. . . I have been spending the day at Lahaina on Maui, on my way
from Kawaihae to Honolulu. Lahaina is thoroughly beautiful and
tropical looking, with its white latticed houses peeping out from
under coco palms, breadfruit, candlenut, tamarinds, mangoes,
bananas, and oranges, with the brilliant green of a narrow strip of
sugar-cane for a background, and above, the flushed mountains of
Eeka, riven here and there by cool green chasms, rise to a height of
6000 feet. Beautiful Lahaina! It is an oasis in a dazzling desert,
straggling for nearly two miles along the shore, but compressed into
a width of half a mile. It was a great missionary centre, as well
as a great whaling station, but the whalers have deserted it, and
missions are represented now only by the seminary of Lahainaluna on
the hillside. An old palace, the remains of a fort, a custom-house,
and a native church are the most conspicuous buildings. The stores
and dwellings of the foreign residents are scattered along the
shore, and the light frame house, with its green verandah, buried
amid gorgeous exotics and shaded by candlenut and breadfruit, looks
as seemly and in keeping as in far-off Massachusetts, under hickory
and elm. The grass houses of the natives cluster along the waters'
edge, or in lanes dark with mangoes and bananas, and fragrant with
gardenia fringing the cane-fields. These, with adobe houses and
walls, the flush of the soil, the gaudy dresses of the natives, the
masses of brilliant exotics, the intense blue of the sea, and the
dry blaze of the tropical heat, give a decided individuality to the
capital of Maui. The heat of Lahaina is a dry, robust, bracing,
joyous heat. The mercury stood at 80 degrees, the usual temperature
of the "flare" or sea level on the leeward side of the islands; but
I strolled through the cane-fields and along the glaring beach
without suffering the least inconvenience from the sun, and found
the unusual precaution of a white umbrella perfectly needless.
The beach is formed of pure white broken coral; the sea is blue with
the calm, pure blue of turquoise, but crystalline in its purity, and
breaks for ever over the environing coral reef with a low deep
music. Blue water stretched to the far horizon, the sky was blazing
blue, the leafage was almost dazzling to the eye, the mountainous
island of Molokai floated like a great blue morning glory on the yet
bluer sea; a sweet, soft breeze rustled through the palms, lazy
ripples plashed lightly on the sand; humanity basked, flower-clad,
in sunny indolence; everything was redundant, fervid, beautiful.
How can I make you realize the glorious, bountiful, sun-steeped
tropics under our cold grey skies, and amidst our pale, monotonous,
lustreless greens?
Yet Molokai is only enchanting in the distance, for its blue petals
enfold 400 lepers doomed to endless isolation, and 300 more are
shortly to be weeded out and sent thither. In to-day's paper
appeared the painful notice, "All lepers are required to report
themselves to the Government health officer within fourteen days
from this date for inspection, and final banishment to Molokai." It
is hoped that leprosy may be "stamped out" by these stringent
measures, but the leprous taint must be strong in many families, and
the social, gregarious natives smoke each other's pipes and wear
each other's clothes, and either from fatalism or ignorance have
disregarded all precautions regarding this woful disease; and now
that measures are being taken for the isolation of lepers, they are
concealing them under mats and in caves and woods. This forlorn
malady, called here Chinese leprosy, in the cases that I have seen,
confers nothing of the white, scaly look attributed to Syrian
leprosy; but the face is red, puffed, bloated, and shining, and the
eyes glazed, and I am told that in its advanced stage the swollen
limbs decay and drop off. It is a fresh item of the infinite curse
which has come upon this race, and with Molokai in sight the
Hesperides vanished, and I ceased to believe that the Fortunate
Islands exist here or elsewhere on this weary earth.
My destination was the industrial training and boarding school for
girls, taught and superintended by two English ladies of Miss
Sellon's sisterhood, Sisters Mary Clara and Phoebe; and I found it
buried under the shade of the finest candlenut trees I have yet
seen. A rude wooden cross in front is a touching and fitting emblem
of the Saviour, for whom these pious women have sacrificed friends,
sympathy, and the social intercourse and amenities which are within
daily reach of our workers at home. The large house, which is
either plastered stone or adobe, contains the dormitories, visitors'
room, and oratory, and three houses at the back, all densely shaded,
are used as schoolroom, cook-house, laundry, and refectory. There
is a playground under some fine tamarind trees, and an adobe wall
encloses, without secluding, the whole. The visitors' room is about
twelve feet by eight feet, very bare, with a deal table and three
chairs in it, but it was vacant, and I crossed to the large, shady,
airy schoolroom, where I found the senior sister engaged in
teaching, while the junior was busy in the cook-house. These ladies
in eight years have never left Lahaina. Other people may think it
necessary to leave its broiling heat and seek health and recreation
on the mountains, but their work has left them no leisure, and their
zeal no desire, for a holiday. A very solid, careful English
education is given here, as well as a thorough training in all
housewifely arts, and in the more important matters of modest dress
and deportment, and propriety in language. There are thirty-seven
boarders, native and half-native, and mixed native and Chinese,
between the ages of four and eighteen. They provide their own
clothes, beds, and bedding, and I think pay forty dollars a year.
The capitation grant from Government for two years was 2325 dollars.
Sister Phoebe was my cicerone, and I owe her one of the pleasantest
days I have spent on the islands. The elder Sister is in middle
life, but though fragile-looking, has a pure complexion and a lovely
countenance; the younger is scarcely middle-aged, one of the
brightest, bonniest, sweetest-looking women I ever saw, with fun
dancing in her eyes and round the corners of her mouth; yet the
regnant expression on both faces was serenity, as though they had
attained to "the love which looketh kindly, and the wisdom which
looketh soberly on all things."
I never saw such a mirthful-looking set of girls. Some were cooking
the dinner, some ironing, others reading English aloud; but each
occupation seemed a pastime, and whenever they spoke to the Sisters
they clung about them as if they were their mothers. I heard them
read the Bible and an historical lesson, as well as play on a piano
and sing, and they wrote some very difficult passages from dictation
without any errors, and in a flowing, legible handwriting that I am
disposed to envy. Their accent and intonation were pleasing, and
there was a briskness and emulation about their style of answering
questions, rarely found in country schools with us, significant of
intelligence and good teaching. All but the younger girls spoke
English as fluently as Hawaiian. I cannot convey a notion of the
blitheness and independence of manner of these children. To say
that they were free and easy would be wrong; it was rather the
manner of very frolicsome daughters to very indulgent mothers or
aunts. It was a family manner rather than a school manner, and the
rule is obviously one of love. The Sisters are very wise in
adapting their discipline to the native character and circumstances.
The rigidity which is customary in similar institutions at home
would be out of place, as well as fatal here, and would ultimately
lead to a rebound of a most injurious description. Strict obedience
is of course required, but the rules are few and lenient, and there
is no more pressure of discipline than in a well-ordered family.
The native amusements generally are objectionable, but Hawaiians are
a dancing people, and will dance, or else indulge in less innocent
pastimes; so the Sisters have taught them various English dances,
and I never saw anything prettier or more graceful than their style
of dancing. There is no uniform dress. The girls wear pretty print
frocks, made in the English style, and several of them wore the
hibiscus in their shining hair. Some of the older girls were
beautiful in face as well as graceful in figure, but there was a
snaky undulation about their movements which I never saw among
Europeans. All looked bubbling over with fun and frolic, and there
was a refinement and intelligence about their expression which
contrasted favourably with that of the ordinary female face on the
islands.
There are two dormitories, excellently ventilated, with a four-post
bed, with mosquito-bars, for each girl, and the beds were covered
with those brilliant-coloured quilts in which the natives delight,
and in which they exercise considerable ingenuity as well as
individuality of taste. One Sister sleeps in each dormitory, and
these highly-educated and refined women have no place of retirement
except a very plain oratory; and having taken the vow of poverty,
they have of course no possessions, none of the books, pictures, and
knick-knacks wherewith others adorn their surroundings. Their whole
lives, with the exception of the time passed in the oratory, are
spent with the girls, and in visiting the afflicted at their homes,
and this through eight blazing years, with the mercury always at 80
degrees!
The Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it,
and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through
a higher morality. Consequently the removal of these girls from
evil and impure surroundings, the placing them under the happiest
influences in favour of purity and goodness, the forming and
fostering of industrious and housewifely habits, and the raising
them in their occupations and amusements above those which are
natural to their race, are in themselves a noble, and in some
degree, a hopeful work, but it admits of neither pause nor
relaxation. Those who carry it on are truly "the lowest in the
meanest task," for they have undertaken not only the superintendence
of menial work (so called), but the work itself, in teaching by
example and instruction the womanly industries of home. They have
no society, until lately no regular Liturgical worship, and of
necessity a very infrequent celebration of the Holy Communion; and
they have undergone the trial which arose very naturally out of the
ecclesiastical relations of the American missionaries, of being
regarded as enemies, or at least dangerous interlopers, by the
excellent men who had long resided on the islands as Christian
teachers, and with whose views on such matters as dress and
recreation their own are somewhat at variance. In the first
instance, the habit they wore, their designations, the presence of
Miss Sellon, the fame of whose Ritualistic tendencies had reached
the islands, and their manifest connection with a section of the
English Church which is regarded here with peculiar disfavour,
roused a strongly antagonistic feeling regarding their work and the
drift of their religious teaching. They are not connected with what
is known at home as the "Honolulu Mission." {256}
I.L.B.