Book: The Hawaiian Archipelago by Isabella Bird - Part II of III

LETTER XII.

HILO, February 22.
My sojourn here is very pleasant, owing to the kindness and sociability of the people.  I think that so much culture and such a variety of refined tastes can seldom be found in so small a community.  There have been pleasant little gatherings for sewing, while some gentlemen read aloud, fern-printing in the verandah, microscopic and musical evenings, little social luncheons, and on Sunday evenings what is colloquially termed, “a sing,” at this most social house.  One of the things I have specially enjoyed has been spending an afternoon at the Rev. Titus Coan’s.  He is not only one of the most venerable of the remaining missionaries, but such an authority on the Hawaiian volcanoes as to entitle him to be designated “the high-priest of Pélé!”  In his modest, quiet way he told thrilling stories of the old missionary days.
As you know, the islands cast off idolatry in 1819, but it was not till 1835 that Mr. and Mrs. Coan arrived in Hilo, where Mr. and Mrs. Lyman had been toiling for some time, and had produced a marked change on the social condition of the people.  Mr. C. was a fervid speaker, and physically very robust, and when he had mastered the language, he undertook much of the travelling and touring, and Mr. Lyman took charge of the home mission station, and the boarding and industrial school which he still indefatigably superintends.  There were 15,000 natives then in the district, and its extremes were 100 miles apart.  Portions of it could only be reached with peril to limbs and even life.  Horses were only regarded as wild animals in those days, and Mr. C. traversed on foot the district I have just returned from, not lazily riding down the gulch sides, but climbing, or being let down by ropes from tree to tree, and from crag to crag.  In times of rain like last week, when it was impossible to ford the rivers, he sometimes swam across, with a rope to prevent him from being carried away, through others he rode on the broad shoulders of a willing native, while a company of strong men locked hands and stretched themselves across the torrent, between him and the cataract, to prevent him from being carried over in case his bearer should fall.  This experience was often repeated three or four times a day.  His smallest weekly number of sermons was six or seven, and the largest from twenty-five to thirty.  He often travelled in drowning rain, crossed dangerous streams, climbed slippery precipices, and frequently preached in wind and rain with all his garments saturated.  On every occasion he received aid from the natives, who were so kind and friendly, that when he used to sleep in the woods at night, he hung his watch on a tree, knowing that it was perfectly safe from pilfering or curious touch.  Indeed the Christian teachers seem to have been regarded as tabu.
Before the end of that year, Mr. Coan had made the circuit of Hawaii, a foot and canoe trip of 300 miles, in which he nearly suffered canoe-wreck twice.  In all, he has admitted into the Christian church by baptism, 12,000 persons, besides 4000 infants.  He gave a most interesting account of one great baptism.  The greatest care was previously taken in selecting, teaching, watching, and examining the candidates.  Those from the distant villages came and spent several months here for preliminary instruction.  Many of these were converts of two years’ standing, a larger class had been on the list for more than a year, and a smaller one for a lesser period.  The accepted candidates were announced by name several weeks previously, and friends and enemies everywhere were called upon to testify all that they knew about them.  On the first Sunday in July, 1838, 1705 persons, formerly heathens, were baptised.  They were seated close together on the earth-floor in rows, with just space between for one to walk, and Mr. Lyman and Mr. Coan passing through them, sprinkled every bowed head, after which Mr. C. admitted the weeping hundreds into the fellowship of the Universal Church by pronouncing the words, “I baptise you all in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”  After this, 2400 converts received the Holy Communion.  I give Mr. C.’s own words concerning those who partook of it, “who truly and earnestly repented of their sins, and steadfastly purposed to lead new lives.”  “The old and decrepit, the lame, the blind, the maimed, the withered, the paralytic, and those afflicted with divers diseases and torments; those with eyes, noses, lips, and limbs consumed; with features distorted, and figures depraved and loathsome: these came hobbling upon their staves, or led and borne by others to the table of the Lord.  Among the throng you would have seen the hoary priest of idolatry, with hands but recently washed from the blood of human victims, together with thieves, adulterers, highway robbers, murderers, and mothers whose hands reeked with the blood of their own children.  It seemed like one of the crowds the Saviour gathered, and over which He pronounced the words of healing.”
Though the people cast off idolatry in 1819, before the arrival of the missionaries, they were very indifferent to Christian teaching until 1837, the year before the great baptism, when a great religious stir began, and for four years affected all the islands.  I wish you could have heard Mr. C. and Mrs. Lyman tell of that stirring time, when nearly all the large population of the Hilo and Puna districts turned out to hear the Gospel, and how the young people went up into the mountains and carried the news of the love of God and the good life to come to the sick and old, who were afterwards baptized, when often the only water which could be obtained for the rite was that which dripped sparingly from the roofs of caves.  The Hawaiian notions of a future state, where any existed, were peculiarly vague and dismal, and Mr. Ellis says that the greater part of the people seemed to regard the tidings of ora loa ia Jesu(endless life by Jesus) as the most joyful news they had ever heard, “breaking upon them,” to use their own phrase, “like light in the morning.”  “Will my spirit never die, and can this poor weak body live again?” an old chiefess exclaimed, and this delighted surprise seemed the general feeling of the natives.  From less difficult distances the sick and lame were brought on litters and on the backs of men, and the infirm often crawled to the trail by which the missionary was to pass, that they might hear of this good news which had come to Hawaii-nei.
There were but these two preachers for the 15,000 people scattered for 100 miles, who were all ravenous to hear, and could not wait for the tardy modes of evangelization. “If we die,” said they, “let us die in the light.”  So this strange thing fell out, that whole villages from miles away gathered to the mission station.  Two-thirds of the population of the district came in, and within the radius of a mile the grass and banana houses clustered as thick as they could stand.  Beautiful Hilo in a short time swelled from a population of 1000 to 10,000; and at any hour of the day or night the sound of the conch shell brought together from 3000 to 6000 worshippers.  It was a vast camp-meeting which continued for two years, but there was no disorder, and a decent quiet ruled throughout the strangely extemporized city.  A new morality, a new social order, new notions on nearly all subjects, had to be inculcated as well as a new religion.  Mrs. C. and Mrs. L. daily assembled the women and children, and taught them the habits and industries of civilization, to attend to their persons, to braid hats, and to wear and make clothes.
During this time, on November 7, 1837, one of the striking phenomena which make the islands remarkable occurred.  The crescent sand-beach, said to be the most beautiful in the Pacific, the fringe of palms, the far-reaching groves behind, and the great ocean, slept in summer calm, as they sleep to-day.  Four sermons, as usual, had been preached to audiences of 6000 people.  There had been a funeral, the natives say, though Mr. C. does not remember it, and his text had been “Be ye also ready,” and larger throngs than usual had followed the preachers to their homes.  The fatiguing day was over, the natives were singing hymns in the still evening air, and Mr. C. “had gathered his family for prayers” in the very room in which he told me this story, when they were startled by “a sound as if a heavy mountain had fallen on the beach.”  There was at once a fearful cry, wailing, and indescribable confusion.  The quiet ocean had risen in a moment in a gigantic wave, which, rushing in with the speed of a racehorse, and uplifting itself over the shore, swept everything into promiscuous ruin; men, women, children, dogs, houses, food, canoes, clothing, floated wildly on the flood, and hundreds of people were struggling among the billows in the midst of their earthly all.  Some were dashed on the shore, some were saved by friends who hurried to their aid, some were carried out to sea by the retiring water, and some stout swimmers sank exhausted; yet the loss of life was not nearly so great as it would have been among a less amphibious people.  Mr. C. described the roaring of the ocean, the cries of distress, the shrieks of the perishing, the frantic rush of hundreds to the shore, and the desolation of the whole neighbourhood of the beach, as forming a scene of the most thrilling and awful interest.
You will remember that I wrote from Kilauea regarding the terror which the Goddess of the Crater inspired, and her high-priest was necessarily a very awful personage.  The particular high-priest of whom Mr. Coan told me was six feet five inches in height, and his sister, who was co-ordinate with him in authority, had a scarcely inferior altitude.  His chief business was to keep Pélé appeased.  He lived on the shore, but often went up to Kilauea with sacrifices.  If a human victim were needed, he had only to point to a native, and the unfortunate wretch was at once strangled.  He was not only the embodiment of heathen piety, but of heathen crime.  Robbery was his pastime.  His temper was so fierce and so uncurbed that no native dared even to tread on his shadow.  More than once he had killed a man for the sake of food and clothes not worth fifty cents.  He was a thoroughly wicked savage.  Curiosity attracted him into one of the Hilo meetings, and the bad giant fell under the resistless, mysterious influence which was metamorphosing thousands of Hawaiians.  “I have been deceived,” he said, “I have deceived others, I have lived in darkness, and did not know the true God.  I worshipped what was no God.  I renounce it all.  The true God has come.  He speaks.  I bow down to Him.  I wish to be His son.”  The priestess, his sister, came soon afterwards, and they remained here several months for instruction.  They were then about seventy years old, but they imbibed the New Testament spirit so thoroughly that they became as gentle, loving, and quiet as little children.  After a long probationary period they were baptized, and after several years of pious and lowly living, they passed gently and trustfully away.
The old church which was the scene of these earlier assemblages, came down with a crash after a night of heavy rain, the large timbers, which were planted in the moist earth after the fashion of the country to support the framework, having become too rotten to support the weight of the saturated thatch.  Without a day’s loss of time the people began a new church.  All were volunteers, some to remove from the wreck of the old building such timbers as might still be of service; some to quarry stone for a foundation, an extravagance never before dreamed of by an islander; some to bring sand in gourd-shells upon their heads, or laboriously gathered in the folds of bark-cloth aprons; some to bring lime from the coral reefs twenty feet under water; whilst the majority hurried to the forest belt, miles away on the mountain side, to fell the straightest and tallest trees.  Then 50 or 100 men, (for in that day horses and oxen were known only as wild beasts of the wilderness,) attached hawsers to the butt ends of logs, and dragged them away through bush and brake, through broken ground and river beds, till they deposited them on the site of the new church.  The wild, monotonous chant, as the men hauled in the timber, lives in the memories of the missionaries’ children, who say that it seemed to them as if the preparations for Solomon’s temple could not have exceeded the accumulations of the islanders!
I think that the greater number of the converts of those four years must have died ere this.  In 1867 the old church at Hilo was divided into seven congregations, six of them with native pastors.  To meet the wants of the widely-scattered people, fifteen churches have been built, holding from 500 up to 1000.  The present Hilo church, a very pretty wooden one, cost about $14,000.  All these have been erected mainly by native money and labour.  Probably the native Christians on Hawaii are not much better or worse than Christian communities elsewhere, but they do seem a singularly generous people.  Besides liberally sustaining their own clergy, the Hilo Christians have contributed altogether $100,000 for religious purposes.  Mr. Coan’s native congregation, sorely dwindled as it is, raises over $1200 annually for foreign missions; and twelve of its members have gone as missionaries to the islands of Southern Polynesia.
Poor people!  It would be unfair to judge of them as we may legitimately be judged of, who inherit the influences of ten centuries of Christianity.  They have only just emerged from a bloody and sensual heathenism, and to the instincts and volatility of these dark Polynesian races, the restraining influences of the Gospel are far more severe than to our cold, unimpulsive northern natures.  The greatest of their disadvantages has been that some of the vilest of the whites who roamed the Pacific had settled on the islands before the arrival of the Christian teachers, dragging the people down to even lower depths of depravity than those of heathenism, and that there are still resident foreigners who corrupt and destroy them.
I must tell you a story which the venerable Mrs. Lyman told me yesterday.  In 1825, five years after the first missionaries landed, Kapiolani, a female aliiof high rank, while living at Kaiwaaloa (where Captain Cook was murdered), became a Christian.  Grieving for her people, most of whom still feared to anger Pélé, she announced that it was her intention to visit Kilauea, and dare the fearful goddess to do her worst.  Her husband and many others tried to dissuade her, but she was resolute, and taking with her a large retinue, she took a journey of one hundred miles, mostly on foot, over the rugged lava, till she arrived near the crater.  There a priestess of Pélé met her, threatened her with the displeasure of the goddess if she persisted in her hostile errand, and prophesied that she and her followers would perish miserably.  Then, as now, ohelo berries grew profusely round the terminal wall of Kilauea, and there, as elsewhere, were sacred to Pélé, no one daring to eat of them till he had first offered some of them to the divinity.  It was usual on arriving at the crater to break a branch covered with berries, and turning the face to the pit of fire, to throw half the branch over the precipice, saying, “Pélé, here are your ohelos.  I offer some to you, some I also eat,” after which the natives partook of them freely.  Kapiolani gathered and eat them without this formula, after which she and her company of eighty persons descended to the black edge of Hale-mau-mau.  There, in full view of the fiery pit, she thus addressed her followers:--“Jehovah is my God.  He kindled these fires.  I fear not Pélé.  If I perish by the anger of Pélé, then you may fear the power of Pélé; but if I trust in Jehovah, and he should save me from the wrath of Pélé, when I break through her tabus, then you must fear and serve the Lord Jehovah.  All the Gods of Hawaii are vain!  Great is Jehovah’s goodness in sending teachers to turn us from these vanities to the living God and the way of righteousness!”  Then they sang a hymn.  I can fancy the strange procession winding its backward way over the cracked, hot, lava sea, the robust belief of the princess hardly sustaining the limping faith of her followers, whose fears would not be laid to rest until they reached the crater’s rim without any signs of the pursuit of an avenging deity.  It was more sublime than Elijah’s appeal on the soft, green slopes of Carmel, but the popular belief in the Goddess of the Volcano survived this flagrant instance of her incapacity, and only died out many years afterwards.
Besides these interesting reminiscences, I have been hearing most thrilling stories from Mrs. Lyman and Mr. Coan of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves.  Told by eye-witnesses, and on the very spot where the incidents occurred, they make a profound, and, I fear, an incommunicable impression.  I look on these venerable people as I should on people who had seen the Deluge, or the burial of Pompeii, and wonder that they eat and dress and live like other mortals!  For they have felt the perpetual shudder of earthquakes, and their eyes, which look so calm and kind, have seen the inflowing of huge tidal waves, the dull red glow of lava streams, and the leaping of fire cataracts into deep-lying pools, burning them dry in a night time.  There were years in which there was no day in which the smoke of underground furnaces was out of their sight, or night which was not lurid with flames.  Once they traced a river of lava burrowing its way 1500 feet below the surface, and saw it emerge, break over a precipice, and fall hissing into the ocean.  Once from their highest mountain a pillar of fire 200 feet in diameter lifted itself for three weeks 1000 feet into the air, making night day, for a hundred miles round, and leaving as its monument a cone a mile in circumference.  We see a clothed and finished earth; they see the building of an island, layer on layer, hill on hill, the naked and deformed product of the melting, forging, and welding, which go on perpetually in the crater of Kilauea.
I could fill many sheets with what I have heard, but must content myself with telling you very little.  In 1855 the fourth recorded eruption of Mauna Loa occurred.  The lava flowed directly Hilo-wards, and for several months, spreading through the dense forests which belt the mountain, crept slowly shorewards, threatening this beautiful portion of Hawaii with the fate of the Cities of the Plain.  Mr. C. made several visits to the eruption, and on each return the simple people asked him how much longer it would last.  For five months they watched the inundation, which came a little nearer every day.  “Should they fly or not?  Would their beautiful homes become a waste of jagged lava and black sand, like the neighbouring district of Puna, once as fair as Hilo?”  Such questions suggested themselves as they nightly watched the nearing glare, till the fiery waves met with obstacles which piled them up in hillocks, eight miles from Hilo, and the suspense was over.  Only gigantic causes can account for the gigantic phenomena of this lava-flow.  The eruption travelled forty miles in a straight line, or sixty, including sinuosities.  It was from one to three miles broad, and from five to two hundred feet deep, according to the contours of the mountain slopes over which it flowed.  It lasted for thirteen months, pouring out a torrent of lava which covered nearly 300 square miles of land, and whose volume was estimated at thirty-eight thousand millions of cubic feet!  In 1859 lava fountains 400 feet in height, and with a nearly equal diameter, played on the summit of Mauna Loa.  This eruption ran fifty miles to the sea in eight days, but the flow lasted much longer, and added a new promontory to Hawaii.
These magnificent overflows, however threatening, had done little damage to cultivated regions, and none to human life; and people began to think that the volcano was reformed.  But in 1868 terrors occurred which are without precedent in island history.  While Mrs. L. was giving me the narrative in her graphic but simple way, and the sweet wind rustled through the palms, and brought the rich scent of the ginger plant into the shaded room, she seemed to be telling me some weird tale of another world.  On March 27, five years ago, a series of earthquakes began, and became more startling from day to day, until their succession became so rapid that “the island quivered like the lid of a boiling pot nearly all the time between the heavier shocks.  The trembling was like that of a ship struck by a heavy wave.”  Then the terminal crater of Mauna Loa (Mokuaweoweo) sent up columns of smoke, steam, and red light, and it was shortly seen that the southern slope of its dome had been rent, and that four separate rivers of molten stone were pouring out of as many rents, and were flowing down the mountain sides in diverging lines.  Suddenly the rivers were arrested, and the blue mountain dome appeared against the still blue sky without an indication of fire, steam, or smoke.  Hilo was much agitated by the sudden lull.  No one was deceived into security, for it was certain that the strangely pent-up fires must make themselves felt.
The earthquakes became nearly continuous; scarcely an appreciable interval occurred between them; “the throbbing, jerking, and quivering motions grew more positive, intense, and sharp; they were vertical, rotary, lateral, and undulating,” producing nausea, vertigo, and vomiting.  Late in the afternoon of a lovely day, April 2, the climax came.  “The crust of the earth rose and sank like the sea in a storm.”  Rocks were rent, mountains fell, buildings and their contents were shattered, trees swayed like reeds, animals were scared, and ran about demented; men thought the judgment had come.  The earth opened in thousands of places, the roads in Hilo cracked open, horses and their riders, and people afoot, were thrown violently to the ground; “it seemed as if the rocky ribs of the mountains, and the granite walls and pillars of the earth were breaking up.”  At Kilauea the shocks were as frequent as the ticking of a watch.  In Kau, south of Hilo, they counted 300 shocks on this direful day; and Mrs. L.’s son, who was in that district at the time, says that the earth swayed to and fro, north and south, then east and west, then round and round, up and down, in every imaginable direction, everything crashing about them, “and the trees thrashing as if torn by a strong rushing wind.”  He and others sat on the ground bracing themselves with hands and feet to avoid being rolled over.  They saw an avalanche of red earth, which they supposed to be lava, burst from the mountain side, throwing rocks high into the air, swallowing up houses, trees, men, and animals; and travelling three miles in as many minutes, burying a hamlet, with thirty-one inhabitants and 500 head of cattle.  The people of the valleys fled to the mountains, which themselves were splitting in all directions, and collecting on an elevated spot, with the earth reeling under them, they spent the night of April 2 in prayer and singing.  Looking towards the shore, they saw it sink, and at the same moment a wave, whose height was estimated at from forty to sixty feet, hurled itself upon the coast, and receded five times, destroying whole villages, and even strong stone houses, with a touch, and engulfing for ever forty-six people who had lingered too near the shore.
Still the earthquakes continued, and still the volcano gave no sign.  The nerves of many people gave way in these fearful days.  Some tried to get away to Honolulu, others kept horses saddled on which to fly, they knew not whither.  The hourly question was, “What of the volcano?”  People put their ears to the quivering ground, and heard, or thought they heard, the surgings of the imprisoned lava sea rending its way among the ribs of the earth.
Five days after the destructive earthquake of April 2, the ground south of Hilo burst open with a crash and roar which at once answered all questions concerning the volcano.  The molten river, after travelling underground for twenty miles, emerged through a fissure two miles in length with a tremendous force and volume.  It was in a pleasant pastoral region, supposed to be at rest for ever, at the top of a grass-covered plateau sprinkled with native and foreign houses, and rich in herds of cattle.  Four huge fountains boiled up with terrific fury, throwing crimson lava, and rocks weighing many tons, to a height of from 500 to 1000 feet.  Mr.  Whitney, of Honolulu, who was near the spot, says:--“From these great fountains to the sea flowed a rapid stream of red lava, rolling, rushing, and tumbling, like a swollen river, bearing along in its current large rocks that made the lava foam as it dashed down the precipice and through the valley into the sea, surging and roaring throughout its length like a cataract, with a power and fury perfectly indescribable.  It was nothing else than a river of fire from 200 to 800 feet wide and twenty deep, with a speed varying from ten to twenty-five miles an hour!”  This same intelligent observer noticed as a peculiarity of the spouting that the lava was ejected by a rotary motion, and in the air both lava and stones always rotated towards the south.  At Kilauea I noticed that the lava was ejected in a southerly direction.  From the scene of these fire fountains, whose united length was about a mile, the river in its rush to the sea divided itself into four streams, between which it shut up men and beasts.  One stream hurried to the sea in four hours, but the others took two days to travel ten miles.  The aggregate width was a mile and a half.  Where it entered the sea it extended the coast-line half a mile, but this worthless accession to Hawaiian acreage was dearly purchased by the loss, for ages at least, of 4000 acres of valuable pasture land, and a much larger quantity of magnificent forest.  The whole south-east shore of Hawaii sank from four to six feet, which involved the destruction of several hamlets and the beautiful fringe of cocoa-nut trees.  Though the region was very thinly peopled, 200 houses and 100 lives were sacrificed in this week of horrors, and from the reeling mountains, the uplifted ocean, and the fiery inundation, the terrified survivors fled into Hilo, each with a tale of woe and loss.  The number of shocks of earthquake counted was 2000 in two weeks, an average of 140 a day; but on the other side of the island the number was incalculable.
                                       I.L.B.

LETTER XIII.

HILO.  HAWAII.  February.
The quiet, dreamy, afternoon existence of Hilo is disturbed.  Two days ago an official intimation was received that the American Government had placed the U.S. ironclad “Benicia” at the disposal of King Lunalilo for a cruise round Hawaii, and that he would arrive here the following morning with Admiral Pennock and the U.S. generals Scholfield and Alexander.
Now this monarchy is no longer an old-time chieftaincy, made up of calabashes and poi, feather-cloaks, kahilis, and a little fuss, but has a civilized constitutional king, the equal of Queen Victoria, a civil list, etc., and though Lunalilo comes here trying to be a private individual and to rest from Hookupus, state entertainments, and privy councils, he brings with him a royal chamberlain and an adjutant-general in attendance.  So the good people of Hilo have been decorating their houses anew with ferns and flowers, furbishing up their clothes, and holding mysterious consultations regarding etiquette and entertainments, just as if royalty were about to drop down in similar fashion on Bude or Tobermory.  There were amusing attempts to bring about a practical reconciliation between the free-and-easiness of Republican notions and the respect due to a sovereign who reigns by “the will of the people” as well as by “the grace of God,” but eventually the tact of the king made everything go smoothly.
At eight yesterday morning the “Benicia” anchored inside the reef, and Hilo blossomed into a most striking display of bunting; the Hawaiian colours, eight blue, red and white stripes, with the English union in the corner, and the flaunting flag of America being predominant.  My heart warmed towards our own flag as the soft breeze lifted its rich folds among the glories of the tropical trees.  Indeed, bunting to my mind never looked so well as when floating and fainting among cocoa-nut palms and all the shining greenery of Hilo, in the sunshine of a radiant morning.  It was bright and warm, but the cool bulk of Mauna Kea, literally covered with snow, looked down as winter upon summer.  Natives galloped in from all quarters, brightly dressed, wreathed, and garlanded, delighted in their hearts at the attention paid to their sovereign by a great foreign power, though they had been very averse to this journey, from a strange but prevalent idea that once on board a U.S. ship the king would be kidnapped and conveyed to America.
Lieut.-Governor Lyman and Mr. Severance, the sheriff, went out to the “Benicia,” and the king landed at ten o’clock, being “graciously pleased” to accept the Governor’s house as his residence during his visit.  The American officers, naval and military, were received by the same loud, hospitable old whaling captain who entertained the Duke of Edinburgh some years ago here, and to judge from the hilarious sounds which came down the road from his house, they had what they would call “a good time.”  I had seen Lunalilo in state at Honolulu, but it was much more interesting to see him here, and this royalty is interesting in itself, as a thing on sufferance, standing between this helpless nationality and its absorption by America.  The king is a very fine-looking man of thirty-eight, tall, well formed, broad-chested, with his head well set on his shoulders, and his feet and hands small.  His appearance is decidedly commanding and aristocratic: he is certainly handsome even according to our notions.  He has a fine open brow, significant at once of brains and straightforwardness, a straight proportionate nose, and a good mouth.  The slight tendency to Polynesian overfulness about his lips is concealed by a well-shaped moustache.  He wears whiskers cut in the English fashion.  His eyes are large, dark-brown of course, and equally of course, he has a superb set of teeth.  Owing to a slight fulness of the lower eyelid, which Queen Emma also has, his eyes have a singularly melancholy expression, very alien, I believe, to his character.  He is remarkably gentlemanly looking, and has the grace of movement which seems usual with Hawaiians.  When he landed he wore a dark morning suit and a black felt hat.
As soon as he stepped on shore, the natives, who were in crowds on the beach, cheered, yelled, and waved their hats and handkerchiefs, and then a procession was formed, or rather formed itself, to escort him to the governor’s house.  A rabble of children ran in front, then came the king, over whom the natives had thrown some beautiful garlands of ohia and mailé (Alyxia olivæformis), with the governor on one side and the sheriff on the other, the chamberlain and adjutant-general walking behind.  Then a native staggering under the weight of an enormous Hawaiian flag, the Hilo band, with my friend Upa beating the big drum, and an irregular rabble (i.e. unorganised crowd) of men, women, and children, going at a trot to keep up with the king’s rapid strides.  The crowd was unwilling to disperse even when he entered the house, and he came out and made a short speech, the gist of which was that he was delighted to see his native subjects, and would hold a reception for them on the ensuing Monday, when we shall see a most interesting sight, a native crowd gathered from all Southern Hawaii for a hookupu, an old custom, signifying the bringing of gift-offerings to a king or chief.
In the afternoon Dr. Wetmore and I rode to the beautiful Puna woods on a botanising excursion.  We were galloping down to the beach round a sharp corner, when we had to pull our horses almost on their haunches to avoid knocking over the king, the American admiral, the captain of the “Benicia,” nine of their officers, and the two generals.  When I saw the politely veiled stare of the white men it occurred to me that probably it was the first time that they had seen a white woman riding cavalier fashion!  We had a delicious gallop over the sands to the Waiakea river, which we crossed, and came upon one of the vast lava-flows of ages since, over which we had to ride carefully, as the pahoehoe lies in rivers, coils, tortuosities, and holes partially concealed by a luxuriant growth of ferns and convolvuli.  The country is thickly sprinkled with cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit trees, which merge into the dense, dark, glorious forest, which tenderly hides out of sight hideous broken lava, on which one cannot venture six feet from the track without the risk of breaking one’s limbs.  All these tropical forests are absolutely impenetrable, except to axe and billhook, and after a trail has been laboriously opened, it needs to be cut once or twice a year, so rapid is the growth of vegetation.  This one, through the Puna woods, only admits of one person at a time.  It was really rapturously lovely.  Through the trees we saw the soft steel-blue of the summer sky: not a leaf stirred, not a bird sang, a hush had fallen on insect life, the quiet was perfect, even the ring of our horses’ hoofs on the lava was a discord.  There was a slight coolness in the air and a fresh mossy smell.  It only required some suggestion of decay, and the rustle of a fallen leaf now and then, to make it an exact reproduction of a fine day in our English October.  The forest was enlivened by many natives bound for Hilo, driving horses loaded with cocoa-nuts, bread-fruit, live fowls, poi and kalo, while others with difficulty urged garlanded pigs in the same direction, all as presents for the king.  We brought back some very scarce parasitic ferns.

HILO, February 24.
I rode over by myself to Onomea on Saturday to get a little rest from the excitements of Hilo.  A gentleman lent me a strong showy mare to go out on, telling me that she was frisky and must be held while I mounted; but before my feet were fairly in the stirrups, she shook herself from the Chinaman who held her, and danced away.  I rode her five miles before she quieted down.  She pranced, jumped, danced, and fretted on the edge of precipices, was furious at the scow and fords, and seemed demented with good spirits.  Onomea looked glorious, and its serenity was most refreshing.  I rode into Hilo the next day in time for morning service, and the mare, after a good gallop, subsided into a staidness of demeanour befitting the day.  Just as I was leaving, they asked me to take the news to the sheriff that a man had been killed a few hours before.  He was riding into Hilo with a child behind him, and they went over by no means one of the worst of the palis.  The man and horse were killed, but the child was unhurt, and his wailing among the deep ferns attracted the attention of passers-by to the disaster.  The natives ride over these dangerous palis so carelessly, and on such tired, starved horses, that accidents are not infrequent.  Hilo had never looked so lovely to me as in the pure bright calm of this Sunday morning.
The verandahs of all the native houses were crowded with strangers, who had come in to share in the jubilations attending the king’s visit.  At the risk of emulating “Jenkins,” or the “Court Newsman,” I must tell you that Lunalilo, who is by no means an habitual churchgoer, attended Mr. Coan’s native church in the morning, and the foreign church at night, when the choir sang a very fine anthem.  I don’t wish to write about his faults, which have doubtless been rumoured in the English papers.  It is hoped that his new responsibilities will assist him to conquer them, else I fear he may go the way of several of the Hawaiian kings.  He has begun his reign with marked good sense in selecting as his advisers confessedly the best men in his kingdom, and all his public actions since his election have shown both tact and good feeling.  If sons, as is often asserted, take their intellects from their mothers, he should be decidedly superior, for his mother, Kekauluohi, a chieftainess of the highest rank, and one of the queens of Kamehameha II., who died in London, was in 1839 chosen for her abilities by Kamehameha III. as his kuhina nui, or premier, an officer recognised under the old system of Hawaiian government as second only in authority to the king, and without whose signature even his act was not legal.  As Kaahumanu II. she continued to hold this important position until her death in 1845.
But the present king does not come of the direct line of the Hawaiian kings, but of a far older family.  His father is a commoner, but Hawaiian rank is inherited through the mother.  He received a good English education at the school which the missionaries established for the sons of chiefs, and was noted as a very bright scholar, with an early developed taste for literature and poetry.  His disposition is said to be most amiable and genial, and his affability endeared him especially to his own countrymen, by whom he was called alii lokomaikai, “the kind chief.”  In spite of his high rank, which gave him precedence of all others on the islands, he was ignored by two previous governments, and often complained that he was never allowed any opportunity of becoming acquainted with public affairs, or of learning whether he possessed any capacity for business.  Thus, without experience, but with noble and liberal instincts, and the highest and most patriotic aspirations for the welfare and improvement of his “weak little kingdom,” he was unexpectedly called to the throne about three months ago, amidst such an enthusiasm as had never before been witnessed on Hawaii-nei, as the unanimous choice of the people.  He called on Mr. Coan the day of his arrival; and when the flute band of Mr. Lyman’s school serenaded him, he made the youths a kind address, in which he said he had been taught as they were, and hoped hereafter to profit by the instruction he had received.
This has been a great day in Hilo.  The old native custom of hookupu was revived, and it has been a most interesting spectacle.  I don’t think I ever enjoyed sight-seeing so much.  The weather has been splendid, which was most fortunate, for many of the natives came in from distances of from sixty to eighty miles.  From early daylight they trooped in on their half broken steeds, and by ten o’clock there were fully a thousand horses tethered on the grass by the sea.  Almost every house displayed flags, and the court-house, where the reception was to take place, was most tastefully decorated.  It is a very pretty two-storied frame building, with deep double verandahs, and stands on a large lawn of fine manienie grass, {199} with roads on three sides.  Long before ten, crowds had gathered outside the low walls of the lawn, natives and foreigners galloped in all directions, boats and canoes enlivened the bay, bands played, and the foreigners, on this occasion rather a disregarded minority, assembled in holiday dress in the upper verandah of the court-house.  Hawaiian flags on tall bamboos decorated the little gateways which gave admission to the lawn, an enormous standard on the government flagstaff could be seen for miles, and the stars and stripes waved from the neighbouring plantations and from several houses in Hilo.  At ten punctually, Lunalilo, Governor Lyman, the sheriff of Hawaii, the royal chamberlain, and the adjutant-general, walked up to the court-house, and the king took his place, standing in the lower verandah with his suite about him.  All the foreigners were either on the upper balcony, or on the stairs leading to it, on which, to get the best possible view of the spectacle, I stood for three mortal hours.  The attendant gentlemen were well dressed, but wore “shocking bad hats;” and the king wore a sort of shooting suit, a short brown cut-away coat, an ash-coloured waistcoat and ash-coloured trousers with a blue stripe.  He stood bareheaded.  He dressed in this style in order that the natives might attend the reception in every-day dress, and not run the risk of spoiling their best clothes by Hilo torrents.  The dress of the king and his attendants was almost concealed by wreaths of ohia blossoms and festoons of mailé, some of them two yards long, which had been thrown over them, and which bestowed a fantastic glamour on the otherwise prosaic inelegance of their European dress.  But indeed the spectacle, as a whole, was altogether poetical, as it was an ebullition of natural, national, human feeling, in which the heart had the first place.  I very soon ceased to notice the incongruous elements, which were supplied chiefly by the Americans present.  There were Republicans by birth and nature, destitute of traditions of loyalty or reverence for aught on earth; who bore on their faces not only republicanism, but that quintessence of puritan republicanism which hails from New England; and these were subjects of a foreign king, nay, several of them office-holders who had taken the oath of allegiance, and from whose lips “His Majesty, Your Majesty,” flowed far more copiously than from ours which are “to the manner born.”
On the king’s appearance, the cheering was tremendous,--regular British cheering, well led, succeeded by that which is not British, “three cheers and a tiger,” but it was “Hi, hi, hi, hullah!”  Every hat was off, every handkerchief in air, tears in many eyes, enthusiasm universal, for the people were come to welcome the king of their choice; the prospective restorer of the Constitution “trampled upon” by Kamehameha V., “the kind chief,” who was making them welcome to his presence after the fashion of their old feudal lords.  When the cheering had subsided, the eighty boys of Missionary Lyman’s School, who, dressed in white linen with crimson leis, were grouped in a hollow square round the flagstaff, sang the Hawaiian national anthem, the music of which is the same as ours.  More cheering and enthusiasm, and then the natives came through the gate across the lawn, and up to the verandah where the king stood, in one continuous procession, till 2400 Hawaiians had enjoyed one moment of infinite and ever to be remembered satisfaction in the royal presence.  Every now and then the white, pale-eyed, unpicturesque face of a foreigner passed by, but these were few, and the foreign school children were received by themselves after Mr. Lyman’s boys.  The Americans have introduced the villanous custom of shaking hands at these receptions, borrowing it, I suppose, from a presidential reception at Washington; and after the king had gone through this ceremony with each native, the present was deposited in front of the verandah, and the gratified giver took his place on the grass.  Not a man, woman, or child came empty handed.  Every face beamed with pride, wonder, and complacency, for here was a sovereign for whom cannon roared, and yards were manned, of their own colour, who called them his brethren.
The variety of costume was infinite.  All the women wore the native dress, the sack or holuku, many of which were black, blue, green, or bright rose colour, some were bright yellow, a few were pure white, and others were a mixture of orange and scarlet.  Some wore very pretty hats made from cane-tops, and trimmed with hibiscus blossoms or passion-flowers; others wore bright-coloured handkerchiefs, knotted lightly round their flowing hair, or wreaths of the Microlepia tenuifolia.  Many had tied bandanas in a graceful knot over the left shoulder.  All wore two, three, four, or even six beautiful leis, besides long festoons of the fragrant mailé.  Leis of the crimson ohia blossoms were universal; but besides these there were leis of small red and white double roses, pohas, {203} yellow amaranth, sugar cane tassels like frosted silver, the orange pandanus, the delicious gardenia, and a very few of orange blossoms, and the great granadilla or passion-flower.  Few if any of the women wore shoes, and none of the children had anything on their heads.
A string of 200 Chinamen passed by, “plantation hands,” with boyish faces, and cunning, almond-shaped eyes.  They were dressed in loose blue denim trousers with shirts of the same, fastening at the side over them, their front hair closely shaven, and the rest gathered into pigtails, which were wound several times round their heads.  These all deposited money in the adjutant-general’s hand.  The dress of the Hawaiian men was more varied and singular than that of the women, every kind of dress and undress, with leis of ohia and garlands of mailé covering all deficiencies.  The poor things came up with pathetic innocence, many of them with nothing on but an old shirt, and cotton trousers rolled up to the knees.  Some had red shirts and blue trousers, others considered that a shirt was an effective outer garment.  Some wore highly ornamental, dandified shirts, and trousers tucked into high, rusty, mud-covered boots.  A few young men were in white straw hats, white shirts, and white trousers, with crimson leis round their hats and throats.  Some had diggers’ scarves round their waists; but the most effective costume was sported by a few old men, who had tied crash towels over their shoulders.
It was often amusing and pathetic at once to see them come up.  Obviously, when the critical moment arrived, they were as anxious to do the right thing as a débutante is to back her train successfully out of the royal presence at St. James’s.  Some were so agitated at last as to require much coaching from the governor as to how to present their gifts and shake hands.  Some half dropped down on their knees, others passionately and with tears kissed the king’s hand, or grasped it convulsively in both their own; while a few were so embarrassed by the presents they were carrying that they had no hands at all to shake, and the sovereign good-naturedly clapped them on the shoulders.  Some of them, in shaking hands, adroitly slipped coins into the king’s palm, so as to make sure that he received their loving tribute.  There had been a hui, or native meeting, which had passed resolutions, afterwards presented to Lunalilo, setting forth that whereas he received a great deal of money in revenue from the haoles, they, his native people, would feel that he did not love them if he would not receive from their own hands contributions in silver for his support.  So, in order not to wound their feelings, he accepted these rather troublesome cash donations.
One woman, sorely afflicted with quaking palsy, dragged herself slowly along.  One hand hung by her side helpless, and the other grasped a live fowl so tightly that she could not loosen it to shake hands, whereupon the king raised the helpless arm, which called forth much cheering.  There was one poor cripple who had only the use of his arms.  His knees were doubled under him, and he trailed his body along the ground.  He had dragged himself two miles “to lie for a moment at the king’s feet,” and even his poor arms carried a gift.  He looked hardly like a human shape, as his desire was realised; and, I doubt not, would have been content then and there to die.  There were ancient men, tattooed all over, who had passed their first youth when the idols were cast away, and who remembered the old days of tyranny when it was an offence, punishable with death, for a man to let his shadow fall on the king; and when none of “the swinish multitude” had any rights which they could sustain against their chiefs.  These came up bewildered, trembling, almost falling on their knees, hardly daring to raise their eyes to the king’s kind, encouraging face, and bathed his hand with tears while they kissed it.  Numbers of little children were led up by their parents; there were babies in arms, and younglings carried on parents’ backs, and the king stooped and shook hands with all, and even pulled out the babies’ hands from under their mufflings, and the old people wept, and cheers rent the air.
Next in interest to this procession of beaming faces, and the blaze of colour, was the sight of the presents, and the ungrudging generosity with which they were brought.  Many of the women presented live fowls tied by the legs, which were deposited, one upon another, till they formed a fainting, palpitating heap under the hot sun.  Some of the men brought decorated hogs tied by one leg, which squealed so persistently in the presence of royalty, that they were removed to the rear.  Hundreds carried nets of sweet potatoes, eggs, and kalo, artistically arranged.  Men staggered along in couples with bamboos between them, supporting clusters of bananas weighing nearly a hundredweight.  Others brought yams, cocoa-nuts, oranges, onions, pumpkins, early pineapples, and even the great delicious granadilla, the fruit of the large passion-flower.  A few maidens presented the king with bouquets of choice flowers, and costly leis of the yellow feathers of the Melithreptes Pacifica.  There were fully two tons of kalo and sweet potatoes in front of the court house, hundreds of fowls, and piles of bananas, eggs, and cocoa-nuts.  The hookupu was a beautiful sight, all the more so that not one of that radiant, loving, gift-offering throng came in quest of office, or for any other thing that he could obtain.  It was just the old-time spirit of reverence for the man who typifies rule, blended with the extreme of personal devotion to the prince whom a united people had placed upon the throne.  The feeling was genuine and pathetic in its intensity.  It is said that the natives like their king better, because he was truly, “above all,” the last of a proud and imperious house, which, in virtue of a pedigree of centuries, looked down upon the nobility of the Kamehamehas.
When the last gift was deposited, the lawn in front of the court-house was one densely-packed, variegated mass of excited, buzzing Hawaiians.  While the king was taking a short rest, two ancient and hideous females, who looked like heathen priestesses, chanted a monotonous and heathenish-sounding chant or mêlé, in eulogy of some ancient idolater.  It just served to remind me that this attractive crowd was but one generation removed from slaughter-loving gods and human sacrifices.
The king and his suite re-appeared in the upper balcony, where all the foreigners were assembled, including the two venerable missionaries and a French priest of benign aspect, and his appearance was the signal for a fresh outburst of enthusiasm.  Advancing to the front, he made an extemporaneous speech, of which the following is a literal translation:--
“To all present I tender my warmest aloha.  This day, on which you are gathered to pay your respects to me, I will remember to the day of my death.  (Cheers.)  I am filled with love for you all, fellow-citizens (makaainana), who have come here on this occasion, and for all the people, because by your unanimous choice I have been made your King, a young sovereign, to reign over you, and to fill the very distinguished office which I now occupy.  (Cheers.)  You are parents to me, and I will be your Father.  (Tremendous cheering.)  Formerly, in the days of our departed ancestors, you were not permitted to approach them; they and you were kept apart; but now we meet and associate together.  (Cheers.)  I urge you all to persevere in the right, to forsake the ignorant ways of the olden time.  There is but one God, whom it is our duty to obey.  Let us forsake every kind of idolatry.
“In the year 1820 Rev. Messrs. Bingham, Thurston, and others came to these Islands and proclaimed the Word of God.  It is their teachings which have enabled you to be what you are to-day.  Now they have all gone to that spirit land, and only Mrs. Thurston remains.  We are greatly indebted to them.  (Cheers.)  There are also among us here (alluding to Revs. Coan and Lyman) old and grey-haired fathers, whose examples we should endeavour to imitate, and obey their teachings.
“I am very glad to see the young men of the present time so well instructed in knowledge--perhaps some of them are your children.  You must persevere in your search of wisdom and in habits of morality.  Do not be indolent.  (Cheers.)  Those who have striven hard after knowledge and good character, are the ones who deserve and shall receive places of trust hereafter under the government.
“At the present time I have four foreigners as my ministerial advisers.  But if, among these young men now standing before me, and under this flag, there are any who shall qualify themselves to fill these positions, then I will select them to fill their places.  (Loud cheers.)  Aloha to you all.”
His manner as a speaker was extremely good, with sufficient gesticulation for the emphasis of particular points.  The address was frequently interrupted by applause, and when at its conclusion he bowed gracefully to the crowd and said, “My aloha to you all,” the cheering and enthusiasm were absolutely unbounded.  And so the great hookupu ended, and the assemblage broke up into knots to discuss the royal speech and the day’s doings.
                                     I.L.B.

LETTER XIV.

HILO.  HAWAII.
The king “signified his intention to honour Mr. and Mrs. Severance with his company” on the evening of the day after the reception, and this involved a regular party and supper.  You can hardly imagine the difficulties connected with “refreshments,” where few, if any, of the materials which we consider necessary for dishes suitable for such occasions can be procured at the stores, and even milk and butter are scarce commodities.  I had won a reputation as a cook by making a much appreciated Bengal curry, and an English “roly-poly” pudding, and when I offered my services, Mrs. S. kindly accepted them, and she and I, with the Chinese cook and a Chinese prisoner to assist us, have been cooking for a day and a half.  I wanted to make a gigantic trifle, a dish not known here, and we hunted every store, hoping to find almonds and raspberry jam among the “assorted notions,” but in vain; however, grated cocoa-nut supplied the place of the first, and a kind friend sent a pot of the last.  The Chinamen were very diverting.  The cook looked on, and laughed constantly, and perhaps was a little jealous: at all events when he thought we had spoilt some cakes in the oven, he capered into Mrs. S.’s room, gesticulating, and exclaiming satirically, “Lu, Lu! cakes so good, cakes so fine!”  No intoxicants were to be used on the occasion, Hilo notions being rigid on this subject; but I hope it was not a crime that I clandestinely used two glasses of sherry, without which my trifle would have been a failure.  We worked hard, and made trifle, sponge cake, pound cake, spiced cake, dozens of cocoa-nut cakes and drops; custards, and sandwiches of potted meat, and enjoyed our preparations so much that we found it hard to exchange kitchen for social duties, and go to “Father Lyman,” who entertained the king and a number of Hilo folk in the evening.
Their rooms, not very large, were quite full.  When the king entered, the company received him standing, and the flute band in the verandah played the national anthem, and afterwards at intervals during the evening sang some Hawaiian songs of the king’s composition.  I was presented to him, and as he is very courteous to strangers, he talked to me a good deal.  He is a very gentlemanly, courteous, unassuming man, hardly assuming enough in fact, and apparently very intelligent and well read.  I was exceedingly pleased with him.  He spoke a good deal of Queen Emma’s reception in England, and of her raptures with Venice, and some other cities of the continent.  He said he had the greatest desire to visit some parts of Europe, Great Britain specially, because he thought that by coming in contact with some of our leading statesmen, he might gain a more accurate knowledge than he possessed of the principles of constitutional government.  He said he hoped that in two years Hawaii-nei would be so settled as to allow of his travelling, and that in the meantime he was studying French with a view to enjoying the continent.
He asked a great many questions regarding things at home, especially concerning the limitation of the power of the Crown.  He cannot reconcile the theoretical right of the sovereign to choose his advisers with his practically submitting to receive them from a Parliamentary majority.  He seemed to find a difficulty in understanding that the sovereign’s right to refuse his assent to a Bill which had passed both Houses was by no means the same thing in practice as the possession of a veto.  He said that in his reading of our constitutional history, the power of the sovereign seemed almost absolute, while if he understood facts rightly, the throne was more of an “ornament,” or “figure-head,” than a power at all.  He asked me if it was true that Republican feeling was spreading very much in England, and if I thought that the monarchy would survive the present sovereign, on whose prudence and exalted virtues he seemed to think it rested.  He said he thought his little kingdom had aped the style of the great monarchies too much, and that he should like to abolish a good many high sounding titles, sinecure offices, the household troops, and some of the “imitation pomp” of his court.  He said he had never enjoyed anything so much since his accession as the hookupu of the morning, and asked me what I thought of it.  I was glad to be able to answer truthfully that I had never seen a state pageant or ceremonial that I had enjoyed half so much, or that had impressed me so favourably.  He has a very musical voice, and a natural nobility and refinement of manner, with an obvious tact and good feeling, rather, I should think, the result of amiable and gentlemanly instincts than of training or consideration, all which combine to make him interesting, altogether apart from his position as a Polynesian sovereign.
Where there are no servants, a party involves the hosts and their friends in the bustle of personal preparation, but all worked with a will, and by sunset the decorations were completed.  All the Chinese lamps in Hilo were hung in the front verandah, and seats were placed in the front and side verandahs, on which the drawing-room opens by four doors, so there was plenty of room, though there were thirty people.  The side verandah was enclosed by a drapery of flags, and the whole was tastefully decorated with festoons and wreaths of ferns.  The king arrived early with his attendants, and was received by the host and hostess, and like a perfectly civilized guest, he handed Mrs. S. into the room.  The great wish of the genial entertainers was to prevent stiffness and give the king a really social evening, so the “chair game,” magical music, and a refined kind of blind man’s buff, better suited to the occasion, but less “jolly” than the old riotous game, were shortly introduced.  Lunalilo only looked on at first, and then entered into the games with a heartiness and zest which showed that he at least enjoyed the evening.  Supper was served at nine.  Several nests of Japanese tables had been borrowed, and these, dispersed about the room and verandah, broke up the guests into little social knots.  Three Hilo ladies and I were the waitresses, and I was pleased to see that the good things were thoroughly appreciated, and that the trifle was universally popular.  After supper there was a little dancing, and as few of the Hilo people knew any dance correctly, it was very amusing for the onlookers.  There was a great deal of promenading in the verandah, and a great deal of talking and merriment, which were enjoyed by a crowd of natives who stood the whole evening outside the garden fence.  I don’t think that any of the Hilo people are so unhappy as to possess an evening dress, and the pretty morning dresses of the ladies, and the thick boots, easy morning coats, and black ties of the gentlemen, gave a jolly “break-down” look to the affair, which would have been deemed inadmissible in less civilized society.
Some of my photographs of some of our eminent literary and scientific men were lying on the table, and the king in looking at them showed a surprising amount of knowledge of what they had written or done, quite entitling him to unite in Stanley’s “Communion of Educated Men.”  I had previously asked him for his signature for my autograph collection, and he said he had composed a stanza for me which he thought I might like to have in addition.  He called with it on the following afternoon, apologising for his dress, a short jacket and blue trowsers, stuffed into boots plastered with mud up to the knees.  I was surprised when he asked me if the lines were correctly spelt, for he speaks English remarkably well.  They are simply a kind wish, unaffectedly expressed.
                            HILO.  HAWAII, Feb. 26.
     “Wheresoe’er thou may’st roam,
      Wheresoe’er thou mak’st thy home,
      May God thy footsteps guide,
      Watch o’er thee and provide.
      This is my earnest prayer for thee,
      Welcome, stranger, from over the sea.”
                                        LUNALILO R.
It startles one sometimes to hear American vulgarisms uttered in his harmonious tones.  The American admiral and generals had just arrived from the volcano, stiff, sore, bruised, jaded, “done,” and the king said, “I guess the Admiral’s about used up.”  He is really remarkably attractive, but I am sorry to observe a look of irresolution about his mouth, indicative of a facility of disposition capable of being turned to the worst account.  I think from what I have heard that the Hawaiian kings have fallen victims rather to unscrupulous foreigners, than to their own bad instincts.
My last day has been taken up with farewell visits, and I finish this on board the “Kilauea.”  Miss Karpe and I had to ride two miles, to a point at which it was possible to embark without risk, a heavy surf having for three weeks rendered it impossible for loaded boats to communicate with the shore at Hilo.  My clothes were soaked when we reached the rocks, and Upa, very wet, carried us into a wet whale-boat, with water up to our ancles, which brought us over a heavy sickening swell into this steamer, which is dirty as well as wet.  I told Upa to lead my mare, and ride his own horse, but the last I saw of him was on the mare’s back, racing a troop of natives along the beach. {215}
                                  I.L.B.

LETTER XV.

WAIMEA.  HAWAII.
There is no limit to the oddities of the steam-ship “Kilauea.”  She lay rolling on the Hilo swell for two hours, and two hours after we sailed her machinery broke down, and we lay-to for five hours, in what they here call a heavy gale and sea.  It was a miserable night.  No privacy: the saloon both hot and wet, almost every one sick.  I lay in my berth in my soaked clothes watching the proceedings of a gigantic cockroach, and listening, not without amusement, to the awful groans of a Chinaman, and a “rough customer” from California, who occupied the next berths.
In the middle of the night the water came in great dashes through the skylight upon the table, and soon the saloon was afloat to the depth of from four to six inches.  When the “Kilauea” rolled, and the water splashed in simultaneously, we were treated to vigorous “douches” in our berths, which soon saturated the pillows, mattresses, and our clothing.  One sea put out the lamp, and a ship’s lantern, making “darkness visible,” was swung in its stead.  In an English ship there would have been a great fuss and a great flying about of stewards, or pretence of mending matters, but when the passengers shouted for our good steward, the serene creature came in with a melancholy smile on his face, said nothing, but quietly sat down on the transom, with his bare feet in the water, contemplating it with a comic air of helplessness.  Breakfast, of course, could not be served, but a plate was put at one end of the table for the silent old Scotch captain, who tucked up his feet and sat with his oilskins and sou’-wester on, while the charming steward, with trousers rolled up to his knees, waded about, pacifying us by bringing us excellent curry as we sat on the edges of our berths, and putting on a sweetly apologetic manner, as if penitent for the gross misbehaviour of the ship.  Such a man would reconcile me to far greater discomfort than that of the “Kilauea.”  I wonder if he is ever unamiable, or tired, or perturbed?
The next day was fine, and we were all much on deck to dry our clothes in the sun.  The southern and leeward coasts of Hawaii as far as Kawaaloa are not much more attractive than coal-fields.  Contrasted with the shining shores of Hilo, they are as dust and ashes; long reaches of black lava and miles of clinkers marking the courses of lava-flows, whose black desolation and deformity nature, as yet, has done almost nothing to clothe.  Cocoa-nut trees usually, however, fringe the shore, but were it not for the wonderful colour of the ocean, like liquid transparent turquoise, revealing the coral forests shelving down into purple depths, and the exciting proximity of sharks, it would have been wearisome.  After leaving the bay where Captain Cook met his death, we passed through a fleet of twenty-seven canoes, each one hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree, from fifteen to twenty-five feet long, about twenty inches deep, hardly wide enough for a fat man, and high and pointed at both ends.  On one side there is an outrigger formed of two long bent sticks, to the outer ends of which is bound a curved beam of light wood, which skims along the surface of the water, rendering the canoe secure from an upset on that side, while the weight of the outrigger makes an upset on the other very unlikely.  In calms they are paddled, and shoot over the water with great rapidity, but whenever there is any breeze a small sprit-sail is used.  They are said to be able to stand very rough water, but they are singularly precarious and irresponsible looking contrivances, and for these, as well as for all other seas, I should much prefer a staunch whale-boat.  We sailed for some hours along a lava coast, streamless, rainless, verdureless, blazing under the fierce light of a tropical sun, and some time after noon anchored in the scorching bay of Kawaihae.
A foreign store, a number of native houses, a great heiau, or heathen temple on a height, a fringe of cocoa-nut palms, and a background of blazing hills, flaring with varieties of red, hardly toned down by any attempt at vegetation, a crystalline atmosphere palpitating with heat, deep, rippleless, clear water, with coral groves below, and a view of the three great Hawaiian mountains, are the salient features of this outlet of Hawaiian commerce.  But ah! how soft and mild and blue the sky was, looking inland, where, for the first time, I saw far aloft, above solid masses of white cloud, sky hung, strangely uplifted, the great volcanic domes of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai, looking as if they had all passed into an endless repose.
This bay, which affords excellent holding ground, and is screened by highlands from the sudden and violent gusts of wind, called “mumuku,” which sweep down between the mountains with almost irresistible fury, used to be a great place of call for whalers, who purchased large quantities of “recruits” here; yams in the earlier days, and more lately Irish potatoes, which flourish in the thirsty soil.  But whaling in the North Pacific seems to be nearly “played out,” and the arrival of a whaler is not a common occurrence.
Shortly before we arrived I found that the sailing of the San Francisco steamer is put off for a week, so I took advantage of a kind invitation I received some time ago to visit Waimea, and go from thence to Waimanu, a wonderful valley beyond Waipio, very little visited by foreigners.  A gentleman and lady rode up here with me, and I got a horse on the beach with a native bullock saddle on him, an uncouth contrivance of wood not covered with hide, and a strong lassoing horn.  The great wooden stirrups could not be shortened, but I soon found myself able, in true savage fashion, to gallop up and down hill without any.
The chief object of interest on this ride is the great heiau, which stands on a bare steep hill above the sea, not easy of access.  It was the last heathen temple built on Hawaii.  On entering the huge pile, which stood gaunt and desolate in the thin red air, the story of the old bloody heathenism of the islands flashed upon my memory.  The entrance is by a narrow passage between two high walls, and it was by this that the sacrificing priests dragged the human victims into the presence of Tairi, a hideous wooden idol, crowned with a helmet, and covered with red feathers, the favourite war-god of Kamehameha the Great, by whom this temple was built, before he proceeded to the conquest of Oahu.
The shape is an irregular parallelogram, 224 feet long, and 100 wide.  At each end, and on the mauka side, the walls, which are very solid and compact, though built of lava stones without mortar, are twenty feet high, and twelve feet wide at the bottom, but narrow gradually towards the top, where they are finished with a course of smooth stones six feet broad.  On the sea side, the wall, which has been partly thrown down, was not more than six or seven feet high, and there were paved platforms for the accommodation of the alii, or chiefs, and the people in their orders.  The upper terrace is spacious, and paved with flat smooth stones which were brought from a considerable distance, the greater part of the population of the island having been employed on the building.  At the south end there was an inner court, where the principal idol stood, surrounded by a number of inferior deities, for the Hawaiians had “gods many, and lords many.”  Here also was the anu, a lofty frame of wickerwork, shaped like an obelisk, hollow, and five feet square at its base.  Within this, the priest, who was the oracle of the god, stood, and of him the king used to inquire concerning war or peace, or any affair of national importance.  It appears that the tones of the oracular voice were more distinct than the meaning of the utterances.  However, the supposed answers were generally acted upon.
On the outside of this inner court was the lélé, or altar, on which human and other sacrifices were offered.  On the day of the dedication of the temple to Tairi, vast offerings of fruit, dogs, and hogs were presented, and eleven human beings were immolated on the altar.  These victims were taken from among captives, or those who had broken Tabu, or had rendered themselves obnoxious to the chiefs, and were often blind, maimed, or crippled persons.  Sometimes they were dispatched at a distance with a stone or club, and their bodies were dragged along the narrow passage up which I walked shuddering; but oftener they were bound and taken alive into the heiau to be slain in the outer court.  The priests, in slaying these sacrifices, were careful to mangle the bodies as little as possible.  From two to twenty were offered at once.  They were laid in a row with their faces downwards on the altar before the idol, to whom they were presented in a kind of prayer by the priest, and, if offerings of hogs were presented at the same time, these were piled upon them, and the whole mass was left to putrify.
The only dwellings within the heiau were those of the priests, and the “sacred house” of the king, in which he resided during the seasons of strict Tabu.  A doleful place this heiau is, haunted not only by the memories of almost unimaginable terrors, but by the sore thought that generations of Hawaiians lived and died in the unutterable darkness of this ignorant worship, passing in long procession from these grim rites into the presence of the Father whose infinite compassions they had never known.
Every hundred feet of ascent from the rainless, fervid beach of Kawaihae increased the freshness of the temperature, and rendered exercise more delightful.  From the fringe of palms along the coast to the damp hills north of Waimea, a distance of ten miles, there is not a tree or stream, though the scorched earth is deeply scored by the rush of fierce temporary torrents.  Hitherto, I have only travelled over the green coast which faces the trade winds, where clouds gather and shed their rains, and this desert, which occupies a great part of leeward Hawaii, displeases me.  It lies burning in the fierce splendours of a zone, which, until now, I had forgotten was the torrid zone, unwatered and unfruitful, red and desolate under the sun.  The island is here only twenty-two miles wide, and strong winds sweep across it, whirling up its surface in great brown clouds, so that the uplands in part appear a smoking plain, backed by naked volcanic cones.  No water, no grass, no ferns.  Some thornless thistles, a little brush of sapless-looking indigo, and some species of compositæ struggle for a doleful existence.  There is nothing tropical about it but the intense heat.  The red soil becomes suffused with a green tinge ten miles from the beach, and at the summit of the ascent the desert blends with this beautiful Waimea plain, one of the most marked features of Hawaii.  The air became damp and cool; miles of fine smooth green grass stretched out before us; high hills, broken, pinnacled, wooded, and cleft with deep ravines, rose on our left; we heard the clash and music of falling water: to the north it was like the Munster Thal, to the south altogether volcanic.  The tropics had vanished.  There were frame houses sheltered from the winds by artificial screens of mulberry trees, and from the incursions of cattle by rough walls of lava stones five feet high; a mission and court house, a native church, much too large for the shrunken population, and other indications of an inhabited region.  Except for the woods which clothe the hills, the characteristic of the scenery is baldness.
On clambering over the wall which surrounds my host’s kraal of dwellings, I heard in the dusk strange sweet voices crying rudely and emphatically, “Who are you?  What do you want?” and was relieved to find that the somewhat inhospitable interrogation only proceeded from two Australian magpies.  Mr. S--- is a Tasmanian, married to a young half-white lady: and her native mother and seven or eight dark girls are here, besides a number of natives and Chinese, and half Chinese, who are employed about the place.  Sheep are the source of my host’s wealth.  He has 25,000 at three stations on Mauna Kea, and, at an altitude of 6000 feet they flourish, and are free from some of the maladies to which they are liable elsewhere.  Though there are only three or four sheep owners on the islands, they exported 288,526 lbs. of wool last year. {223}  Mr. S--- has also 1000 head of cattle and 50 horses.
The industry of Waimea is cattle raising, and some feeble attempts are being made to improve the degenerate island breed by the importation of a few short-horn cows from New Zealand.  These plains afford magnificent pasturage as well as galloping ground.  They are a very great thoroughfare.  The island, which is an equilateral triangle, about 300 miles in “circuit,” can only be crossed here.  Elsewhere, an impenetrable forest belt, and an impassable volcanic wilderness, compel travellers to take the burning track of adamant which snakes round the southern coast, when they are minded to go from one side of Hawaii to the other.  Waimea also has the singular distinction of a road from the beach, which is traversed on great occasions by two or three oxen and mule teams, and very rarely by a more ambitious conveyance.  There are few hours of day or night in which the tremulous thud of shoeless horses galloping on grass is not heard in Waimea.
The altitude of this great table-land is 2500 feet, and the air is never too hot, the temperature averaging 64° Fahrenheit.  There is mist or rain on most days of the year for a short time, and the mornings and evenings are clear and cool.  The long sweeping curves of the three great Hawaiian mountains spring from this level.  The huge bulk of Mauna Kea without shoulders or spurs, rises directly from the Waimea level on the south to the altitude of 14,000 feet, and his base is thickly clustered with tufa-cones of a bright red colour, from 300 to 1000 feet in height.  Considerably further back, indeed forty miles away, the smooth dome of Mauna Loa appears very serene now, but only thirteen years ago the light was so brilliant, from one of its tremendous eruptions, that here it was possible to read a newspaper by it, and during its height candles were unnecessary in the evenings!  Nearer the coast, and about thirty miles from here, is the less conspicuous dome of the dead volcano of Hualalai.  If all Hawaii, south of Waimea, were submerged to a depth of 8000 feet, three nearly equi-distant, dome-shaped volcanic islands would remain, the highest of which would have an altitude of 6000 feet.  To the south of these plains violent volcanic action is everywhere apparent, not only in tufa cones, but in tracts of ashes, scoriæ, and volcanic sand.  Near the centre there are some very curious caves, possibly “lava bubbles,” which were used by the natives as places of sepulture.  The Kohala hills, picturesque, wooded, and abrupt, bound Waimea on the north, with their exquisite grassy slopes, and bring down an abundance of water to the plain, but owing to the lightness of the soil and the evaporation produced by the tremendous winds, the moisture disappears within two miles of the hills, and an area of rich soil, ten miles by twelve, which, if irrigated, would be invaluable, is nothing but a worthless dusty desert, perpetually encroaching on the grass.  As soon as the plains slope towards the east, the vegetation of the tropics reappears, and the face of the country is densely covered with a swampy and impenetrable bush hardly at all explored, which shades the sources of the streams which fall into the Waipio and Waimanu Valleys, and is supposed to contain water enough to irrigate the Saharas of leeward Hawaii.
The climate of the plain is most invigorating.  If there were waggon roads and obtainable comforts, Waimea, with its cool equable temperature, might become the great health resort of invalids from the Pacific coast.  But Hawaii is not a place for the sick or old; for, if people cannot ride on horseback, they can have neither society nor change.  Mr. Lyons, one of the most famous of the early missionaries, still clings to this place, where he has worked for forty years.  He is an Hawaiian poet; and, besides translating some of our best hymns, has composed enough to make up the greater part of a bulky volume, which is said to be of great merit.  He says that the language lends itself very readily to rhythmical expression.  He was indefatigable in his youth, and was four times let down the pali by ropes to preach in the Waimanu Valley.  Neither he nor his wife can mount a horse now, and it is very dreary for them, as the population has receded and dwindled from about them.  Their house is made lively, however, by some bright little native girls, who board with them, and receive an English and industrial education.
The moral atmosphere of Waimea has never been a wholesome one.  The region was very early settled by a class of what may be truly termed “mean whites,” the “beach-combers” and riff-raff of the Pacific.  They lived infamous lives, and added their own to the indigenous vices of the islands, turning the district into a perfect sink of iniquity, in which they were known by such befitting aliases as “Jake the Devil,” etc.  The coming of the missionaries, and the settlement of moral, orderly whites on Hawaii, have slowly created a public opinion averse to flagrant immorality, and the outrageous license of former years would now meet with legal penalties.  Many of the old settlers are dead, and others have drifted to regions beyond restraining influences, but still “the Waimea crowd” is not considered up to the mark.  Most of the present set of foreigners are Englishmen who have married native women.  It was in such quarters as this that the great antagonistic influence to the complete Christianization of the natives was created, and it is from such suspicious sources that the aspersions on missionary work are usually derived.
Waimea has its own beauty--the grand breezy plain, the gigantic sweep of the mountain curves, the incessant changes of colour, and the morning view of Mauna Kea, with the pure snow on its ragged dome, rose-flushed in the early sunlight.  I don’t agree with Disraeli that “happiness is atmosphere;” yet constant sunshine, and a climate which never threatens one with discomfort or ills, certainly conduce to equable cheerfulness.
I am quite interested with a native lady here, the first I have met with who has been able to express her ideas in English.  She is extremely shrewd and intelligent, very satirical, and a great mimic.  She very cleverly burlesques the way in which white people express their admiration of scenery, and, in fact, ridicules admiration of scenery for itself.  She evidently thinks us a sour, morose, worrying, forlorn race.  “We,” she said, “are always happy; we never grieve long about anything; when any one dies we break our hearts for some days, and then we are happy again.  We are happy all day long, not like white people, happy one moment, gloomy another: we’ve no cares, the days are too short.  What are haoles always unhappy about?”  Perhaps she expresses the general feeling of her careless, pleasure-loving, mirth-loving people, who, whatever commands they disobey, fulfil the one, “Take no thought for the morrow.”  The fabrication of the beautiful quilts I before wrote of is a favourite occupation of native women, and they make all their own and their husbands’ clothes; but making leis, going into the woods to collect materials for them, talking, riding, bathing, visiting, and otherwise amusing themselves, take up the greater part of their time.  Perhaps if we white women always wore holukus of one shape, we should have fewer gloomy moments!
                                         I.L.B.

LETTER XVI.

WAIMANU VALLEY.  HAWAII.
I am sitting at the door of a grass lodge, at the end of all things, for no one can pass further by land than this huge lonely cleft.  About thirty natives are sitting about me, all staring, laughing, and chattering, and I am the only white person in the region.  We have all had a meal, sitting round a large calabash of poi and a fowl, which was killed in my honour, and roasted in one of their stone ovens.  I have forgotten my knife, and have had to help myself after the primitive fashion of aborigines, not without some fear, for some of them I am sure are in an advanced stage of leprosy.  The brown tattooed limbs of one man are stretched across the mat, the others are sitting cross-legged, making lauhala leis.  One man is making fishing-lines of a beautifully white and marvellously tenacious fibre, obtained from an Hawaiian “flax” plant (possibly Urtica argentea), very different from the New Zealand Phormium tenax.  Nearly all the people of the valley are outside, having come to see the wahine haole: only one white woman, and she a resident of Hawaii, having been seen in Waimanu before.  I am really alone, miles of mountain and gulch lie between me and the nearest whites.  This is a wonderful place: a ravine about three miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, without an obvious means of ingress, being walled in by precipices from 2000 to 4000 feet high.  Five cascades dive from the palis at its head, and unite to form a placid river about up to a horse’s body here, and deep enough for a horse to swim in a little below.  Dense forests of various shades of green fill up the greater part of the valley, concealing the basins into which the cascades leap, and the grey basalt of the palis is mostly hidden by greenery.  At the open end, two bald bluffs, one of them 2000 feet in height, confront the Pacific, and its loud booming surf comes up to within one hundred yards of the house where I am writing, but is banked off by a heaped-up barrier of colossal shingle.
Hot and silent, a sunset world of an endless afternoon, it seems a palpable and living dream.  And a few of these people, I understand, have dreamed away their lives here, never having been beyond their valley, at least by land.  But it is a dream of ceaseless speech and rippling laughter.  They are the merriest people I have yet seen, and doubtless their isolated life is dear to them.
I wish I could sketch this most picturesque scene.  In the verandah, which is formed of mats, two handsome youths, and five women in green, red, and orange chemises, all with leis of ferns round their hair, are reclining on the ground.  Outside of this there is a pavement of large lava stones, and groups in all colours, wreathed and garlanded, including some much disfigured old people, crouching in red and yellow blankets, are sitting and lying there.  Some are fondling small dogs; and a number of large ones, with a whole tribe of amicable cats, are picking bones.  Surf-boards, paddles, saddles, lassos, spurs, gear, and bundles of ti leaves are lying about.  Thirteen horses are tethered outside, some of which brought the riders who escorted me triumphantly from the head of the valley.  The foreheads of the precipices opposite are reddening in the sunset, and between them and me horses and children are constantly swimming across the broad, still stream which divides the village into two parts; and now and then a man in a malo, and children who have come up the river swimming, with their clothes in one hand, increase the assemblage.
All are intently watching me, but are as kind and good-natured as possible; and my guide from Waipio is discoursing to them about me.  He knows a little abrupt, disjointed, almost unintelligible English, and comes up every now and then with an interrogation in his manner, “Father? mother? married? watch?  How came?”  “You” appears beyond his efforts.  “Kilauea?  Lunalilo?”  Then he goes back and orates rapidly, gesticulating emphatically.  A very handsome, pleasant-looking man, with a red sash round his waist, who, I understand from signs, is the schoolmaster, emerged from the throng, and sat down beside me; but his English appears limited to these words, “How old?”  When I told him by counting on my fingers he laughed heartily, and said “Too old,” and he told the others, and they all laughed.  I have photographs of Queen Victoria and Mr. Coan in my writing-book, and when I exhibited them they crowded round me clapping their hands, and screaming with delight when they recognized Mr. Coan.  The king’s handwriting was then handed round amidst reverent “ahs” and “ohs,” or what sounded like them.  This letter was also passed round and examined lengthwise, sidewise, and upside down.  They shrieked with satirical laughter when I pressed some fragile ferns in my blotting-book.  The natives think it quite idiotic in us to attach any value to withered leaves.  My inkstand with its double-spring lids has been a great amusement.  Each one opened both, and shut them again, and a chorus of “maikai, maikai,” (good) ran round the circle.  They seem so simple and good that at last I have trusted them with my watch, which excites unbounded admiration, probably because of its small size.  It is now on its travels; but I am not the least anxious about it.  A man pointed to a hut some distance on the other side of the river, and appeared interrogative, and on my replying affirmatively, he mounted a horse and carried off the watch in the direction indicated.  Mr. Ellis came to this valley in a canoe, and he mentions that when he preached, the natives, who seemed to be very indifferent to the general truths of Christianity, became very deeply interested when they heard of Ora loa ia Jesu (endless life by Jesus).  While I was up the valley the poor people made a wonderful bed of seven fine mats, one over the other, on one side of the house, and screened it off with a flaring muslin curtain; but on the other side there are ten pillows in a row, so that I wonder how many are to occupy the den during the night.  I am now writing inside the house, with a hollowed stone, with some beef fat and a wick in it, for a light, and two youths seem delegated to attend upon me.  One holds my ink, and if I look up, the other rushes for something that I am supposed to want.  They insist on thinking that I am cold because my clothes are wet, and have thrown over me several folds of tapa, made from the inner bark of the wauti or cloth plant (Broussonetia papyrifera).  They brought me a kalo leaf containing a number of living freshwater shrimps, and were quite surprised when I did not eat them.

WAIPIO, March 5th.
It seems fully a week since I left Waimea yesterday morning, so many new experiences have been crowded into the time.  I will try to sketch my expedition while my old friend Halemanu is preparing dinner.  The morning opened gloriously.  The broad Waimea plains were flooded with red and gold, and the snowy crest of Mauna Kea was cloudless.  We breakfasted by lamp light (the days of course are short in this latitude), and were away before six.  My host kindly provided me with a very fine horse and some provisions in a leather wallet, and with another white man and a native accompanied me as far as this valley, where they had some business.  The morning deepened into gorgeousness.  A blue mist hung in heavy folds round the violet bases of the mountains, which rose white and sharp into the rose-flushed sky; the dew lay blue and sparkling on the short crisp grass; the air was absolutely pure, and with a suspicion of frost in it.  It was all very fair, and the horses enjoyed the morning freshness, and danced and champed their bits as though they disliked being reined in.  We rode over level grass-covered ground, till we reached the Hamakua bush, fringed with dead trees, and full of ohias and immense fern trees, some of them with a double tier of fronds, far larger and finer than any that I saw in New Zealand.  There are herds of wild goats, cattle, and pigs on the island, and they roam throughout this region, trampling, grubbing, and rending, grinding the bark of the old trees and eating up the young ones.  This ravaging is threatening at no distant date to destroy the beauty and alter the climate of the mountainous region of Hawaii.  The cattle are a hideous breed--all bones, hide, and horns.
We were at the top of the Waipio pali at eight, and our barefooted horses, used to the soft pastures of Waimea, refused to carry us down its rocky steep, so we had to walk.  I admired this lonely valley far more than before.  It was full of infinite depths of blue--blue smoke in lazy spirals curled upwards; it was eloquent in a morning silence that I felt reluctant to break.  Against its dewy greenness the beach shone like coarse gold, and its slow silver river lingered lovingly, as though loth to leave it, and be merged in the reckless loud-tongued Pacific.  Across the valley, the track I was to take climbed up in thready zigzags, and disappeared round a bold headland.  It was worth a second visit just to get a glimpse of such a vision of peace.
Halemanu, with hospitable alacrity, soon made breakfast ready, after which Mr. S., having arranged for my further journey, left me here, and for the first time I found myself alone among natives ignorant of English.  For the Waimanu trip it is essential to have a horse bred in the Waimanu Valley and used to its dizzy palis, and such a horse was procured, and a handsome native, called Hananui, as guide.  We were away by ten, and galloped across the valley till we came to the nearly perpendicular pali on the other side.  The sight of this air-hung trail from Halemanu’s house has turned back several travellers who were bent on the trip, but I had been told that it was quite safe on a Waimanu horse; and keeping under my fears as best I could, I let Hananui precede me, and began the ascent, which is visible from here for an hour.  The pali is as nearly perpendicular as can be.  Not a bush or fern, hardly a tuft of any green thing, clothes its bare, scathed sides.  It terminates precipitously on the sea at a height of 2000 feet.  Up this shelving wall, something like a sheep track, from thirty to forty-six inches broad, goes in great swinging zigzags, sometimes as broken steps of rock breast high, at others as a smooth ledge with hardly foothold, in three places carried away by heavy rains--altogether the most frightful track that imagination can conceive. {235}  It was most unpleasant to see the guide’s horse straining and scrambling, looking every now and then as if about to fall over backwards.  My horse went up wisely and nobly, but slipping, jumping, scrambling, and sending stones over the ledge, now and then hanging for a second by his fore feet.  The higher we went the narrower and worse it grew.  The girth was loose, so as not to impede the horse’s respiration, the broad cinch which usually passes under the body having been fastened round his chest, and yet it was once or twice necessary to run the risk of losing my balance by taking my left foot out of the stirrup to press it against the horse’s neck to prevent it from being crushed, while my right hung over the precipice.  We came to a place where the path had been carried away, leaving a declivity of loose sand and gravel.  You can hardly realize how difficult it was to dismount, when there was no margin outside the horse.  I somehow slid under him, being careful not to turn the saddle, and getting hold of his hind leg, screwed myself round carefully behind him.  It was alarming to see these sure-footed creatures struggle and slide in the deep gravel as though they must go over, and not less so to find myself sliding, though I was grasping my horse’s tail.
Between the summit and Waimanu, a distance of ten miles, there are nine gulches, two of them about 900 feet deep, all very beautiful, owing to the broken ground, the luxuriant vegetation, and the bright streams, but the kona, or south wind, was blowing, bringing up the hot breath of the equatorial belt, and the sun was perfectly unclouded, so that the heat of the gorges was intense.  They succeed each other occasionally with very great rapidity.  Between two of the deepest and steepest there is a ridge not more than fifty yards wide.
Soon after noon we simultaneously stopped our horses.  The Waimanu Valley lay 2500 feet (it is said) below us, and the trail struck off into space.  It was a scene of loneliness to which Waipio seems the world.  In a second the eye took in the twenty grass lodges of its inhabitants, the five cascades which dive into the dense forests of its upper end, its river like a silver ribbon, and its meadows of living green.  In ten seconds a bird could have spanned the ravine and feasted on its loveliness, but we could only tip over the dizzy ridge that overhangs the valley, and laboriously descend into its heat and silence.  The track is as steep and broken as that which goes up from hence, but not nearly so narrow, and without its elements of terror, for kukuis, lauhalas, ohias, and ti trees, with a lavish growth of ferns and trailers, grow luxuriantly in every damp rift of rock, and screen from view the precipices of the pali.  The valley looks as if it could only be reached in a long day’s travel, so very far it is below, but the steepness of the track makes it accessible in an hour from the summit.  As we descended, houses and a church which had looked like toys at first, dilated on our sight, the silver ribbon became a stream, the specks on the meadows turned into horses, the white wavy line on the Pacific beach turned into a curling wave, and lower still, I saw people, who had seen us coming down, hastily shuffling into clothes.
There were four houses huddled between the pali and the river, and six or eight, with a church and schoolhouse on the other side; and between these and the ocean a steep narrow beach, composed of large stones worn as round and smooth as cannon balls, on which the surf roars the whole year round.  The pali which walls in the valley on the other side is inaccessible.  The school children and a great part of the population had assembled in front of the house which I described before.  There was a sort of dyke of rough lava stones round it, difficult to climb, but the natives, though they are very kind, did not, on this or any similar occasion, offer me any help, which neglect, I suppose, arises from the fact that the native women never need help, as they are as strong, fearless, and active as the men, and rival them in swimming and other athletic sports.  An old man, clothed only with his dark skin, was pounding baked kalo for poi, in front of the house; a woman with flowers in her hair, but apparently not otherwise clothed, was wading up to her waist in the river, pushing before her a light trumpet-shaped basket used for catching shrimps, and the other women wore the usual bright-coloured chemises.
I wanted to make the most of the six hours of daylight left, and we remounted our horses and rode for some distance up the river, which is the highway of the valley, all the children swimming on our right and left, each holding up a bundle of clothes with one hand, and two canoes paddled behind us.  The river is still and clear, with a smooth bottom, but comes halfway up a horse’s body, and riders take their feet out of the stirrups, bring them to a level with the saddle, lean slightly back, and hold them against the horse’s neck.  Equestrians following this fashion, canoes gliding, children and dogs swimming, were a most amusing picture.  Several of the children swim to and from school every day.  I was anxious to get rid of this voluntary escort, and we took a gallop over the soft springy grass till we reached some very pretty grass houses, under the shade of the most magnificent bread-fruit trees on Hawaii, loaded with fruit.  There were orange trees in blossom, and coffee trees with masses of sweet white flowers lying among their flaky branches like snow, and the unfailing cocoa-nut rising out of banana groves, and clusters of gardenia smothering the red hibiscus.  Here Hananui adopted a showman’s air; he made me feel as if I were one of Barnum’s placarded monsters.  I had nothing to do but sit on my horse and be stared at.  I felt that my bleached face was unpleasing, that my eyes and hair were faded, and that I had a great deal to answer for in the way of colour and attire.  From the way in which he asked me unintelligible questions, I gathered that the people were catechizing him about me, and that he was romancing largely at my expense.  They brought me some bananas and cocoa-nut milk, which were most refreshing.
Beyond the houses the valley became a jungle of Indian shot (Canna indica), eight or nine feet high, guavas and ohias, with an entangled undergrowth of ferns rather difficult to penetrate, and soon Hananui, whose soul was hankering after the delights of society, stopped, saying, “Lios (horses) no go.”  “We’ll try,” I replied, and rode on first.  He sat on his horse laughing immoderately, and then followed me.  I see that in travelling with natives it is essential to have a definite plan of action in one’s own mind, and to verge on self-assertion in carrying it out.  We fought our way a little further, and then he went out of sight altogether in the jungle, his horse having floundered up to his girths in soft ground, on which we dismounted and tethered the horses.  H. had never been any further, and as I failed to make him understand that I desired to visit the home of the five cascades, I had to reverse our positions and act as guide.  We crept along the side of a torrent among exquisite trees, moss, and ferns, till we came to a place where it divided.  There were three horses tethered there, some wearing apparel lying on the rocks, and some human footprints along one of the streams, which decided me in favour of the other.  H. remonstrated by signs, as doubtless he espied an opportunity for much gossip in the other direction, but on my appearing persistent, he again laughed and followed me.
From this point it was one perfect, rapturous, intoxicating, supreme vision of beauty, and I felt, as I now believe, that at last I had reached a scene on which foreign eyes had never looked.  The glories of the tropical forest closed us in with their depth, colour, and redundancy.  Here the operations of nature are rapid and decisive.  A rainfall of eleven feet in a year and a hothouse temperature force every plant into ceaseless activity, and make short work of decay.  Leafage, blossom, fruitage, are simultaneous and perennial.  The river, about as broad as the Cam at Cambridge, leaped along, clear like amber, pausing to rest awhile in deep bright pools, where fish were sporting above the golden sand, a laughing, sparkling, rushing, terrorless stream, “without mysteries or agonies,” broken by rocks, green with mosses and fragile ferns, and in whose unchilled waters, not more than three feet deep, wading was both safe and pleasant.  It was not possible to creep along its margin, the forest was so dense and tangled, so we waded the whole way, and wherever the water ran fiercely my unshod guide helped me.  One varied, glorious maze of vegetation came down to it, and every green thing leant lovingly towards it, or stooped to touch it, and over its whole magic length was arched and interlaced the magnificent large-leaved ohia, whose millions of spikes of rose-crimson blossoms lit up the whole arcade, and the light of the afternoon sun slanted and trickled through them, dancing in the mirthful water, turning its far-down sands to gold, and brightening the many-shaded greens of candlenut and breadfruit.  It shone on majestic fern-trees, on the fragile Polypodium tamariscinum, which clung tremblingly to the branches of the ohia, on the beautiful lygodium, which adorned the uncouth trunk of the breadfruit; on shining banana leaves and glossy trailing yams; on gigantic lianas, which, climbing to the tops of the largest trees, descended in vast festoons, passing from tree to tree, and interlacing the forest with a living network; and on lycopodiums of every kind, from those which wrapped the rocks in feathery green to others hardly distinguishable from ferns.  But there were twilight depths too, where no sunlight penetrated the leafy gloom, damp and cool: dreamy shades, in which the music of the water was all too sweet, and the loveliness too entrancing, creating that sadness, hardly “akin to pain,” which is latent in all intense enjoyment.  Here and there a tree had fallen across the river, from which grew upwards and trailed downwards, fairy-like, semi-transparent mosses and ferns, all glittering with moisture and sunshine, and now and then a scarlet tropic bird heightened the effect by the flash of his plumage.
After an hour of wading we emerged into broad sunny daylight at the home of the five cascades, which fall from a semicircular precipice into three basins.  It is not, however, possible to pass from one to the other.  This great gulf is a grand sight, with its dark deep basin from which it seemed so far to look up to the heavenly blue, and the water falling calmly and unhurriedly, amidst innumerable rainbows, from a height of 3000 feet.  The sides were draped with ferns flourishing under the spray, and at the base the rock was very deeply caverned.  I enjoyed a delicious bath, relying on sun and wind to dry my clothes, and then reluctantly waded down the river.  At its confluence with another stream, still arched by ohias, a man and two women appeared rising out of the water, like a vision of the elder world in the days of Fauns, and Naiads, and Hamadryads.  The water was up to their waists, and leis of ohia blossoms and ferns, and masses of unbound hair fantastically wreathed with moss, fell over their faultless forms, and their rich brown skin gleamed in the slant sunshine.  They were catching shrimps with trumpet-shaped baskets, perhaps rather a prosaic occupation.  They joined us, and we waded down together to the place where they had left their horses.  The women slipped into their holukus, and the man insisted on my riding his barebacked horse to the place where we had left our own, and then we all galloped over the soft grass.
Waimanu had turned out to meet us about thirty people on horseback, all of whom shook hands with me, and some of them threw over me garlands of ohia, pandanus, and hibiscus.  Where our cavalcade entered the river, a number of children and dogs and three canoes awaited us, and thus escorted I returned triumphantly to the house.  The procession on the river of paddling canoes, swimming children, and dogs, and more than thirty riders, with their feet tucked up round their horses’ necks, all escorting a “pale face,” was grotesque and enchanting, and I revelled in this lapse into savagery, and enjoyed heartily the kindliness and goodwill of this unsophisticated people.
When darkness spread over the valley, clear voices ascended in a weird recitative, the room filled up with people, pipes circulated freely, poi was again produced, and calabashes of cocoa-nut milk.  The mêlés were long, and I crept within my curtain and lay down, but the drowsiness which legitimately came over me after riding thirty miles and wading two, was broken in upon by two monstrous cockroaches really as large as mice, with fierce-looking antennæ and prominent eyes, both of which mounted guard on my pillow.  On rising to drive them away, I found to my dismay that they were but the leaders of a host, which only made a temporary retreat, rustling over the mat and dried grass with the crisp tread of mice, and scaring away sleep for some hours.  Worse than these were the mosquitoes, also an imported nuisance, which stabbed and stung without any preliminary droning; and the heat was worse still, for thirteen human beings were lying on the floor and the door was shut.  Had I known that two of these were lepers, I should have felt far from comfortable.  As it was, I got up soon after midnight, and cautiously stepping among the sleeping forms, went out of doors.  Everything favoured reflection, but I think the topics to which my mind most frequently reverted were my own absolute security--a lone white woman among “savages,” and the civilizing influence which Christianity has exercised, so that even in this isolated valley, gouged out of a mountainous coast, there was nothing disagreeable or improper to be seen.  The night was very still, but the sea was moaning; the river rippled very gently as it brushed past the reeds; there was a hardly perceptible vibration in the atmosphere, which suggested falling water and quivering leaves; and the air was full of a heavy, drowsy fragrance, the breath of orange flowers, perhaps, and of the night-blowing Cereus, which had opened its ivory urn to the moon.  I should have liked to stay out all night in the vague, delicious moonlight, but the dew was heavy, and moreover I had not any boots on, so I reluctantly returned to the grass house, which was stifling with heat and smells of cocoa-nut oil, tobacco, and the rancid smoke from beef fat.
Before sunrise this morning my horse was saddled, and a number of natives had assembled.  Hananui had disappeared, but the man who lent me his bare-backed horse yesterday was ready to act as guide.  My boots could not then be found, so I adopted the native fashion of riding with bare feet.  We again rode up the river in that slow and solemn fashion in which horses walk in water, galloped over a stretch of grass, crossed a bright stream several times, and then entered a dense jungle of Indian shot, plantains, and sadlerias, with breadfruit, kukui, and ohia rising out of it.  There were thousands of plantains, a fruit resembling the banana, but that it requires cooking.  The Indian shot, the yellow-blossomed variety, was of a gigantic size.  Its hard, black seeds put into a bladder furnish the chic-chac, which in many places is used as an accompaniment to the utterly abominable and heathenish tom-tom.  Here guavas as large as oranges and as yellow as lemons ripened and fell unheeded.  Sometimes deep down we heard the rush of water, and Paalau got down and groped for it on his hands and knees; sometimes we heard a noise as of hippopotami, but nothing could be seen but the tips of ears, as a herd of happy, unbroken horses, scared by our approach, crashed away through the jungle.  Clear rapid streams, fern-fringed, sometimes offered us a few yards of highway, but the jungle ever grew more dense, the forest trees larger, the lianas more tangled, the streams more sunk and rocky, and though the horses shut their eyes and boldly pushed through the tangle, we were fairly foiled when within half a mile from the head of the valley.  I thoroughly appreciated the unsightly leather guards which are here used to cover the stirrups and feet, as without them I could not have ridden ten yards.  We were so hemmed in that it was difficult to dismount, but I bound some wild kalo leaves round my feet, and managed to get over some broken rock to a knoll, from which I obtained a superb view of the wonderful cleft.  Palis 3000 feet in height walled in its head with a complete inaccessibility.  It lay in cool dewy shadow till the sudden sun flushed its precipices with pink, and a broad bar of light revealed the great chasm in which it terminates, while far off its portals opened upon the red eastern sky.  This little lonely world had become so very dear to me, that I found it hard to leave it.
There was some stir near the sea, for a man was about to build a grass house, and they were preparing a stone pavement for it.  Thirty people sat on the ground in a line from the beach, and passed stones from hand to hand, as men pass buckets at a fire.  It seemed a very attractive occupation, and I could hardly get Hananui to leave it.  The natives are most gregarious and social in their habits.  They assemble together for everything that has to be made or done, and their occupations and amusements are shared by both sexes.  In old days it is said that a king of Hawaii assembled most of the adults of the then populous island, and formed a human chain three miles long to pass up stones for the building of the great Heiau in Kona.  It is said that this valley had 2000 inhabitants forty years ago, but they have dwindled to 117.  The former estimate is probably not an excessive one, for nearly the whole valley is suitable for the culture of kalo, and a square mile of kalo will feed 15,000 natives for a year.
Two women were shrimping in the river, the children were swimming to school, blue smoke curled up into the still air, kalo was baking among the stones, and a group of women sat sewing and making leis on the ground.  The Waimanu day had begun; and it was odd to think that through the long summer years days dawned like this, and that the people of the valley grew grey and old in shrimping and sewing and kalo baking.  All Waimanu shook hands with me, the kindly “Aloha” filled the air, and the women threw garlands over us both.  I could hardly induce my host to accept a dollar and a half for my entertainment.  From the dizzy summit of the pali, where the sun was high and hot, I looked my last on the dark, cool valley, slumbering in an endless calm, the deepest, greenest, quaintest cleft on all the island.
The sun was fierce and bright, the ocean had a metallic glint, the hot breath of the kona was scorching.  My hands, swollen from mosquito bites, could not be stuffed into my gloves, and inflamed under the sun, and my wet boots baked and stiffened on my feet.  Hananui plaited a crown of leaves for my hot head, which I found a great relief.  I was still minded to linger, for one side of each glorious gulch was cool with shadow and dripping with dew.  The blue morning glories were yet unwilted, rivulets dropped down into ferny grottoes and lingered there, rose ohia blossoms lighted shady places, orange flowers gleamed like stars amidst the dense leafage, and the crimped-leaved coffee shrubs were white with their mimic snow.  It was my last tropical dream, and I was rudely roused by finding myself on the unsightly verge of the great bluff on the north side of this valley, which plunges to the sea with an uncompromising perpendicular dip of 2000 feet, and carries on its dizzy brow a shelving trail not more than two feet wide!
I felt that I must go back and live and die in Waimanu rather than descend that scathed steep, and being stupid with terror flung myself from my horse, forgetting that it was much safer to trust to his four feet than to my two, and to an animal without “nerves,” dizziness, or “the fore-knowledge of death,” than to my palsied, cowardly self.  I had intended to go into details of the horrible descent, but the “pilikia” is over now, and Halemanu claps me on the shoulder with an approving smile, ejaculating, “Maikai, maikai” (good).  Besides, my returning senses inform me that I have not tasted food since yesterday, and some delicious river fishes are smoking on the table. . . . .
                                       I.L.B.

LETTER XVII.

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

LETTER XVIII.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU.  March 20th.
Oahu, with its grey pinnacles, its deep valleys, its cool chasms, its ruddy headlands, and volcanic cones, all clothed in green by the recent rains, looked unspeakably lovely as we landed by sunrise in a rose-flushed atmosphere, and Honolulu, shady, dew-bathed, and brilliant with flowers, deserved its name, “The Paradise of the Pacific.”  The hotel is pleasant, and Mrs. D.’s presence makes it sweet and homelike; but in a very few days I have lost much of the health I gained on Hawaii, and the “Rolling Moses” and the Rocky Mountains can hardly come too soon.  For Honolulu is truly a metropolis, gay, hospitable, and restless, and this hotel centralizes the restlessness.  Visiting begins at breakfast time, when it ends I know not, and receiving and making visits, court festivities, entertainments given by the commissioners of the great powers, riding parties, picnics, verandah parties, “sociables,” and luncheon and evening parties on board the ships of war, succeed each other with frightful rapidity.  This is all on the surface, but beneath and better than this is a kindness which leaves no stranger to a sense of loneliness, no want uncared for, and no sorrow unalleviated.  This, more than its beauty and its glorious climate, makes Honolulu “Paradise” for the many who arrive here sick and friendless.  I notice that the people are very intimate with each other, and generally address each other by their Christian names.  Very many are the descendants of the clerical and secular members of the mission, and these, besides being naturally intimate, are further drawn and held together by a society called “The Cousins’ Society,” the objects of which are admirable.  The people take an intense interest in each other, and love each other unusually.  Possibly they may hate each other as cordially when occasion offers.  It is a charming town, and the society is delightful.  I wish I were well enough to enjoy it.
For people in the early stages of consumption this climate is perfect, owing to its equability, as also for bronchial affections.  Unlike the health resorts of the Mediterranean, Algeria, Madeira, and Florida, where great summer heats or an unhealthy season compel half-cured invalids to depart in the spring, to return the next winter with fresh colds to begin the half-cure process again, people can live here until they are completely cured, as the climate is never unhealthy, and never too hot.  Though the regular trades, which blow for nine months of the year, have not yet set in, and the mercury stands at 80°, there is no sultriness: a tremulous sea-breeze and a mountain breeze fan the town, and the purple nights, when the stars hang out like lamps, and the moon gives a light which is almost golden, are cool and delicious.  Roughly computed, the annual mean temperature is 75° 55’, with a divergence in either direction of only 7° 55’.  As a general rule the temperature is cooler by four degrees for every thousand feet of altitude, so that people can choose their climate to suit themselves without leaving the islands.
I am gradually learning a little of the topography of this island and of Honolulu, but the last is very intricate.  The appearance of Oahu from the sea is deceptive.  It looks hardly larger than Arran, but it is really forty-six miles long by twenty-five broad, and is 530 square miles in extent.  Diamond Hill, or Leahi, is the most prominent object south of the town, beyond the palm groves of Waikiki.  It is red and arid, except when, as now, it is verdure-tinged by recent rains.  Its height is 760 feet, and its crater nearly as deep, but its cone is rapidly diminishing.  Some years ago, when the enormous quantity of thirty-six inches of rain fell in one week, the degradation of both exterior and interior was something incredible, and the same process is being carried on slowly or rapidly at all times.  The Punchbowl, immediately behind Honolulu, is a crater of the same kind, but of yet more brilliant colouring: so red is it indeed, that one might suppose that its fires had but just died out.  In 1786 an observer noted it as being composed of high peaks; but atmospheric influences have reduced it to the appearance of a single wasting tufa cone, similar to those which stud the northern slopes of Mauna Kea.  There are a number of shore craters on the island, and six groups of tufa cones, but from the disintegration of the lava, and the great depth of the soil in many places, it is supposed that volcanic action ceased earlier than on Maui or Hawaii.  The shores are mostly fringed with coral reefs, often half a mile in width, composed of cemented coral fragments, shells, sand, and a growing species of zoophyte.  The ancient reefs are elevated thirty, forty, and even 100 feet in some places, forming barriers which have changed lagoons into solid ground.  Honolulu was a bay or lagoon, protected from the sea by a coral reef a mile wide; but the elevation of this reef twenty-five feet has furnished a site for the capital, by converting the bay into a low but beautifully situated plain.
The mountainous range behind is a rocky wall with outlying ridges, valleys of great size cutting the mountain to its core on either side, until the culminating peaks of Waiolani and Konahuanui, 4000 feet above the sea, seem as if rent in twain to form the Nuuanu Valley.  The windward side of this range is fertile, and is dotted over with rice and sugar plantations, but the leeward side has not a trace of the redundancy of the tropics, and this very barrenness gives a unique charm to the exotic beauty of Honolulu.
To me it is daily a fresh pleasure to stroll along the shady streets and revel among palms and bananas, to see clusters of the granadilla and night-blowing cereus mixed with the double blue pea, tumbling over walls and fences, while the vermilion flowers of the Erythrina umbrosa, like spikes of red coral, and the flaring magenta Bougainvillea (which is not a flower at all, but an audacious freak of terminal leaves) light up the shade, and the purple-leaved Dracæna which we grow in pots for dinner-table ornament, is as common as a weed.
Besides this hotel, and the handsome but exaggerated and inappropriate Government buildings not yet finished, there are few “imposing edifices” here.  The tasteful but temporary English Cathedral, the Kaiwaiaho Church, diminished once to suit a dwindled population, but already too large again; the prison, a clean, roomy building, empty in the daytime, because the convicts are sent out to labour on roads and public works; the Queen’s Hospital for Curables, for which Queen Emma and her husband became mendicants in Honolulu; the Court House, a staring, unshaded building; and the Iolani Palace, almost exhaust the category.  Of this last, little can be said, except that it is appropriate and proportioned to a kingdom of 56,000 souls, which is more than can be said of the income of the king, the salaries of the ministers, and some other things.  It stands in pleasure-grounds of about an acre in extent, with a fine avenue running through them, and is approached by a flight of steps which leads to a tolerably spacious hall, decorated in the European style.  Portraits of Louis Philippe and his queen, presented by themselves, and of the late Admiral Thomas, adorn the walls.  The Hawaiians have a profound respect for this officer’s memory, as it was through him that the sovereignty of the islands was promptly restored to the native rulers, after the infamous affair of its cession to England, as represented by Lord George Paulet.  There are also some ornamental vases and miniature copies of some of Thorwaldsen’s works.  The throne-room takes up the left wing of the palace.  This unfortunately resembles a rather dreary drawing-room in London or New York, and has no distinctive features except a decorated chair, which is the Hawaiian throne.  There is an Hawaiian crown also, neither grand nor costly, but this I have not seen.  At present the palace is only used for state receptions and entertainments, for the king is living at his private residence of Haemoeipio, not far off.
Miss W. kindly introduced me to Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani, the widowed queen of Kamehameha IV., whom you will remember as having visited England a few years ago, when she received great attention.  She has one-fourth of English blood in her veins, but her complexion is fully as dark as if she were of unmixed Hawaiian descent, and her features, though refined by education and circumstances, are also Hawaiian; but she is a very pretty, as well as a very graceful woman.  She was brought up by Dr. Rooke, an English physician here, and though educated at the American school for the children of chiefs, is very English in her leanings and sympathies, an attached member of the English Church, and an ardent supporter of the “Honolulu Mission.”  Socially she is very popular, and her exceeding kindness and benevolence, with her strongly national feeling as an Hawaiian, make her much beloved by the natives.
The winter palace, as her town house is called, is a large shady abode, like an old-fashioned New England house externally, but with two deep verandahs, and the entrance is on the upper one.  The lower floor seemed given up to attendants and offices, and a native woman was ironing clothes under a tree.  Upstairs, the house is like a tasteful English country house, with a pleasant English look, as if its furniture and ornaments had been gradually accumulating during a series of years, and possessed individual histories and reminiscences, rather than as if they had been ordered together as “plenishings” from stores.  Indeed, it is the most English-looking house I have seen since I left home, except Bishopscourt at Melbourne.  If there were a bell I did not see it; and we did not ring, for the queen received us at the door of the drawing-room, which was open.  I had seen her before in European dress, driving a pair of showy black horses in a stylish English phaeton; but on this occasion she was not receiving visitors formally, and was indulging in wearing the native holuku, and her black wavy hair was left to its own devices.  She is rather below the middle height, very young-looking for her age, which is thirty-seven, and very graceful in her movements.  Her manner is indeed very fascinating from a combination of unconscious dignity with ladylike simplicity.  Her expression is sweet and gentle, with the same look of sadness about her eyes that the king has, but she has a brightness and archness of expression which give a great charm to her appearance.  She has sorrowed much: first, for the death, at the age of four, of her only child, the Prince of Hawaii, who when dying was baptized into the English Church by the name of Albert Edward, Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales being his sponsors; and secondly, for the premature death of her husband, to whom she was much attached.  She speaks English beautifully, only hesitating now and then for the most correct form of expression.  She spoke a good deal and with great pleasure of England; and described Venice and the emotions it excited in her so admirably, that I should like to have heard her describe all Europe.
A few days afterwards I went to a garden party at her house.  It was a very pretty sight, and the “everybody” of Honolulu was there to the number of 250.  I must describe it for the benefit of ----, who persists in thinking that coloured royalty must necessarily be grotesque.  People arrived shortly before sunset, and were received by Queen Emma, who sat on the lawn, with her attendants about her, very simply dressed in black silk.  The king, at whose entrance the band played the national anthem, stood on another lawn, where presentations were made by the chamberlain; and those who were already acquainted with him had an opportunity for a few minutes’ conversation.  He was dressed in a very well-made black morning suit, and wore the ribbon and star of the Austrian order of Francis Joseph.  His simplicity was atoned for by the superlative splendour of his suite; the governor of Oahu, and the high chief Kalakaua, who was a rival candidate for the throne, being conspicuously resplendent.  The basis of the costume appeared to be the Windsor uniform, but it was smothered with epaulettes, cordons, and lace; and each dignitary has a uniform peculiar to his office, so that the display of gold lace was prodigious.  The chiefs are so raised above the common people in height, size, and general nobility of aspect, that many have supposed them to be of a different race; and the alii who represented the dwindled order that night were certainly superb enough in appearance to justify the supposition.  Beside their splendour and stateliness, the forty officers of the English and American war-ships, though all in full-dress uniform, looked decidedly insignificant; and I doubt not that the natives who were assembled outside the garden railings in crowds were not behind me in making invidious comparisons.
Chairs and benches were placed under the beautiful trees, and people grouped themselves on these, and promenaded, flirted, talked politics and gossip, or listened to the royal band, which played at intervals, and played well.  The dress of the ladies, whether white or coloured, was both pretty and appropriate.  Most of the younger women were in white, and wore natural flowers in their hair; and many of the elder ladies wore black or coloured silks, with lace and trains.  There were several beautiful leis of the gardenia, which filled all the garden with their delicious odour.  Tea and ices were handed round on Sèvres china by footmen and pages in appropriate liveries.  What a wonderful leap from calabashes and poi, malos and paus, to this correct and tasteful civilization!  As soon as the brief amber twilight of the tropics was over, the garden was suddenly illuminated by myriads of Chinese lanterns, and the effect was bewitching.  The upper suite of rooms was thrown open for those who preferred dancing under cover; but I think that the greater part of the assemblage chose the shady walks and purple night.  Supper was served at eleven, and the party broke up soon afterwards; but I must confess that, charming as it was, I left before eight, for society makes heavier demands on any strength than the rough open-air life of Hawaii.
The dwindling of the race is a most pathetic subject.  Here is a sovereign chosen amidst an outburst of popular enthusiasm, with a cabinet, a legislature, and a costly and elaborate governing machinery, sufficient in Yankee phrase to “run” an empire of several millions, and here are only 49,000 native Hawaiians; and if the decrease be not arrested, in a quarter of a century there will not be an Hawaiian to govern.  The chiefs, or alii, are a nearly extinct order; and, with a few exceptions, those who remain are childless.  In riding through Hawaii I came everywhere upon traces of a once numerous population, where the hill slopes are now only a wilderness of guava scrub, and upon churches and school-houses all too large, while in some hamlets the voices of young children were altogether wanting.  This nation, with its elaborate governmental machinery, its churches and institutions, has to me the mournful aspect of a shrivelled and wizened old man dressed in clothing much too big, the garments of his once athletic and vigorous youth.  Nor can I divest myself of the idea that the laughing, flower-clad hordes of riders who make the town gay with their presence, are but like butterflies fluttering out their short lives in the sunshine,
       “.  .  .  a wreck and residue,
        Whose only business is to perish.”
The statistics on this subject are perfectly appalling.  If we reduce Captain Cook’s estimate of the native population by one-fourth, it was 300,000 in 1779.  In 1872 it was only 49,000.  The first official census was in 1832, when the native population was 130,000.  This makes the decrease 80,000 in forty years, or at the rate of 2000 a year, and fixes the period for the final extinction of the race in 1897, if that rate were to continue.  It is a pity, for many reasons, that it is dying out.  It has shown a singular aptitude for politics and civilization, and it would have been interesting to watch the development of a strictly Polynesian monarchy starting under passably fair conditions.  Whites have conveyed to these shores slow but infallible destruction on the one hand, and on the other the knowledge of the life that is to come; and the rival influences of blessing and cursing have now been fifty years at work, producing results with which most reading people are familiar.
I have not heard the subject spoken of, but I should think that the decrease in the population must cause the burden of taxation to press heavily on that which remains.  Kings, cabinet ministers, an army, a police, a national debt, a supreme court, and common schools, are costly luxuries or necessaries.  The civil list is ludicrously out of proportion to the resources of the islands, and the heads of the four departments--Foreign Relations, Interior, Finance, and Law(Attorney-General)--receive $5,000 a year each!  Expenses and salaries have been increasing for the last thirty years.  For schools alone every man between twenty-one and sixty pays a tax of two dollars annually, and there is an additional general tax for the same purpose.  I suppose that there is not a better educated country in the world.  Education is compulsory; and besides the primary schools, there are a number of academies, all under Government supervision, and there are 324 teachers, or one for every twenty-seven children.  There is a Board of Education, and Kamakau, its president, reported to the last biennial session of the legislature that out of 8931 children between the ages of six and fifteen, 8287 were actually attending school!  Among other direct taxes, every quadruped that can be called a horse, above two years old, pays a dollar a year, and every dog a dollar and a half.  Does not all this sound painfully civilized?  If the influence of the tropics has betrayed me into rhapsody and ecstacy in earlier letters, these dry details will turn the scale in favour of prosaic sobriety!
I have said little about Honolulu, except of its tropical beauty.  It does not look as if it had “seen better days.”  Its wharves are well cared for, and its streets and roads are very clean.  The retail stores are generally to be found in two long streets which run inland, and in a splay street which crosses both.  The upper storekeepers, with a few exceptions, are Americans, but one street is nearly given up to Chinamen’s stores, and one of the wealthiest and most honourable merchants in the town is a Chinaman.  There is an ice factory, and icecream is included in the daily bill of fare here, and iced water is supplied without limit, but lately the machinery has only worked in spasms, and the absence of ice is regarded as a local calamity, though the water supplied from the waterworks is both cool and pure.  There are two good photographers and two booksellers.  I don’t think that plateglass fronts are yet to be seen.  Many of the storekeepers employ native “assistants;” but the natives show little aptitude for mercantile affairs, or indeed for the “splendid science” of money-making generally, and in this respect contrast with the Chinamen, who, having come here as Coolies, have contrived to secure a large share of the small traffic of the islands.  Most things are expensive, but they are good.  I have seen little of such decided rubbish as is to be found in the cheap stores of London and Edinburgh, except in tawdry artificial flowers.  Good black silks are to be bought, and are as essential to the equipment of a lady as at home.  Saddles are to be had at most of the stores, from the elaborate Mexican and Californian saddle, worth from 30 to 50 dollars, to a worthless imitation of the English saddle, dear at five.  Boots and shoes, perhaps because in this climate they are a mere luxury, are frightfully dear, and so are books, writing paper, and stationery generally; a sheet of Bristol board, which we buy at home for 6d., being half a dollar here.  But it is quite a pleasure to make purchases in the stores.  There is so much cordiality and courtesy that, as at this hotel, the bill recedes into the background, and the purchaser feels the indebted party.
The money is extremely puzzling.  These islands, like California, have repudiated greenbacks, and the only paper currency is a small number of treasury notes for large amounts.  The coin in circulation is gold and silver, but gold is scarce, which is an incovenience to people who have to carry a large amount of money about with them.  The coinage is nominally that of the United States, but the dollars are Mexican, or French 5 franc pieces, and people speak of “rials,” which have no existence here, and of “bits,” a Californian slang term for 12½ cents, a coin which to my knowledge does not exist anywhere.  A dime, or 10 cents, is the lowest coin I have seen, and copper is not in circulation.  An envelope, a penny bottle of ink, a pencil, a spool of thread, cost 10 cents each; postage-stamps cost 2 cents each for inter-island postage, but one must buy five of them, and dimes slip away quickly and imperceptibly.  There is a loss on English money, as half-a-crown only passes for a half-dollar, sixpence for a dime, and so forth; indeed, the average loss seems to be about twopence in the shilling.
There are four newspapers: the Honolulu Gazette, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa (the “Independent Press”), and a lately started spasmodic sheet, partly in English and partly in Hawaiian, the Nuhou (News). {270}  The two first are moral and respectable, but indulge in the American sins of personalities and mutual vituperation.  The Nuhou is scurrilous and diverting, and appears “run” with a special object, which I have not as yet succeeded in unravelling from its pungent but not always intelligible pages.  I think perhaps the writing in each paper has something of the American tendency to hysteria and convulsions, though these maladies are mild as compared with the “real thing” in the Alta California, which is largely taken here.  Besides these there are monthly sheets called The Friend, the oldest paper in the Pacific, edited by good “Father Damon,” and the Church Messenger, edited by Bishop Willis, partly devotional and partly devoted to the Honolulu Mission.  All our popular American and English literature is read here, and I have hardly seen a table without “Scribner’s” or “Harper’s Monthly” or “Good Words.”
I have lived far too much in America to feel myself a stranger where, as here, American influence and customs are dominant; but the English who are in Honolulu just now, in transitu from New Zealand, complain bitterly of its “Yankeeism,” and are very far from being at home, and I doubt not that Mr. M---, whom you will see, will not confirm my favourable description.  It is quite true that the islands are Americanized, and with the exception of the Finance Minister, who is a Scotchman, Americans “run” the Government and fill the Chief Justiceship and other high offices of State.  It is, however, perfectly fair, for Americans have civilized and Christianized Hawaii-nei, and we have done little except make an unjust and afterwards disavowed seizure of the islands.
On looking over this letter I find it an olla podrida of tropical glories, royal festivities, finance matters, and odds and ends in general.  I dare say you will find it dull after my letters from Hawaii, but there are others who will prefer its prosaic details to Kilauea and Waimanu; and I confess that, amidst the general lusciousness of tropical life, I myself enjoy the dryness and tartness of statistics, and hard uncoloured facts.
                                      I.L.B.

LETTER XIX.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU.
My latest news of you is five months old, and though I have not the slightest expectation that I shall hear from you, I go up to the roof to look out for the “Rolling Moses” with more impatience and anxiety than those whose business journeys are being delayed by her non-arrival.  If such an unlikely thing were to happen as that she were to bring a letter, I should be much tempted to stay five months longer on the islands rather than try the climate of Colorado, for I have come to feel at home, people are so very genial, and suggest so many plans for my future enjoyment, the islands in their physical and social aspects are so novel and interesting, and the climate is unrivalled and restorative.
Honolulu has not yet lost the charm of novelty for me.  I am never satiated with its exotic beauties, and the sight of a kaleidoscopic whirl of native riders is always fascinating.  The passion for riding, in a people who only learned equitation in the last generation, is most curious.  It is very curious, too, to see women incessantly enjoying and amusing themselves in riding, swimming, and making leis.  They have few home ties in the shape of children, and I fear make them fewer still by neglecting them for the sake of riding and frolic, and man seems rather the help-meet than the “oppressor” of woman; though I believe that the women have abandoned that right of choosing their husbands, which, it is said, that they exercised in the old days.  Used to the down-trodden look and harrassed care-worn faces of the over-worked women of the same class at home, and in the colonies, the laughing, careless faces of the Hawaiian women have the effect upon me of a perpetual marvel.  But the expression generally has little of the courteousness, innocence, and childishness of the negro physiognomy.  The Hawaiians are a handsome people, scornful and sarcastic-looking even with their mirthfulness; and those who know them say that they are always quizzing and mimicking the haoles, and that they give everyone a nickname, founded on some personal peculiarity.
The women are free from our tasteless perversity as to colour and ornament, and have an instinct of the becoming.  At first the holuku, which is only a full, yoke nightgown, is not attractive, but I admire it heartily now, and the sagacity of those who devised it.  It conceals awkwardness, and befits grace of movement; it is fit for the climate, is equally adapted for walking and riding, and has that general appropriateness which is desirable in costume.  The women have a most peculiar walk, with a swinging motion from the hip at each step, in which the shoulder sympathises.  I never saw anything at all like it.  It has neither the delicate shuffle of the Frenchwoman, the robust, decided jerk of the Englishwoman, the stately glide of the Spaniard, or the stealthiness of the squaw; and I should know a Hawaiian woman by it in any part of the world.  A majestic wahine with small, bare feet, a grand, swinging, deliberate gait, hibiscus blossoms in her flowing hair, and a lé of yellow flowers falling over her holuku, marching through these streets, has a tragic grandeur of appearance, which makes the diminutive, fair-skinned haole, tottering along hesitatingly in high-heeled shoes, look grotesque by comparison.
On Saturday, our kind host took Mrs. D. and myself to the market, where we saw the natives in all their glory.  The women, in squads of a dozen at a time, their Pa-ús streaming behind them, were cantering up and down the streets, and men and women were thronging into the market-place; a brilliant, laughing, joking crowd, their jaunty hats trimmed with fresh flowers, and leis of the crimson ohia and orange lauhala falling over their costumes, which were white, green, black, scarlet, blue, and every other colour that can be dyed or imagined.  The market is a straggling, open space, with a number of shabby stalls partially surrounding it, but really we could not see the place for the people.  There must have been 2000 there.
Some of the stalls were piled up with wonderful fish, crimson, green, rose, blue, opaline--fish that have spent their lives in coral groves under the warm, bright water.  Some of them had wonderful shapes too, and there was one that riveted my attention and fascinated me.  It was, I thought at first, a heap, composed of a dog fish, some limpets, and a multitude of water snakes, and other abominable forms; but my eyes slowly informed me of the fact, which I took in reluctantly and with extreme disgust, that the whole formed one living monster, a revolting compound of a large paunch with eyes, and a multitude of nervy, snaky, out-reaching, twining, grasping, tentacular arms, several feet in length, I should think, if extended, but then lying in a crowded undulating heap; the creature was dying, and the iridescence was passing over what seemed to be its body in waves of colour, such as glorify the last hour of the dolphin.  But not the colours of the rainbow could glorify this hideous, abominable form, which ought to be left to riot in ocean depths, with its loathsome kindred.  You have read “Les Travailleurs du Mer,” and can imagine with what feelings I looked upon a living Devil-fish!  The monster is much esteemed by the natives as an article of food, and indeed is generally relished.  I have seen it on foreign tables, salted, under the name of squid. {276}
We passed on to beautiful creatures, the kihi-kihi, or sea-cock, with alternate black and yellow transverse bands on his body; the hinalea, like a glorified mullet, with bright green, longitudinal bands on a dark shining head, a purple body of different shades, and a blue spotted tail with a yellow tip.  The Ohuatoo, a pink scaled fish, shaped like a trout; the opukai, beautifully striped and mottled; the mullet and flying fish as common here as mackerel at home; the hala, a fine pink-fleshed fish, the albicore, the bonita, the manini striped black and white, and many others.  There was an abundance of opilu or limpets, also the pipi, a small oyster found among the coral; the ula, as large as a clawless lobster, but more beautiful and variegated; and turtles which were cheap and plentiful.  Then there were purple-spiked sea urchins, black-spiked sea eggs or wana, and ina or eggs without spikes, and many other curiosities of the bright Pacific.  It was odd to see the pearly teeth of a native meeting in some bright-coloured fish, while the tail hung out of his mouth, for they eat fish raw, and some of them were obviously at the height of epicurean enjoyment.  Seaweed and fresh-water weed are much relished by Hawaiians, and there were four or five kinds for sale, all included in the term limu.  Some of this was baked, and put up in balls weighing one pound each.  There were packages of baked fish, and dried fish, and of many other things which looked uncleanly and disgusting; but no matter what the package was, the leaf of the Ti tree was invariably the wrapping, tied round with sennet, the coarse fibre obtained from the husk of the cocoa-nut.  Fish, here, averages about ten cents per pound, and is dearer than meat; but in many parts of the islands it is cheap and abundant.
There is a ferment going on in this kingdom, mainly got up by the sugar planters and the interests dependent on them, and two political lectures have lately been given in the large hall of the hotel in advocacy of their views; one, on annexation, by Mr. Phillips, who has something of the oratorical gift of his cousin, Wendell Phillips; and the other, on a reciprocity treaty, by Mr. Carter.  Both were crowded by ladies and gentlemen, and the first was most enthusiastically received.  Mrs. D. and I usually spend our evenings in writing and working in the verandah, or in each other’s rooms; but I have become so interested in the affairs of this little state, that in spite of the mosquitos, I attended both lectures, but was not warmed into sympathy with the views of either speaker.
I daresay that some of my friends here would quarrel with my conclusions, but I will briefly give the data on which they are based.  The census of 1872 gives the native population at 49,044 souls; of whom, 700 are lepers; and it is decreasing at the rate of from 1,200 to 2,000 a year, while the excess of native males over females on the islands is 3,216.  The foreign population is 5,366, and it is increasing at the rate of 200 a year; and the number of half-castes of all nations has increased at the rate of 140 a year.  The Chinese, who came here originally as plantation coolies, outnumber all the other nationalities together, excluding the Americans; but the Americans constitute the ruling and the monied class.  Sugar is the reigning interest on the islands, and it is almost entirely in American hands.  It is burdened here by the difficulty of procuring labour, and at San Francisco by a heavy import duty.  There are thirty-five plantations on the islands, and there is room for fifty more.  The profit, as it is, is hardly worth mentioning, and few of the planters do more than keep their heads above water.  Plantations which cost $50,000 have been sold for $15,000; and others, which cost $150,000 have been sold for $40,000.  If the islands were annexed, and the duty taken off, many of these struggling planters would clear $50,000 a year and upwards.  So, no wonder that Mr. Phillips’s lecture was received with enthusiastic plaudits.  It focussed all the clamour I have heard on Hawaii and elsewhere, exalted the “almighty dollar,” and was savoury with the odour of coming prosperity.  But he went far, very far; he has aroused a cry among the natives “Hawaii for the Hawaiians,” which, very likely, may breed mischief; for I am very sure that this brief civilization has not quenched the “red fire” of race; and his hint regarding the judicious disposal of the king in the event of annexation, was felt by many of the more sober whites to be highly impolitic.
The reciprocity treaty, very lucidly advocated by Mr. Carter, and which means the cession of a lagoon with a portion of circumjacent territory on this island, to the United States, for a Pacific naval station, meets with more general favour as a safer measure; but the natives are indisposed to bribe the great Republic to remit the sugar duties by the surrender of a square inch of Hawaiian soil; and, from a British point of view, I heartily sympathise with them.  Foreign, i.e. American, feeling is running high upon the subject.  People say that things are so bad that something must be done, and it remains to be seen whether natives or foreigners can exercise the strongest pressure on the king.  I was unfavourably impressed in both lectures by the way in which the natives and their interests were quietly ignored, or as quietly subordinated to the sugar interest.
It is never safe to forecast destiny; yet it seems most probable that sooner or later in this century, the closing catastrophe must come.  The more thoughtful among the natives acquiesce helplessly and patiently in their advancing fate; but the less intelligent, as I had some opportunity of hearing at Hilo, are becoming restive and irritable, and may drift into something worse if the knowledge of the annexationist views of the foreigners is diffused among them.  Things are preparing for change, and I think that the Americans will be wise in their generation if they let them ripen for many years to come.  Lunalilo has a broken constitution, and probably will not live long.  Kalakaua will probably succeed him, and “after him the deluge,” unless he leaves a suitable successor, for there are no more chiefs with pre-eminent claims to the throne.  The feeling among the people is changing, the feudal instinct is disappearing, the old despotic line of the Kamehamehas is extinct; and king-making by paper ballots, introduced a few months ago, is an approximation to president-making, with the canvassing, stumping, and wrangling, incidental to such a contested election.  Annexation, or peaceful absorption, is the “manifest destiny” of the islands, with the probable result lately most wittily prophesied by Mark Twain in the New York Tribune, but it is impious and impolitic to hasten it.  Much as I like America, I shrink from the day when her universal political corruption and her unrivalled political immorality shall be naturalised on Hawaii-nei. . . .  Sunday evening.  The “Rolling Moses” is in, and Sabbatic quiet has given place to general excitement.  People thought they heard her steaming in at 4 a.m., and got up in great agitation.  Her guns fired during morning service, and I doubt whether I or any other person heard another word of the sermon.  The first batch of letters for the hotel came, but none for me; the second, none for me; and I had gone to my room in cold despair, when some one tossed a large package in at my verandah door, and to my infinite joy I found that one of my benign fellow-passengers in the Nevada, had taken the responsibility of getting my letters at San Francisco and forwarding them here.  I don’t know how to be grateful enough to the good man.  With such late and good news, everything seems bright; and I have at once decided to take the first schooner for the leeward group, and remain four months longer on the islands.
                                     I.L.B.

LETTER XX.

KOLOA, KAUAI, March 23rd.
I am spending a few days on some quaint old mission premises, and the “guest house,” where I am lodged, is a dobe house, with walls two feet thick, and a very thick grass roof comes down six feet all round to shade the windows.  It is itself shaded by date palms and algarobas, and is surrounded by hibiscus, oleanders, and the datura arborea(?), which at night fill the air with sweetness.  I am the only guest, and the solitude of the guest house in which I am writing is most refreshing to tired nerves.  There is not a sound but the rustling of trees.
The first event to record is that the trade winds have set in, and though they may yet yield once or twice to the kona, they will soon be firmly established for nine months.  They are not soft airs as I supposed, but riotous, rollicking breezes, which keep up a constant clamour, blowing the trees about, slamming doors, taking liberties with papers, making themselves heard and felt everywhere, flecking the blue Pacific with foam, lowering the mercury three degrees, bringing new health and vigour with them,--wholesome, cheery, frolicsome north-easters.  They brought me here from Oahu in eighteen hours, for which I thank them heartily.
You will think me a Sybarite for howling about those eighteen hours of running to leeward, when the residents of Kauai, if they have to go to Honolulu in the intervals between the quarterly trips of the Kilauea, have to spend from three to nine days in beating to windward.  These inter-island voyages of extreme detention, rolling on a lazy swell in tropical heat, or beating for days against the strong trades without shelter from the sun, and without anything that could be called accommodation, were among the inevitable hardships to which the missionaries’ wives and children were exposed in every migration for nearly forty years.
When I reached the wharf at Honolulu the sight of the Jenny, the small sixty-ton schooner by which I was to travel, nearly made me give up this pleasant plan, so small she looked, and so cumbered with natives and their accompaniments of mats, dogs, and calabashes of poi.  But she is clean, and as sweet as a boat can be which carries through the tropics cattle, hides, sugar, and molasses.  She is very low in the water, her deck is the real “fisherman’s walk, two steps and overboard;” and on this occasion was occupied solely by natives.  The Attorney General and Mrs. Judd were to have been my fellow voyagers, but my disappointment at their non-appearance was considerably mitigated by the fact that there was not stowage room for more than one white passenger!  Mrs. Dexter pitied me heartily, for it made her quite ill to look down the cabin hatch; but I convinced her that no inconveniences are legitimate subjects for sympathy which are endured in the pursuit of pleasure.  There was just room on deck for me to sit on a box, and the obliging, gentlemanly master, who, with his son and myself, were the only whites on board, sat on the taffrail.
The Jenny spread her white duck sails, glided gracefully away from the wharf, and bounded through the coral reef; the red sunlight faded, the stars came out, the Honolulu light went down in the distance, and in two hours the little craft was out of sight of land on the broad, crisp Pacific.  It was so chilly, that after admiring as long as I could, I dived into the cabin, a mere den, with a table, and a berth on each side, in one of which I lay down, and the other was alternately occupied by the captain and his son.  But limited as I thought it, boards have been placed across on some occasions, and eleven whites have been packed into a space six feet by eight!  The heat and suffocation were nearly intolerable, the black flies swarming, the mosquitos countless and vicious, the fleas agile beyond anything, and the cockroaches gigantic.  Some of the finer cargo was in the cabin, and large rats, only too visible by the light of a swinging lamp, were assailing it, and one with a portentous tail ran over my berth more than once, producing a stampede among the cockroaches each time.  I have seldom spent a more miserable night, though there was the extreme satisfaction of knowing that every inch of canvas was drawing.
Towards morning the short jerking motion of a ship close hauled, made me know that we were standing in for the land, and at daylight we anchored in Koloa Roads.  The view is a pleasant one.  The rains have been abundant, and the land, which here rises rather gradually from the sea, is dotted with houses, abounds in signs of cultivation, and then spreads up into a rolling country between precipitous ranges of mountains.  The hills look something like those of Oahu, but their wonderful greenness denotes a cooler climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features, one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me impune lacessit most literally applies.
I had not time to tell you before that this trip to Kauai was hastily arranged for me by several of my Honolulu friends, some of whom gave me letters of introduction, while others wrote forewarning their friends of my arrival.  I am often reminded of Hazael’s question, “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?”  There is no inn or boarding house on the island, and I had hitherto believed that I could not be concussed into following the usual custom whereby a traveller throws himself on the hospitality of the residents.  Yet, under the influence of Honolulu persuasions, I am doing this very thing, but with an amount of mauvaise honte and trepidation, which I will not voluntarily undergo again.
My first introduction was to Mrs. Smith, wife of a secular member of the Mission, and it requested her to find means of forwarding me a distance of twenty-three miles.  Her son was at the landing with a buggy, a most unpleasant index of the existence of carriage roads, and brought me here; and Mrs. Smith most courteously met me at the door.  When I presented my letter I felt like a thief detected in a first offence, but I was at once made welcome, and my kind hosts insist on my remaining with them for some days.  Their house is a pretty old-fashioned looking tropical dwelling, much shaded by exotics, and the parlour is homelike with new books.  There are two sons and two daughters at home, all, as well as their parents, interesting themselves assiduously in the welfare of the natives.  Six bright-looking native girls are receiving an industrial training in the house.  Yesterday being Sunday, the young people taught a Sunday school twice, besides attending the native church, an act of respect to Divine service in Hawaiian which always has an influence on the native attendance.
We have had some beautiful rides in the neighbourhood.  It is a wild, lonely, picturesque coast, and the Pacific moans along it, casting itself on it in heavy surges, with a singularly dreary sound.  There are some very fine specimens of the phenomena called “blow-holes” on the shore, not like the “spouting cave” at Iona, however.  We spent a long time in watching the action of one, though not the finest.  At half tide this “spouting horn” throws up a column of water over sixty feet in height from a very small orifice, and the effect of the compressed air rushing through a crevice near it, sometimes with groans and shrieks, and at others with a hollow roar like the warning fog-horn on a coast, is magnificent, when, as to-day, there is a heavy swell on the coast.
Kauai is much out of the island world, owing to the infrequent visits of the Kilauea, but really it is only twelve hours by steam from the capital.  Strangers visit it seldom, as it has no active volcano like Hawaii, or colossal crater like Maui, or anything sensational of any kind.  It is called the “Garden Island,” and has no great wastes of black lava and red ash like its neighbours.  It is queerly shaped, almost circular, with a diameter of from twenty-eight to thirty miles, and its area is about 500 square miles.  Waialeale, its highest mountain, is 4,800 feet high, but little is known of it, for it is swampy and dangerous, and a part of it is a forest-covered and little explored tableland, terminating on the sea in a range of perpendicular precipices 2,000 feet in depth, so steep it is said, that a wild cat could not get round them.  Owing to these, and the virtual inaccessibility of a large region behind them, no one can travel round the island by land, and small as it is, very little seems to be known of portions of its area.
Kauai has apparently two centres of formation, and its mountains are thickly dotted with craters.  The age and density of the vegetation within and without those in this Koloa district, indicate a very long cessation from volcanic action.  It is truly an oddly contrived island.  An elevated rolling region, park-like, liberally ornamented with clumps of ohia, lauhala, hau, (hibiscus) and koa, and intersected with gullies full of large eugenias, lies outside the mountain spurs behind Koloa.  It is only the tropical trees, specially the lauhala or “screw pine,” the whimsical shapes of outlying ridges, which now and then lie like the leaves in a book, and the strange forms of extinct craters, which distinguish it from some of our most beautiful park scenery, such as Windsor Great Park or Belvoir.  It is a soft tranquil beauty, and a tolerable road which owes little enough to art, increases the likeness to the sweet home scenery of England.  In this part of the island the ground seems devoid of stones, and the grass is as fine and smooth as a race course.
The latest traces of volcanic action are found here.  From the Koloa Ridge to, and into the sea, a barren uneven surface of pahoehoe extends, often bulged up in immense bubbles, some of which have partially burst, leaving caverns, one of which, near the shore, is paved with the ancient coral reef!
The valleys of Kauai are long, and widen to the sea, and their dark rich soil is often ten feet deep.  On the windward side the rivers are very numerous and picturesque.  Between the strong winds and the lightness of the soil, I should think that like some parts of the Highlands, “it would take a shower every day.”  The leeward side, quite close to the sea, is flushed and nearly barren, but there is very little of this desert region.  Kauai is less legible in its formation than the other islands.  Its mountains, from their impenetrable forests, dangerous breaks, and swampiness, are difficult of access, and its ridges are said to be more utterly irregular, its lavas more decomposed, and its natural sections more completely smothered under a profuse vegetation than those of any other island in the tropical Pacific.  Geologists suppose, from the degradation of its ridges, and the absence of any recent volcanic products, that it is the oldest of the group, but so far as I have read, none of them venture to conjecture how many ages it has taken to convert its hard basalt into the rich soil which now sustains trees of enormous size.  If this theory be correct, the volcanoes must have gone on dying out from west to east, from north to south, till only Kilauea remains, and its energies appear to be declining.  The central mountain of this island is built of a heavy ferruginous basalt, but the shore ridges contain less iron, are more porous, and vary in their structure from a compact phonolite, to a ponderous basalt.
The population of Kauai is a widely scattered one of 4,900, and as it is an out of the world region the people are probably better, and less sophisticated.  They are accounted rustics, or “pagans,” in the classical sense, elsewhere.  Horses are good and very cheap, and the natives of both sexes are most expert riders.  Among their feats, are picking up small coins from the ground while going at full gallop, or while riding at the same speed wringing off the heads of unfortunate fowls, whose bodies are buried in the earth.
There are very few foreigners, and they appear on the whole a good set, and very friendly among each other.  Many of them are actively interested in promoting the improvement of the natives, but it is uphill work, and ill-rewarded, at least on earth.  The four sugar plantations employ a good deal of Chinese labour, and I fear that the Chinamen are stealthily tempting the Hawaiians to smoke opium.
All the world over, however far behind aborigines are in the useful arts, they exercise a singular ingenuity in devising means for intoxicating and stupifying themselves.  On these islands distillation is illegal, and a foreigner is liable to conviction and punishment for giving spirits to a native Hawaiian, yet the natives contrive to distil very intoxicating drinks, specially from the root of the ti tree, and as the spirit is unrectified it is both fiery and unwholesome.  Licences to sell spirits are confined to the capital.  In spite of the notoriously bad effect of alcohol in the tropics, people drink hard, and the number of deaths which can be distinctly traced to spirit drinking is quite startling.
The prohibition on selling liquor to natives is the subject of incessant discussions and “interpellations” in the national legislature.  Probably all the natives agree in regarding it as a badge of the “inferiority of colour;” but I have been told generally that the most intelligent and thoughtful among them are in favour of its continuance, on the ground that if additional facilities for drinking were afforded, the decrease in the population would be accelerated.  In the printed “Parliamentary Proceedings,” I see that petitions are constantly presented praying that the distillation of spirits may be declared free, while a few are in favour of “total prohibition.”  Another prayer is “that Hawaiians may have the same privileges as white people in buying and drinking spirituous liquors.”
A bill to repeal the invidious distinction was brought into the legislature not long since; but the influence of the descendants of the missionaries and of an influential part of the white community is so strongly against spirit drinking, as well as against the sale of drink to the natives, that the law remains on the Statute-book.
The tone in which it was discussed is well indicated by the language of Kalakaua, the present king’s rival: “The restrictions imposed by this law do the people no good, but rather harm; for instead of inculcating the principles of honour, they teach them to steal behind the bar, the stable, and the closet, where they may be sheltered from the eyes of the law.  The heavy licence imposed on the liquor dealers, and the prohibition against selling to the natives are an infringement of our civil rights, binding not only the purchaser but the dealer against acquiring and possessing property.  Then, Mr. President, I ask, where lies virtue, where lies justice?  Not in those that bind the liberty of this people, by refusing them the privilege that they now crave, of drinking spirituous liquors without restriction.  Will you by persisting that this law remain in force make us a nation of hypocrites? or will you repeal it, that honour and virtue may for once be yours, O Hawaii.”  A committee of the Assembly, in reporting on the question of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicants to anybody, through its chairman, Mr. Carter, stated, “Experience teaches that such prohibition could not be enforced without a strong public sentiment to indorse it, and such a sentiment does not prevail in this community, as is evidenced by the fact that the sale of intoxicating drinks to natives is largely practised in defiance of law and the executive, and that the manufacture of intoxicating drinks, though prohibited, is carried on in every district of the kingdom.”  So the question which is rising in every country ruled or colonised by Anglo-Saxons, is also agitated here with very strong feeling on both sides.
I was led to this digression by seeing, for the first time, some very fine plants of the Piper methysticum.  This is awa, truly a “plant of renown” throughout Polynesia.  Strange tales are told of it.  It is said to produce profound sleep, with visions more enchanting than those of opium or hasheesh, and that its repetition, instead of being deleterious, is harmless and even wholesome.  Its sale is prohibited, except on the production of evidence that it has been prescribed as a drug.  Nevertheless no law on the islands is so grossly violated.  It is easy to give it, and easy to grow it, or dig it up in the woods, so that, in spite of the legal restrictions, it is used to an enormous extent.  It was proposed absolutely to prohibit the sale of it, though the sum paid for the licence is no inconsiderable item in the revenue of a kingdom, which, like many others, is experiencing the difficulty of “making both ends meet;” but the committee which sat upon the subject reported “that such prohibition is not practicable, unless its growth and cultivation are prevented.  So long as public sentiment permits the open violation of the existing laws regulating its sale without rebuke, so long will it be of little use to attempt prohibition.”  One cannot be a day on the islands without hearing wonderful stories about awa; and its use is defended by some who are strongly opposed to the use as well as abuse of intoxicants.  People who like “The Earl and the Doctor” delight themselves in the strongly sensuous element which pervades Polynesian life, delight themselves too, in contemplating the preparation and results of the awa beverage; but both are to me extremely disgusting, and I cannot believe that a drink, which stupifies the senses, and deprives a human being of the power to exercise reason and will, is anything but hurtful to the moral nature.
While passing the Navigator group, one of my fellow-passengers, who had been for some time in Tutuila, described the preparation of awa poetically, the root “being masticated by the pearly teeth of dusky flower-clad maidens;” but I was an accidental witness of a nocturnal “awa drinking” on Hawaii, and saw nothing but very plain prose.  I feel as if I must approach the subject mysteriously.  I had no time to tell you of the circumstance when it occurred, when also I was completely ignorant that it was an illegal affair; and, now with a sort of “guilty knowledge” I tremble to relate what I saw, and to divulge that though I could not touch the beverage, I tasted the root, which has an acrid pungent taste, something like horse-radish, with an aromatic flavour in addition, and I can imagine that the acquired taste for it must, like other acquired tastes, be perfectly irresistible, even without the additional gratification of the results which follow its exercise.
In the particular instance which I saw, two girls who were not beautiful, and an old man who would have been hideous but for a set of sound regular teeth, were sitting on the ground masticating the awa root, the process being contemplated with extreme interest by a number of adults.  When, by careful chewing, they had reduced the root to a pulpy consistence, they tossed it into a large calabash, and relieved their mouths of superfluous saliva before preparing a fresh mouthful.  This went on till a considerable quantity was provided, and then water was added, and the mass was kneaded and stirred with the hands till it looked like soap suds.  It was then strained; and after more water had been added it was poured into cocoa-nut calabashes, and handed round.  Its appearance eventually was like weak, frothy coffee and milk.  The appearance of purely animal gratification on the faces of those who drank it, instead of being poetic, was of the low gross earth.  Heads thrown back, lips parted with a feeble sensual smile, eyes hazy and unfocussed, arms folded on the breast, and the mental faculties numbed and sliding out of reach.
Those who drink it pass through the stage of idiocy into a deep sleep, which it is said can be reproduced once without an extra dose, by bathing in cold water.  Confirmed awa drinkers might be mistaken for lepers, for they are covered with whitish scales, and have inflamed eyes and a leathery skin, for the epidermis is thickened and whitened, and eventually peels off.  The habit has been adopted by not a few whites, specially on Hawaii, though, of course, to a certain extent clandestinely.  Awa is taken also as a medicine, and was supposed to be a certain cure for corpulence.
The root and base of the stem are the parts used, and it is best when these are fresh.  It seems to exercise a powerful fascination, and to be loved and glorified as whisky is in Scotland, and wine in southern Europe.  In some of the other islands of Polynesia, on festive occasions, when the chewed root is placed in the calabash, and the water is poured on, the whole assemblage sings appropriate songs in its praise; and this is kept up until the decoction has been strained to its dregs.  But here, as the using it as a beverage is an illicit process, a great mystery attends it.  It is said that awa drinking is again on the increase, and with the illicit distillation of unwholesome spirits, and the illicit sale of imported spirits and the opium smoking, the consumption of stimulants and narcotics on the islands is very considerable. {295}
To turn from drink to climate.  It is strange that with such a heavy rainfall, dwellings built on the ground and never dried by fires should be so perfectly free from damp as they are.  On seeing the houses here and in Honolulu, buried away in dense foliage, my first thought was, “how lovely in summer, but how unendurably damp in winter,” forgetting that I arrived in the nominal winter, and that it is really summer all the year.  Lest you should think that I am perversely exaggerating the charms of the climate, I copy a sentence from a speech made by Kamehameha IV., at the opening of an Hawaiian agricultural society:--
“Who ever heard of winter on our shores?  Where among us shall we find the numberless drawbacks which, in less favoured countries, the labourer has to contend with?  They have no place in our beautiful group, which rests like a water lily on the swelling bosom of the Pacific.  The heaven is tranquil above our heads, and the sun keeps his jealous eye upon us every day, while his rays are so tempered that they never wither prematurely what they have warmed into life.” {296}  The kindness of my hosts is quite overwhelming.  They will not hear of my buying a horse, but insist on my taking away with me the one which I have been riding since I came, the best I have ridden on the islands, surefooted, fast, easy, and ambitious.  I have complete sympathy with the passion which the natives have for riding.  Horses are abundant and cheap on Kauai: a fairly good one can be bought for $20.  I think every child possesses one.  Indeed the horses seem to outnumber the people.
The eight native girls who are being trained and educated here as a “family school” have their horses, and go out to ride as English children go for a romp into a play-ground.  Yesterday Mrs. S. said, “Now, girls, get the horses,” and soon two little creatures of eight and ten came galloping up on two spirited animals.  They had not only caught and bridled them, but had put on the complicated Mexican saddles as securely as if men had done it; and I got a lesson from them in making the Mexican knot with the thong which secures the cinch, which will make me independent henceforward.
These children can all speak English, and their remarks are most original and amusing.  They have not a particle of respect of manner, as we understand it, but seem very docile.  They are naïve and fascinating in their manners, and the most joyous children I ever saw.  When they are not at their lessons, or household occupations, they are dancing on stilts, acting plays of their own invention, riding or bathing, and they laugh all day long.  Mrs. S. has trained nearly seventy since she has been here.  If there were nothing else they see family life in a pure and happy form, which must in itself be a moral training, and by dint of untiring watchfulness they are kept aloof from the corrupt native associations.  Indeed they are not allowed to have any intercourse with natives, for, according to one of the missionaries who has spent many years on the islands: “None know or can conceive without personal observation the nameless taint that pervades the whole garrulous talk and gregarious life of all heathen peoples, and above which our poor Hawaiian friends have not yet risen.”  Of this universal impurity of speech every one speaks in the strongest terms, and careful white parents not only seclude their children in early years from unrestrained intercourse with the natives, but prevent them from acquiring the Hawaiian tongue.  In this respect the training of native girls involves a degree of patient watchfulness which must at times press heavily on those who undertake it, as the carefulness of years might fail of its result, if it were intermitted for one afternoon.
                                   I.L.B.