Hookena is its name. It stands on the same coast which I had wondered at

before from the tossing _Casco_; the same coast on which the far voyager

Cook ended a noble career not very nobly. That district of Kona where he

fell is one illustrious in the history of Hawaii. It was at first the

centre of the dominion of the great Kamehameha. There, in an unknown

sepulchre, his bones are still hidden; there, too, his reputed

treasures, spoils of a buccaneer, lie, and are still vainly sought for,

in one of the thousand caverns of the lava. There the tabus were first

broken, there the missionaries first received; and but for the new use

of ships and the new need of harbours, here might be still the chief

city and the organs of the kingdom. Yet a nearer approach confirmed the

impression of the distance. It presents to the seaward one immense

decline. Streams of lava have followed and submerged each other down

this slope, and overflowed into the sea. These cooled and shrank, and

were buried under fresh inundations, or dislocated by fresh tremors of

the mountain. A multiplicity of caves is the result. The mouths of caves

are everywhere; the lava is tunnelled with corridors and halls; under

houses high on the mountain, the sea can be heard throbbing in the

bowels of the land; and there is one gallery of miles, which has been

used by armies as a pass. Streams are thus unknown. The rain falls

continually in the highlands: an isle that rises nearly fourteen

thousand feet sheer from the sea could never fail of rain; but the

treasure is squandered on a sieve; and by sunless conduits returns

unseen into the ocean. Corrugated slopes of lava, bristling lava cliffs,

spouts of metallic clinkers, miles of coast without a well or rivulet;

scarce anywhere a beach, nowhere a harbour: here seems a singular land

to be contended for in battle as a seat for courts and princes. Yet it

possessed in the eyes of the natives one more than countervailing

advantage. The windward shores of the isle are beaten by a monstrous

surf; there are places where goods and passengers must be hauled up and

lowered by a rope, there are coves which even the daring boatmen of

Hamakua dread to enter; and men live isolated in their hamlets or

communicate by giddy footpaths in the cliff. Upon the side of Kona, the

table-like margin of the lava affords almost everywhere a passage by

land; and the waves, reduced by the vast breakwater of the island, allow

an almost continual communication by way of sea.

Yet even here the surf of the Pacific appears formidable to the stranger

as he lands, and daily delights him with its beauty as he walks the

shore.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that the steamer _Hall_ conveyed me to

Hookena. She was charged with tourists on their way to the volcano; and

I found it hard to justify my choice of a week in an unheard-of hamlet,

rather than a visit to one of the admitted marvels of the world. I do

not know that I can justify it now and to a larger audience. I should

prefer, indeed, to have seen both; but I was at the time embarrassed

with arrears of work; it was imperative that I should choose; and I

chose one week in a Kona village and another in the lazaretto, and

renounced the craters of Maunaloa and Haleakala. For there are some so

constituted as to find a man or a society more curious than the highest

mountain; some, in whom the lava foreshores of Kona and Kau will move as

deep a wonder as the fiery vents that made them what they are.

The land and sea breezes alternate on the Kona coast with regularity;

and the veil of rain draws up and down the talus of the mountain, now

retiring to the zone of forests, now descending to the margin of the

sea. It was in one of the latter and rarer moments that I was set on

board a whale boat full of intermingled barrels, passengers, and

oarsmen. The rain fell and blotted the crude and sombre colours of the

scene. The coast rose but a little way; it was then intercepted by the

cloud: and for all that appeared, we might have been landing on an isle

of some two hundred feet of elevation. On the immediate foreshore, under

a low cliff, there stood some score of houses, trellised and

verandahed, set in narrow gardens, and painted gaudily in green and

white; the whole surrounded and shaded by a grove of cocoa-palms and

fruit trees, springing (as by miracle) from the bare lava. In front, the

population of the neighbourhood were gathered for the weekly incident,

the passage of the steamer; sixty to eighty strong, and attended by a

disproportionate allowance of horses, mules, and donkeys; for this land

of rock is, singular to say, a land of breeding. The green trees, the

painted houses, the gay dresses of the women, were everywhere relieved

on the uncompromising blackness of the lava; and the rain, which fell

unheeded by the sightseers, blended and beautified the contrast.

The boat was run in upon a breaker, and we passengers ejected on a flat

rock where the next wave submerged us to the knees. There we continued

to stand, the rain drenching us from above, the sea from below, like

people mesmerised; and as we were all (being travellers) tricked out

with the green garlands of departure, we must have offered somewhat the

same appearance as a shipwrecked picnic.

The purser spied and introduced me to my host, ex-judge Nahinu, who was

then deep in business, despatching and receiving goods. He was dressed

in pearl-grey tweed like any self-respecting Englishman; only the band

of his wide-awake was made of peacock's feather.--"House by and by,"

said he, his English being limited, and carried me to the shelter of a

rather lofty shed. On three sides it was open, on the fourth closed by a

house; it was reached from without by five or six wooden steps; on the

fourth side, a farther flight of ten conducted to the balcony of the

house; a table spread with goods divided it across, so that I knew it

for the village store and (according to the laws that rule in country

life) the village lounging-place. People sat with dangling feet along

the house verandah, they sat on benches on the level of the shed or

among the goods upon the counter; they came and went, they talked and

waited; they opened, skimmed, and pocketed half-read, their letters;

they opened the journal, and found a moment, not for the news, but for

the current number of the story: methought, I might have been in France,

and the paper the _Petit Journal_ instead of the _Nupepa Eleele_. On

other islands I had been the centre of attention; here none observed my

presence. One hundred and ten years before, the ancestors of these

indifferents had looked in the faces of Cook and his seamen with

admiration and alarm, called them gods, called them volcanoes; took

their clothes for a loose skin, confounded their hats and their heads,

and described their pockets as a "treasure door, through which they

plunge their hands into their bodies and bring forth cutlery and

necklaces and cloth and nails," and to-day the coming of the most

attractive stranger failed (it would appear) to divert them from Miss

Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_: for that was the novel of the day.

My host returned, and led me round the shore among the mules and donkeys

to his house. Like all the houses of the hamlet, it was on the European

or, to be more descriptive, on the American plan. The parlour was fitted

with the usual furniture and ornamented with the portraits of Kamehameha

the third, Lunalilo, Kalakaua, the queen consort of the isles, and Queen

Victoria. There was a Bible on the table, other books stood on a shelf.

A comfortable bedroom was placed at my service, the welcome afforded me

was cordial and unembarrassed, the food good and plentiful. My host, my

hostess; his grown daughters, strapping lassies; his young hopefuls,

misbehaving at a meal or perfunctorily employed upon their school-books:

all that I found in that house, beyond the speech and a few exotic

dishes on the table, would have been familiar and exemplary in Europe.

I walked that night beside the sea. The steamer with its lights and

crowd of tourists was gone by; it had left me alone among these aliens,

and I felt no touch of strangeness. The trim, lamp-lit houses shining

quietly, like villas, each in its narrow garden; the gentle sound of

speech from within; the room that awaited my return, with the lamp, and

the books, and the spectacled householder studying his Bible:--there was

nothing changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and

played, a child, beside the borders of another sea. And some ten miles

from where I walked, Cook was adored as a deity; his bones, when he was

dead, were cleansed for worship; his entrails devoured in a mistake by

rambling children.

A day of session in the Hookena Court-house equally surprised me. The

judge, a very intelligent, serious Hawaiian, sat behind a table, taking

careful notes; two policemen, with their bright metal badges, standing

attention at his back or bustling forth on errands. The plaintiff was a

Portuguese. For years, he had kept store and raised cattle in the

district, without trouble or dispute. His store stood always open, it

was standing so seven miles away at the moment of the case; and when his

cattle strayed, they were duly impounded and restored to him on payment

of one shilling. But recently a gentleman of great acuteness and a

thousand imperfect talents had married into the family of a neighbouring

proprietor; consecutively on which event the store-keeper's cattle began

to be detained and starved, the fine rose to half a dollar, and lastly a

cow had disappeared. The Portuguese may have been right or wrong: he was

convinced the new-comer was the main-spring of the change; called a suit

in consequence against the father-in-law;--and it was the son-in-law who

appeared for the defence. I saw him there, seated at his ease, with

spectacles on brow; still young, much of a gentleman in looks, and

dressed in faultless European clothes; and presently, for my good

fortune, he rose to address the court. It appears he has already stood

for the Hawaiian parliament; but the people (I was told) "did not think

him honest," and he was defeated. Honesty, to our ways of thought,

appears a trifle in a candidate; and I think we have few constituencies

to refuse so great a charmer. I understood but a few dozen words, yet I

heard the man with delight, followed the junctures of his argument, knew

when he was enumerating points in his own favour, when he was admitting

those against him, when he was putting a question _per absurdum_, when

(after the due pause) he smilingly replied to it. There was no haste, no

heat, no prejudice; with a hinted gesture, with a semitone of

intonation, the speaker lightly set forth and underlined the processes

of reason; he could not shift a foot nor touch his spectacles, but what

persuasion radiated in the court--it is impossible to conceive a style

of oratory more rational or civilised. The point to which he spoke was

pretty in itself. The people, as I had been told, did not think the

orator honest; some judge, on a particular occasion, had inclined to the

same view, and the man of talent was disbarred. By a clause in a

statute, a layman or a disbarred lawyer might conduct a case for himself

or for one of "his own family." Is a father-in-law one of a man's own

family? "Yes," argued the orator: "No," with less grace and perspicuity,

Nahinu, retained by the Portuguese. The laws of the tight little kingdom

are conceived in duplicate for the Hawaiian hare and his many white

friends. The native text appearing inconclusive, an appeal was made to

the English, and I (as _amicus curiae_) was led out, installed upon the

court-house steps, and painfully examined as to its precise

significance. The judge heard the orator; he heard Nahinu; he received

by the mouth of the schoolmaster my report, for which he thanked me with

a bow; and ruled the claimant out. This skirmish decided the fate of the

engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the

afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under

his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted;

judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and

but for the plaintiff, the business was entirely native.

The Portuguese had come seven miles to Hookena, sure of substantial

justice, and he left his store open, fearless of being robbed. Another

white man, of strong sense and much frugality and choler, thus reckoned

up what he had lost by theft in thirty-nine years among the different

islands of Hawaii: a pair of shoes, an umbrella, some feet of hose-pipe,

and one batch of chickens. It is his continual practice to send

Hawaiians by a perilous, solitary path with sums in specie; at any

moment the messenger might slip, the money-bag roll down a thousand feet

of precipice, and lodge in fissures inaccessible to man: and consider

how easy it were to invent such misadventures!--"I should have to know a

white man well before I trusted him," he said; "I trust Hawaiians

without fear. It would be villainous of me to say less." It should be

remembered the Hawaiians of yore were not particular; they were eager to

steal from Cook, whom they believed to be a god, and it was a theft that

led to the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay; and it must not be forgotten that

the Hawaiians of to-day are many of them poor. One residual trait of

savage incompetence I have already referred to; they cannot administer a

trust--I was told there had never yet been a case known. Even a judge,

skilled in the knowledge of the law and upright in its administration,

was found insusceptible of those duties and distinctions which appear so

natural and come so easy to the European. But the disability stands

alone, a single survival in the midst of change; and the faults of the

modern Hawaiian incline to the other side. My orator of Hookena

court-room may be a gentleman much maligned; I may have received his

character from the lips of his political opponents; but the type

described is common. The islands begin to fill with lawyers; many of

whom, justly or unjustly, are disbarred; and to the age of Kamehameha,

the age of Glossin has succeeded. Thus none would rob the store of the

Portuguese, but the law was wrested to oppress him.

It was of old a warlike and industrious race. They were diggers and

builders; the isles are still full of their deserted monuments; the

modern word for law, Kanawai, "water rights," still serves to remind us

of their ancient irrigation. And the island story is compact of battles.

Their courage and goodwill to labour seems now confined to the sea,

where they are active sailors and fearless boatmen, pursue the shark in

his own element, and make a pastime of their incomparable surf. On shore

they flee equally from toil and peril, and are all turned to carpet

occupations and to parlous frauds. Nahinu, an ex-judge, was paid but two

dollars for a hard day in court, and he is paying a dollar a day to the

labourers among his coffee. All Hawaiians envy and are ready to compete

with him for this odd chance of an occasional fee for some hours'

talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his

plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One

cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office

work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly

occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young

Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. "What are you doing

here?" she cried, for she was a strong partisan. "Do you not know they

are murdering your king?" "I know," said the skulker. "Why do you not go

to help him?" she asked. "Aflaid," said the poor craven, and crouched

again among the grass. Here was a strange grandchild for the warriors

that followed or faced Kamehameha. I give the singular instance as the

more explicit; but the whole race must have been stricken at the moment

with a similar weakness. No man dare say of this revolution that it was

unprovoked; but its means were treachery and violence; the numbers and

position of those engaged made the design one of the most insolent in

history; and a mere modicum of native boldness and cohesion must have

brought it to the dust. "My race had one virtue, they were brave," said

a typical Hawaiian: "and now they have taken that away."

I have named a French example: but the thought that haunts the stranger

in Hawaii is that of Italy. The ruggedness of feature which marks out

the race among Polynesians is the Italian ruggedness. Countenances of

the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality,

are to be found in Hawaii and amongst Italian fisher-folk or whose

people, in the midst of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of

men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave,

beautiful in plainness: faces that take the heart captive. The tougher

struggle of the race in these hard isles has written history there;

energy enlivens the Hawaiian strength--or did so once, and the faces are

still eloquent of the lost possession. The stock that has produced a

Caesar, a Kamehameha, a Kaa-humanu, retains their signature.

CHAPTER II

A RIDE IN THE FOREST

By the Hawaiian tongue, the slope of these steep islands is parcelled

out in zones. As we mount from the seaboard, we pass by the region of

Ilima, named for a flowering shrub, and the region of Apaa, named for a

wind, to Mau, the place of mist. This has a secondary name, the Au- or

Wao-Kanaka, "the place of men" by exclusion, man not dwelling higher.

The next, accordingly, is called the Waoakua, region of gods and

goblins; other names, some apparently involving thoughts of solitude and

danger, follow till the top is reached. The mountain itself might be a

god or the seat of a god; it might be a volcano, the home of the dread

Pele; and into desert places few would venture but such as were adroit

to snare the whispering spirits of the dead. To-day, from the Waoakua or

the Waomaukele, the gods have perhaps fled; the descendants of

Vancouver's cattle fill them with less questionable terrors.

As we mounted the glacis of the island, the horses clattering on the

lava, we saw far above us the curtain of the rain exclude the view. The

sky was clear, the sun strong overhead; around us, a thin growth of

bushes and creepers glittered green in their black setting, like plants

upon a ruinous pavement; all else was lava--wastes of lava, some of them

enclosed (it seemed in wantonness) with dry-stone walls. But the bushes,

when the rain descends often enough from its residential altitudes,

flourish extremely; and cattle and asses, walking on these resonant

slabs, collect a livelihood. Here and there, a prickly-pear came to the

bigness of a standard tree and made a space of shade; under one I saw a

donkey--under another no less than three cows huddled from the sun. Thus

we had before our eyes the rationale of two of the native distinctions;

traversed the zone of flowering shrubs; and saw above us the mist hang

perennial in Mau.

As we continued to draw nearer to the rain, trees began to be mingled

with the shrubs; and we came at last to where a house stood in an

orchard of papaias, with their palm-like growth and collar of green

gourds. In an out-house stood the water-barrel, that necessity of Kona

life. For all the water comes from heaven, and must be caught and

stored; and the name of Hookena itself may very well imply a cistern and

a cup of water for the traveller along the coast. The house belonged to

Nahinu, but was in occupation by an American, seeking to make butter

there (if I understood) without success. The butterman was gone, to muse

perhaps on fresh expedients; his house was closed; and I was able to

observe his three chambers only through the windows. In the first were

milk pans and remains of breakfast, in the second a bed; in the third a

scanty wardrobe hung from pegs, and two pirated novels lay on the floor.

One was reversed and could not be identified; the name of the other I

made out. It was _Little Loo_. Happy Mr. Clark Russell, making life

pleasant for the exile in his garden of papaias, high over sea, upon the

forest edge, and where the breeze comes freely.

A little way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very

sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the

parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a

rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with

soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the

horses munched it by the way with relish. Candle-nut trees with their

white foliage stood in groves. Bread-fruits were here and there, but

never well-to-do; Hawaii is no true mother for the bread-fruit or the

cocoa-palm. Mangoes, on the other hand, attained a splendid bigness,

many of them discoloured on one side with a purplish hue which struck

the note of autumn. The same note was repeated by a certain aerial

creeper, which drops (you might suppose) from heaven like the wreck of

an old kite, and roosts on tree-tops with a pendent raffle of air-roots,

the whole of a colour like a wintry beech's. These are clannish plants;

five or six may be quartered on a single tree, thirty or forty on a

grove; the wood dies under them to skeletons; and they swing there, like

things hung out from washing, over the death they have provoked.

We had now turned southward towards Kaa, following a shapeless

bridle-track which is the high road of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand.

Our way was across--the woods we threaded did but cling upon--the vast

declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin

of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the

white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea

marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent

milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle,

delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew's cross

against the sea and sky, certainly fifty yards from where I rode, and

five feet at least from either tree: so wide was its death-gossamer

spread, so huge the ugly vermin.

Presently the sea was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their

fronds above a horseman's head. High over these, the dead and the living

rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached

us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that

in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In

the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our

excursion. The schoolmaster and certain others of Hookena had recently

bought a tract of land for some four thousand dollars; set out coffee;

and hired a Chinaman to mind it. The thing was notable in itself;

natives selling land is a thing of daily custom; of natives buying, I

have heard no other instance; and it was civil to show interest. "But

when," I asked, "shall we come to your coffee plantation?" "This is it,"

said he, and pointed down. Their bushes grew on the path-side; our

horses breasted them as they went by; and the gray wood on every hand

enclosed and over-arched that thread of cultivation.

A little farther, we strung in single file through the hot crypt, our

horses munching grass, their riders chewing unpalatable gum collected

from a tree. Next the wood opened, and we issued forth again into the

day on the precipitous broadside of the isle. A village was before us: a

Catholic church and perhaps a dozen scattered houses, some of grass in

the old island fashion, others spick-and-span with outside stair and

balcony and trellis, and white paint and green, in the more modern

taste. One arrested my attention; it stood on the immediate verge of a

deep precipice: two stories high, with double balconies, painted white,

and showing by my count fifteen windows. "There is a fine house," said

I. "Outside," returned the schoolmaster drily. "That is the way with

natives; they spend money on the outside. Let us go there: you will find

they live in the verandah and have no furniture." We were made welcome,

sure enough, on the verandah; and in the lower room, which I entered,

there was not a chair or table; only mats on the floor, and photographs

and lithographs upon the wall. The house was an eidolon, designed to

gladden the eye and enlarge the heart of the proprietor returning from

Hookena; and its fifteen windows were only to be numbered from without.

Doubtless that owner had attained his end; for I observed, when we were

home again at Hookena, and Nahinu was describing our itinerary to his

wife, he mentioned we had baited at Ka-hale-nui--"the great house."

The photographs were of the royal family; that goes without saying in

Hawaii; of the two lithographs, made in San Francisco, one I knew at the

first sight for General Garfield: the second tempted and tantalised me;

it could not be, I thought--and yet it must; it was this dubiety which

carried me across the threshold; and behold! It was indeed the Duke of

Thunder, his name printed under his effigies in the Hawaiianised form of

_Nelesona_. I thought it a fine instance of fame that his features and

his empty sleeve should have been drawn on stone in San Fransisco, which

was a lone Mexican mission while he lived; and lettered for a market in

those islands, which were not yet united under Kamehameha when he died.

And then I had a cold fit, and wondered after all if these good folk

knew anything of the man's world-shaking deeds and gunpowder weaknesses,

or if he was to them a "bare appellation" and a face on stone; and

turning to the schoolmaster, I asked of him the question. Yes, the

Hawaiians knew of Nelesona; there had been a story in the papers where

he figured, and the portrait had been given for a supplement. So he was

known as a character of Romance! Brave men since Agamemnon, like the

brave before, must patiently expect the "inspired author." And nowhere

has fiction deeper roots than in the world of Polynesia. They are all

tellers and hearers of tales; and the first requisite of any native

paper is a story from the English or the French. These are of all sorts,

and range from the works of good Miss Porter to _The Lightning

Detective_. Miss Porter, I was told, was "drawing" in Hawaii; and Dumas

and the _Arabian Nights_ were named as having pleased extremely.

Our homeward way was down the hill and by the sea in the black open. We

traversed a waste of shattered lava; spires, ravines, well-holes showing

the entrance to vast subterranean vaults in whose profundities our

horse-hooves doubtless echoed. The whole was clothed with stone

_fiorituri_ fantastically fashioned, like debris from the workshop of

some brutal sculptor: dog's heads, devils, stone trees, and gargoyles

broken in the making. From a distance, so intricate was the detail, the

side of a hummock wore the appearance of some coarse and dingy sort of

coral, or a scorched growth of heather. Amid this jumbled wreck, naked

itself, and the evidence of old disaster, frequent plants found root:

rose-apples bore their rosy flowers; and a bush between a cypress and a

juniper attained at times a height of twenty feet.

The breakneck path had descended almost to the sea, and we were already

within sound of its reverberations, when a cliff hove up suddenly on the

landward hand, very rugged and broken, streaked with white lichen,

laddered with green lianas, and pierced with the apertures of half a

hundred caves. Two of these were piously sealed with doors, the wood

scarce weathered. For the Hawaiian remembers the repository of the bones

of old, and is still jealous of the safety of ancestral relics. Nor

without cause. For the white man comes and goes upon the hunt for

curiosities; and one (it is rumoured) consults soothsayers and explores

the caves of Kona after the fabled treasures of Kamehameha.

CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF REFUGE

Our way was northward on the naked lava of the coast. The schoolmaster

led the march on a trumpeting black stallion; not without anxious

thought, I followed after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the

air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and

trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily

upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day,

and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the

margin.

The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with

cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of

branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature's making, endlessly

vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is,

cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this

northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting.

Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag,

green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam.

Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering

bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too,

their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea

pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of

aromatic plants.

We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not

been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out

to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac,

red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might

have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden

enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a

wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the

turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed,

he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my

companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown

about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit

of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. "Will you be at school

to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like school?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like

bathing?" "No, ma'am," with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden,

of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our

approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand

on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the

door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a

pound-master's notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of

lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre,

melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over

these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell,

and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of

a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the

entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the

sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one

Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long

bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond

the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and

presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the

ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts

twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an

area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places,

the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the

shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts--the

greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the _heiau_, or temple, the

so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his

alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but

whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more

renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And

Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since

his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent

messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at

Honaunau. First to the keeper's wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit

of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon

the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the

crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy

chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not

yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour

the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some

unknown crevice of that caverned isle.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the

dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and

presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in

a drawing, more effectively in words. "Several rudely carved male and

female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some

on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high

posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A

number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the

principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former

deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming

a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual

guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining.... Once

they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most

indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered

garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before

them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed

to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness.

We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were

told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the

boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw

many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks' teeth,

and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human

bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoa-nut fibre,

and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich

shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the

bones belonged." Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over

the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded.

Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where

their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of

the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like

European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might

harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without.

The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate

once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty

prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go

again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his

misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of

white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the

women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the

true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them

their toil and danger.

The city had yet another function. There was in Hawaii a class apart,

comparable to the doomed families of Tahiti, whose special mission was

to supply the altar. It seems the victim fell usually on the holy day,

of which there were four in the month; between these, the man was not

only safe, but enjoyed, in virtue of his destiny, a singular licence of

behaviour. His immunities exceeded those of the mediaeval priest and

jester rolled in one; he might have donned the King's girdle (the height

of sacrilege and treason), and gone abroad with it, unpunished and

apparently unblamed; and with a little care and some acquaintance in

priests' families, he might prolong this life of licence to old age. But

the laws of human nature are implacable; their destiny of privilege and

peril turned the men's heads; even at dangerous seasons, they went

recklessly abroad upon their pleasures; were often sighted in the open,

and must run for the City of Refuge with the priestly murderers at their

heels. It is strange to think it was a priest also who stood in the door

to welcome and protect them.

The enclosure of the sanctuary was all paved with the lava; scattered

blocks encumbered it in places; everywhere tall cocoa-palms jutted from

the fissures and drew shadows on the floor; a loud continuous sound of

the near sea burthened the ear. These rude monumental ruins, and the

thought of that life and faith of which they stood memorial, threw me in

a muse. There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid

than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye. I have found

it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it so again in

the City of Refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous

existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the Heiau, the

priestly murderers and the fleeing victim, rose before and mastered my

imagination.

Some dozen natives of Honaunau followed me about to show the boundaries;

and I was recalled from these scattering thoughts by one of my guides

laying his hand on a big block of lava.

"This stone is called Kaahumanu," said he. "It is here she lay hid with

her dog from Kamehameha."

And he told me an anecdote which would not interest the reader as it

interested me, till he has learned what manner of woman Kaahumanu was.

CHAPTER IV

KAAHUMANU

Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a

man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are

tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the

Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat;

as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a

soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and

wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country

farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the

fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes,

cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all

his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by

the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He

passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against

the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the

archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he

directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were

astonished. "You are old," they argued; "soon you will die; what use

will it be to you?" "Let the bird go," said the King. "It will be for my

children afterwards." Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood

and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.

The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for

some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had

come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an

Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to

identify. It was this missionary's habit to go walking in the morning

ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea.

The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people,

observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about

these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary's path, and

drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began

to press the King with Christianity. "If you will throw yourself from

that cliff," said Kamehameha, "and come down uninjured, I will accept

your religion: not unless." But the missionary was a man of parts; he

wrote a deep impression on his hearer's mind, and after he had left for

home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to

break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was

the King's servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to

proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over

against the other's; and when both were finished, a game of what we call

_French and English_ or _The Tug of War_ was played upon the intervening

space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King's men were dragged in

a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None

employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance;

the King's misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little

doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had

another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his

son's estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island

deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come

to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous

vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the

King. "A man to your god!" they urged--"a man to your god, that you may

recover!" "The man is sacred to (my son) the King," replied Kamehameha.

So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret

commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most

beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead)

that which he had spared to do while living.

No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of

the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them

to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of

Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none

of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of

what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the

most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a

conditional successor: "If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the

kingdom and preserve it." The priests met in council of diviners; and by

a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the

King's death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain.

Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King

came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his

English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him.

"(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are

the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns,

here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together." He must

have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he

trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he

consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own

mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But

Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much

daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the

more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a

drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger

spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of

a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the

food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon

Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in

battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the

missionary Ellis.

The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged

in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820),

all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of

some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first

upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under

the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously

defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their

command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an

almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the

progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the

accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous

periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not

been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on

5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a

saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date

of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.

Kaahumanu was a woman of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty;

Bingham admits she was "_beautiful for a Polynesian_"; and her husband

cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an

especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her,

and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years

of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island

Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and

paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years

later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the

misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation

and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to make a crime

of it against the mission. Party spirit ran very violent in the islands;

tears were shed, threats flying; and Kaahumanu called a council of the

chiefs. In that day stood forth the native historian, David Malo (though

his name should rather have been Nathan), and pressed the regent with

historic instances. Who was to be punished?--the whaler guilty of the

act, the missionary whose denunciation had provoked the scandal? "O you,

the wife of Kamehameha," said he, "Kanihonui came and slept with you

Luheluhe declared to Kamehameha the sleeping together of you two. I ask

you, which of these two persons was slain by Kamehameha? Was it

Luheluhe?" And she answered: "It was Kanihonui!" Shakespeare never

imagined such a character; and it would require none less than he to

represent her sublimities and contradictions.

After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been

named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait.

Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at

last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters

of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to

a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night,

plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by

the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and

refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none

had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to

silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed

Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who

was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and

lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran

past the City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began

to bark. "Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!" said the messengers, and

returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence

Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations

was restored.

A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her,

when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not

see her until 1820, thought her "_beautiful for a Polynesian_," and

while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her

life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary

Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic

meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the

island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler

story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal.

CHAPTER V

THE LEPERS OF KONA

A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in

a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the

night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had

inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife,

brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was

by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the

floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there,

hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with

food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group,

similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but

the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some

are desperate fellows; some mournful women--mothers and wives; some

stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped,

the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and

took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For

the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the

rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice.

How does their own poet sing?

In the land of distress

My dwelling was on the mountain height,

My talking companions were the birds,

The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing.

It is for no crime this law-abiding race flee to the woods; it is no

fear of the gallows or the dungeon that nerves themselves to resist and

their friends to aid and to applaud them. Their liability is for

disease; they are lepers; and what they combine to combat is not

punishment but segregation. While China, and England, and France, in

their tropical possessions, either attempt nothing or effect little,

Hawaii has honourably faced the problem of this ancient and apparently

reviving malady. Her small extent is an advantage; but the ruggedness of

the physical characters, the desert woods and mountains, and the habit

of the native mind, oppose success. To the native mind, our medical

opinions seem unfounded. We smile to hear of ghosts and gods; they, when

they are told to keep warm in fevers or to avoid contagion. Leprosy in

particular they cannot be persuaded to avoid. But no mere opinion would

exalt them to resist the law and lie in forests did not a question of

the family bond embitter and exasperate the opposition. Their family

affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent,

circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without

nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval

of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single

demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death

intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified

fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation

often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the

dwellers are well used in Molokai; they receive letters from friends

already there who praise the place; and could the family be taken in a

body, they would go with glee, overjoyed to draw rations from

Government. But all cannot become pensioners at once; a proportion of

rate-payers must be kept; and the leper must go alone or with a single

relative; and the native instinctively resists the separation as a

weasel bites. A similar reluctance can be shown in Molokai itself. By a

recent law, clean children born within the precinct are taken from their

leper parents, sent to an intermediate hospital, and given a chance of

life and health and liberty. I have stood by while Mr. Meyer and Mr.

Hutchinson, the luna and the sub-luna of the lazaretto, opened the

petitions of the settlement. As they sat together on the steps of the

guest-house at Kalawao, letter after letter was passed between them with

a sneer, and flung upon the ground; till I was at last struck with this

cavalier procedure, and inquired the nature of the appeals. They were

all the same; all from leper parents, all pleading to have their clean

children retained in that abode of sorrow, and all alleging the same

reason--_aloha nuinui_--an extreme affection. Such was the extreme

affection of Kaahumanu for Kanihonui; by which she indulged her

wantonness in safety and he died. But love has a countenance more

severe.

The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have

thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely

for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not

betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they

had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong.

I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond

Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in

all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the

antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I

came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were

open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat

conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching

and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew

more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song.

The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the

improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way.

"That was not singing," explained the schoolmaster's wife on my return,

"that was crying." And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the

lament: "O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now

you are taken away from me at last," and so on without end.

The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows--the look

of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely

birth--perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the

lament--subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to

seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in

the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of

the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I

believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I

dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of

Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England to whom my superfluity

had proved more useful; but the next morning saw me at the pest-house,

under convoy of the schoolmaster and the policeman.

The doors were again open. A fire was burning and a pot cooking on the

lava, under the supervision of an old woman in a grass-green sacque.

This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and

tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in

my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a

retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the

midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them

freely; the elder chatting at intervals--the girl in the same black weed

and bowed in the same attitude as yesterday. It was painfully plain she

would conceal, if possible, her face. Perhaps she had been beautiful:

certainly, poor soul, she had been vain--a gift of equal value. Some

consultation followed; I was told that nothing was required for outfit,

but a gift in money would be gratefully received; and this (forgetting I

was in the South Seas) I was about to make in silence. The confounded

expression of the schoolmaster reminded me of where I was. We stood up,

accordingly, side by side before the lepers; I made the necessary

speech, which the schoolmaster translated sentence by sentence; the

money (thus hallowed by oratory) was handed over and received; and the

two women each returned a dry "Mahalo," the girl not even then

exhibiting her face.

Between nine and ten of the same morning, the schooner lay-to off

Hookena and a whaleboat came ashore. The village clustered on the rocks

for the farewell: a grief perhaps--a performance certainly. We miss in

our modern life these operatic consolations of the past. The lepers came

singly and unattended; the elder first; the girl a little after, tricked

out in a red dress and with a fine red feather in her hat. In this

bravery, it was the more affecting to see her move apart on the rocks

and crouch in her accustomed attitude. But this time I had seen her

face; it was scarce horribly affected, but had a haunting look of an

unfinished wooden doll, at once expressionless and disproportioned;

doubtless a sore spectacle in the mirror of youth. Next there appeared a

woman of the middle life, of a swaggering gait, a gallant figure, and a

bold, handsome face. She came, swinging her hat, rolling her eyes and

shoulders, visibly working herself up; the crowd stirred and murmured on

her passage; and I knew, without being told, this was the mother and

protagonist. Close by the sea, in the midst of the spectators, she sat

down, and raised immediately the notes of the lament. One after another

of her friends approached her. To one after the other she reached out an

arm, embraced them down, rocked awhile with them embraced, and

passionately kissed them in the island fashion, with the pressed face.

The leper girl at last, as at some signal, rose from her seat apart,

drew near, was inarmed like the rest, and with a small knot (I suppose

of the most intimate) held some while in a general clasp. Through all,

the wail continued, rising into words and a sort of passionate

declamatory recitation as each friend approached, sinking again, as the

pair rocked together, into the tremolo drone. At length the scene was

over; the performers rose; the lepers and the mother were helped in

silence to their places; the whaleboat was urged between the reefs into

a bursting surge, and swung next moment without on the smooth swell.

Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears.

It was odd, but perhaps natural amongst a ceremonious, oratorical race,

that the boat should have waited while a passenger publicly lamented on

the beach. It was more odd still that the mother should have been the

chief, rather the only, actor. She was leaving indeed; she hoped to be

taken as a Kokua, or clean assistant, and thus accompany her daughter to

the settlement; but she was far from sure; and it was highly possible

she might return to Kona in a month. The lepers, on the other hand, took

leave for ever. In so far as regarded their own isle and birthplace, and

for their friends and families, it was their day of death.

The soldier from the war returns,

The sailor from the main:

but not the sick from the gray island. Yet they went unheeded; and the

chief part, and the whole stage and sympathy, was for their travelling

companion.

At the time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy

oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the

station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had

seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their

arrival, and that place itself.[6]

FOOTNOTE:

[6] For an account of the writer's visit to the leper settlement, see

_Letters_, section x.

PART IV

THE GILBERTS

CHAPTER I

BUTARITARI

At Honolulu we had said farewell to the _Casco_ and to Captain Otis, and

our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for

myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy

trading schooner, the _Equator_, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain

bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the

garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair wind for

Micronesia.

The whole extent of the South Seas is desert of ships, more especially

that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands;

communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one

thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for

instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of

day by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we

were destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of

mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had

intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary

cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon

unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had

learned to welcome shark' flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion,

an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to

aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near the

line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb ocean climate,

days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness.

Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava, measuring perhaps (at the widest)

a quarter of a mile from beach to beach. In both, a coarse kind of

_taro_ thrives; its culture is a chief business of the natives, and the

consequent mounds and ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye.

In all else they show the customary features of an atoll: the low

horizon, the expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the

sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and

interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points like

life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken for granted;

and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon the centre of

attention. The isles are populous, independent, seats of kinglets,

recently civilised, little visited. In the last decade many changes have

crept in: women no longer go unclothed till marriage; the widow no

longer sleeps at night and goes abroad by day with the skull of her dead

husband; and, fire-arms being introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth

sword are sold for curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and

practices were to be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old

society will have entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see

its institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed.

Populous and independent--warrens of men, ruled over with some rustic

pomp--such was the first and still the recurring impression of these

tiny lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of Butaritari, a

stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with the brown roofs of

houses; those of the palace and king's summer parlour (which are of

corrugated iron) glittered near one end conspicuously bright; the royal

colours flew hard by on a tall flagstaff; in front, on an artificial

islet, the gaol played the part of a martello. Even upon this first and

distant view, the place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a

village; rather of that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city

rustic and yet royal.

The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter of a

mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a flagrant

stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island after noon is

indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the trade will be still

blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon it will be blowing also,

speeding the canoes; but the screen of bush completely intercepts it

from the shore, and sleep and silence and companies of mosquitoes brood

upon the towns.

We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few

inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed. As

we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to explore a

city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open houses, we could see

the townsfolk stretched in the siesta, sometimes a family together

veiled in a mosquito net, sometimes a single sleeper on a platform like

a corpse on a bier.

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of

churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could

scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are

mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds;

some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls

pierced with little windows. A few were perched on piles in the lagoon;

the rest stood at random on a green, through which the roadway made a

ribbon of sand, or along the embankments of a sheet of water like a

shallow dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree

wood and palm-tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no

hammer sounded, in their building, and they were held together by

lashings of palm-tree sinnet.

In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island, a

lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of framing

sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the street shows

in a vista. The proportions of the place, in such surroundings, and

built of such materials, appeared august; and we threaded the nave with

a sentiment befitting visitors in a cathedral. Benches run along either

side. In the midst, on a crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king

and queen when they shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop,

apparently from a hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the

hoop (which hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material,

red and white.

This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and presently we

stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood

upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed

with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be

called spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously

lodged; but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was

enriched (beyond all island expectation) with coloured advertisements

and cuts from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the

treasures of the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two

pieces of cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the

guns fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade

of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square. A

straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace door; the

containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over against the

mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the martello-like islet

of the gaol breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs with tribute, neighbour

monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in, view with surprise these

extensive public works, and be awed by these mouths of silent cannon. It

was impossible to see the place and not to fancy it designed for

pageantry. But the elaborate theatre then stood empty; the royal house

deserted, its doors and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town

immersed in silence. On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed

stage, an ancient gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant;

and beyond on the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing

moving.

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet.

At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong

peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the

king. The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent

marquee--called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a

maniap'--at the lowest estimation forty feet by sixty. The iron roof,

lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter,

is supported externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood.

The floor is of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the

frame; the house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters

freely and disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is

seen to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we

had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed,

we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people,

some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The

court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled.

Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a

pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little

closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon

examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon

some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the

house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which

sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body

overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull; he seemed at

once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper

rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of the Dutch army,

looks perhaps not otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and

first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet

always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is

no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming. But the queen,

who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible; and there

was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility became at last

the cause of our departure. He had greeted us upon our entrance:--"That

is the honourable King, and I am his interpreter," he had said, with

more stateliness than truth. For he held no appointment in the court,

seemed extremely ill-acquainted with the island language, and was

present, like ourselves, upon a visit of civility. Mr. Williams was his

name: an American darkey, runaway ship's cook, and bar-keeper at "The

Land we Live in" tavern, Butaritari. I never knew a man who had more

words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the gloom of

the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in the least abash

him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left talking.

The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch

itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence. So much the more vivid

was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the islet, the

Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his unmelodious David, Mr.

Williams, chattering through the drowsy hours.

CHAPTER II

THE FOUR BROTHERS

The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin;

some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-independent

chieftains do him qualified homage. The importance of the office is

measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both

extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.

On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa's father, Nakaeia, the

eldest son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength,

masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence

of men and business. Alone in his islands it was he who dealt and

profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled

for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought long and well their

task-master declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general

debauch. The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six

hundred dollars' worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once; the

narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry; and it was a common

thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves) parade their drunken

sovereign on the forehatch of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling

and singing as they went. At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel

ended; Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and

on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the

taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was

affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it

seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and

midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play

the executioner; and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help

and countenance of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one

that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus

disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance,

which he would then execute alone and return well pleased with his

connubial crew. The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to

conceive. Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were

yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign's life; they were still

wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their

faces. They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of

those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of

Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms, which commanded

the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper

with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing

palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same

moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the

involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign he must

lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted

him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms,

accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of

wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.

And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem. He was

at that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a

pleasure-house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one

day he summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him;

that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the

husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets. She would be

arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked

with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed;

for death, as she well knew. "Tell me the man's name, and I will spare

you," said Nakaeia. But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved

her lover; and the queens strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that

smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice;

his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the

firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed

and kept at arm's-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea

phrase) of "a perfect gentleman when sober."

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his

next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and

warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and

for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia's. Nanteitei

dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a

leather mail-bag. To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence;

you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike

remained unanswered. The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them

heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a

chief means of buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for

himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance,

Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the

town. The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and

waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing

durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look

down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time

already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari--Maka and

Kanoa, two brave child-like men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine;

he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some

affection for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he

slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs

to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not

only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had

fled) with some expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell

more completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in

his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the

king which soon grew paramount. Nanteitei, with the royal house, was

publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries

disavow, the harem was at once reduced. It was a compendious act. The

throne was thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen's

relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions)

cast in a body on the market. I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian

sailor who was successively married to two of these _impromptu_ widows,

and successively divorced by both for misconduct. That two great and

rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married "a man

from another island" marks the dissolution of society. The laws besides

were wholly remodelled, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man;

as a legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime,

stern to repress innocent pleasures.

War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei

died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne,

and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave

in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst. The rule of the

high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps

alternated with monarchy. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right

to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king's chief

superiority is a form of closure--"The Speaking is over." After the

long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men

were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond

question jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather

caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka

was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in

the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront,

the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings. In the space of

one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust. The king sat

in the maniap' before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by

his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the

north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the

succours as they came. They came singly or in groups, each with his gun

or pistol slung about his neck. "Where are you going?" asked the chief.

"The king called us," they would reply. "Here is your place. Sit down,"

returned the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and

sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia

was summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part of

the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the

last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to

ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style

were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a

festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never

enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of

Nakaeia, and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the

service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in

debt.

He died some months before my arrival in the islands, and no one

regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by

repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue,

a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in

the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help;

and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.

Nantemat', _Mr. Corpse_, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned

it well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded

houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered

families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia _redux_. He came,

summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he

proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and

the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the

name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man's character was much commented on in the island,

and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my eyes, there

seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency. Mr. Corpse was

afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror

of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second

disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of

bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering

others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a

reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of

accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and

blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and

sits among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that

put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre

of a king.

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my observation,

depict him in his two capacities. A chief in Little Makin asked, in an

hour of lightness, "Who is Kaeia?" A bird carried the saying; and

Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three. Mr.

Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner died before my arrival; the

third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance

that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled

with a scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in

such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the

blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than

awkward. "I will strike the blow," said the venerable Abou; and Mr.

Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The quarry was

decoyed into the bush; he was set carrying a log; and while his arms

were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow. Justice being thus done,

the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee. But their victim

recalled them to his side. "You need not run away now," he said. "You

have done this thing to me. Stay." He was some twenty minutes dying, and

his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All the

stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing

features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr. Corpse;

and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has some reason

to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I was never more sure of

anything than the tragic quality of the king's thoughts; and yet I had

but the one sight of him at unawares. I had once an errand for his ear.

It was once more the hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers

abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal

where Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony, being in

some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his

Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the

unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the

floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his

visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just: Nakaeia, the author

of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his

tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature,

but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances damn and save them;

and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in

a quiet by-street of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter,

and, even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues. He has no

lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot

enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar

of his future, and he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him

a patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation

at the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a

shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of

three hundred pounds a year. He had been some nine months on the throne:

had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a

uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent his brother's photograph to

be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had

greatly reduced that brother's legacy of debt; and had still sovereigns

in his pocket. An affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides

a handy carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the

palace. It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues: that Tebureimoa

should have a diversion filled me with surprise.

CHAPTER III

AROUND OUR HOUSE

When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and within

the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six foreign houses of

Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by Maka, the Hawaiian

missionary. Two San Francisco firms are here established, Messrs.

Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the first hard by the palace of

the mid town, the second at the north entry; each with a store and

bar-room. Our house was in the Wightman compound, betwixt the store and

bar, within a fenced enclosure. Across the road a few native houses

nestled in the margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose

solid, shutting out the breeze. A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in

behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens' hands. Here,

when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when the tide was

low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and an endless series

of natives descended the pier stair, tailed across the sand in strings

and clusters, waded to the waist with the bags of copra, and loitered

backward to renew their charge. The mystery of the copra trade tormented

me, as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at night,

the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the road:

families going up the island to make copra on their lands; women bound

for the bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a

day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell. In the first

grey of the morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would

straggle past about their tree-top business, strike off here and there

into the bush, and vanish from the face of the earth. At about the same

hour, if the tide be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound

yourself across the island for a bath, and may enter close at their

heels alleys of the palm wood. Right in front, although the sun is not

yet risen, the east is already lighted with preparatory fires, and the

huge accumulations of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the

coming day. The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the

palms, its playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you

will, above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and

shaken forest. And right overhead the song of an invisible singer breaks

from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top answers; and

beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more distant minstrel

perches and sways and sings. So, all round the isle, the toddy-cutters

sit on high, and are rocked by the trade, and have a view far to

seaward, where they keep watch for sails and like huge birds utter their

songs in the morning. They sing with a certain lustiness and Bacchic

glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from

the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls. And yet in a

sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete,

and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was

understood the cutters "prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old

wars." The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is

brought to your door, you have a beverage well "worthy of a grace." All

forenoon you may return and taste; it only sparkles, and sharpens, and

grows to be a new drink, not less delicious; but with the progress of

the day the fermentation quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it

will be yeast for bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the

counsellor of crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and

moustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets, all

stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty lip. The

hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise in a frizzled

bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese, a pointed stick (used for a

comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls. The women from this bush of

hair look forth enticingly: the race cannot be compared with the

Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt even if the average be high, but

some of the prettiest girls, and one of the handsomest women I ever saw,

were Gilbertines. Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group,

is Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common wear,

the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with flowers, fruit,

and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the characteristic female

dress of the Gilberts no longer universal. The _ridi_ is its name: a

cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not

unlike tarry string; the lower edge not reaching the mid-thigh, the

upper adjusted so low upon the haunches that it seems to cling by

accident. A sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left

destitute. "The perilous, hairbreadth ridi" was our word for it; and in

the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to

please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more

frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine

would look her best, that must be her costume. In that, and naked

otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life,

that marks the poetry of Micronesia. Bundle her in a gown, the charm is

fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous. The men broke out in

all the colours of the rainbow--or at least of the trade-room,--and both

men and women began to be adorned and scented with new flowers. A small

white blossom is the favourite, sometimes sown singly in a woman's hair

like little stars, now composed in a thick wreath. With the night, the

crowd sometimes thickened in the road, and the padding and brushing of

bare feet became continuous; the promenades mostly grave, the silence

only interrupted by some giggling and scampering of girls; even the

children quiet. At nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral,

and the life of the town ceased. At four the next morning the signal is

repeated in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for

seven hours all must lie--I was about to say within doors, of a place

where doors, and even walls, are an exception--housed, at least, under

their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-nets.

Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send

abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the

police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house

like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope

in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous

presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked

nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat

him. But the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain cast

anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out. This was

owing to our position between the store and the bar--the "Sans Souci,"

as the last was called. Mr. Rick was not only Messrs. Wightman's

manager, but consular agent for the States. Mrs. Rick was the only white

woman on the island, and one of the only two in the archipelago; their

house besides, with its cool verandahs, its bookshelves, its comfortable

furniture, could not be rivalled nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu. Every

one called in consequence, save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea

quarrel, hingeing on the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a

difference about poultry. Even these, if they did not appear upon the

north, would be presently visible to the southward, the "Sans Souci"

drawing them as with cords. In an island with a total population of

twelve white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem

superfluous; but every bullet has its billet, and the double

accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient by

the captains and the crews of ships: "The Land we Live in" being tacitly

resigned to the forecastle, the "Sans Souci" tacitly reserved for the

afterguard. So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding was my fear of

Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first; but in the other,

which was the club or rather the casino of the island, I regularly

passed my evenings. It was small, but neatly fitted, and at night (when

the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass and glowed with coloured pictures

like a theatre at Christmas. The pictures were advertisements, the glass

coarse enough, the carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that

incongruous isle, was of unbridled luxury and inestimable expense. Here

songs were sung, tales told, tricks performed, games played. The Ricks,

ourselves, Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the

ships, and perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their

boats or by the road on foot, made up the usual company. The traders,

all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; "South

Sea Merchants" is the title they prefer. "We are all sailors

here"--"Merchants, if you please"--"_South Sea_ Merchants,"--was a piece

of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour.

We found them at all times simple, genial, gay, gallant, and obliging;

and, across some interval of time, recall with pleasure the traders of

Butaritari. There was one black sheep indeed. I tell of him here where

he lived, against my rule; for in this case I have no measure to

preserve, and the man is typical of a class of ruffians that once

disgraced the whole field of the South Seas, and still linger in the

rarely visited isles of Micronesia. He had the name on the beach of "a

perfect gentleman when sober," but I never saw him otherwise than

drunk. The few shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has

singled out with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of

his original baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a

treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me

to suppose him innocent. His daughter is defaced by his erroneous

cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and, in the

darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the

wrong victim. The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with

natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears her forcible

restoration. The best of his business is to make natives drink, and then

advance the money for the fine upon a lucrative mortgage. "Respect for

whites" is the man's word: "What is the matter with this island is the

want of respect for whites." On his way to Butaritari, while I was

there, he spied his wife in the bush with certain natives and made a

dash to capture her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and

the husband retreated: "Do you call that proper respect for whites?" he

cried. At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for

his kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death.

Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what

sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I

beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence;

and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a

recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English lips

incredibly incongruous.

Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered, was

of some extent. In one corner was a trellis with a long table of rough

boards. Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not long before with

memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here we took our meals;

here entertained to a dinner the king and notables of Makin. In the

midst was the house, with a verandah front and back, and three rooms

within. In the verandah we slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there

by day, and slept at night. Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a

fine hanging lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii. Queen

Victoria proves nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and

the truth is we were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage. On the day

of our arrival Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his doors; and

the dear rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and tobacco, returned to

find his verandah littered with cigarettes and his parlour horrible with

bottles. He made but one condition--on the round table, which he used in

the celebration of the sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting

liquor; in all else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent,

retired across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat,

beat the remotest quarters of the isle for provender. He found us

pigs--I could not fancy where--no other pigs were visible; he brought us

fowls and taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry, it was

he who supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the cooking, he

who asked grace at table, and when the king's health was proposed, he

also started the cheering with an English hip-hip-hip. There was never a

more fortunate conception; the heart of the fatted king exulted in his

bosom at the sound.

Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging creature

than this parson of Butaritari: his mirth, his kindness, his noble,

friendly feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and gesture. He loved

to exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary part, to exercise his

lungs and muscles, and to speak and laugh with his whole body. He had

the morning cheerfulness of birds and healthy children; and his humour

was infectious. We were next neighbours and met daily, yet our

salutations lasted minutes at a stretch--shaking hands, slapping

shoulders, capering like a pair of Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our

sides upon some pleasantry that would scarce raise a titter in an

infant school. It might be five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just

gone by, the road empty, the shade of the island lying far on the

lagoon: and the ebullition cheered me for the day.

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy; these jubilant

extremes could scarce be constantly maintained. He was besides long, and

lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and his Sabbath

countenance was even saturnine. On that day we made a procession to the

church, or (as I must always call it) the cathedral: Maka (a blot on the

hot landscape) in tall hat, black frock-coat, black trousers; under his

arm the hymn-book and the Bible; in his face, a reverent

gravity:--beside him Mary his wife, a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly

lady, seriously attired:--myself following with singular and moving

thoughts. Long before, to the sound of bells and streams and birds,

through a green Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a

minister in whose house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference,

and the series of years and deaths, profoundly touched me. In the great,

dusky, palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty: the

men on one side, the women on the other, myself posted (for a privilege)

amongst the women, and the small missionary contingent gathered close

around the platform, we were lost in that round vault. The lessons were

read antiphonally, the flock was catechised, a blind youth repeated

weekly a long string of psalms, hymns were sung--I never heard worse

singing,--and the sermon followed. To say I understood nothing were

untrue; there were points that I learned to expect with certainty; the

name of Honolulu, that of Kalakaua, the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa', the word

ship, and a description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and I

was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the

bargain. The rest was but sound to the ears, silence for the mind; a

plain expanse of tedium, rendered unbearable by heat, a hard chair, and

the sight through the wide doors of the more happy heathen on the

green. Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears;

it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched;

they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you

may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of

boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and

addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more

effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of

my successful struggles against sleep--and I hope they were

successful--cheered the flight of time. He, when he was not catching

flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours, gloated with a fixed,

translucent eye upon the stages of my agony; and once when the service

was drawing towards a close he winked at me across the church.

I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there--always with

respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep seriousness, his

burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the sincere and various

accents of his voice. To see him weekly flogging a dead horse and

blowing a cold fire was a lesson in fortitude and constancy. It may be a

question whether if the mission were fully supported, and he was set

free from business avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise

myself; I think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that

rigour which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man

so lively and engaging, amazes the beholder. No song, no dance, no

tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life--only toil and church-going;

so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of the

Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different

world. And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular missionary in the

Gilberts, coming from a country recklessly unchaste to one conspicuously

strict; from a race hag-ridden with bogies to one comparatively bold

against the terrors of the dark. The thought was stamped one morning in

my mind, when I chanced to be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town

lightless, but the lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed. It

requires no law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and

his countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted.

CHAPTER IV

A TALE OF A TAPU

On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our photographers

were early stirring. Once more we traversed a silent town; many were yet

abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no

sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the

quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the

"Arabian Nights" or from the classic poets; here were the fit

destination of some "faery frigot," here some adventurous prince might

step ashore among new characters and incidents; and the island prison,

where it floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed

for the repository of the Grail. In such a scene, and at such an hour,

the impression received was not so much of foreign travel--rather of

past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had

crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by the

same steps, home and to-day. A few children followed us, mostly nude,

all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal some silent damsels

waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of the maniap's before the

palace gate we were attracted by a low but stirring hum of speech.

The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged. The king was there

in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with Winchesters,

his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and decision; tumblers and

black bottles went the round; and the talk, throughout loud, was general

and animated. I was inclined at first to view this scene with suspicion.

But the hour appeared unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides

forbidden equally by the law of the land and the canons of the church;

and while I was yet hesitating, the king's rigorous attitude disposed of

my last doubt. We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his

guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted. We were

reminded of the day--the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no

photographs--and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the rejected

camera.

At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne unoccupied.

So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be present; perhaps

my doubts revived; and before I got home they were transformed to

certainties. Tom, the bar-keeper of the "Sans Souci," was in

conversation with two emissaries from the court. The "keen," they said,

wanted "din," failing which "perandi."[7] No din, was Tom's reply, and

no perandi; but "pira" if they pleased. It seems they had no use for

beer, and departed sorrowing.

"Why, what is the meaning of all this?" I asked. "Is the island on the

spree?"

Such was the fact. On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and the

king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu against

liquor. There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies to the

superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one can start

him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop. The tapu,

raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten days the town

had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen it the afternoon

before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by the Old Men and his own

appetites, continued to maintain the liberty, to squander his savings on

liquor, and to join in and lead the debauch. The whites were the authors

of this crisis; it was upon their own proposal that the freedom had been

granted at the first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they

were doubtless pleased it should continue. That pleasure had now

sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded) unduly;

and it now began to be a question how it might conclude. Hence Tom's

refusal. Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the moment, and it was

avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied by Tom at the "Sans

Souci," would be supplied at "The Land we Live in" by the gobbling Mr.

Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I am

inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate. Yet the conduct of

drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our

populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers

and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole

townful--and I might rather say, by the whole polity--king, magistrates,

police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be

thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited,

lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable

number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their

own misconduct; and the natives have displayed in at least one instance

a disposition to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing

but dumb bones. This last was the chief consideration against a sudden

closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach and

dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any moment

precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for a massacre.

_Monday, 15th_.--At the same hour we returned to the same maniap'.

Kuemmel (of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the

crown prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and busily

plying the corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed the loose

mouth, the uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated eye of the

early drinker. It was plain we were impatiently expected; the king

retired with alacrity to dress, the guards were despatched after their

uniforms; and we were left to await the issue of these preparations

with a shedful of tipsy natives. The orgie had proceeded further than

on Sunday. The day promised to be of great heat; it was already sultry,

the courtiers were already fuddled; and still the kuemmel continued to go

round, and the crown prince to play butler. Flemish freedom followed

upon Flemish excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed,

and with a full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a

humorous courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described. It was our

diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the gathering of the

guards. They have European arms, European uniforms, and (to their

sorrow) European shoes. We saw one warrior (like Mars) in the article of

being armed; two men and a stalwart woman were scarce strong enough to

boot him; and after a single appearance on parade the army is crippled

for a week.

At last, the gates under the king's house opened; the army issued, one

behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped under the

gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with gold lace;

majesty's wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an ample trained

silk gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the pageantry of Makin

marshalled on its chosen theatre. Dickens might have told how serious

they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and streamed under his cocked

hat; how he took station by the larger of his two cannons--austere,

majestic, but not truly vertical; how the troops huddled, and were

straightened out, and clubbed again; how they and their firelocks raked

at various inclinations like the masts of ships; and how an amateur

photographer reviewed, arrayed, and adjusted them, to see his

dispositions change before he reached the camera.

The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to

laugh at; and our report of these transactions was received on our

return with the shaking of grave heads.

The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at any

moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin. The

Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded on three

sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to contain over a

thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to the ships, in the

case of an alert, was a recourse not to be thought of. Our talk that

morning must have closely reproduced the talk in English garrisons

before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt that any mischief was in

prospect, the sure belief that (should any come) there was nothing left

but to go down fighting, the half-amused, half-anxious attitude of mind

in which we were awaiting fresh developments.

The kuemmel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king had

followed us in quest of more. Mr. Corpse was now divested of his more

awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in striped

pyjamas; a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at the trail;

and his majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan whalerman and

the playful courtier with the turban of frizzed hair. There was never a

more lively deputation. The whalerman was gapingly, tearfully tipsy; the

courtier walked on air; the king himself was even sportive. Seated in a

chair in the Ricks' sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and

menaces unmoved. He was even rated, plied with historic instances,

threatened with the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the

spot--and nothing in the least affected him. It should be done

to-morrow, he said; to-day it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not.

"Is that royal?" cried indignant Mr. Rick. No, it was not royal; had the

king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a different

language; and royal or not, he had the best of the dispute. The terms

indeed were hardly equal; for the king was the only man who could

restore the tapu, but the Ricks were not the only people who sold drink.

He had but to hold his ground on the first question, and they were sure

to weaken on the second. A little struggle they still made for the

fashion's sake; and then one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed,

greatly rejoicing, a case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow.

The Rarotongan (whom I had never seen before) wrung me by the hand like

a man bound on a far voyage. "My dear frien'!" he cried, "good-bye, my

dear frien'!"--tears of kuemmel standing in his eyes; the king lurched as

he went, the courtier ambled--a strange party of intoxicated children to

be entrusted with that barrowful of madness.

You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a ferment

in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives in the

street. But it was not before half-past one that a sudden hubbub of

voices called us from the house, to find the whole white colony already

gathered on the spot as by concerted signal. The "Sans Souci" was

overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah thronged. From all these

throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly; it sounded

like the bleating of young lambs, but angrier. In the road his royal

highness (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying

upon Tom; on the top step, tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting

to the prince. Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous.

Then came a brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned and was

rejected; the stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view,

through the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their

midst a fourth. By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his

knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and whisked

along the road into the village, howling as he disappeared. Had his face

been raised, we should have seen it bloodied, and the blood was not his

own. The courtier with the turban of frizzed hair had paid the costs of

this disturbance with the lower part of one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the

inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces, and--a fact that spoke

volumes--Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go

elsewhither, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had

enough of bar-keeping for that day. Indeed, the event had hung on a

hair. A man had sought to draw a revolver--on what quarrel I could never

learn, and perhaps he himself could not have told; one shot, when the

room was so crowded, could scarce have failed to take effect; where many

were armed and all tipsy, it could scarce have failed to draw others;

and the woman who spied the weapon and the man who seized it may very

well have saved the white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the day

our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in solitude. But the

tranquillity was only local; _din_ and _perandi_ still flowed in other

quarters: and we had one more sight of Gilbert Island violence. In the

church, where we had wandered photographing, we were startled by a

sudden piercing outcry. The scene, looking forth from the doors of that

great hall of shadow, was unforgettable. The palms, the quaint and

scattered houses, the flag of the island streaming from its tall staff,

glowed with intolerable sunshine. In the midst two women rolled fighting

on the grass. The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished,

because the one was stripped to the _ridi_ and the other wore a holoku

(sacque) of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth

locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog; the other

impotently fought and scratched. So for a moment we saw them wallow and

grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore. But we

were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the adventurous; on

the first sign of an adventure it would have been a singular

inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board instead for our

revolvers. Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr. Osbourne, and Mrs.

Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public highway, and fired at

bottles to the admiration of the natives. Captain Reid, of the

_Equator_, stayed on shore with us to be at hand in case of trouble, and

we retired to bed at the accustomed hour, agreeably excited by the day's

events. The night was exquisite, the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in

my hammock looking on the strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one

ugly picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked

in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I

could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to

these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his

ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the

cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is

a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell

on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work; the imagination

readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary,

whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as

the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and

huggermugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet

to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens

of our cities: I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through

Soho, and seen that which cured me of my dinner.

FOOTNOTE:

[7] Gin and brandy.

CHAPTER V

A TALE OF A TAPU--_continued_

_Tuesday, July 16_.--It rained in the night, sudden and loud, in Gilbert

Island fashion. Before the day, the crowing of a cock aroused me and I

wandered in the compound and along the street. The squall was blown by,

the moon shone with incomparable lustre, the air lay dead as in a room,

and yet all the isle sounded as under a strong shower, the eaves thickly

pattering, the lofty palms dripping at larger intervals and with a

louder note. In this bold nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay

inscrutable, one lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the

roof, and made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the

pillars on the floor. Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not

a creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police

were faithful to their duty; secretly vigilant, keeping account of time;

and a little later, the watchman struck slowly and repeatedly on the

cathedral bell; four o'clock, the warning signal. It seemed strange

that, in a town resigned to drunkenness and tumult, curfew and reveille

should still be sounded and still obeyed.

The day came, and brought little change. The place still lay silent; the

people slept, the town slept. Even the few who were awake, mostly women

and children, held their peace and kept within under the strong shadow

of the thatch, where you must stop and peer to see them. Through the

deserted streets, and past sleeping houses, a deputation took its way at

an early hour to the palace; the king was suddenly awakened, and must

listen (probably with a headache) to unpalatable truths. Mrs. Rick,

being a sufficient mistress of that difficult tongue, was spokeswoman;

she explained to the sick monarch that I was an intimate personal friend

of Queen Victoria's; that immediately on my return I should make her a

report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again

invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make reprisals.

It was scarce the fact--rather a just and necessary parable of the fact,

corrected for latitude; and it certainly told upon the king. He was much

affected; he had conceived the notion (he said) that I was a man of some

importance, but not dreamed it was as bad as this; and the missionary

house was tapu'd under a fine of fifty dollars.

So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any more; and

I gathered subsequently that much more had passed. The protection gained

was welcome. It had been the most annoying and not the least alarming

feature of the day before, that our house was periodically filled with

tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a time, begging drink, fingering our

goods, hard to be dislodged, awkward to quarrel with. Queen Victoria's

friend (who was soon promoted to be her son) was free from these

intrusions. Not only my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in

peace; even on our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and,

like great persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side. For the

matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in a

fool's paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the tapu to

be revived, and the island once more sober.

_Tuesday, July 23_.--We dined under a bare trellis erected for the

Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee and

tobacco. In that climate evening approaches without sensible chill; the

wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and fades, and darkens

into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly and insensibly the

shadows thicken, the stars multiply their number; you look around you

and the day is gone. It was then that we would see our Chinaman draw

near across the compound in a lurching sphere of light, divided by his

shadows; and with the coming of the lamp the night closed about the

table. The faces of the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out

suddenly bright on a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with

palm-tops and the peaked roofs of houses. Here and there the gloss upon

a leaf, or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle. All

else had vanished. We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars _in

vacuo_; we sat, manifest and blind, amid the general ambush of the

darkness; and the islanders, passing with light footfalls and low voices

in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen.