I rode from Makaueli to Dr. Smith's, at Koloa, with two native
attendants, a luna to sustain my dignity, and an inferior native to
carry my carpet-bag. Horses are ridden with curb-bits here, and I
had only brought a light snaffle, and my horse ran away with me
again on the road, and when he stopped at last, these men rode
alongside of me, mimicking me, throwing themselves back with their
feet forwards, tugging at their bridles, and shrieking with
laughter, exclaiming Maikai! Maikai! (good).
I remained several days at Koloa, and would gladly have accepted the
hospitable invitation to stay as many weeks, but for a cowardly
objection to "beating to windward" in the Jenny. The scenery in the
Koloa woods is exquisitely beautiful. Such supreme beauty produces
on me some of the effects which fine music has upon those who have
an exquisite sense of it. It speaks in a language of its own, like
music, and is equally untranslatable.
One day, the girls asked me to go with them to the forests and
return by moonlight, but they only spoke of them as the haunts of
ferns, because they supposed that I should think nothing of them
after the forests of Australia and New Zealand! They were not like
the tropical woods of Hawaii, and owe more to the exceeding
picturesqueness of the natural scenery. Hawaii is all domes and
humps, Kauai all peaks and sierras. There were deep ravines, along
which bright fern-shrouded streams brawled among wild bananas,
overarched by Eugenias, with their gory blossoms: walls of peaks,
and broken precipices, grey ridges rising out of the blue forest
gloom, high mountains with mists wreathing their spiky summits, for
a background: gleams of a distant silver sea: and the nearer many-
tinted woods were not matted together in jungle fashion, but
festooned and adorned with numberless lianas, and even the prostrate
trunks of fallen trees took on new beauty from the exquisite ferns
which covered them. Long cathedral aisles stretched away in far-off
vistas, and so perfect at times was the Gothic illusion, that I
found myself listening for anthems and the roll of organs. So cool
and moist it was, and triumphantly redundant in vagaries of form and
greenery, it was a forest of forests, and it became a necessity to
return the next day, and the next; and I think if I had remained at
Koloa I should have been returning still.
This place is outside the beauty, among cane-fields, and is much
swept by the trade winds. Mr. Rice, my host, is the son of an
esteemed missionary, and he and his wife take a deep interest in the
natives. When he brought her here as a bride a few months ago, the
natives were so delighted that he had married an island lady who
could speak Hawaiian, that they gave them an ahaaina, or native
feast, on a grand scale. The food was cooked in Polynesian style,
by being wrapped up in greens called luau, and baked underground.
There were two bullocks, nineteen hogs, a hundred fowls, any
quantity of poi and fruit, and innumerable native dishes. Five
hundred natives, profusely decorated with leis of flowers and maile,
were there, and each brought a gift for the bride. After the feast
they chaunted meles in praise of Mr. Rice, and Mrs. Rice played to
them on her piano, an instrument which they had not seen before, and
sang songs to them in Hawaiian. Mr. and Mrs. R. teach in and
superintend a native Sunday-school, and have enlisted twenty native
teachers, and in order to keep up the interest and promote cordial
feeling, they and the other teachers meet once a month for a regular
teachers' meeting, taking the houses in rotation. Refreshments are
served afterwards, and they say that nothing can be more agreeable
than the good feeling at the meetings, and the tact and graceful
hospitality which prevail at the subsequent entertainments.
The Hawaiians are a most pleasant people to foreigners, but many of
their ways are altogether aggravating. Unlike the Chinamen, they
seldom do a thing right twice. In my experience, they have almost
never saddled and bridled my horse quite correctly. Either a strap
has been left unbuckled, or the blanket has been wrinkled under the
saddle. They are too easy to care much about anything. If any
serious loss arises to themselves or others through their
carelessness, they shrug their shoulders, and say, "What does it
matter?" Any trouble is just a pilikia. They can't help it. If
they lose your horse from neglecting to tether it, they only laugh
when they find you are wanting to proceed on your journey. Time,
they think, is nothing to any one. "What's the use of being in a
hurry?" Their neglect of their children, a cause from which a large
proportion of the few born perish, is a part of this universal
carelessness. The crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to
a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love of pleasure
and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it, are
apparently still stronger among the women than the maternal
instinct, and they do not take the trouble necessary to rear their
infants. They give their children away, too, to a great extent, and
I have heard of instances in which children have been so passed from
hand to hand, that they are quite ignorant of their real parents.
It is an odd caprice in some cases, that women who have given away
their own children are passionately attached to those whom they have
received as presents, but I have nowhere seen such tenderness
lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry
about with them. Though they are so deficient in adhesiveness to
family ties, that wives seek other husbands, and even children
desert their parents for adoptive homes, the tie of race is
intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each
other, sharing with each other food, clothing, and all that they
possess. There are no paupers among them but the lunatics and the
lepers, and vagrancy is unknown. Happily on these sunny shores no
man or woman can be tempted into sin by want.
With all their faults, and their intolerable carelessness, all the
foreigners like them, partly from the absolute security which they
enjoy among them. They are so thoroughly good-natured, mirthful,
and friendly, and so ready to enter heart and soul into all haole
diversions, that the islands would be dreary indeed if the dwindling
race became extinct.
Among the many misfortunes of the islands, it has been a fortunate
thing that the missionaries' families have turned out so well, and
that there is no ground for the common reproach that good men's sons
turn out reprobates.
The Americans show their usual practical sagacity in missionary
matters. In 1853, when these islands were nominally Christianised,
and a native ministry consisting of fifty-six pastors had been
established, the American Board of Missions, which had expended
during thirty-five years nine hundred and three thousand dollars in
Christianising the group, and had sent out 149 male and female
missionaries, resolved that it should not receive any further aid
either in men or money.
In the early days, the King and chiefs had bestowed lands upon the
Mission, on which substantial mission premises had been erected, and
on withdrawing from the islands, the Board wisely made over these
lands to the Mission families as freehold property. The result has
been that, instead of a universal migration of the young people to
America, numbers of them have been attached to Hawaiian soil. The
establishment at an early date of Punahou College, at which for a
small sum both boys and girls receive a first-class English
education, also contributed to retain them on the islands, and
numbers of the young men entered into sugar-growing, cattle-raising,
storekeeping, and other businesses here. At Honolulu and Hilo a
large proportion of the residents of the upper class are
missionaries' children; most of the respectable foreigners on Kauai
are either belonging to, or intimately connected with, the Mission
families; and they are profusely scattered through Maui and Hawaii
in various capacities, and are bound to each other by ties of
extreme intimacy and friendliness, as well as by marriage and
affinity. This "clan" has given society what it much wants--a sound
moral core, and in spite of all disadvantageous influences, has
successfully upheld a public opinion in favour of religion and
virtue. The members of it possess the moral backbone of New
England, and its solid good qualities, a thorough knowledge of the
language and habits of the natives, a hereditary interest in them, a
solid education, and in many cases much general culture.
In former letters I have mentioned Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyons as
missionaries. I must correct this, as there have been no actual
missionaries on the islands for twenty years. When the Board
withdrew its support, many of the missionaries returned to America;
some, especially the secular members, went into other positions on
the group, while the two first-mentioned and two or three besides,
remained as pastors of native congregations.
I venture to think that the Board has been premature in transferring
the islands to a native pastorate at such a very early stage of
their Christianity. Such a pastorate must be too feeble to uphold a
robust Christian standard. As an adjunct it would be essential to
the stability of native Christianity, but it is not possible that it
can be trusted as the sole depository of doctrine and discipline,
and even were it all it ought to be, it would lack the power to
repress the lax morality which is ruining the nation. Probably each
year will render the overhaste of this course more apparent, and it
is likely that some other mode of upholding pure Christianity will
have to be adopted, when the venerable men who now sustain and guide
the native pastors by their influence shall have been gathered to
their rest.
I.L.B.