doubt as to the actual existence of land in the
direction they were heading. This, combined with the weariness which
inevitably steals over the senses when long at sea without change, led
to greater carelessness in the night-watches. They fancied themselves
borne onward by a fate which their own precautions could neither alter
nor avert. Hence it was, that having worn out conjecture and argument as
to their positive and probable destiny, they had on the tenth evening
more than ordinarily abandoned themselves to chance. The day had been
thicker than usual, and there was no light at night except the uncertain
twinkling of stars through driving masses of clouds.
All except the helmsman slept. He dozed. Habit kept him sufficiently
awake to keep the caravel to her course, but nothing more. Suddenly a
dull, weighty sound was heard, like the roll of heavy waters, dying
slowly away in the distance. Another; then another; quicker and quicker,
each louder and nearer. The caravel was lifted high on one sea and fell
heavily into the trough of another, rolling so uneasily as to start up
all on board. At this moment the pilot, catching the gleam of a long line
of breakers, hoarsely shouted “all hands, quick, or by the saints we are
lost,” at the same moment putting the helm hard down to bring her into
the wind. He was too late. The craft fell broadside into the rollers and
became unmanageable. The mast snapped off close to the deck, and was
pitched into the water to the leeward. At the same instant a grinding,
crushing sound was heard underneath, as the caravel was lifted and thrown
heavily upon the reef, breaking in the floor timbers and flooding her
hold with water. It was too dark to distinguish anything but the white
crest of the breakers all around, while their noise prevented any orders
being distinctly heard. Indeed so sudden and complete was the disaster,
that there was nothing to be done by the crew but to cling to the wreck
and passively await their fate. Death came soon to a number, who were
washed overboard and taken by the undertow seaward, where sharks fed
upon them. Waves washed over the vessel in quick succession, gradually
breaking her up. The after cabin held together longest, affording some
shelter to its occupants. In a little while, however, even this was gone.
All left on board were floated off, they knew not whither, clinging
to whatever they could grasp, and rolled over in the surf until most
of them became insensible. Beatriz, however, retained her presence of
mind, and aided by the almost superhuman efforts of Tolta, a Mexican
captive, was finally cast upon a soft beach, without other injury than a
few skin bruises and the swallowing of a little water, of which she was
soon relieved. It was too dark to learn the fate of the others. Dragging
themselves beyond the wash of the breakers, in anxious suspense they
awaited daybreak to disclose more fully their situation.