KAPIOLANI, THE HEROINE OF HAWAII
_Kapiolani_
(Date of Incident, 1824)
"Pélé[24] the all-terrible, the fire goddess, will hurl her thunder
and her stones, and will slay you," cried the angry priests of
Hawaii.[25] "You no longer pay your sacrifices to her. Once you gave
her hundreds of hogs, but now you give nothing. You worship the new
God Jehovah. She, the great Pélé, will come upon you, she and
the Husband of Thunder, with the Fire-Thruster, and the Red-Fire
Cloud-Queen, they will destroy you altogether."
The listening Hawaiians shuddered as they saw the shaggy priests
calling down the anger of Pélé. One of the priests was a gigantic man
over six feet five inches high, whose strength was so terrible that he
could leap at his victims and break their bones by his embrace.
Away there in the volcanic island[26] in the centre of the greatest
ocean in the world--the Pacific Ocean--they had always as children
been taught to fear the great goddess.
They were Christians; but they had only been Christians for a short
time, and they still trembled at the name of the goddess Pélé, who
lived up in the mountains in the boiling crater of the fiery volcano,
and ruled their island.
Their fathers had told them how she would get angry, and would pour
out red-hot rivers of molten stone that would eat up all the trees and
people and run hissing into the Pacific Ocean. There to that day was
that river of stone--a long tongue of cold, hard lava--stretching
down to the shore of the island, and here across the trees on the
mountain-top could be seen, even now, the smoke of her anger.
Perhaps, after all, Pélé was greater than Jehovah--she was certainly
terrible--and she was very near!
"If you do not offer fire to her, as you used to do," the priests went
on, "she will pour down her fire into the sea and kill all your fish.
She will fill up your fishing grounds with the pahoehoe[27] (lava),
and you will starve. Great is Pélé and greatly to be feared."
The priests were angry because the preaching of the missionaries had
led many away from the worship of Pélé which, of course, meant fewer
hogs for themselves; and now the whole nation on Hawaii, that volcanic
island of the seas, seemed to be deserting her.
The people began to waver under the threats, but a brown-faced woman,
with strong, fearless eyes that looked out with scorn on Pélé priests,
was not to be terrified.
"It is Kapiolani,[28] the chieftainess," murmured the people to one
another. "She is Christian; will she forsake Jehovah and return to
Pélé?"
Only four years before this, Kapiolani had--according to the custom of
the Hawaiian chieftainesses, married many husbands, and she had given
way to drinking habits. Then she had become a Christian, giving up her
drinking and sending away all her husbands save one. She had thrown
away her idols and now taught the people in their huts the story of
Christ.
"Pélé is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea,[29] the
mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pélé shall
not touch me. My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within
it too, as He made us all."
So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would
defy Pélé the goddess. The priests threatened her with awful torments
of fire from the goddess; her people pleaded with her not to dare the
fires of Kilawea. But Kapiolani pressed on, and eighty of her people
made up their minds to go with her. She climbed the mountain paths,
through lovely valleys hung with trees, up and up to where the hard
rocky lava-river cut the feet of those who walked upon it.
Day by day they asked her to go back, and always she answered, "If I
am destroyed you may believe in Pélé; if I live you must all believe
in the true God, Jehovah."
As she drew nearer to the crater she saw the great cloud of smoke that
came up from the volcano and felt the heat of its awful fires. But she
did not draw back.
As she climbed upward she saw by the side of the path low bushes, and
on them beautiful red and yellow berries, growing in clusters. The
berries were like large currants.
"It is chelo,"[30] said the priests, "it is Pélé's berry. You must not
touch them unless we ask her. She will breathe fire on you."
Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of
the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without
stopping to ask the goddess for her permission.
She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them
what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and
horror.
Up she climbed until the full terrors of the boiling crater of Kilawea
burst on her sight. Before her an immense gulf yawned in the shape of
the crescent moon, eight miles in circumference and over a thousand
feet deep. Down in the smoking hollow, hundreds of feet beneath her, a
lake of fiery lava rolled in flaming waves against precipices of
rock. This ever-moving lake of molten fire is called: "The House of
Everlasting Burning." This surging lake was dotted with tiny mountain
islets, and, from the tops of their little peaks, pyramids of flame
blazed and columns of grey smoke went up. From some of these little
islands streams of blazing lava rolled down into the lake of fire. The
air was filled with the roar of the furnaces of flame.
Even the fearless Kapiolani stood in awe as she looked. But she did
not flinch, though here and there, as she walked, the crust of the
lava cracked under her feet and the ground was hot with hidden fire.
She came to the very edge of the crater. To come so far without
offering hogs and fish to the fiery goddess was in itself enough to
bring a fiery river of molten lava upon her. Kapiolani offered nothing
save defiance. Audacity, they thought, could go no further.
Here, a priestess of Pélé came, and raising her hands in threat
denounced death on the head of Kapiolani if she came further.
Kapiolani pulled from her robe a book. In it--for it was her
New Testament--she read to the priestess of the one true, loving
Father-God.
Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who
watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and
stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward
the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and
sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the
demons of Pélé fumed in their frenzy. Hundreds of staring, wondering
eyes followed her, fascinated and yet horrified.
Then she stood on a ledge of rock, and, offering up prayer and praise
to the God of all, Who made the volcano and Who made her, she cast the
Pélé berries into the lake, and sent stone after stone down into the
flaming lava. It was the most awful insult that could be offered to
Pélé! Now surely she would leap up in fiery anger, and, with a hail
of burning stones, consume Kapiolani. But nothing happened; and
Kapiolani, turning, climbed the steep ascent of the crater edge and at
last stood again unharmed among her people. She spoke to her people,
telling them again that Jehovah made the fires. She called on them all
to sing to His praise and, for the first time, there rang across the
crater of Kilawea the song of Christians. The power of the priests
was gone, and from that hour the people all over that island who had
trembled and hesitated between Pélé and Christ turned to the worship
of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God the Father Almighty.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: Pay-lay.]
[Footnote 25: Hah-wye-ee.]
[Footnote 26: Discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. The first Christian
missionaries landed in 1819. Now the island is ruled by the United
States of America.]
[Footnote 27: Pa-h[=o]-è-h[=o]-è.]
[Footnote 28: Kah-pèe-[=o]-l[)a]-nèe. She was high female chief, in
her own right, of a large district.]
[Footnote 29: Kil-a-wee-[)a]. The greatest active volcano in the
world.]
[Footnote 30: Chay-lo.]