The Hawaiian Archipelago, by Isabella L. Bird
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THE HAWAIIAN ARCHIPELAGO.
SIX MONTHS AMONG THE PALM GROVES, CORAL REEFS, AND VOLCANOES OF THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.BY ISABELLA L. BIRD.
In dark purple spheres of sea.”
PREFACE.
Within the last century the Hawaiian islands have been the topic of various works of merit, and some explanation of the reasons which have led me to enter upon the same subject are necessary.I was travelling for health, when circumstances induced me to land on the group, and the benefit which I derived from the climate tempted me to remain for nearly seven months. During that time the necessity of leading a life of open air and exercise as a means of recovery, led me to travel on horseback to and fro through the islands, exploring the interior, ascending the highest mountains, visiting the active volcanoes, and remote regions which are known to few even of the residents, living among the natives, and otherwise seeing Hawaiian life in all its phases.
At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction of Christianity and subsequent historical events. They also represented that I had seen the islands more thoroughly than any foreign visitor, and the volcano of Mauna Loa under specially favourable circumstances, and that I had so completely lived the island life, and acquainted myself with the existing state of the country, as to be rather a kamaina {0} than a stranger, and that consequently I should be able to write on Hawaii with a degree of intimacy as well as freshness. My friends at home, who were interested in my narratives, urged me to give them to a wider circle, and my inclinations led me in the same direction, with a sort of longing to make others share something of my own interest and enjoyment.
The letters which follow were written to a near relation, and often hastily and under great difficulties of circumstance, but even with these and other disadvantages, they appear to me the best form of conveying my impressions in their original vividness. With the exception of certain omissions and abridgments, they are printed as they were written, and for such demerits as arise from this mode of publication, I ask the kind indulgence of my readers.
ISABELLA L. BIRD.
January, 1875.
TRAVELS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
Canon Kingsley, in his charming book on the West Indies, says, “The undoubted fact is known I find to few educated English people, that the Coco palm, which produces coir rope, cocoanuts, and a hundred other useful things, is not the same plant as the cacao bush which produces chocolate, or anything like it. I am sorry to have to insist upon this fact, but till Professor Huxley’s dream and mine is fulfilled, and our schools deign to teach, in the intervals of Greek and Latin, some slight knowledge of this planet, and of those of its productions which are most commonly in use, even this fact may need to be re-stated more than once.”There is no room for the supposition that the intelligence of Mr. Kingsley’s “educated English” acquaintance is below the average, and I should be sorry to form an unworthy estimate of that of my own circle, though I have several times met with the foregoing confusion, as well as the following and other equally ill-informed questions, one or two of which I reluctantly admit that I might have been guilty of myself before I visited the Pacific: “Whereabouts are the Sandwich Islands? They are not the same as the Fijis, are they? Are they the same as Otaheite? Are the natives all cannibals? What sort of idols do they worship? Are they as pretty as the other South Sea Islands? Does the king wear clothes? Who do they belong to? Does any one live on them but the savages? Will anything grow on them? Are the people very savage?” etc. Their geographical position is a great difficulty. I saw a gentleman of very extensive information looking for them on the map in the neighbourhood of Tristran d’Acunha; and the publishers of a high-class periodical lately advertised, “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” as “Letters from the South Sea Islands.” In consequence of these and similar interrogatories, which are not altogether unreasonable, considering the imperfect teaching of physical geography, the extent of this planet, the multitude of its productions, and the enormous number of islands composing Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, it is necessary to preface the following letters with as many preliminary statements as shall serve to make them intelligible.
The Sandwich Islands do not form one of the South Sea groups, and have no other connexion with them than certain affinities of race and language. They constitute the only important group in the vast North Pacific Ocean, in which they are so advantageously placed as to be pretty nearly equidistant from California, Mexico, China, and Japan. They are in the torrid zone, and extend from 18° 50’ to 22° 20’ north latitude, and their longitude is from 154° 53’ to 160° 15’ west from Greenwich. They were discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. They are twelve in number, but only eight are inhabited, and these vary in size from Hawaii, which is 4000 square miles in extent, and 88 miles long by 73 broad, to Kahoolawe, which is only 11 miles long and 8 broad. Their entire superficial area is about 6,100 miles. They are to some extent bounded by barrier reefs of coral, and have few safe harbours. Their formation is altogether volcanic, and they possess the largest perpetually active volcano and the largest extinct crater in the world. They are very mountainous, and two mountain summits on Hawaii are nearly 14,000 feet in height. Their climate for salubrity and general equability is reputed the finest on earth. It is almost absolutely equable, and a man may take his choice between broiling all the year round on the sea level on the leeward side of the islands at a temperature of 80°, and enjoying the charms of a fireside at an altitude where there is frost every night of the year. There is no sickly season, and there are no diseases of locality. The trade winds blow for nine months of the year, and on the windward coasts there is an abundance of rain, and a perennial luxuriance of vegetation.
The Sandwich Islands are not the same as Otaheite nor as the Fijis, from which they are distant about 4,000 miles, nor are their people of the same race. The natives are not cannibals, and it is doubtful if they ever were so. Their idols only exist in missionary museums. They cast them away voluntarily in 1819, at the very time when missionaries from America sent out to Christianize the group were on their way round Cape Horn. The people are all clothed, and the king, who is an educated gentleman, wears the European dress. The official designation of the group is “Hawaiian Islands,” and they form an independent kingdom.
The natives are not savages, most decidedly not. They are on the whole a quiet, courteous, orderly, harmless, Christian community. The native population has declined from 400,000 as estimated by Captain Cook in 1778 to 49,000, according to the census of 1872. There are about 5,000 foreign residents, who live on very friendly terms with the natives, and are mostly subjects of Kalakaua, the king of the group.
The islands have a thoroughly civilized polity, and the Hawaiians show a great aptitude for political organization. They constitute a limited monarchy, and have a constitutional and hereditary king, a parliament with an upper and lower house, a cabinet, a standing army, a police force, a Supreme Court of Judicature, a most efficient postal system, a Governor and Sheriff on each of the larger islands, court officials, and court etiquette, a common school system, custom houses, a civil list, taxes, a national debt, and most of the other amenities and appliances of civilization.
There is no State Church. The majority of the foreigners, as well as of the natives, are Congregationalists. The missionaries translated the Bible and other books into Hawaiian, taught the natives to read and write, gave the princes and nobles a high class education, induced the king and chiefs to renounce their oppressive feudal rights, with legal advice framed a constitution which became the law of the land, and obtained the recognition of the little Polynesian kingdom as a member of the brotherhood of civilized nations.
With these few remarks I leave the subject of the volume to develop itself in my letters. They have not had the advantage of revision by any one familiar with the Sandwich Islands, and mistakes and inaccuracies may consequently appear, on which, I hope that my Hawaiian friends will not be very severe. In correcting them, I have availed myself of the very valuable “History of the Hawaiian Islands,” by Mr. Jackson Jarves, Ellis’ “Tour Round Hawaii,” Mr. Brigham’s valuable monograph on “The Hawaiian Volcanoes,” and sundry reports presented to the legislature during its present session. I have also to express my obligations to the Hon. E. Allen, Chief Justice and Chancellor of the Hawaiian kingdom, Mr. Manley Hopkins, author of “Hawaii,” Dr. T. M. Coan, of New York, Professor W. Alexander, Daniel Smith, Esq., and other friends at Honolulu, for assistance most kindly rendered.
ISABELLA L. BIRD.
LETTER I.
STEAMER NEVADA, NORTH PACIFIC, January 19.A white, unwinking, scintillating sun blazed down upon Auckland, New Zealand. Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees and calla lilies drooped with the heat. Dusty thickets sheltered the cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the palpitating atmosphere. In dusty enclosures, supposed to be gardens, shrivelled geraniums scattered sparsely alone defied the heat. Flags drooped in the stifling air. Men on the verge of sunstroke plied their tasks mechanically, like automatons. Dogs, with flabby and protruding tongues, hid themselves away under archway shadows. The stones of the sidewalks and the brick of the houses radiated a furnace heat. All nature was limp, dusty, groaning, gasping. The day was the climax of a burning fortnight, of heat, draught, and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and oily breezeless seas, of glaring days, passing through fierce fiery sunsets into stifling nights.
I only remained long enough in the capital to observe that it had a look of having seen better days, and that its business streets had an American impress, and, taking a boat at a wharf, in whose seams the pitch was melting, I went off to the steamer Nevada, which was anchored out in the bay, preferring to spend the night in her than in the unbearable heat on shore. She belongs to the Webb line, an independent mail adventure, now dying a natural death, undertaken by the New Zealand Government, as much probably out of jealousy of Victoria as anything else. She nearly foundered on her last voyage; her passengers unanimously signed a protest against her unseaworthy condition. She was condemned by the Government surveyor, and her mails were sent to Melbourne. She has, however, been patched up for this trip, and eight passengers, including myself, have trusted ourselves to her. She is a huge paddle-steamer, of the old-fashioned American type, deck above deck, balconies, a pilot-house abaft the foremast, two monstrous walking beams, and two masts which, possibly in case of need, might serve as jury masts.
Huge, airy, perfectly comfortable as she is, not a passenger stepped on board without breathing a more earnest prayer than usual that the voyage might end propitiously. The very first evening statements were whispered about to the effect that her state of disrepair is such that she has not been to her own port for nine months, and has been sailing for that time without a certificate; that her starboard shaft is partially fractured, and that to reduce the strain upon it the floats of her starboard wheel have been shortened five inches, the strain being further reduced by giving her a decided list to port; that her crank is “bandaged,” that she is leaky; that her mainmast is sprung, and that with only four hours’ steaming many of her boiler tubes, even some of those put in at Auckland, had already given way. I cannot testify concerning the mainmast, though it certainly does comport itself like no other mainmast I ever saw; but the other statements and many more which might be added, are, I believe, substantially correct. That the caulking of the deck was in evil case we very soon had proof, for during heavy rain above, it was a smart shower in the saloon and state rooms, keeping four stewards employed with buckets and swabs, and compelling us to dine in waterproofs and rubber shoes.
In this dilapidated condition, when two days out from Auckland, we encountered a revolving South Sea hurricane, succinctly entered in the log of the day as “Encountered a very severe hurricane with a very heavy sea.” It began at eight in the morning, and never spent its fury till nine at night, and the wind changed its direction eleven times. The Nevada left Auckland two feet deeper in the water than she ought to have been, and laboured heavily. Seas struck her under the guards with a heavy, explosive thud, and she groaned and strained as if she would part asunder. It was a long weird day. We held no communication with each other, or with those who could form any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward department was suspended without notice; the sounds were tremendous, and a hot lurid obscurity filled the atmosphere. Soon after four the clamour increased, and the shock of a sea blowing up a part of the fore-guards made the groaning fabric reel and shiver throughout her whole huge bulk. At that time, by common consent, we assembled in the deck-house, which had windows looking in all directions, and sat there for five hours. Very few words were spoken, and very little fear was felt. We understood by intuition that if our crazy engines failed at any moment to keep the ship’s head to the sea, her destruction would not occupy half-an-hour. It was all palpable. There was nothing which the most experienced seaman could explain to the merest novice. We hoped for the best, and there was no use in speaking about the worst. Nor, indeed, was speech possible, unless a human voice could have outshrieked the hurricane.
In this deck-house the strainings, sunderings, and groanings were hardly audible, or rather were overpowered by a sound which, in thirteen months’ experience of the sea in all weathers, I have never heard, and hope never to hear again, unless in a staunch ship, one loud, awful, undying shriek, mingled with a prolonged relentless hiss. No gathering strength, no languid fainting into momentary lulls, but one protracted gigantic scream. And this was not the whistle of wind through cordage, but the actual sound of air travelling with tremendous velocity, carrying with it minute particles of water. Nor was the sea running mountains high, for the hurricane kept it down. Indeed during those fierce hours no sea was visible, for the whole surface was caught up and carried furiously into the air, like snow-drift on the prairies, sibilant, relentless. There was profound quiet on deck, the little life which existed being concentrated near the bow, where the captain was either lashed to the foremast, or in shelter in the pilot-house. Never a soul appeared on deck, the force of the hurricane being such that for four hours any man would have been carried off his feet. Through the swift strange evening our hopes rested on the engine, and amidst the uproar and din, and drifting spray, and shocks of pitiless seas, there was a sublime repose in the spectacle of the huge walking beams, alternately rising and falling, slowly, calmly, regularly, as if the Nevada were on a holiday trip within the Golden Gate. At eight in the evening we could hear each other speak, and a little later, through the great masses of hissing drift we discerned black water. At nine Captain Blethen appeared, smoking a cigar with nonchalance, and told us that the hurricane had nearly boxed the compass, and had been the most severe he had known for seventeen years. This grand old man, nearly the oldest captain in the Pacific, won our respect and confidence from the first, and his quiet and masterly handling of this dilapidated old ship is beyond all praise.
When the strain of apprehension was mitigated, we became aware that we had not had anything to eat since breakfast, a clean sweep having been made, not only of the lunch, but of all the glass in the racks above it; but all requests to the stewards were insufficient to procure even biscuits, and at eleven we retired supperless to bed, amidst a confusion of awful sounds, and were deprived of lights as well as food. When we asked for food or light, and made weak appeals on the ground of faintness, the one steward who seemed to dawdle about for the sole purpose of making himself disagreeable, always replied, “You can’t get anything, the stewards are on duty.” We were not accustomed to recognize that stewards had any other duty than that of feeding the passengers, but under the circumstances we meekly acquiesced. We were allowed to know that a part of the foreguards had been carried way, and that iron stanchions four inches thick had been gnarled and twisted like candy sticks, and the constant falling of the saloon casing of the mainmast, showed something wrong there. A heavy clang, heard at intervals by day and night, aroused some suspicions as to more serious damage, and these were afterwards confirmed. As the wind fell the sea rose, and for some hours realized every description I have read of the majesty and magnitude of the rollers of the South Pacific.
The day after the hurricane something went wrong with the engines, and we were stationary for an hour. We all felt thankful that this derangement which would have jeopardised or sacrificed sixty lives, was then only a slight detention on a summer sea.
Five days out from Auckland we entered the tropics with a temperature of 80° in the water, and 85° in the air, but as the light head airs blew the intense heat of our two smoke stacks aft, we often endured a temperature of 110°. There were quiet, heavy tropical showers, and a general misty dampness, and the Navigator Islands, with their rainbow-tinted coral forests, their fringe of coco palms, and groves of banyan and breadfruit trees, these sunniest isles of the bright South Seas, resolved themselves into dark lumps looming through a drizzling mist. But the showers and the dampness were confined to that region, and for the last fortnight an unclouded tropical sun has blazed upon our crawling ship. The boiler tubes are giving way at the rate of from ten to twenty daily, the fracture in the shaft is extending, and so, partially maimed, the old ship drags her 320 feet of length slowly along. The captain is continually in the engine-room, and we know when things are looking more unpropitious than usual by his coming up puffing his cigar with unusual strength of determination. It has been so far a very pleasant voyage. The moral, mental, and social qualities of my fellow-passengers are of a high order, and since the hurricane we have been rather like a family circle than a miscellaneous accidental group. For some time our days went by in reading aloud, working, chess, draughts and conversation, with two hours at quoits in the afternoon for exercise; but four days ago the only son of Mrs. Dexter, who is the only lady on board besides myself, ruptured a blood vessel on the lungs, and lies in a most critical state in the deck-house from which he has not been moved, requiring most careful nursing, incessant fanning, and the attention of two persons by day and night. Mrs. D. had previously won the regard of everyone, and I had learned to look on her as a friend from whom I should be grieved to part. The only hope for the young man’s life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently shall see the Sandwich Islands. This severe illness has cast a great gloom over our circle of six, and Mr. D. continues in a state of so much exhaustion and peril that all our arrangements as to occupation, recreation, and sleep, are made with reference to a sick, and as we sometimes fear, a dying man, whose state is much aggravated by the maltreatment and stupidity of a dilapidated Scotch doctor, who must be at least eighty, and whose intellects are obfuscated by years of whiskey drinking. Two of the gentlemen not only show the utmost tenderness as nurses, but possess a skill and experience which are invaluable. They never leave him by night, and scarcely take needed rest even in the day, one or other of them being always at hand to support him when faint, or raise him on his pillows.
It is not only that the Nevada is barely seaworthy, and has kept us broiling in the tropics when we ought to have been at San Francisco, but her fittings are so old. The mattresses bulge and burst, and cockroaches creep in and out, the deck is so leaky that the water squishes up under the saloon matting as we walk over it, the bread swarms with minute ants, and we have to pick every piece over because of weevils. Existence at night is an unequal fight with rats and cockroaches, and at meals with the stewards for time to eat. The stewards outnumber the passengers, and are the veriest riff-raff I have seen on board ship. At meals, when the captain is not below, their sole object is to hurry us from the table in order that they may sit down to a protracted meal; they are insulting and disobliging, and since illness has been on board, have shown a want of common humanity which places them below the rest of their species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other oddities of this vaunted “Mail Line.”
Our most serious grievance was the length of time that we were kept in the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our cabins, only just kept us alive. We read, wrote, and talked like automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away. We decided that heat was less felt in exercise, made up an afternoon quoit party, and played unsheltered from the nearly vertical sun, on decks so hot that we required thick boots for the protection of our feet, but for three days were limp and faint, and hardly able to crawl about or eat. The nights were insupportable. We used to lounge on the bow, and retire late at night to our cabins, to fight the heat, and scare rats and kill cockroaches with slippers, until driven by the solar heat to rise again unrefreshed to wrestle through another relentless day. We read the “Idylls of the King” and talked of misty meres and reedy fens, of the cool north, with its purple hills, leaping streams, and life-giving breezes, of long northern winters, and ice and snow, but the realities of sultriness and damp scared away our coolest imaginations. In this dismal region, when about forty miles east of Tutuila, a beast popularly known as the “Flying fox” {14} alighted on our rigging, and was eventually captured as a prize for the zoological collection at San Francisco. He is a most interesting animal, something like an exaggerated bat. His wings are formed of a jet black membrane, and have a highly polished claw at the extremity of each, and his feet consist of five beautifully polished long black claws, with which he hangs on head downwards. His body is about twice the size of that of a very large rat, black and furry underneath, and with red foxy fur on his head and back. His face is pointed, with a very black nose and prominent black eyes, with a savage, remorseless expression. His wings, when extended, measure forty-eight inches across, and his flying powers are prodigious. He snapped like a dog at first, but is now quite tame, and devours quantities of dried figs, the only diet he will eat.
We crossed the Equator in Long. 159° 44’, but in consequence of the misty weather it was not till we reached Lat. 10° 6’ N. that the Pole star, cold and pure, glistened far above the horizon, and two hours later we saw the coruscating Pleiades, and the starry belt of Orion, the blessed familiar constellations of “auld lang syne,” and a “breath of the cool north,” the first I have felt for five months, fanned the tropic night and the calm silvery Pacific. From that time we have been indifferent to our crawling pace, except for the sick man’s sake. The days dawn in rose colour and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted region of perpetual calm, and an endless summer. Far off, for many an azure league, rims of rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle still lagoons, and are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myriads of flying fish and a few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the scarcely undulating water. But we look in vain for the “sails of silk and ropes of sendal,” which are alone appropriate to this dream-world. The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue expanse, pure and lonely, an almost untraversed sea. We revel in these tropic days of transcendent glory, in the balmy breath which just stirs the dreamy blue, in the brief, fierce crimson sunsets, in the soft splendour of the nights, when the moon and stars hang like lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and in the pearly crystalline dawns, when the sun rising through a veil of rose and gold “rejoices as a giant to run his course,” and brightens by no “pale gradations” into the “perfect day.”
I.L.B.
LETTER II.
HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU, Jan. 26th.Yesterday morning at 6.30 I was aroused by the news that “The Islands” were in sight. Oahu in the distance, a group of grey, barren peaks rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an exception to the rule that the first sight of land is a disappointment. Owing to the clear atmosphere, we seemed only five miles off, but in reality we were twenty, and the land improved as we neared it. It was the fiercest day we had had, the deck was almost too hot to stand upon, the sea and sky were both magnificently blue, and the unveiled sun turned every minute ripple into a diamond flash. As we approached, the island changed its character. There were lofty peaks, truly--grey and red, sun-scorched and wind-bleached, glowing here and there with traces of their fiery origin; but they were cleft by deep chasms and ravines of cool shadow and entrancing green, and falling water streaked their sides--a most welcome vision after eleven months of the desert sea and the dusty browns of Australia and New Zealand. Nearer yet, and the coast line came into sight, fringed by the feathery cocoanut tree of the tropics, and marked by a long line of surf. The grand promontory of Diamond Head, its fiery sides now softened by a haze of green, terminated the wavy line of palms; then the Punchbowl, a very perfect extinct crater, brilliant with every shade of red volcanic ash, blazed against the green skirts of the mountains. We were close to the coral reef before the cry, “There’s Honolulu!” made us aware of the proximity of the capital of the island kingdom, and then, indeed, its existence had almost to be taken upon trust, for besides the lovely wooden and grass huts, with deep verandahs, which nestled under palms and bananas on soft green sward, margined by the bright sea sand, only two church spires and a few grey roofs appeared above the trees.
We were just outside the reef, and near enough to hear that deep sound of the surf which, through the ever serene summer years girdles the Hawaiian Islands with perpetual thunder, before the pilot glided alongside, bringing the news which Mark Twain had prepared us to receive with interest, that “Prince Bill” had been unanimously elected to the throne. The surf ran white and pure over the environing coral reef, and as we passed through the narrow channel, we almost saw the coral forests deep down under the Nevada’s keel; the coral fishers plied their graceful trade; canoes with outriggers rode the combers, and glided with inconceivable rapidity round our ship; amphibious brown beings sported in the transparent waves; and within the reef lay a calm surface of water of a wonderful blue, entered by a narrow, intricate passage of the deepest indigo. And beyond the reef and beyond the blue, nestling among cocoanut trees and bananas, umbrella trees and breadfruits, oranges, mangoes, hibiscus, algaroba, and passion-flowers, almost hidden in the deep, dense greenery, was Honolulu. Bright blossom of a summer sea! Fair Paradise of the Pacific!
Inside the reef the magnificent iron-clad California (the flag-ship) and another huge American war vessel, the Benicia, are moored in line with the British corvette Scout, within 200 yards of the shore; and their boats were constantly passing and re-passing, among countless canoes filled with natives. Two coasting schooners were just leaving the harbour, and the inter-island steamer Kilauea, with her deck crowded with natives, was just coming in. By noon the great decrepit Nevada, which has no wharf at which she can lie in sleepy New Zealand, was moored alongside a very respectable one in this enterprising little Hawaiian capital.
We looked down from the towering deck on a crowd of two or three thousand people--whites, Kanakas, Chinamen--and hundreds of them at once made their way on board, and streamed over the ship, talking, laughing, and remarking upon us in a language which seemed without backbone. Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy, shining black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect teeth like ivory. Everyone was smiling. The forms of the women seem to be inclined towards obesity, but their drapery, which consists of a sleeved garment which falls in ample and unconfined folds from their shoulders to their feet, partly conceals this defect, which is here regarded as a beauty. Some of these dresses were black, but many of those worn by the younger women were of pure white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light green. The men displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best advantage in white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts. A few of the women wore coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one side of their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by bandana handkerchiefs of rich bright colours round their necks, knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no Anglo-Saxon dandy could attain. Without an exception the men and women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their necks, flowers unknown to me, but redolent of the tropics in fragrance and colour. Many of the young beauties wore the gorgeous blossom of the red hibiscus among their abundant, unconfined, black hair, and many, besides the garlands, wore festoons of a sweet-scented vine, or of an exquisitely beautiful fern, knotted behind and hanging half-way down their dresses. These adornments of natural flowers are most attractive. Chinamen, all alike, very yellow, with almond-shaped eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long pigtails, spotlessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled cunning and simplicity, “foreigners,” half-whites, a few negroes, and a very few dark-skinned Polynesians from the far-off South Seas, made up the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd.
The “foreign” ladies, who were there in great numbers, generally wore simple light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many of them so far conformed to native custom as to wear natural flowers round their hats and throats. But where were the hard, angular, careworn, sallow, passionate faces of men and women, such as form the majority of every crowd at home, as well as in America, and Australia? The conditions of life must surely be easier here, and people must have found rest from some of its burdensome conventionalities. The foreign ladies, in their simple, tasteful, fresh attire, innocent of the humpings and bunchings, the monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste, beamed with cheerfulness, friendliness, and kindliness. Men and women looked as easy, contented, and happy as if care never came near them. I never saw such healthy, bright complexions as among the women, or such “sparkling smiles,” or such a diffusion of feminine grace and graciousness anywhere.
Outside this motley, genial, picturesque crowd about 200 saddled horses were standing, each with the Mexican saddle, with its lassoing horn in front, high peak behind, immense wooden stirrups, with great leathern guards, silver or brass bosses, and coloured saddle-cloths. The saddles were the only element of the picturesque that these Hawaiian steeds possessed. They were sorry, lean, undersized beasts, looking in general as if the emergencies of life left them little time for eating or sleeping. They stood calmly in the broiling sun, heavy-headed and heavy-hearted, with flabby ears and pendulous lower lips, limp and rawboned, a doleful type of the “creation which groaneth and travaileth in misery.” All these belonged to the natives, who are passionately fond of riding. Every now and then a flower-wreathed Hawaiian woman, in her full radiant garment, sprang on one of these animals astride, and dashed along the road at full gallop, sitting on her horse as square and easy as a hussar. In the crowd and outside of it, and everywhere, there were piles of fruit for sale--oranges and guavas, strawberries, papayas, bananas (green and golden), cocoanuts, and other rich, fantastic productions of a prolific climate, where nature gives of her wealth the whole year round. Strange fishes, strange in shape and colour, crimson, blue, orange, rose, gold, such fishes as flash like living light through the coral groves of these enchanted seas, were there for sale, and coral divers were there with their treasures--branch coral, as white as snow, each perfect specimen weighing from eight to twenty pounds. But no one pushed his wares for sale--we were at liberty to look and admire, and pass on unmolested. No vexatious restrictions obstructed our landing. A sum of two dollars for the support of the Queen’s Hospital is levied on each passenger, and the examination of ordinary luggage, if it exists, is a mere form. From the demeanour of the crowd it was at once apparent that the conditions of conquerors and conquered do not exist. On the contrary, many of the foreigners there were subjects of a Hawaiian king, a reversal of the ordinary relations between a white and a coloured race which it is not easy yet to appreciate.
Two of my fellow-passengers, who were going on to San Francisco, were anxious that I should accompany them to the Pali, the great excursion from Honolulu; and leaving Mr. M--- to make all arrangements for the Dexters and myself, we hired a buggy, destitute of any peculiarity but a native driver, who spoke nothing but Hawaiian, and left the ship. This place is quite unique. It is said that 15,000 people are buried away in these low-browed, shadowy houses, under the glossy, dark-leaved trees, but except in one or two streets of miscellaneous, old-fashioned looking stores, arranged with a distinct leaning towards native tastes, it looks like a large village, or rather like an aggregate of villages. As we drove through the town we could only see our immediate surroundings, but each had a new fascination. We drove along roads with over-arching trees, through whose dense leafage the noon sunshine only trickled in dancing, broken lights; umbrella trees, caoutchouc, bamboo, mango, orange, breadfruit, candlenut, monkey pod, date and coco palms, alligator pears, “prides” of Barbary, India, and Peru, and huge-leaved, wide-spreading trees, exotics from the South Seas, many of them rich in parasitic ferns, and others blazing with bright, fantastic blossoms. The air was heavy with odours of gardenia, tuberose, oleanders, roses, lilies, and the great white trumpet-flower, and myriads of others whose names I do not know, and verandahs were festooned with a gorgeous trailer with magenta blossoms, passion-flowers, and a vine with masses of trumpet-shaped, yellow, waxy flowers. The delicate tamarind and the feathery algaroba intermingled their fragile grace with the dark, shiny foliage of the South Sea exotics, and the deep red, solitary flowers of the hibiscus rioted among dear familiar fuschias and geraniums, which here attain the height and size of large rhododendrons.
Few of the new trees surprised me more than the papaya. It is a perfect gem of tropical vegetation. It has a soft, indented stem, which runs up quite straight to a height of from 15 to 30 feet, and is crowned by a profusion of large, deeply indented leaves, with long foot-stalks, and among, as well as considerably below these, are the flowers or the fruit, in all stages of development. This, when ripe, is bright yellow, and the size of a musk melon. Clumps of bananas, the first sight of which, like that of the palm, constitutes a new experience, shaded the native houses with their wonderful leaves, broad and deep green, from five to ten feet long. The breadfruit is a superb tree, about 60 feet high, with deep green, shining leaves, a foot broad, sharply and symmetrically cut, worthy, from their exceeding beauty of form, to take the place of the acanthus in architectural ornament, and throwing their pale green fruit into delicate contrast. All these, with the exquisite rose apple, with a deep red tinge in its young leaves, the fan palm, the chirimoya, and numberless others, and the slender shafts of the coco palms rising high above them, with their waving plumes and perpetual fruitage, were a perfect festival of beauty.
In the deep shade of this perennial greenery the people dwell. The foreign houses show a very various individuality. The peculiarity in which all seem to share is, that everything is decorated and festooned with flowering trailers. It is often difficult to tell what the architecture is, or what is house and what is vegetation; for all angles, and lattices, and balustrades, and verandahs are hidden by jessamine or passion-flowers, or the gorgeous flame-like Bougainvillea. Many of the dwellings straggle over the ground without an upper story, and have very deep verandahs, through which I caught glimpses of cool, shady rooms, with matted floors. Some look as if they had been transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut Valley, with their clap-board fronts painted white and jalousies painted green; but then the deep verandah in which families lead an open-air life has been added, and the chimneys have been omitted, and the New England severity and angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants. Besides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or large sun-baked bricks, plastered; houses of grass and bamboo; houses on the ground and houses raised on posts; but nothing looks prosaic, commonplace, or mean, for the glow and luxuriance of the tropics rest on all. Each house has a large garden or “yard,” with lawns of bright perennial greens and banks of blazing, many-tinted flowers, and lines of Dracæna, and other foliage plants, with their great purple or crimson leaves, and clumps of marvellous lilies, gladiolas, ginger, and many plants unknown to me. Fences and walls are altogether buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus, and the tropæolum, mixed with geraniums, fuchsia, and jessamine, which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable profusion. A soft air moves through the upper branches, and the drip of water from miniature fountains falls musically on the perfumed air. This is midwinter! The summer, they say, is thermometrically hotter, but practically cooler, because of the regular trades which set in in April, but now, with the shaded thermometer at 80° and the sky without clouds, the heat is not oppressive.
The mixture of the neat grass houses of the natives with the more elaborate homes of the foreign residents has a very pleasant look. The “aborigines” have not been crowded out of sight, or into a special “quarter.” We saw many groups of them sitting under the trees outside their houses, each group with a mat in the centre, with calabashes upon it containing poi, the national Hawaiian dish, a fermented paste made from the root of the kalo, or arum esculentum. As we emerged on the broad road which leads up the Nuuanu Valley to the mountains, we saw many patches of this kalo, a very handsome tropical plant, with large leaves of a bright tender green. Each plant was growing on a small hillock, with water round it. There were beautiful vegetable gardens also, in which Chinamen raise for sale not only melons, pineapples, sweet potatoes, and other edibles of hot climates, but the familiar fruits and vegetables of the temperate zones. In patches of surpassing neatness, there were strawberries, which are ripe here all the year, peas, carrots, turnips, asparagus, lettuce, and celery. I saw no other plants or trees which grow at home, but recognized as hardly less familiar growths the Victorian Eucalyptus, which has not had time to become gaunt and straggling, the Norfolk Island pine, which grows superbly here, and the handsome Moreton Bay fig. But the chief feature of this road is the number of residences; I had almost written of pretentious residences, but the term would be a base slander, as I have jumped to the conclusion that the twin vulgarities of ostentation and pretence have no place here. But certainly for a mile and a half or more there are many very comfortable-looking dwellings, very attractive to the eye, with an ease and imperturbable serenity of demeanour as if they had nothing to fear from heat, cold, wind, or criticism. Their architecture is absolutely unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are embowered among trailers, shadowed by superb exotics, and surrounded by banks of flowers, while the stately cocoanut, the banana, and the candlenut, the aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced. One house with extensive grounds, a perfect wilderness of vegetation, was pointed out as the summer palace of Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani, widow of Kamehameha IV., who visited England a few years ago, and the finest garden of all was that of a much respected Chinese merchant, named Afong. Oahu, at least on this leeward side, is not tropical looking, and all this tropical variety and luxuriance which delight the eye result from foreign enthusiasm and love of beauty and shade.
When we ascended above the scattered dwellings and had passed the tasteful mausoleum, with two tall Kahilis, {28} or feather plumes, at the door of the tomb in which the last of the Kamehamehas received Christian burial, the glossy, redundant, arborescent vegetation ceased. At that height a shower of rain falls on nearly every day in the year, and the result is a green sward which England can hardly rival, a perfect sea of verdure, darkened in the valley and more than half way up the hill sides by the foliage of the yellow-blossomed and almost impenetrable hibiscus, brightened here and there by the pea-green candlenut. Streamlets leap from crags and ripple along the roadside, every rock and stone is hidden by moist-looking ferns, as aërial and delicate as marabout feathers, and when the windings of the valley and the projecting spurs of mountains shut out all indications of Honolulu, in the cool green loneliness one could image oneself in the temperate zones. The peculiarity of the scenery is, that the hills, which rise to a height of about 4,000 feet, are wall-like ridges of grey or coloured rock, rising precipitously out of the trees and grass, and that these walls are broken up into pinnacles and needles. At the Pali (wall-like precipice), the summit of the ascent of 1,000 feet, we left our buggy, and passing through a gash in the rock the celebrated view burst on us with overwhelming effect. Immense masses of black and ferruginous volcanic rock, hundreds of feet in nearly perpendicular height, formed the pali on either side, and the ridge extended northwards for many miles, presenting a lofty, abrupt mass of grey rock broken into fantastic pinnacles, which seemed to pierce the sky. A broad, umbrageous mass of green clothed the lower buttresses, and fringed itself away in clusters of coco palms on a garden-like stretch below, green with grass and sugar-cane, and dotted with white houses, each with its palm and banana grove, and varied by eminences which looked like long extinct tufa cones. Beyond this enchanted region stretched the coral reef, with its white wavy line of endless surf, and the broad blue Pacific, ruffled by a breeze whose icy freshness chilled us where we stood. Narrow streaks on the landscape, every now and then disappearing behind intervening hills, indicated bridle tracks connected with a frightfully steep and rough zigzag path cut out of the face of the cliff on our right. I could not go down this on foot without a sense of insecurity, but mounted natives driving loaded horses descended with perfect impunity into the dreamland below.
This pali is the scene of one of the historic tragedies of this island. Kamehameha the Conqueror, who after fierce fighting and much ruthless destruction of human life united the island sovereignties in his own person, routed the forces of the King of Oahu in the Nuuanu Valley, and drove them in hundreds up the precipice, from which they leaped in despair and madness, and their bones lie bleaching 800 feet below.
The drive back here was delightful, from the wintry height, where I must confess that we shivered, to the slumbrous calm of an endless summer, the glorious tropical trees, the distant view of cool chasm-like valleys, with Honolulu sleeping in perpetual shade, and the still blue ocean, without a single sail to disturb its profound solitude. Saturday afternoon is a gala-day here, and the broad road was so thronged with brilliant equestrians, that I thought we should be ridden over by the reckless laughing rout. There were hundreds of native horsemen and horsewomen, many of them doubtless on the dejected quadrupeds I saw at the wharf, but a judicious application of long rowelled Mexican spurs, and a degree of emulation, caused these animals to tear along at full gallop. The women seemed perfectly at home in their gay, brass-bossed, high peaked saddles, flying along astride, barefooted, with their orange and scarlet riding dresses streaming on each side beyond their horses’ tails, a bright kaleidoscopic flash of bright eyes, white teeth, shining hair, garlands of flowers and many-coloured dresses; while the men were hardly less gay, with fresh flowers round their jaunty hats, and the vermilion-coloured blossoms of the Ohia round their brown throats. Sometimes a troop of twenty of these free-and-easy female riders went by at a time, a graceful and exciting spectacle, with a running accompaniment of vociferation and laughter. Among these we met several of the Nevada’s officers, riding in the stiff, wooden style which Anglo-Saxons love, and a horde of jolly British sailors from H.M.S. Scout, rushing helter skelter, colliding with everybody, bestriding their horses as they would a topsail-yard, hanging on to manes and lassoing horns, and enjoying themselves thoroughly. In the shady tortuous streets we met hundreds more of native riders, clashing at full gallop without fear of the police. Many of the women were in flowing riding-dresses of pure white, over which their unbound hair, and wreaths of carmine-tinted flowers fell most picturesquely.
All this time I had not seen our domicile, and when our drive ended under the quivering shadow of large tamarind and algaroba trees, in front of a long, stone, two-storied house with two deep verandahs festooned with clematis and passion flowers, and a shady lawn in front, I felt as if in this fairy land anything might be expected.
This is the perfection of an hotel. Hospitality seems to take possession of and appropriate one as soon as one enters its never-closed door, which is on the lower verandah. There is a basement, in which there are a good many bedrooms, the bar, and billiard-room. This is entered from the garden, under two semicircular flights of stairs which lead to the front entrance, a wide corridor conducting to the back entrance. This is crossed by another running the whole length, which opens into a very large many-windowed dining-room which occupies the whole width of the hotel. On the same level there is a large parlour, with French windows opening on the verandah. Upstairs there are two similar corridors on which all the bedrooms open, and each room has one or more French windows opening on the verandah, with doors as well, made like German shutters, to close instead of the windows, ensuring at once privacy and coolness. The rooms are tastefully furnished with varnished pine with a strong aromatic scent, and there are plenty of lounging-chairs on the verandah, where people sit and receive their intimate friends. The result of the construction of the hotel is that a breeze whispers through it by day and night.
Everywhere, only pleasant objects meet the eye. One can sit all day on the back verandah, watching the play of light and colour on the mountains and the deep blue green of the Nuuanu Valley, where showers, sunshine, and rainbows make perpetual variety. The great dining-room is delicious. It has no curtains, and its decorations are cool and pale. Its windows look upon tropical trees in one direction, and up to the cool mountains in the other. Piles of bananas, guavas, limes, and oranges, decorate the tables at each meal, and strange vegetables, fish, and fruits vary the otherwise stereotyped American hotel fare. There are no female domestics. The host is a German, the manager an American, the steward an Hawaiian, and the servants are all Chinamen in spotless white linen, with pigtails coiled round their heads, and an air of superabundant good-nature. They know very little English, and make most absurd mistakes, but they are cordial, smiling, and obliging, and look cool and clean. The hotel seems the great public resort of Honolulu, the centre of stir--club-house, exchange and drawing-room in one. Its wide corridors and verandahs are lively with English and American naval uniforms, several planters’ families are here for the season; and with health seekers from California, resident boarders, whaling captains, tourists from the British Pacific Colonies, and a stream of townspeople always percolating through the corridors and verandahs, it seems as lively and free-and-easy as a place can be, pervaded by the kindliness and bonhomie which form an important item in my first impressions of the islands. The hotel was lately built by government at a cost of $120,000, a sum which forms a considerable part of that token of an advanced civilization, a National Debt. The minister whose scheme it was seems to be severely censured on account of it, but undoubtedly it brings strangers and their money into the kingdom, who would have avoided it had they been obliged as formerly to cast themselves on the hospitality of the residents. The present proprietor has it rent-free for a term of years, but I fear that it is not likely to prove a successful speculation either for him or the government. I dislike health resorts, and abhor this kind of life, but for those who like both, I cannot imagine a more fascinating residence. The charges are $15 a week, or $3 a day, but such a kindly, open-handed system prevails that I am not conscious that I am paying anything! This sum includes hot and cold plunge baths ad libitum, justly regarded as a necessity in this climate.
Dr. McGrew has hope that our invalid will rally in this healing, equable atmosphere. Our kind fellow-passengers are here, and take turns in watching and fanning him. Through the half-closed jalousies we see breadfruit trees, delicate tamarinds and algarobas, fan-palms, date-palms and bananas, and the deep blue Pacific gleams here and there through the plumage of the cocoanut trees. A soft breeze, scented with a slight aromatic odour, wanders in at every opening, bringing with it, mellowed by distance, the hum and clatter of the busy cicada. The nights are glorious, and so absolutely still, that even the feathery foliage of the algaroba is at rest. The stars seem to hang among the trees like lamps, and the crescent moon gives more light than the full moon at home. The evening of the day we landed, parties of officers and ladies mounted at the door, and with much mirth disappeared on moonlight rides, and the white robes of flower-crowned girls gleamed among the trees, as groups of natives went by speaking a language which sounded more like the rippling of water than human speech. Soft music came from the ironclads in the harbour, and from the royal band at the king’s palace, and a rich fragrance of dewy blossoms filled the delicious air. These are indeed the “isles of Eden,” the “sun lands,” musical with beauty. They seem to welcome us to their enchanted shores. Everything is new but nothing strange; for as I enjoyed the purple night, I remembered that I had seen such islands in dreams in the cold gray North. “How sweet,” I thought it would be, thus to hear far off, the low sweet murmur of the “sparkling brine,” to rest, and
“Ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream.”
A half-dream only, for one would not wish to be quite asleep and lose the consciousness of this delicious outer world. So I thought one moment. The next I heard a droning, humming sound, which certainly was not the surf upon the reef. It came nearer--there could be no mistake. I felt a stab, and found myself the centre of a swarm of droning, stabbing, malignant mosquitoes. No, even this is not paradise! I am ashamed to say that on my first night in Honolulu I sought an early refuge from this intolerable infliction, in profound and prosaic sleep behind mosquito curtains.
I.L.B.
LETTER III.
HAWAIIAN HOTEL, Jan. 28th.Sunday was a very pleasant day here. Church bells rang, and the shady streets were filled with people in holiday dress. There are two large native churches, the Kaumakapili, and the Kaiwaiaho, usually called the stone church. The latter is an immense substantial building, for the erection of which each Christian native brought a block of rock-coral. There is a large Roman Catholic church, the priests of which are said to have been somewhat successful in proselytizing operations. The Reformed Catholic, or English temporary cathedral, is a tasteful but very simple wooden building, standing in pretty grounds, on which a very useful institution for boarding and training native and half-white girls, and the reception of white girls as day scholars, also stands. This is in connection with Miss Sellon’s Sisterhood at Devonport. Another building, alongside the cathedral, is used for English service in Hawaiian. There are two Congregational churches: the old “Bethel,” of which the Rev. S. C. Damon, known to all strangers, and one of the oldest and most respected Honolulu residents, is the minister; and the “Fort St. Church,” which has a large and influential congregation, and has been said to “run the government,” because its members compose the majority of the Cabinet. Lunalilo, the present king, has cast in his lot with the Congregationalists, but Queen Emma is an earnest member of the Anglican Church, and attends the Liturgical Hawaiian Service in order to throw the weight of her influence with the natives into the scale of that communion. Her husband spent many of his later days in translating the Prayer-Book. As is natural, most of the natives belong to the denomination from which they or their fathers received the Christian faith, and the majority of the foreigners are of the same persuasion. The New England Puritan influence, with its rigid Sabbatarianism, though considerably worn away, is still influential enough to produce a general appearance of Sabbath observance. The stores are closed, the church-going is very demonstrative, and the pleasure-seeking is very unobtrusive. The wharves are profoundly quiet.
I went twice to the English Cathedral, and was interested to see there a lady in a nun’s habit, with a number of brown girls, who was pointed out to me as Sister Bertha, who has been working here usefully for many years. The ritual is high. I am told that it is above the desires and the comprehension of most of the island episcopalians, but the zeal and disinterestedness of Bishop Willis will, in time, I doubt not, win upon those who prize such qualities. He called in the afternoon, and took me to his pretty, unpretending residence up the Nuuanu Valley. He has a training and boarding school there for native boys, some of whom were at church in the morning as a surpliced choir. The bishop, his sister, the schoolmaster, and fourteen boys take their meals together in a refectory, the boys acting as servitors by turns. There is service every morning at 6.30 in the private chapel attached to the house, and also in the cathedral a little later. Early risers, so near the equator, must get up by candlelight all the year round.
This morning we joined our kind friends from the Nevada for the last time at breakfast. I have noticed that there is often a centrifugal force which acts upon passengers who have been long at sea together, dispersing them on reaching port. Indeed, the temporary enforced cohesion is often succeeded by violent repulsion. But in this instance we deeply regret the dissolution of our pleasant fraternity; the less so, however, that this wonderful climate has produced a favourable change in Mr. D., who no longer requires the hourly attention they have hitherto shown him. The mornings here, dew-bathed and rose-flushed, are, if possible, more lovely than the nights, and people are astir early to enjoy them. The American consul and Mr. Damon called while we were sitting at our eight-o’clock breakfast, from which I gather that formalities are dispensed with. After spending the morning in hunting among the stores for things which were essential for the invalid, I lunched in the Nevada with Captain Blethen and our friends.
Next to the advent of “national ships” (a euphemism for men-of-war), the arrivals and departures of the New Zealand mail-steamers constitute the great excitement of Honolulu, and the failures, mishaps, and wonderful unpunctuality of this Webb line are highly stimulating in a region where “nothing happens.” The loungers were saying that the Nevada’s pumps were going for five days before we arrived, and pointed out the clearness of the water which was running from them at the wharf as an evidence that she was leaking badly. {40} The crowd of natives was enormous, and the foreigners were there in hundreds. She was loading with oranges and green bananas up to the last moment,--those tasteless bananas which, out of the tropics, misrepresent this most delicious and ambrosial fruit.
There was a far greater excitement for the natives, for King Lunalilo was about to pay a state visit to the American flag-ship California, and every available place along the wharves and roads was crowded with kanakas anxious to see him. I should tell you that the late king, being without heirs, ought to have nominated his successor; but it is said that a sorceress, under whose influence he was, persuaded him that his death would follow upon this act. When he died, two months ago, leaving the succession unprovided for, the duty of electing a sovereign, according to the constitution, devolved upon the people through their representatives, and they exercised it with a combination of order and enthusiasm which reflects great credit on their civilization. They chose the highest chief on the islands, Lunalilo (Above All), known among foreigners as “Prince Bill,” and at this time letters of congratulation are pouring in upon him from his brethren, the sovereigns of Europe.
The spectacular effect of a pageant here is greatly heightened by the cloudless blue sky, and the wealth of light and colour. It was very hot, almost too hot for sight-seeing, on the Nevada’s bow. Expectation among the lieges became tremendous and vociferous when Admiral Pennock’s sixteen-oared barge, with a handsome awning, followed by two well-manned boats, swept across the strip of water which lies between the ships and the shore. Outrigger canoes, with garlanded men and women, were poised upon the motionless water or darted gracefully round the ironclads, as gracefully to come to rest. Then a stir and swaying of the crowd, and the American Admiral was seen standing at the steps of an English barouche and four, and an Hawaiian imitation of an English cheer rang out upon the air. More cheering, more excitement, and I saw nothing else till the Admiral’s barge, containing the Admiral, and the king dressed in a plain morning suit with a single decoration, swept past the Nevada. The suite followed in the other boats,--brown men and white, governors, ministers, and court dignitaries, in Windsor uniforms, but with an added resplendency of plumes, epaulettes, and gold lace. As soon as Lunalilo reached the California, the yards of the three ships were manned, and amidst cheering which rent the air, and the deafening thunder of a royal salute from sixty-three guns of heavy calibre, the popular descendant of seventy generations of sceptred savages stepped on board the flag-ship’s deck. No higher honours could have been paid to the Emperor “of all the Russias.” I have seen few sights more curious than that of the representative of the American Republic standing bare-headed before a coloured man, and the two mightiest empires on earth paying royal honours to a Polynesian sovereign, whose little kingdom in the North Pacific is known to many of us at home only as “the group of islands where Captain Cook was killed.” Ah! how lovely this Queen of Oceans is! Blue, bright, balm-breathing, gentle in its supreme strength, different both in motion and colour from the coarse “vexed Atlantic!”
STEAMER KILAUEA, Jan. 29th.
I was turning homewards, enjoying the prospect of a quiet week in Honolulu, when Mr. and Mrs. Damon seized upon me, and told me that a lady friend of theirs, anxious for a companion, was going to the volcano on Hawaii, that she was a most expert and intelligent traveller, that the Kilauea would sail in two hours, that unless I went now I should have no future opportunity during my limited stay on the islands, that Mrs. Dexter was anxious for me to go, that they would more than fill my place in my absence, that this was a golden opportunity, that in short I must go, and they would drive me back to the hotel to pack! The volcano is still a myth to me, and I wanted to “read up” before going, and above all was grieved to leave my friend, but she had already made some needful preparations, her son with his feeble voice urged my going, the doctor said that there was now no danger to be apprehended, and the Damons’ kind urgency left me so little choice, that by five I was with them on the wharf, being introduced to my travelling companion, and to many of my fellow-passengers. Such an unexpected move is very bewildering, and it is too experimental, and too much of a leap in the dark to be enjoyable at present.
The wharf was one dense, well-compacted mass of natives taking leave of their friends with much effusiveness, and the steamer’s encumbered deck was crowded with them, till there was hardly room to move; men, women, children, dogs, cats, mats, calabashes of poi, cocoanuts, bananas, dried fish, and every dusky individual of the throng was wreathed and garlanded with odorous and brilliant flowers. All were talking and laughing, and an immense amount of gesticulation seems to emphasize and supplement speech. We steamed through the reef in the brief red twilight, over the golden tropic sea, keeping on the leeward side of the islands. Before it was quite dark the sleeping arrangements were made, and the deck and skylights were covered with mats and mattresses on which 170 natives sat, slept, or smoked,--a motley, parti-coloured mass of humanity, in the midst of which I recognized Bishop Willis in the usual episcopal dress, lying on a mattress among the others, a prey to discomfort and weariness! What would his episcopal brethren at home think of such a hardship?
There is a yellow-skinned, soft-voiced, fascinating Goa or Malay steward on board, who with infinite goodwill attends to the comfort of everybody. I was surprised when he asked me if I would like a mattress on the skylight, or a berth below, and in unhesitating ignorance replied severely, “Oh, below, of course, please,” thinking of a ladies’ cabin, but when I went down to supper, my eyes were enlightened.
The Kilauea is a screw boat of 400 tons, most unprepossessing in appearance, slow, but sure, and capable of bearing an infinite amount of battering. It is jokingly said that her keel has rasped off the branch coral round all the islands. Though there are many inter-island schooners, she is the only sure mode of reaching the windward islands in less than a week; and though at present I am disposed to think rather slightingly of her, and to class her with the New Zealand coasting craft, yet the residents are very proud of her, and speak lovingly of her, and regard her as a blessed deliverance from the horrors of beating to windward. She has a shabby, obsolete look about her, like a second-rate coasting collier, or an old American tow-boat. She looks ill-found, too; I saw two essential pieces of tackle give way as they were hoisting the main sail. {44} She has a small saloon with a double tier of berths, besides transoms, which give accommodation on the level of the lower berth. There is a stern cabin, which is a prolongation of the saloon, and not in any way separated from it. There is no ladies’ cabin; but sex, race, and colour are included in a promiscuous arrangement.
Miss Karpe, my travelling companion, and two agreeable ladies, were already in their berths very sick, but I did not get into mine because a cockroach, looking as large as a mouse, occupied the pillow, and a companion not much smaller was roaming over the quilt without any definite purpose. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my observation, but it seemed to me that these tremendous creatures were dark red, with eyes like lobsters’, and antennæ two inches long. They looked capable of carrying out the most dangerous and inscrutable designs. I called the Malay steward; he smiled mournfully, but spoke reassuringly, and pledged his word for their innocuousness, but I never can believe that they are not the enemies of man; and I lay down on the transom, not to sleep, however, for it seemed essential to keep watch on the proceedings of these formidable vermin.
The grotesqueness of the arrangements of the berths and their occupants grew on me during the night, and the climax was put upon it when a gentleman coming down in the early morning asked me if I knew that I was using the Governor of Maui’s head for a footstool, this portly native “Excellency” being in profound slumber on the forward part of the transom. This diagram represents one side of the saloon and the “happy family” of English, Chinamen, Hawaiians, and Americans:
Governor Lyman. Miss Karpe. Miss ---.
Afong. Vacant. Miss ---.
Governor Nahaolelua. Myself. An Hawaiian.I noticed, too, that there were very few trunks and portmanteaus, but that the after end of the saloon was heaped with Mexican saddles and saddlebags, which I learned too late were the essential gear of every traveller on Hawaii.
At five this morning we were at anchor in the roads of Lahaina, the chief village on the mountainous island of Maui. This place is very beautiful from the sea, for beyond the blue water and the foamy reef the eye rests gratefully on a picturesque collection of low, one-storied, thatched houses, many of frame, painted white; others of grass, but all with deep, cool verandahs, half hidden among palms, bananas, kukuis, breadfruit, and mangoes, dark groves against gentle slopes behind, covered with sugar-cane of a bright pea-green. It is but a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the red, flaring, almost inaccessible, Maui hills, which here rise abruptly to a height of 6,000 feet, pinnacled, chasmed, buttressed, and almost verdureless, except in a few deep clefts, green and cool with ferns and candlenut trees, and moist with falling water. Lahaina looked intensely tropical in the roseflush of the early morning, a dream of some bright southern isle, too surely to pass away. The sun blazed down on shore, ship, and sea, glorifying all things through the winter day. It was again ecstasy “to dream, and dream” under the awning, fanned by the light sea-breeze, with the murmur of an unknown musical tongue in one’s ears, and the rich colouring and graceful grouping of a tropical race around one. We called at Maaleia, a neck of sandy, scorched, verdureless soil, and at Ulupalakua, or rather at the furnace seven times heated, which is the landing of the plantation of that name, on whose breezy slopes cane refreshes the eye at a height of 2,000 feet above the sea. We anchored at both places, and with what seemed to me a needless amount of delay, discharged goods and natives, and natives, mats, and calabashes were embarked. In addition to the essential mat and calabash of poi, every native carried some pet, either dog or cat, which was caressed, sung to, and talked to with extreme tenderness; but there were hardly any children, and I noticed that where there were any, the men took charge of them. There were very few fine, manly dogs; the pets in greatest favour are obviously those odious weak-eyed, pink-nosed Maltese terriers.
The aspect of the sea was so completely lazy, that it was a fresh surprise as each indolent undulation touched the shore that it had latent vigour left to throw itself upwards into clouds of spray. We looked through limpid water into cool depths where strange bright fish darted through the submarine chapparal, but the coolness was imaginary, for the water was at 80.° {47} The air above the great black lava flood, which in prehistoric times had flowed into the sea, and had ever since declined the kindly draping offices of nature, vibrated in waves of heat. Even the imperishable cocoanut trees, whose tall, bare, curved trunks rose from the lava or the burnt red earth, were gaunt, tattered, and thirsty-looking, weary of crying for moisture to the pitiless skies. At last the ceaseless ripple of talk ceased, crew and passengers slept on the hot deck, and no sounds were heard but the drowsy flap of the awning, and the drowsier creak of the rudder, as the Kilauea swayed sleepily on the lazy undulations. The flag drooped and fainted with heat. The white sun blazed like a magnesium light on blue water, black lava, and fiery soil, roasting, blinding, scintillating, and flushed the red rocks of Maui into glory. It was a constant marvel that troops of mounted natives, male and female, could gallop on the scorching shore without being melted or shrivelled. It is all glorious, this fierce bright glow of the Tropic of Cancer, yet it was a relief to look up the great rolling featureless slopes above Ulupalakua to a forest belt of perennial green, watered, they say, by perpetual showers, and a little later to see a mountain summit uplifted into a region of endless winter, above a steady cloud-bank as white as snow. This mountain, Haleakala, the House of the Sun, is the largest extinct volcano in the world, its terminal crater being nineteen miles in circumference at a height of more than 10,000 feet. It, and its spurs, slopes, and clusters of small craters form East Maui. West Maui is composed mainly of the lofty picturesque group of the Eeka mountains. A desert strip of land, not much above high water mark, unites the twain, which form an island forty-eight miles long and thirty broad, with an area of 620 square miles.
We left Maui in the afternoon, and spent the next six hours in crossing the channel between it and Hawaii, but the short tropic day did not allow us to see anything of the latter island but two snow-capped domes uplifted above the clouds. I have been reading Jarves’ excellent book on the islands as industriously as possible, as well as trying to get information from my fellow-passengers regarding the region into which I have been so suddenly and unintentionally projected. I really know nothing about Hawaii, or the size and phenomena of the volcano to which we are bound, or the state of society or of the native race, or of the relations existing between it and the foreign population, or of the details of the constitution. This ignorance is most oppressive, and I see that it will not be easily enlightened, for among several intelligent gentlemen who have been conversing with me, no two seem agreed on any matter of fact.
From the hour of my landing I have observed the existence of two parties of pro and anti missionary leanings, with views on all island subjects in grotesque antagonism. So far, the former have left the undoubted results of missionary effort here to speak for themselves; and I am almost disposed, from the pertinacious aggressiveness of the latter party, to think that it must be weak. I have already been seized upon (a gentleman would write “button-holed”) by several persons, who, in their anxiety to be first in imprinting their own views on the tabula rasa of a stranger’s mind, have exercised an unseemly overhaste in giving the conversation an anti-missionary twist. They apparently desire to convey the impression that the New England teachers, finding a people rejoicing in the innocence and simplicity of Eden, taught them the knowledge of evil, turned them into a nation of hypocrites, and with a strange mingling of fanaticism and selfishness, afflicted them with many woes calculated to accelerate their extinction, clothing among others. The animus appears strong and bitter. There are two intelligent and highly educated ladies on board, daughters of missionaries, and the candid and cautious tone in which they speak on the same subject impresses me favourably. Mr. Damon introduced me to a very handsome half white gentleman, a lawyer of ability, and lately interpreter to the Legislature, Mr. Ragsdale, or, as he is usually called, “Bill Ragsdale,” a leading spirit among the natives. His conversation was eloquent and poetic, though rather stilted, and he has a good deal of French mannerism; but if he is a specimen of native patriotic feeling, I think that the extinction of Hawaiian nationality must be far off. I was amused with the attention that he paid to his dress under very adverse circumstances. He has appeared in three different suits, with light kid gloves to match, all equally elegant, in two days. A Chinese gentleman, who is at the same time a wealthy merchant at Honolulu, and a successful planter on Hawaii, interests me, from the quiet keen intelligence of his face, and the courtesy and dignity of his manner. I hear that he possesses the respect of the whole community for his honour and integrity. It is quite unlike an ordinary miscellaneous herd of passengers. The tone is so cheerful, courteous, and friendly, and people speak without introductions, and help to make the time pass pleasantly to each other.
The Kilauea is not a fast propeller, and as she lurched very much in crossing the channel most of the passengers were sea-sick, a casualty which did not impair their cheerfulness and good humour. After dark we called at Kawaihae (pronounced To-wee-hye), on the northwest of Hawaii, and then steamed through the channel to the east or windward side. I was only too glad on the second night to accept the offer of “a mattrass on the skylight,” but between the heavy rolling caused by the windward swell, and the natural excitement on nearing the land of volcanoes and earthquakes, I could not sleep, and no other person slept, for it was considered “a very rough passage,” though there was hardly a yachtsman’s breeze. It would do these Sybarites good to give them a short spell of the howling horrors of the North or South Atlantic, an easterly snowstorm off Sable Island, or a winter gale in the latitude of Inaccessible Island! The night was cloudy, and so the glare from Kilauea which is often seen far out at sea was not visible.
When the sun rose amidst showers and rainbows (for this is the showery season), I could hardly believe my eyes. Scenery, vegetation, colour were all changed. The glowing red, the fiery glare, the obtrusive lack of vegetation were all gone. There was a magnificent coast-line of grey cliffs many hundred feet in height, usually draped with green, but often black, caverned, and fantastic at their bases. Into cracks and caverns the heavy waves surged with a sound like artillery, sending their broad white sheets of foam high up among the ferns and trailers, and drowning for a time the endless baritone of the surf, which is never silent through the summer years. Cascades in numbers took one impulsive leap from the cliffs into the sea, or came thundering down clefts or “gulches,” which, widening at their extremities, opened on smooth green lawns, each one of which has its grass house or houses, kalo patch, bananas, and coco-palms, so close to the broad Pacific that its spray often frittered itself away over their fan-like leaves. Above the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green, bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. Creation surely cannot exhibit a more brilliant green than that which clothes windward Hawaii with perpetual spring. I have never seen such verdure. In the final twenty-nine miles there are more than sixty gulches, from 100 to 700 feet in depth, each with its cataracts, and wild vagaries of tropical luxuriance. Native churches, frame-built and painted white, are almost like mile-stones along the coast, far too large and too many for the notoriously dwindling population. Ten miles from Hilo we came in sight of the first sugar plantation, with its patches of yet brighter green, its white boiling house and tall chimney stack; then more churches, more plantations, more gulches, more houses, and before ten we steamed into Byron’s, or as it is now called Hilo Bay.
This is the paradise of Hawaii. What Honolulu attempts to be, Hilo is without effort. Its crescent-shaped bay, said to be the most beautiful in the Pacific, is a semi-circle of about two miles, with its farther extremity formed by Cocoanut Island, a black lava islet on which this palm attains great perfection, and beyond it again a fringe of cocoanuts marks the deep indentations of the shore. From this island to the north point of the bay, there is a band of golden sand on which the roar of the surf sounded thunderous and drowsy as it mingled with the music of living waters, the Waiakea and the Wailuku, which after lashing the sides of the mountains which give them birth, glide deep and fern-fringed into the ocean. Native houses, half hidden by greenery, line the bay, and stud the heights above the Wailuku, and near the landing some white frame houses and three church spires above the wood denote the foreign element. Hilo is unique. Its climate is humid, and the long repose which it has enjoyed from rude volcanic upheavals has mingled a great depth of vegetable mould with the decomposed lava. Rich soil, rain, heat, sunshine, stimulate nature to supreme efforts, and there is a luxuriant prodigality of vegetation which leaves nothing uncovered but the golden margin of the sea, and even that above high-water-mark is green with the Convolvulus maritimus. So dense is the wood that Hilo is rather suggested than seen. It is only on shore that one becomes aware of its bewildering variety of native and exotic trees and shrubs. From the sea it looks one dense mass of greenery, in which the bright foliage of the candle-nut relieves the glossy dark green of the breadfruit--a maze of preposterous bananas, out of which rise slender annulated trunks of palms giving their infinite grace to the grove. And palms along the bay, almost among the surf, toss their waving plumes in the sweet soft breeze, not “palms in exile,” but children of a blessed isle where “never wind blows loudly.” Above Hilo, broad lands sweeping up cloudwards, with their sugar cane, kalo, melons, pine-apples, and banana groves suggest the boundless liberality of Nature. Woods and waters, hill and valley are all there, and from the region of an endless summer the eye takes in the domain of an endless winter, where almost perpetual snow crowns the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Mauna Kea from Hilo has a shapely aspect, for its top is broken into peaks, said to be the craters of extinct volcanoes, but my eyes seek the dome-like curve of Mauna Loa with far deeper interest, for it is as yet an unfinished mountain. It has a huge crater on its summit 800 feet in depth, and a pit of unresting fire on its side; it throbs and rumbles, and palpitates; it has sent forth floods of fire over all this part of Hawaii, and at any moment it may be crowned with a lonely light, showing that its tremendous forces are again in activity. My imagination is already inflamed by hearing of marvels, and I am beginning to think tropically.
Canoes came off from the shore, dusky swimmers glided through the water, youths, athletes, like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, rode the waves on their surf-boards, brilliantly dressed riders galloped along the sands and came trooping down the bridle-paths from all the vicinity till a many-coloured tropical crowd had assembled at the landing. Then a whaleboat came off, rowed by eight young men in white linen suits and white straw hats, with wreaths of carmine-coloured flowers round both hats and throats. They were singing a glee in honour of Mr. Ragsdale, whom they sprang on deck to welcome. Our crowd of native fellow-passengers, by some inscrutable process, had re-arrayed themselves and blossomed into brilliancy. Hordes of Hilo natives swarmed on deck, and it became a Babel of alohas, kisses, hand-shakings, and reiterated welcomes. The glee singers threw their beautiful garlands of roses and ohias over the foreign passengers, and music, flowers, good-will and kindliness made us welcome to these enchanted shores. We landed in a whaleboat, and were hoisted up a rude pier which was crowded, for what the arrival of the Australian mail-steamer is to Honolulu, the coming of the Kilauea is to Hilo. I had not time to feel myself a stranger, there were so many introductions, and so much friendliness. Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyman, two of the most venerable of the few surviving missionaries, were on the landing, and I was introduced to them and many others. There is no hotel in Hilo. The residents receive strangers, and Miss Karpe and I were soon installed in a large buff frame-house, with two deep verandahs, the residence of Mr. Severance, Sheriff of Hawaii.
Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer acquaintance, so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose. Two narrow roads lead up from the sea to one as narrow, running parallel with it. Further up the hill another runs in the same direction. There are no conveyances, and outside the village these narrow roads dwindle into bridle-paths, with just room for one horse to pass another. The houses in which Mr. Coan, Mr. Lyman, Dr. Wetmore (formerly of the Mission), and one or two others live, have just enough suggestion of New England about them to remind one of the dominant influence on these islands, but the climate has idealized them, and clothed them with poetry and antiquity.
Of the three churches, the most prominent is the Roman Catholic Church, a white frame building with two great towers; Mr. Coan’s native church with a spire comes next; and then the neat little foreign church, also with a spire. The Romish Church is a rather noisy neighbour, for its bells ring at unnatural hours, and doleful strains of a band which cannot play either in time or tune proceed from it. The court-house, a large buff painted frame-building with two deep verandahs, standing on a well-kept lawn planted with exotic trees, is the most imposing building in Hilo. All the foreigners have carried out their individual tastes in their dwellings, and the result is very agreeable, though in picturesqueness they must yield the plain to the native houses, which whether of frame, or grass plain or plaited, whether one or two storied, all have the deep thatched roofs and verandahs plain or fantastically latticed, which are so in harmony with the surroundings. These lattices and single and double verandahs are gorgeous with trailers, and the general warm brown tint of the houses contrasts pleasantly with the deep green of the bananas which over-shadow them. There are living waters everywhere. Each house seems to possess its pure bright stream, which is arrested in bathing houses to be liberated among kalo patches of the brightest green. Every verandah appears a gathering place, and the bright holukus of the women, the gay shirts and bandanas of the men, the brilliant wreaths of natural flowers which adorn both, the hot-house temperature, the new trees and flowers which demand attention, the strange rich odours, and the low monotonous recitative which mourns through the groves make me feel that I am in a new world. Ah, this is all Polynesian! This must be the land to which the “timid-eyed” lotos-eaters came. There is a strange fascination in the languid air, and it is strangely sweet “to dream of fatherland” . . .
I.L.B.
LETTER IV.
HILO, HAWAII.I find that I can send another short letter before leaving for the volcano. I cannot convey to you any idea of the greenness and lavish luxuriance of this place, where everything flourishes, and glorious trailers and parasitic ferns hide all unsightly objects out of sight. It presents a bewildering maze of lilies, roses, fuschias, clematis, begonias, convolvuli, the huge appalling looking granadilla, the purple and yellow water lemons, also varieties of passiflora, both with delicious edible fruit, custard apples, rose apples, mangoes, mangostein guavas, bamboos, alligator pears, oranges, tamarinds, papayas, bananas, breadfruit, magnolias, geraniums, candle-nut, gardenias, dracænas, eucalyptus, pandanus, ohias, {59a} kamani trees, kalo, {59b} noni, {59c} and quantities of other trees and flowers, of which I shall eventually learn the names, patches of pine-apple, melons, and sugar-cane for children to suck, kaloand sweet potatoes.
In the vicinity of this and all other houses, Chili peppers, and a ginger-plant with a drooping flower-stalk with a great number of blossoms, which when not fully developed have a singular resemblance to very pure porcelain tinted with pink at the extremities of the buds, are to be seen growing in “yards,” to use a most unfitting Americanism. I don’t know how to introduce you to some of the things which delight my eyes here; but I must ask you to believe that the specimens of tropical growths which we see in conservatories at home are in general either misrepresentations, or very feeble representations of these growths in their natural homes. I don’t allude to flowers, and especially not to orchids, but in this instance very specially to bananas, coco-palms, and the pandanus. For example, there is a specimen of the Pandanus odoratissimus in the palm-house in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, which is certainly a malignant caricature, with its long straggling branches, and widely scattered tufts of poverty stricken foliage. The bananas and plantains in that same palm-house represent only the feeblest and poorest of their tribe. They require not only warmth and moisture, but the generous sunshine of the tropics for their development. In the same house the date and sugar-palms are tolerable specimens, but the cocoa-nut trees are most truly “palms in exile.”
I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own. As I write now I hear the moaning rustle of the wind through their plume-like tops, and their long slender stems, and crisp crown of leaves above the trees with shining leafage which revel in damp, have a suggestion of Orientalism about them. How do they come too, on every atoll or rock that raises its head throughout this lonely ocean? They fringe the shores of these islands. Wherever it is dry and fiercely hot, and the lava is black and hard, and nothing else grows, or can grow, there they are, close to the sea, sending their root-fibres seawards as if in search of salt water. Their long, curved, wrinkled, perfectly cylindrical stems, bulging near the ground like an apothecary’s pestle, rise to a height of from sixty to one hundred feet. These stems are never straight, and in a grove lean and curve every way, and are apparently capable of enduring any force of wind or earthquake. They look as if they had never been young, and they show no signs of growth, rearing their plumy tufts so far aloft, and casting their shadows so far away, always supremely lonely, as though they belonged to the heavens rather than the earth. Then, while all else that grows is green they are yellowish. Their clusters of nuts in all stages of growth are yellow, their fan-like leaves, which are from twelve to twenty feet long, are yellow, and an amber light pervades and surrounds them. They provide milk, oil, food, rope, and matting, and each tree produces about one hundred nuts annually.
The pandanus, or lauhala, is one of the most striking features of the islands. Its funereal foliage droops in Hilo, and it was it that I noticed all along the windward coast as having a most striking peculiarity of aërial roots which the branches send down to the ground, and which I now see have large cup-shaped spongioles. These air-roots seem like props, and appear to vary in length from three to twelve feet, according to the situation of the tree. There is one variety I saw to-day, the “screw pine,” which is really dangerous if one approached it unguardedly. It is a whorled pandanus, with long sword-shaped leaves, spirally arranged in three rows, and hard, saw-toothed edges, very sharp. When unbranched as I saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands. {62} Its foliage is singularly dense, although it is borne in tufts of a quantity of long yucca-like leaves on the branches. The shape of the tree is usually circular. The mournful look is caused by the leaves taking a downward and very decided droop in the middle. At present each tuft of leaves has in its centre an object like a green pine-apple. This contains the seeds which are eatable, as is also the fleshy part of the drupes. I find that it is from the seeds of this tree and their coverings that the brilliant orange leis, or garlands of the natives, are made. The soft white case of the leaves and the terminal buds can also be eaten. The leaves are used for thatching, and their tough longitudinal fibres for mats and ropes. There is another kind, the Pandanus vacoa, the same as is used for making sugar bags in Mauritius, but I have not seen it.
One does not forget the first sight of a palm. I think the banana comes next, and I see them in perfection here for the first time, as those in Honolulu grow in “yards,” and are tattered by the winds. It transports me into the tropics in feeling, as I am already in them in fact, and satisfies all my cravings for something which shall represent and epitomize their luxuriance, as well as for simplicity and grace in vegetable form. And here it is everywhere with its shining shade, its smooth fat green stem, its crown of huge curving leaves from four to ten feet long, and its heavy cluster of a whorl of green or golden fruit, with a pendant purple cone of undeveloped blossom below. It is of the tropics, tropical; a thing of beauty, and gladness, and sunshine. It is indigenous here, and wild, but never bears seeds, and is propagated solely by suckers, which spring up when the parent plant has fruited, or by cuttings. It bears seed, strange to say, only (so far as is known) in the Andaman Islands, where, stranger still, it springs up as a second growth wherever the forests are cleared. Go to the palm-house, find the Musa sapientum, magnify it ten times, glorify it immeasurably, and you will have a laggard idea of the banana groves of Hilo.
The ground is carpeted with a grass of preternaturally vivid green and rankness of growth, mixed with a handsome fern, with a caudex a foot high, the Sadleria cyathoides, and another of exquisite beauty, the Micropia tenuifolia, which are said to be the commonest ferns on Hawaii. It looks Elysian.
Hilo is a lively place for such a mere village; so many natives are stirring about, and dashing along the narrow roads on horseback. This is a large airy house, simple and tasteful, with pretty engravings and water-colour drawings on the walls. There is a large bath-house in the garden, into which a pure, cool stream has been led, and the gurgle and music of many such streams fill the sweet, soft air. There is a saying among sailors, “Follow a Pacific shower, and it leads you to Hilo.” Indeed I think they have a rainfall of from thirteen to sixteen feet annually. These deep verandahs are very pleasant, for they render window-blinds unnecessary; so there is nothing of that dark stuffiness which makes indoor life a trial in the closed, shadeless Australian houses.
Miss Karpe, my travelling companion, is a lady of great energy, and apparently an adept in the art of travelling. Undismayed by three days of sea-sickness, and the prospect of the tremendous journey to the volcano to-morrow, she extemporised a ride to the Anuenue Falls on the Wailuku this afternoon, and I weakly accompanied her, a burly policeman being our guide. The track is only a scramble among rocks and holes, concealed by grass and ferns, and we had to cross a stream, full of great holes, several times. The Fall itself is very pretty, 110 feet in one descent, with a cavernous shrine behind the water, filled with ferns. There were large ferns all round the Fall, and a jungle of luxuriant tropical shrubs of many kinds.
Three miles above this Fall there are the Pei-pei Falls, very interesting geologically. The Wailuku River is the boundary between the two great volcanoes, and its waters, it is supposed by learned men, have often flowed over heated beds of basalt, with the result of columnar formation radiating from the bottom of the stream. This structure is sometimes beautifully exhibited in the form of Gothic archways, through which the torrent pours into a basin, surrounded by curved, broken, and half-sunk prisms, black and prominent amidst the white foam of the Falls. In several places the river has just pierced the beds of lava, and in one passes under a thick rock bridge, several hundred feet wide. Often, where the water flows over beds of dark grey basalt, masses of trachyte, closely resembling syenite, have formed “potholes,” and by mutual action have been worn to pebbles. At Pei-pei there are three circular pools, each about fifty feet in diameter, and separated by walls six feet thick, in a bed of columnar basalt. {65} During freshets the river sometimes rises thirty feet, and hides these pools, but during the dry season the upper bed is bare, and after a succession of cascades of various heights the stream pours into the first basin, filling it with foam. From this there is no apparent outlet, but leaves thrown in soon appear in the second basin, whose tranquillity is only disturbed by a few bubbles. Between this and the third there are two subterranean passages, and the water there leaps over a fall about forty feet high, nearly covering a perfect Gothic arch which is the entrance to a shallow cave. The scene is enclosed by high and nearly perpendicular walls. {66}
Near the Anuenue Fall we stopped at a native house, outside which a woman, in a rose-coloured chemise, was stringing roses for a necklace, while her husband pounded the kalo root on a board. His only clothing was the malo, a narrow strip of cloth wound round the loins, and passed between the legs. This was the only covering worn by men before the introduction of Christianity. Females wore the pau, a short petticoat made of tapa, which reached from the waist to the knees. To our eyes, the brown skin produces nearly the effect of clothing.
Everything was new and interesting, but the ride was spoiled by my insecure seat in my saddle, and the increased pain in my spine which riding produced. Once in crossing a stream the horses have to make a sort of downward jump from a rock, and I slipped round my horse’s neck. Indeed on the way back I felt that on the ground of health I must give up the volcano, as I would never consent to be carried to it, like Lady Franklin, in a litter. When we returned, Mr. Severance suggested that it would be much better for me to follow the Hawaiian fashion, and ride astride, and put his saddle on the horse. It was only my strong desire to see the volcano which made me consent to a mode of riding against which I have so strong a prejudice, but the result of the experiment is that I shall visit Kilauea thus or not at all. The native women all ride astride, on ordinary occasions in the full sacks, or holukus, and on gala days in the pau, the gay, winged dress which I described in writing from Honolulu. A great many of the foreign ladies on Hawaii have adopted the Mexican saddle also, for greater security to themselves and ease to their horses, on the steep and perilous bridle-tracks, but they wear full Turkish trowsers and jauntily-made dresses reaching to the ankles.
It appears that Hilo is free from the universally admitted nuisance of morning calls. The hours are simple--eight o’clock breakfasts, one o’clock dinners, six o’clock suppers. If people want anything with you, they come at any hour of the day, but if they only wish to be sociable, the early evening is the recognized time for “calling.” After supper, when the day’s work is done, people take their lanterns and visit each other, either in the verandahs or in the cheerful parlours which open upon them. There are no door-bells, or solemn announcements by servants of visitors’ names, or “not-at-homes.” If people are in their parlours, it is presumed that they receive their friends. Several pleasant people came in this evening. They seem to take great interest in two ladies going to the volcano without an escort, but no news has been received from it lately, and I fear that it is not very active as no glare is visible to-night. Mr. Thompson, the pastor of the small foreign congregation here, called on me. He is a very agreeable, accomplished man, and is acquainted with Dr. Holland and several of my New England friends. He kindly brought his wife’s riding-costume for my trip to Kilauea. The Rev. Titus Coan, one of the first and most successful missionaries to Hawaii, also called. He is a tall, majestic-looking man, physically well fitted for the extraordinary exertions he has undergone in mission work, and intellectually also, I should think, for his face expresses great mental strength, and nothing of the weakness of a sanguine enthusiast. He has admitted about 12,000 persons into the Christian Church. He is the greatest authority on volcanoes on the islands, and his enthusiastic manner and illuminated countenance as he spoke of Kilauea, have raised my expectations to the highest pitch. We are prepared for to-morrow, having engaged a native named Upa, who boasts a little English, as our guide. He provides three horses and himself for three days for the sum of thirty dollars.
I.L.B.
LETTER V.
VOLCANO OF KILAUEA, Jan. 31.Bruised aching bones, strained muscles, and overwhelming fatigue, render it hardly possible for me to undergo the physical labour of writing, but in spirit I am so elated with the triumph of success, and so thrilled by new sensations, that though I cannot communicate the incommunicable, I want to write to you while the impression of Kilauea is fresh, and by “the light that never was on sea or shore.”
By eight yesterday morning our preparations were finished, and Miss Karpe, whose conversance with the details of travelling I envy, mounted her horse on her own side-saddle, dressed in a short grey waterproof, and a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat tied so tightly over her ears with a green veil as to give it the look of a double spout. The only pack her horse carried was a bundle of cloaks and shawls, slung together with an umbrella on the horn of her saddle. Upa, who was most picturesquely got up in the native style with garlands of flowers round his hat and throat, carried our saddle-bags on the peak of his saddle, a bag with bananas, bread, and a bottle of tea on the horn, and a canteen of water round his waist. I had on my coarse Australian hat which serves the double purpose of sunshade and umbrella, Mrs. Thompson’s riding costume, my great rusty New Zealand boots, and my blanket strapped behind a very gaily ornamented brass-bossed demi-pique Mexican saddle, which one of the missionary’s daughters had lent me. It has a horn in front, a low peak behind, large wooden stirrups with leathern flaps the length of the stirrup-leathers, to prevent the dress from coming in contact with the horse, and strong guards of hide which hang over and below the stirrup, and cover it and the foot up to the ancles, to prevent the feet or boots from being torn in riding through the bush. Each horse had four fathoms of tethering rope wound several times round his neck. In such fashion must all travelling be done on Hawaii, whether by ladies or gentlemen.
Upa supplied the picturesque element, we the grotesque. The morning was moist and unpropitious looking. As the greater part of the thirty miles has to be travelled at a foot’s-pace the guide took advantage of the soft grassy track which leads out of Hilo, to go off at full gallop, a proceeding which made me at once conscious of the demerits of my novel way of riding. To guide the horse and to clutch the horn of the saddle with both hands were clearly incompatible, so I abandoned the first as being the least important. Then my feet either slipped too far into the stirrups and were cut, or they were jerked out; every corner was a new terror, for at each I was nearly pitched off on one side, and when at last Upa stopped, and my beast stopped without consulting my wishes, only a desperate grasp of mane and tethering rope saved me from going over his head. At this ridiculous moment we came upon a bevy of brown maidens swimming in a lakelet by the roadside, who increased my confusion by a chorus of laughter. How fervently I hoped that the track would never admit of galloping again!
Hilo fringes off with pretty native houses, kalo patches and mullet ponds, and in about four miles the track, then formed of rough hard lava, and not more than 24 inches wide, enters a forest of the densest description, a burst of true tropical jungle. I could not have imagined anything so perfectly beautiful, nature seemed to riot in the production of wonderful forms, as if the moist hot-house air encouraged her in lavish excesses. Such endless variety, such depths of green, such an impassable and altogether inextricable maze of forest trees, ferns, and lianas! There were palms, breadfruit trees, ohias, eugenias, candle-nuts of immense size, Koa (acacia), bananas, noni, bamboos, papayas (Carica papaya), guavas, ti trees (Cordyline terminalis), treeferns, climbing ferns, parasitic ferns, and ferns themselves the prey of parasites of their own species. The lianas were there in profusion climbing over the highest trees, and entangling them, with stems varying in size from those as thick as a man’s arm to those as slender as whipcord, binding all in an impassable network, and hanging over our heads in rich festoons or tendrils swaying in the breeze. There were trailers, i.e., (Freycinetia scandens) with heavy knotted stems, as thick as a frigate’s stoutest hawser, coiling up to the tops of tall ohias with tufted leaves like yuccas, and crimson spikes of gaudy blossom. The shining festoons of the yam and the graceful trailers of the mailé (Alyxia Olivæformis), a sweet scented vine, from which the natives make garlands, and glossy leaved climbers hung from tree to tree, and to brighten all, huge morning glories of a heavenly blue opened a thousand blossoms to the sun as if to give a tenderer loveliness to the forest. Here trees grow and fall, and nature covers them where they lie with a new vegetation which altogether obliterates their hasty decay. It is four miles of beautiful and inextricable confusion, untrodden by human feet except on the narrow track. “Of every tree in this garden thou mayest freely eat,” and no serpent or noxious thing trails its hideous form through this Eden.
It was quite intoxicating, so new, wonderful, and solemn withal, that I was sorry when we emerged from its shady depths upon a grove of cocoanut trees and the glare of day. Two very poor-looking grass huts, with a ragged patch of sugar-cane beside them, gave us an excuse for half an hour’s rest. An old woman in a red sack, much tattooed, with thick short grey hair bristling on her head, sat on a palm root, holding a nude brown child; a lean hideous old man, dressed only in a malo, leaned against its stem, our horses with their highly miscellaneous gear were tethered to a fern stump, and Upa, the most picturesque of the party, served out tea. He and the natives talked incessantly, and from the frequency with which the words “wahine haole” (foreign woman) occurred, the subject of their conversation was obvious. Upa has taken up the notion from something Mr. S--- said, that I am a “high chief,” and related to Queen Victoria, and he was doubtlessly imposing this fable on the people. In spite of their poverty and squalor, if squalor is a term which can be applied to aught beneath these sunny skies, there was a kindliness about them which they made us feel, and the aloha with which they parted from us had a sweet friendly sound.
From this grove we travelled as before in single file over an immense expanse of lava of the kind called pahoehoe, or satin rock, to distinguish it from the a-a, or jagged, rugged, impassable rock. Savants all use these terms in the absence of any equally expressive in English. The pahoehoe extends in the Hilo direction from hence about twenty-three miles. It is the cooled and arrested torrent of lava which in past ages has flowed towards Hilo from Kilauea. It lies in hummocks, in coils, in rippled waves, in rivers, in huge convolutions, in pools smooth and still, and in caverns which are really bubbles. Hundreds of square miles of the island are made up of this and nothing more. A very frequent aspect of pahoehoe is the likeness on a magnificent scale of a thick coat of cream drawn in wrinkling folds to the side of a milk-pan. This lava is all grey, and the greater part of its surface is slightly roughened. Wherever this is not the case the horses slip upon it as upon ice.
Here I began to realize the universally igneous origin of Hawaii, as I had not done among the finely disintegrated lava of Hilo. From the hard black rocks which border the sea, to the loftiest mountain dome or peak, every stone, atom of dust, and foot of fruitful or barren soil bears the Plutonic mark. In fact, the island has been raised heap on heap, ridge on ridge, mountain on mountain, to nearly the height of Mont Blanc, by the same volcanic forces which are still in operation here, and may still add at intervals to the height of the blue dome of Mauna Loa, of which we caught occasional glimpses above the clouds. Hawaii is actually at the present time being built up from the ocean, and this great sea of pahoehoe is not to be regarded as a vindictive eruption, bringing desolation on a fertile region, but as an architectural and formative process.
There is no water, except a few deposits of rain-water in holes, but the moist air and incessant showers have aided nature to mantle this frightful expanse with an abundant vegetation, principally ferns of an exquisite green, the most conspicuous being the Sadleria, the Gleichenia Hawaiiensis, a running wire-like fern, and the exquisite Microlepia tenuifolia, dwarf guava, with its white flowers resembling orange flowers in odour, and ohelos (Vaccinium reticulatum), with their red and white berries, and a profusion of small-leaved ohias (Metrosideros polymorpha), with their deep crimson tasselled flowers, and their young shoots of bright crimson, relieved the monotony of green. These crimson tassels deftly strung on thread or fibres, are much used by the natives for their leis, or garlands. The ti tree (Cordyline terminalis) which abounds also on the lava, is most valuable. They cook their food wrapped up in its leaves, the porous root when baked, has the taste and texture of molasses candy, and when distilled yields a spirit, and the leaves form wrappings for fish, hard poi, and other edibles. Occasionally a clump of tufted coco-palms, or of the beautiful candle-nut rose among the smaller growths. To our left a fringe of palms marked the place where the lava and the ocean met, while, on our right, we were seldom out of sight of the dense timber belt, with its fringe of tree-ferns and bananas, which girdles Mauna Loa.
The track, on the whole, is a perpetual upward scramble; for, though the ascent is so gradual, that it is only by the increasing coolness of the atmosphere that the increasing elevation is denoted, it is really nearly 4,000 feet in thirty miles. Only strong, sure-footed, well-shod horses can undertake this journey, for it is a constant scramble over rocks, going up or down natural steps, or cautiously treading along ledges. Most of the track is quite legible owing to the vegetation having been worn off the lava, but the rock itself hardly shows the slightest abrasion.
Upa had indicated that we were to stop for rest at the “Half Way House;” and, as I was hardly able to sit on my horse owing to fatigue, I consoled myself by visions of a comfortable sofa and a cup of tea. It was with real dismay that I found the reality to consist of a grass hut, much out of repair, and which, bad as it was, was locked. Upa said we had ridden so slowly that it would be dark before we reached the volcano, and only allowed us to rest on the grass for half-an-hour. He had frequently reiterated “Half Way House, you wear spur;” and, on our remounting, he buckled on my foot a heavy rusty Mexican spur, with jingling ornaments and rowels an inch and a half long. These horses are so accustomed to be jogged with these instruments that they won’t move without them. The prospect of five hours more riding looked rather black, for I was much exhausted, and my shoulders and knee-joints were in severe pain. Miss K.’s horse showed no other appreciation of a stick with which she belaboured him than flourishes of his tail, so, for a time, he was put in the middle, that Upa might add his more forcible persuasions, and I rode first and succeeded in getting my lazy animal into the priestly amble known at home as “a butter and eggs trot,” the favourite travelling pace, but this not suiting the guide’s notion of progress, he frequently rushed up behind with a torrent of Hawaiian, emphasized by heavy thumps on my horse’s back, which so sorely jeopardised my seat on the animal, owing to his resenting the interference by kicking, that I “dropped astern” for the rest of the way, leaving Upa to belabour Miss K.’s steed for his diversion.
The country altered but little, only the variety of trees gave place to the ohia alone, with its sombre foliage. There were neither birds nor insects, and the only travellers we encountered in the solitude compelled us to give them a wide berth, for they were a drove of half wild random cattle, led by a lean bull of hideous aspect, with crumpled horns. Two picturesque native vaccheros on mules accompanied them, and my flagging spirits were raised by their news that the volcano was quite active. The owner of these cattle knows that he has 10,000 head, and may have a great many more. They are shot for their hides by men who make shooting and skinning them a profession, and, near settlements, the owners are thankful to get two cents a pound for sirloin and rump-steaks. These, and great herds which are actually wild and ownerless upon the mountains, are a degenerate breed, with some of the worst peculiarities of the Texas cattle, and are the descendants of those which Vancouver placed on the islands and which were under Tabu for ten years. They destroy the old trees by gnawing the bark, and render the growth of young ones impossible.
As it was getting dark we passed through a forest strip, where tree-ferns from twelve to eighteen feet in height, and with fronds from five to seven feet long, were the most attractive novelties. As we emerged, “with one stride came the dark,” a great darkness, a cloudy night, with neither moon nor stars, and the track was further obscured by a belt of ohias. There were five miles of this, and I was so dead from fatigue and want of food, that I would willingly have lain down in the bush in the rain. I most heartlessly wished that Miss K. were tired too, for her voice, which seemed tireless as she rode ahead in the dark, rasped upon my ears. I could only keep on my saddle by leaning on the horn, and my clothes were soaked with the heavy rain. “A dreadful ride,” one and another had said, and I then believed them. It seemed an awful solitude full of mystery. Often, I only knew that my companions were ahead by the sparks struck from their horse’s shoes.
It became a darkness which could be felt.
“Is that possibly a pool of blood?” I thought in horror, as a rain puddle glowed crimson on the track. Not that indeed! A glare brighter and redder than that from any furnace suddenly lightened the whole sky, and from that moment brightened our path. There sat Miss K. under her dripping umbrella as provokingly erect as when she left Hilo. There Upa jogged along, huddled up in his poncho, and his canteen shone red. There the ohia trees were relieved blackly against the sky. The scene started out from the darkness with the suddenness of a revelation. We felt the pungency of sulphurous fumes in the still night air. A sound as of the sea broke on our ears, rising and falling as if breaking on the shore, but the ocean was thirty miles away. The heavens became redder and brighter, and when we reached the crater-house at eight, clouds of red vapour mixed with flame were curling ceaselessly out of a huge invisible pit of blackness, and Kilauea was in all its fiery glory. We had reached the largest active volcano in the world, the “place of everlasting burnings.”
Rarely was light more welcome than that which twinkled from under the verandah of the lonely crater-house into the rainy night. The hospitable landlord of this unique dwelling lifted me from my horse, and carried me into a pleasant room thoroughly warmed by a large wood fire, and I hastily retired to bed to spend much of the bitterly cold night in watching the fiery vapours rolling up out of the infinite darkness, and in dreading the descent into the crater. The heavy clouds were crimson with the reflection, and soon after midnight jets of flame of a most peculiar colour leapt fitfully into the air, accompanied by a dull throbbing sound.
This morning was wet and murky as many mornings are here, and the view from the door was a blank up to ten o’clock, when the mist rolled away and revealed the mystery of last night, the mighty crater whose vast terminal wall is only a few yards from this house. We think of a volcano as a cone. This is a different thing. The abyss, which really is at a height of nearly 4,000 feet on the flank of Mauna Loa, has the appearance of a great pit on a rolling plain. But such a pit! It is nine miles in circumference, and its lowest area, which not long ago fell about 300 feet, just as ice on a pond falls when the water below it is withdrawn, covers six square miles. The depth of the crater varies from 800 to 1,100 feet in different years, according as the molten sea below is at flood or ebb. Signs of volcanic activity are present more or less throughout its whole depth, and for some distance round its margin, in the form of steam cracks, jets of sulphurous vapour, blowing cones, accumulating deposits of acicular crystals of sulphur, etc., and the pit itself is constantly rent and shaken by earthquakes. Grand eruptions occur at intervals with circumstances of indescribable terror and dignity, but Kilauea does not limit its activity to these outbursts, but has exhibited its marvellous phenomena through all known time in a lake or lakes in the southern part of the crater three miles from this side.
This lake, the Hale-mau-mau, or House of Everlasting Fire of the Hawaiian mythology, the abode of the dreaded goddess Pelé, is approachable with safety except during an eruption. The spectacle, however, varies almost daily, and at times the level of the lava in the pit within a pit is so low, and the suffocating gases are evolved in such enormous quantities, that travellers are unable to see anything. There had been no news from it for a week, and as nothing was to be seen but a very faint bluish vapour hanging round its margin, the prospect was not encouraging.
When I have learned more about the Hawaiian volcanoes, I shall tell you more of their phenomena, but tonight I shall only write to you my first impressions of what we actually saw on this January 31st. My highest expectations have been infinitely exceeded, and I can hardly write soberly after such a spectacle, especially while through the open door I see the fiery clouds of vapour from the pit rolling up into a sky, glowing as if itself on fire.
We were accompanied into the crater by a comical native guide, who mimicked us constantly, our Hilo guide, who “makes up” a little English, a native woman from Kona, who speaks imperfect English poetically, and her brother who speaks none. I was conscious that we foreign women with our stout staffs and grotesque dress looked like caricatures, and the natives, who have a keen sense of the ludicrous, did not conceal that they thought us so.
The first descent down the terminal wall of the crater is very precipitous, but it and the slope which extends to the second descent are thickly covered with ohias, ohelos (a species of whortleberry), sadlerias, polypodiums, silver grass, and a great variety of bulbous plants many of which bore clusters of berries of a brilliant turquoise blue. The “beyond” looked terrible. I could not help clinging to these vestiges of the kindlier mood of nature in which she sought to cover the horrors she had wrought. The next descent is over rough blocks and ridges of broken lava, and appears to form part of a break which extends irregularly round the whole crater, and which probably marks a tremendous subsidence of its floor. Here the last apparent vegetation was left behind, and the familiar earth. We were in a new Plutonic region of blackness and awful desolation, the accustomed sights and sounds of nature all gone. Terraces, cliffs, lakes, ridges, rivers, mountain sides, whirlpools, chasms of lava surrounded us, solid, black, and shining, as if vitrified, or an ashen grey, stained yellow with sulphur here and there, or white with alum. The lava was fissured and upheaved everywhere by earthquakes, hot underneath, and emitting a hot breath.
After more than an hour of very difficult climbing we reached the lowest level of the crater, pretty nearly a mile across, presenting from above the appearance of a sea at rest, but on crossing it we found it to be an expanse of waves and convolutions of ashy-coloured lava, with huge cracks filled up with black iridescent rolls of lava, only a few weeks old. Parts of it are very rough and ridgy, jammed together like field ice, or compacted by rolls of lava which may have swelled up from beneath, but the largest part of the area presents the appearance of huge coiled hawsers, the ropy formation of the lava rendering the illusion almost perfect. These are riven by deep cracks which emit hot sulphurous vapours. Strange to say, in one of these, deep down in that black and awful region, three slender metamorphosed ferns were growing, three exquisite forms, the fragile heralds of the great forest of vegetation, which probably in coming years will clothe this pit with beauty. Truly they seemed to speak of the love of God. On our right there was a precipitous ledge, and a recent flow of lava had poured over it, cooling as it fell into columnar shapes as symmetrical as those of Staffa. It took us a full hour to cross this deep depression, and as long to master a steep hot ascent of about 400 feet, formed by a recent lava-flow from Hale-mau-mau into the basin. This lava hill is an extraordinary sight--a flood of molten stone, solidifying as it ran down the declivity, forming arrested waves, streams, eddies, gigantic convolutions, forms of snakes, stems of trees, gnarled roots, crooked water-pipes, all involved and contorted on a gigantic scale, a wilderness of force and dread. Over one steeper place the lava had run in a fiery cascade about 100 feet wide. Some had reached the ground, some had been arrested midway, but all had taken the aspect of stems of trees. In some of the crevices I picked up a quantity of very curious filamentose lava, known as “Pelé’s hair.” It resembles coarse spun glass, and is of a greenish or yellowish-brown colour. In many places the whole surface of the lava is covered with this substance seen through a glazed medium. During eruptions, when fire-fountains play to a great height, and drops of lava are thrown in all directions, the wind spins them out in clear green or yellow threads two or three feet long, which catch and adhere to projecting points.
As we ascended, the flow became hotter under our feet, as well as more porous and glistening. It was so hot that a shower of rain hissed as it fell upon it. The crust became increasingly insecure, and necessitated our walking in single file with the guide in front, to test the security of the footing. I fell through several times, and always into holes full of sulphurous steam, so malignantly acid that my strong dog-skin gloves were burned through as I raised myself on my hands.
We had followed a lava-flow for thirty miles up to the crater’s brink, and now we had toiled over recent lava for three hours, and by all calculation were close to the pit, yet there was no smoke or sign of fire, and I felt sure that the volcano had died out for once for our especial disappointment. Indeed, I had been making up my mind for disappointment since we left the crater-house, in consequence of reading seven different accounts, in which language was exhausted in describing Kilauea.
Suddenly, just above, and in front of us, gory drops were tossed in air, and springing forwards we stood on the brink of Hale-mau-mau, which was about 35 feet below us. I think we all screamed, I know we all wept, but we were speechless, for a new glory and terror had been added to the earth. It is the most unutterable of wonderful things. The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable, a sight to remember for ever, a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul, removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life. Here was the real “bottomless pit”--the “fire which is not quenched”--“the place of hell”--“the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone”--the “everlasting burnings”--the fiery sea whose waves are never weary. There were groanings, rumblings, and detonations, rushings, hissings, and splashings, and the crashing sound of breakers on the coast, but it was the surging of fiery waves upon a fiery shore. But what can I write! Such words as jets, fountains, waves, spray, convey some idea of order and regularity, but here there was none. The inner lake, while we stood there, formed a sort of crater within itself, the whole lava sea rose about three feet, a blowing cone about eight feet high was formed, it was never the same two minutes together. And what we saw had no existence a month ago, and probably will be changed in every essential feature a month hence.
What we did see was one irregularly-shaped lake, possibly 500 feet wide at its narrowest part and nearly half a mile at its broadest, almost divided into two by a low bank of lava, which extended nearly across it where it was narrowest, and which was raised visibly before our eyes. The sides of the nearest part of the lake were absolutely perpendicular, but nowhere more than 40 feet high; but opposite to us on the far side of the larger lake they were bold and craggy, and probably not less than 150 feet high. On one side there was an expanse entirely occupied with blowing cones, and jets of steam or vapour. The lake has been known to sink 400 feet, and a month ago it overflowed its banks. The prominent object was fire in motion, but the surface of the double lake was continually skinning over for a second or two with a cooled crust of a lustrous grey-white, like frosted silver, broken by jagged cracks of a bright rose-colour. The movement was nearly always from the sides to the centre, but the movement of the centre itself appeared independent and always took a southerly direction. Before each outburst of agitation there was much hissing and a throbbing internal roaring, as of imprisoned gases. Now it seemed furious, demoniacal, as if no power on earth could bind it, then playful and sportive, then for a second languid, but only because it was accumulating fresh force. On our arrival eleven fire fountains were playing joyously round the lakes, and sometimes the six of the nearer lake ran together in the centre to go wallowing down in one vortex, from which they reappeared bulging upwards, till they formed a huge cone 30 feet high, which plunged downwards in a whirlpool only to reappear in exactly the previous number of fountains in different parts of the lake, high leaping, raging, flinging themselves upwards. Sometimes the whole lake, abandoning its usual centripetal motion, as if impelled southwards, took the form of mighty waves, and surging heavily against the partial barrier with a sound like the Pacific surf, lashed, tore, covered it, and threw itself over it in clots of living fire. It was all confusion, commotion, force, terror, glory, majesty, mystery, and even beauty. And the colour! “Eye hath not seen” it! Molten metal has not that crimson gleam, nor blood that living light! Had I not seen this I should never have known that such a colour was possible.
The crust perpetually wrinkled, folded over, and cracked, and great pieces were drawn downwards to be again thrown up on the crests of waves. The eleven fountains of gory fire played the greater part of the time, dancing round the lake with a strength of joyousness which was absolute beauty. Indeed after the first half hour of terror had gone by, the beauty of these jets made a profound impression upon me, and the sight of them must always remain one of the most fascinating recollections of my life. During three hours, the bank of lava which almost divided the lakes rose considerably, owing to the cooling of the spray as it dashed over it, and a cavern of considerable size was formed within it, the roof of which was hung with fiery stalactites, more than a foot long. Nearly the whole time the surges of the further lake taking a southerly direction, broke with a tremendous noise on the bold craggy cliffs which are its southern boundary, throwing their gory spray to a height of fully forty feet. At times an overhanging crag fell in, creating a vast splash of fire and increased commotion.
Almost close below us there was an intermittent jet of lava, which kept cooling round what was possibly a blowhole forming a cone with an open top, which when we first saw it was about six feet high on its highest side, and about as many in diameter. Up this cone or chimney heavy jets of lava were thrown every second or two, and cooling as they fell over its edge, raised it rapidly before our eyes. Its fiery interior, and the singular sound with which the lava was vomited up, were very awful. There was no smoke rising from the lake, only a faint blue vapour which the wind carried in the opposite direction. The heat was excessive. We were obliged to stand the whole time, and the soles of our boots were burned, and my ear and one side of my face were blistered. Although there was no smoke from the lake itself, there was an awful region to the westward, of smoke and sound, and rolling clouds of steam and vapour whose phenomena it was not safe to investigate, where the blowing cones are, whose fires last night appeared stationary. We were able to stand quite near the margin, and look down into the lake, as you look into the sea from the deck of a ship, the only risk being that the fractured ledge might give way.
Before we came away, a new impulse seized the lava. The fire was thrown to a great height; the fountains and jets all wallowed together; new ones appeared, and danced joyously round the margin, then converging towards the centre they merged into one glowing mass, which upheaved itself pyramidally and disappeared with a vast plunge. Then innumerable billows of fire dashed themselves into the air, crashing and lashing, and the lake dividing itself recoiled on either side, then hurling its fires together and rising as if by upheaval from below, it surged over the temporary rim which it had formed, passing downwards in a slow majestic flow, leaving the central surface swaying and dashing in fruitless agony as if sent on some errand it failed to accomplish.
Farewell, I fear for ever, to the glorious Hale-mau-mau, the grandest type of force that the earth holds! “Break, break, break,” on through the coming years,
“No more by thee my steps shall be,
No more again for ever!”
It seemed a dull trudge over the black and awful crater, and strange, like half-forgotten sights of a world with which I had ceased to have aught to do, were the dwarf tree-ferns, the lilies with their turquoise clusters, the crimson myrtle blossoms, and all the fair things which decked the precipice up which we slowly dragged our stiff and painful limbs. Yet it was but the exchange of a world of sublimity for a world of beauty, the “place of hell,” for the bright upper earth, with its endless summer, and its perennial foliage, blossom, and fruitage.
Since writing the above I have been looking over the “Volcano Book,” which contains the observations and impressions of people from all parts of the world. Some of these are painstaking and valuable as showing the extent and rapidity of the changes which take place in the crater, but there is an immense quantity of flippant rubbish, and would-be wit, in which “Madam Pelé,” invariably occurs, this goddess, who was undoubtedly one of the grandest of heathen mythical creations, being caricatured in pencil and pen and ink, under every ludicrous aspect that can be conceived. Some of the entries are brief and absurd, “Not much of a fizz,” “a grand splutter,” “Madam Pelé in the dumps,” and so forth. These generally have English signatures. The American wit is far racier, but depends mainly on the profane use of certain passages of scripture, a species of wit which is at once easy and disgusting. People are all particular in giving the precise time of the departure from Hilo and arrival here, “making good time” being a thing much admired on Hawaii, but few can boast of more than three miles an hour. It is wonderful that people can parade their snobbishness within sight of Hale-mau-mau.
This inn is a unique and interesting place. Its existence is strikingly precarious, for the whole region is in a state of perpetual throb from earthquakes, and the sights and sounds are gruesome and awful both by day and night. The surrounding country steams and smokes from cracks and pits, and a smell of sulphur fills the air. They cook their kalo in a steam apparatus of nature’s own work just behind the house, and every drop of water is from a distillery similarly provided. The inn is a grass and bamboo house, very beautifully constructed without nails. It is a longish building with a steep roof divided inside by partitions which run up to the height of the walls. There is no ceiling. The joists which run across are concealed by wreaths of evergreens, from among which peep out here and there stars on a blue ground. The door opens from the verandah into a centre room with a large open brick fire place, in which a wood fire is constantly burning, for at this altitude the temperature is cool. Some chairs, two lounges, small tables, and some books and pictures on the walls give a look of comfort, and there is the reality of comfort in perfection. Our sleeping-place, a neat room with a matted floor opens from this, and on the other side there is a similar room, and a small eating-room with a grass cookhouse beyond, from which an obliging old Chinaman who persistently calls us “sir,” brings our food. We have had for each meal, tea, preserved milk, coffee, kalo, biscuits, butter, potatoes, goats’ flesh, and ohelos. The charge is five dollars a day, but everything except the potatoes and ohelos has to be brought twenty or thirty miles on mules’ backs. It is a very pretty picturesque house both within and without, and stands on a natural lawn of brilliant but unpalatable grass, surrounded by a light fence covered with a small trailing double rose. It is altogether a most magical building in the heart of a formidable volcanic wilderness. Mr. Gilman, our host, is a fine picturesque looking man, half Indian, and speaks remarkably good English, but his wife, a very pretty native woman, speaks none, and he attends to us entirely himself.
A party of native travellers rainbound are here, and the native women are sitting on the floor stringing flowers and berries for leis. One very attractive-looking young woman, refined by consumption, is lying on some blankets, and three native men are smoking by the fire. Upa attempts conversation with us in broken English, and the others laugh and talk incessantly. My inkstand, pen, and small handwriting amuse them very much. Miss K., the typical American travelling lady, who is encountered everywhere from the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with an indomitable energy, Spartan endurance, and a genius for attaining everything, and myself, a limp, ragged, shoeless wretch, complete the group, and our heaps of saddles, blankets, spurs, and gear tell of real travelling, past and future. It is a most picturesque sight by the light of the flickering fire, and the fire which is unquenchable burns without.
About 300 yards off there is a sulphur steam vapour-bath, highly recommended by the host as a panacea for the woeful aches, pains, and stiffness produced by the six-mile scramble through the crater, and I groaned and limped down to it: but it is a truly spasmodic arrangement, singularly independent of human control, and I have not the slightest doubt that the reason why Mr. Gilman obligingly remained in the vicinity was, lest I should be scalded or blown to atoms by a sudden freak of Kilauea, though I don’t see that he was capable of preventing either catastrophe! A slight grass shed has been built over a sulphur steam crack, and within this there is a deep box with a sliding lid and a hole for the throat, and the victim is supposed to sit in this and be steamed. But on this occasion the temperature was so high, that my hand, which I unwisely experimented upon, was immediately peeled. In order not to wound Mr. Gilman’s feelings, which are evidently sensitive on the subject of this irresponsible contrivance, I remained the prescribed time within the shed, and then managed to limp a little less, and go with him to what are called the Sulphur Banks, on which sulphurous vapour is perpetually depositing the most exquisite acicular sulphur crystals; these, as they aggregate, take entrancing forms, like the featherwork produced by the “frost-fall” in Colorado, but, like it, they perish with a touch, and can only be seen in the wonderful laboratory where they are formed.
In addition to the natives before mentioned, there is an old man here who has been a bullock-hunter on Hawaii for forty years, and knows the island thoroughly. In common with all the residents I have seen, he takes an intense interest in volcanic phenomena, and has just been giving us a thrilling account of the great eruption in 1868, when beautiful Hilo was threatened with destruction. Three weeks ago, he says, a profound hush fell on Kilauea, and the summit crater of Mauna Loa became active, and amidst throbbings, rumblings, and earthquakes, broke into such magnificence that the light was visible 100 miles at sea, a burning mountain 13,750 feet high! The fires after two days died out as suddenly, and from here we can see the great dome-like top, snow-capped under the stars, serene in an eternal winter.
I.L.B.
LETTER VI.
HILO, HAWAII, Feb. 3.My plans are quite overturned. I was to have ridden with the native mail-carrier to the north of the island to take the steamer for Honolulu, but there are freshets in the gulches on the road, making the ride unsafe. There is no steamer from Hilo for three weeks, and in the meantime Mr. and Mrs. S. have kindly consented to receive me as a boarder; and I find the people, scenery, and life so charming, that I only regret my detention on Mrs. Dexter’s account. I am already rested from the great volcano trip.
We left Kilauea at seven in the morning of the 1st Feb. in a pouring rain. The natives decorated us with leis of turquoise and coral berries, and of crimson and yellow ohia blossoms. The saddles were wet, the crater was blotted out by mist, water dripped from the trees, we splashed through pools in the rocks, the horses plunged into mud up to their knees, and the drip, drip, of vertical, earnest, tepid, tropical rain accompanied us nearly to Hilo. Upa and Miss K. held umbrellas the whole way, but I required both hands for holding on to the horse whenever he chose to gallop. As soon as we left the crater-house Upa started over the grass at full speed, my horse of course followed, and my feet being jerked out of the stirrups, I found myself ignominiously sitting on the animal’s back behind the saddle, and nearly slid over his tail, before, by skilful efforts, I managed to scramble over the peak back again, when I held on by horn and mane until the others stopped. Happily I was last, and I don’t think they saw me. Upa amused me very much on the way; he insists that I am “a high chief.” He said a good deal about Queen Victoria, whose virtues seem well known here: “Good Queen make good people,” he said, “English very good!” He asked me how many chiefs we had, and supposing him to mean hereditary peers, I replied, over 500. “Too many, too many!” he answered emphatically--“too much chief eat up people!” He asked me if all people were good in England, and I was sorry to tell him that this was very far from being the case. He was incredulous, or seemed so out of flattery, and said, “You good Queen, you Bible long time, you good!” I was surprised to find how much he knew of European politics, of the liberation of Italy, and the Franco-German war. He expressed a most orthodox horror of the Pope, who, he said, he knew from his Bible was the “Beast!” He said, “I bring band and serenade for good Queen sake,” but this has not come off yet.
We straggled into Hilo just at dusk, thoroughly wet, jaded, and satisfied, but half-starved, for the rain had converted that which should have been our lunch into a brownish pulp of bread and newspaper, and we had subsisted only on some half-ripe guavas. After the black desolation of Kilauea, I realized more fully the beauty of Hilo, as it appeared in the gloaming. The rain had ceased, cool breezes rustled through the palm-groves and sighed through the funereal foliage of the pandanus. Under thick canopies of the glossy breadfruit and banana, groups of natives were twining garlands of roses and ohiablossoms. The lights of happy foreign homes flashed from under verandahs festooned with passion-flowers, and the low chant, to me nearly intolerable, but which the natives love, mingled with the ceaseless moaning of the surf and the sighing of the breeze through the trees, and a heavy fragrance, unlike the faint sweet odours of the north, filled the evening air. It was delicious.
I suffered intensely from pain and stiffness, and was induced to try a true Hawaiian remedy, which is not only regarded as a cure for all physical ills, but as the greatest of physical luxuries; i.e. lomi-lomi. This is a compound of pinching, pounding, and squeezing, and Moi Moi, the fine old Hawaiian nurse in this family, is an adept in the art. She found out by instinct which were the most painful muscles, and subjected them to a doubly severe pounding, laughing heartily at my groans. However, I must admit that my arms and shoulders were almost altogether relieved before the lomi-lomi was finished. The first act of courtesy to a stranger in a native house is this, and it is varied in many ways. Now and then the patient lies face downwards, and children execute a sort of dance upon his spine. {95} Formerly, the chiefs, when not engaged in active pursuits, exacted lomi-lomi as a constant service from their followers.
A number of Hilo folk came in during the evening to inquire how we had sped, and for news of the volcano. I think the proximity of Kilauea gives sublimity to Hilo, and helps to lift conversation out of common-place ruts. It is no far-off spectacle, but an immediate source of wonder and apprehension, for it rocks the village with earthquakes, and renders the construction of stone houses and plastered ceilings impossible. It rolls vast tidal waves with infinite destruction on the coast, and of late years its fiery overflowings have twice threatened this paradise with annihilation. Then there is the dead volcano of Mauna Loa, from whose resurrection anything may be feared. Even last night a false rumour that a light was to be seen on its summit brought everyone out, but it was only an increased glare from the pit of Hale-mau-mau. It is most interesting to be in a region of such splendid possibilities.
I.L.B.
LETTER VII.
HILO, HAWAII.The white population here, which constitutes “society,” is very small. There are two venerable missionaries “Father Coan” and “Father Lyman,” the former pastor of a large native congregation, which, though much shrunken, is not only self-sustaining, but contributes $1200 a year to foreign missions, and the latter, though very old and frail, the indefatigable head of an industrial school for native young men. Their houses combine the trimness of New England, with the luxuriance of the tropics; they are cool retreats, embowered among breadfruit, tamarind, and bamboo, through whose graceful leafage the blue waters of the bay are visible. Innumerable exotics are domesticated round these fair homesteads. Two of “Father Lyman’s” sons are influential residents, one being the Lieutenant-Governor of the island. Other sons of former missionaries are settled here in business, and there are a few strangers who have been attracted hither. Dr. Wetmore, formerly of the mission, is a typical New Englander of the old orthodox school. It is pleasant to see him brighten into almost youthful enthusiasm on the subject of Hawaiian ferns. My host, a genial, social, intelligent American, is sheriff of Hawaii, postmaster, etc., and with his charming wife (a missionary’s daughter), and some friends who live with them, make their large house a centre of kindliness, friendliness, and hospitality. Mr. Thompson, pastor of the foreign church, is a man of very liberal culture, as well as wide sympathies. The lady principal of the Government school is a handsome, talented Vermont girl, and besides being an immense favourite, well deserves her unusual and lucrative position.
There are hardly any young ladies, and very few young men, but plenty of rosy, blooming children, who run about barefoot all the year. Besides the Hilo residents, there are some planters’ families within seven miles, who come in to sewing circles, church, etc. There is a small class of reprobate white men who have ostracized themselves by means of drink and bad morals, and are a curse to the natives. The half whites, among whom “Bill Ragsdale” is the leading spirit, are not numerous. Hilo has no carriage roads and no carriages: every one must ride or travel in a litter. People are very kind to each other. Horses, dresses, patterns, books, and articles of domestic use, are lent and borrowed continually. The smallness of the society and the close proximity are too much like a ship. People know everything about the details of each other’s daily life, income, and expenditure, and the day’s doings of each member of the little circle are matters for conversation. Indeed, were it not for the volcano and its doings, conversation might degenerate into gossip. There is an immense deal of personal talk; the wonder is that there is so little ill-nature. Not only is what everybody does here common property, but the sayings, doings, goings, comings, and purchases of every one in all the other islands are common property also, made so by letters and oral communication. It is all very amusing, and on the whole very kindly, and human interests are always interesting; but it has its perilous side. They are very kind to each other. There is no distress which is not alleviated. There is no nurse, and in cases of sickness the ladies take it by turns to wait on the sufferer by day and night for weeks, and even months. Such inevitable mutual dependence of course promotes friendliness.
The foreigners live very simply. The eating-rooms are used solely for eating, the “parlours” are always cheerful and tasteful, and the bedrooms very pretty, adorned with all manner of knick-knacks made by the ladies, who are indescribably deft with their fingers. Light Manilla matting is used instead of carpets. A Chinese man-cook, who leaves at seven in the evening, is the only servant, except in one or two cases, where, as here, a native woman condescends to come in during the day as a nurse. In the morning the ladies, in their fresh pretty wrappers and ruffled white aprons, sweep and dust the rooms, and I never saw women look more truly graceful and refined than they do, when engaged in the plain prose of these domestic duties. They make all their own dresses, and when any lady is busy and wants a dress in a hurry, two or three of them meet and make it for her. I never saw people live such easy pleasant lives. They have such good health, for one thing, partly no doubt because their domestic duties give them wholesome exercise without pressing upon them. They have abounding leisure for reading, music, choir practising, drawing, fern-printing, fancy work, picnics, riding parties, and enjoy sociability thoroughly. They usually ride in dainty bloomer costumes, even when they don’t ride astride. All the houses are pretty, and it takes little to make them so in this climate. One novel fashion is to decorate the walls with festoons of the beautiful fern Microlepia tenuifolia, which are renewed as soon as they fade, and every room is adorned with a profusion of bouquets, which are easily obtained where flowers bloom all the year. Many of the residents possess valuable libraries, and these, with cabinets of minerals, volcanic specimens, shells, and coral, with weapons, calabashes, ornaments, and cloth of native manufacture, almost furnish a room in themselves. Some of the volcanic specimens and the coral are of almost inestimable value, as well as of exquisite beauty.
The gentlemen don’t seem to have near so much occupation as the ladies. There are two stores on the beach, and at these and at the Court-house they aggregate, for lack of club-house and exchange. Business is not here a synonym for hurry, and official duties are light; so light, that in these morning hours I see the governor, the sheriff, and the judge, with three other gentlemen, playing an interminable croquet game on the Court-house lawn. They purvey gossip for the ladies, and how much they invent, and how much they only circulate can never be known!
There is a large native population in the village, along the beach, and on the heights above the Wailuku River. Frame houses with lattices, and grass houses with deep verandahs, peep out everywhere from among the mangoes and bananas. The governess of Hawaii, the Princess Keelikalani, has a house on the beach shaded by a large umbrella-tree and a magnificent clump of bamboos, 70 feet in height. The native life with which one comes constantly in contact, is very interesting.
The men do whatever hard work is done in cultivating the kalo patches and pounding the kalo. Thus kalo, the Arum esculentum, forms the national diet. A Hawaiian could not exist without his calabash of poi. The root is an object of the tenderest solicitude, from the day it is planted until the hour when it is lovingly eaten. The eating of poi seems a ceremony of profound meaning; it is like the eating salt with an Arab, or a Masonic sign. The kalo root is an ovate oblong, as bulky as a Californian beet, and it has large leaves, shaped like a broad arrow, of a singularly bright green. The best kinds grow entirely in water. The patch is embanked and frequently inundated, and each plant grows on a small hillock of puddled earth. The cutting from which it grows is simply the top of the plant, with a little of the tuber. The men stand up to their knees in water while cultivating the root. It is excellent when boiled and sliced; but the preparation of poi is an elaborate process. The roots are baked in an underground oven, and are then laid on a slightly hollowed board, and beaten with a stone pestle. It is hard work, and the men don’t wear any clothes while engaged in it. It is not a pleasant-looking operation. They often dip their hands in a calabash of water to aid them in removing the sticky mass, and they always look hot and tired. When it is removed from the board into large calabashes, it is reduced to paste by the addition of water, and set aside for two or three days to ferment. When ready for use it is either lilac or pink, and tastes like sour bookbinders’ paste. Before water is added, when it is in its dry state, it is called paiai, or hard food, and is then packed in ti leaves in 20 lb. bundles for inland carriage, and is exported to the Guano Islands. It is a prolific and nutritious plant. It is estimated that forty square feet will support an Hawaiian for a year.
The melon and kalo patches represent a certain amount of spasmodic industry, but in most other things the natives take no thought for the morrow. Why should they indeed? For while they lie basking in the sun, without care of theirs, the cocoanut, the breadfruit, the yam, the guava, the banana, and the delicious papaya, which is a compound of a ripe apricot with a Cantaloupe melon, grow and ripen perpetually. Men and women are always amusing themselves, the men with surf-bathing, the women with making leis--both sexes with riding, gossiping, and singing. Every man and woman, almost every child, has a horse. There is a perfect plague of badly bred, badly developed, weedy looking animals. The beach and the pleasant lawn above it are always covered with men and women riding at a gallop, with bare feet, and stirrups tucked between the toes. To walk even 200 yards seems considered a degradation. The people meet outside each others’ houses all day long, and sit in picturesque groups on their mats, singing, laughing, talking, and quizzing the haoles, as if the primal curse had never fallen. Pleasant sights of out-door cooking gregariously carried on greet one everywhere. This style of cooking prevails all over Polynesia. A hole in the ground is lined with stones, wood is burned within it, and when the rude oven has been sufficiently heated, the pig, chicken, breadfruit, or kalo, wrapped in ti leaves is put in, a little water is thrown on, and the whole is covered up. It is a slow but sure process.
Bright dresses, bright eyes, bright sunshine, music, dancing, a life without care, and a climate without asperities, make up the sunny side of native life as pictured at Hilo. But there are dark moral shadows, the population is shrinking away, and rumours of leprosy are afloat, so that some of these fair homes may be desolate ere long. However many causes for regret exist, one must not forget that only forty years ago the people inhabiting this strip of land between the volcanic wilderness and the sea were a vicious, sensual, shameless herd, that no man among them, except their chiefs, had any rights, that they were harried and oppressed almost to death, and had no consciousness of any moral obligations. Now, order and external decorum at least, prevail. There is not a locked door in Hilo, and nobody makes anybody else afraid.
The people of Hawaii-nei are clothed and civilized in their habits; they have equal rights; 6,500 of them have kuleanas or freeholds, equable and enlightened laws are impartially administered; wrong and oppression are unknown; they enjoy one of the best administered governments in the world; education is universal, and the throne is occupied by a liberal sovereign of their own race and election.
Few of them speak English. Their language is so easy that most of the foreigners acquire it readily. You know how stupid I am about languages, yet I have already picked up the names of most common things. There are only twelve letters, but some of these are made to do double duty, as K is also T, and L is also R. The most northern island of the group, Kauai, is as often pronounced as if it began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro. It is a very musical language. Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are none of our rasping and sibilant consonants. In their soft phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina. Each vowel is distinctly pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound. The volcano is pronounced as if spelt Keel-ah-wee-ah, and Kauai as if Kah-wye-ee. The name Owhyhee for Hawaii had its origin in a mistake, for the island was never anything but Hawaii, pronounced Hah-wye-ee, but Captain Cook mistook the prefix O, which is the sign of the nominative case, for a part of the word. Many of the names of places, specially of those compounded with wai, water, are very musical; Wailuku, “water of destruction;” Waialeale, “rippling water;” Waioli, “singing water;” Waipio, “vanquished water;” Kaiwaihae, “torn water.” Mauna, “mountain,” is a mere prefix, and though always used in naming the two giants of the Pacific, Mauna Kea, and Mauna Loa, is hardly ever applied to Hualalai, “the offspring of the shining sun;” or to Haleakala on Maui, “the house of the sun.”
I notice that the foreigners never use the English or botanical names of trees or plants, but speak of ohias, ohelos, kukui (candle-nut), lauhala (pandanus), pulu (tree fern), mamané, koa, etc. There is one native word in such universal use that I already find I cannot get on without it, pilikia. It means anything, from a downright trouble to a slight difficulty or entanglement. “I’m in a pilikia,” or “very pilikia,” or “pilikia!” A revolution would be “a pilikia.” The fact of the late king dying without naming a successor was pre-eminently a pilikia, and it would be a serious pilikia if a horse were to lose a shoe on the way to Kilauea. Hou-hou, meaning “in a huff,” I hear on all sides; and two words, makai, signifying “on the sea-side,” and mauka, “on the mountain side.” These terms are perfectly intelligible out of doors, but it is puzzling when one is asked to sit on “the mauka side of the table.” The word aloha, in foreign use, has taken the place of every English equivalent. It is a greeting, a farewell, thanks, love, goodwill. Aloha looks at you from tidies and illuminations, it meets you on the roads and at house-doors, it is conveyed to you in letters, the air is full of it. “My aloha to you,” “he sends you his aloha,” “they desire their aloha.” It already represents to me all of kindness and goodwill that language can express, and the convenience of it as compared with other phrases is, that it means exactly what the receiver understands it to mean, and consequently, in all cases can be conveyed by a third person. There is no word for “thank you.” Maikai “good,” is often useful in its place, and smiles supply the rest. There are no words which express “gratitude” or “chastity,” or some others of the virtues; and they have no word for “weather,” that which we understand by “weather” being absolutely unknown.
Natives have no surnames. Our volcano guide is Upa, or Scissors, but his wife and children are anything else. The late king was Kamehameha, or the “lonely one.” The father of the present king is called Kanaina, but the king’s name is Lunalilo, or “above all.” Nor does it appear that a man is always known by the same name, nor that a name necessarily indicates the sex of its possessor. Thus, in signing a paper the signature would be Hoapili kanaka, or Hoapili wahine, according as the signer was man or woman. I remember that in my first letter I fell into the vulgarism, initiated by the whaling crews, of calling the natives Kanakas. This is universally but very absurdly done, as Kanaka simply means man. If an Hawaiian word is absolutely necessary, we might translate native and have maole, pronounced maori, like that of the New Zealand aborigines. Kanaka is to me decidedly objectionable, as conveying the idea of canaille.
I had written thus far when Mr. Severance came in to say that a grand display of the national sport of surf-bathing was going on, and a large party of us went down to the beach for two hours to enjoy it. It is really a most exciting pastime, and in a rough sea requires immense nerve. The surf-board is a tough plank shaped like a coffin lid, about two feet broad, and from six to nine feet long, well oiled and cared for. It is usually made of the erythrina, or the breadfruit tree. The surf was very heavy and favourable, and legions of natives were swimming and splashing in the sea, though not more than forty had their Papa-he-nalu, or “wave sliding boards,” with them. The men, dressed only in malos, carrying their boards under their arms, waded out from some rocks on which the sea was breaking, and, pushing their boards before them, swam out to the first line of breakers, and then diving down were seen no more till they re-appeared as a number of black heads bobbing about like corks in smooth water half a mile from shore.
What they seek is a very high roller, on the top of which they leap from behind, lying face downwards on their boards. As the wave speeds on, and the bottom strikes the ground, the top breaks into a huge comber. The swimmers but appeared posing themselves on its highest edge by dexterous movements of their hands and feet, keeping just at the top of the curl, but always apparently coming down hill with a slanting motion. So they rode in majestically, always just ahead of the breaker, carried shorewards by its mighty impulse at the rate of forty miles an hour, yet seeming to have a volition of their own, as the more daring riders knelt and even stood on their surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries. They were always apparently on the verge of engulfment by the fierce breaker whose towering white crest was ever above and just behind them, but just as one expected to see them dashed to pieces, they either waded quietly ashore, or sliding off their boards, dived under the surf, taking advantage of the undertow, and were next seen far out at sea, preparing for fresh exploits.
The great art seems to be to mount the roller precisely at the right time, and to keep exactly on its curl just before it breaks. Two or three athletes, who stood erect on their boards as they swept exultingly shorewards, were received with ringing cheers by the crowd. Many of the less expert failed to throw themselves on the crest, and slid back into smooth water, or were caught in the combers which were fully ten feet high, and after being rolled over and over, ignominiously disappeared amidst roars of laughter, and shouts from the shore. At first I held my breath in terror, thinking the creatures were smothered or dashed to pieces, and then in a few seconds I saw the dark heads of the objects of my anxiety bobbing about behind the rollers waiting for another chance. The shore was thronged with spectators, and the presence of the elite of Hilo stimulated the swimmers to wonderful exploits.
These people are truly amphibious. Both sexes seem to swim by nature, and the children riot in the waves from their infancy. They dive apparently by a mere effort of the will. In the deep basin of the Wailuku River, a little below the Falls, the maidens swim, float, and dive with garlands of flowers round their heads and throats. The more furious and agitated the water is, the greater the excitement, and the love of these watery exploits is not confined to the young. I saw great fat men with their hair streaked with grey, balancing themselves on their narrow surf-boards, and riding the surges shorewards with as much enjoyment as if they were in their first youth. I enjoyed the afternoon thoroughly.
Is it “always afternoon” here, I wonder? The sea was so blue, the sunlight so soft, the air so sweet. There was no toil, clang, or hurry. People were all holidaymaking (if that can be where there is no work), and enjoying themselves, the surf-bathers in the sea, and hundreds of gaily-dressed men and women galloping on the beach. It was so serene and tropical. I sympathize with those who eat the lotus, and remain for ever on such enchanted shores.
I am gaining health daily, and almost live in the open air. I have hired the native policeman’s horse and saddle, and with a Macgregor flannel riding costume, which my kind friends have made for me, and a pair of jingling Mexican spurs am quite Hawaiianised. I ride alone once or twice a day exploring the neighbourhood, finding some new fern or flower daily, and abandon myself wholly to the fascination of this new existence.
I.L.B.
LETTER VIII.
ONOMEA, HAWAII. JUDGE AUSTIN’S.Mrs. A. has been ill for some time, and Mrs. S. her sister and another friend “plotted” in a very “clandestine” manner that I should come here for a few days in order to give her “a little change of society,” but I am quite sure that under this they only veil a kind wish that I should see something of plantation life. There is a plan, too, that I should take a five days’ trip to a remarkable valley called Waipio, but this is only a “castle in the air.”
Mr. A. sent in for me a capital little lean rat of a horse which by dint of spirit and activity managed to keep within sight of two large horses, ridden by Mr. Thompson, and a very handsome young lady riding “cavalier fashion,” who convoyed me out. Borrowed saddle-bags, and a couple of shingles for carrying ferns formed my outfit, and were carried behind my saddle. It is a magnificent ride here. The track crosses the deep, still, Wailuku River on a wooden bridge, and then after winding up a steep hill, among native houses fantastically situated, hangs on the verge of the lofty precipices which descend perpendicularly to the sea, dips into tremendous gulches, loses itself in the bright fern-fringed torrents which have cleft their way down from the mountains, and at last emerges on the delicious height on which this house is built.
This coast looked beautiful from the deck of the Kilauea, but I am now convinced that I have never seen anything so perfectly lovely as it is when one is actually among its details. Onomea is 600 feet high, and every yard of the ascent from Hilo brings one into a fresher and purer air. One looks up the wooded, broken slopes to a wild volcanic wilderness and the snowy peaks of Mauna Kea on one side, and on the other down upon the calm blue Pacific, wrinkled by the sweet trade-wind, till it blends in far-off loveliness with the still, blue, sky; and heavy surges break on the reefs, and fritter themselves away on the rocks, tossing their pure foam over ti and lauhala trees, and the exquisite ferns and trailers which mantle the cliffs down to the water’s edge. Here a native house stands, with passion-flowers clustering round its verandah, and the great solitary red blossoms of the hibiscus flaming out from dark surrounding leafage, and women in rose and green holukus, weaving garlands, greet us with “Aloha” as we pass. Then we come upon a whole cluster of grass houses under lauhalas and bananas. Then there is the sugar plantation of Kaiwiki, with its patches of bright green cane, its flumes crossing the track above our heads, bringing the cane down from the upland cane-fields to the crushing-mill, and the shifting, busy scenes of the sugar-boiling season.
Then the track goes down with a great dip, along which we slip and slide in the mud to a deep broad stream. This is a most picturesque spot, the junction of two clear bright rivers, and a few native houses and a Chinaman’s store are grouped close by under some palms, with the customary loungers on horseback, asking and receiving nuhou, or news, at the doors. Our accustomed horses leaped into a ferry-scow provided by Government, worked by a bearded female of hideous aspect, and leaped out on the other side to climb a track cut on the side of a precipice, which would be steep to mount on one’s own feet. There we met parties of natives, all flower-wreathed, talking and singing, coming gaily down on their sure-footed horses, saluting us with the invariable “Aloha.” Every now and then we passed native churches, with spires painted white, or a native schoolhouse, or a group of scholars all ferns and flowers. The greenness of the vegetation merits the term “dazzling.” We think England green, but its colour is poor and pale as compared with that of tropical Hawaii. Palms, candlenuts, ohias, hibiscus, were it not for their exceeding beauty, would almost pall upon one from their abundance, and each gulch has its glorious entanglement of breadfruit, the large-leaved ohia, or native apple, a species of Eugenia (Eugenia Malaccensis), and the pandanus, with its aërial roots, all looped together by large sky-blue convolvuli and the running fern, and is marvellous with parasitic growths.
The distracting beauty of this coast is what are called gulches--narrow deep ravines or gorges, from 100 to 2,000 feet in depth, each with a series of cascades from 10 to 1,800 feet in height. I dislike reducing their glories to the baldness of figures, but the depth of these clefts (originally, probably, the seams caused by fire torrents), cut and worn by the fierce streams fed by the snows of Mauna Kea, and the rains of the forest belt, cannot otherwise be expressed. The cascades are most truly beautiful, gleaming white among the dark depths of foliage far away, and falling into deep limpid basins, festooned and overhung with the richest and greenest vegetation of this prolific climate, from the huge-leaved banana and shining breadfruit to the most feathery of ferns and lycopodiums. Each gulch opens on a velvet lawn close to the sea, and most of them have space for a few grass houses, with cocoanut trees, bananas, and kalo patches. There are sixty-nine of these extraordinary chasms within a distance of thirty miles!
I think we came through eleven, fording the streams in all but two. The descent into some of them is quite alarming. You go down almost standing in your stirrups, at a right angle with the horse’s head, and up, grasping his mane to prevent the saddle slipping. He goes down like a goat, with his bare feet, looking cautiously at each step, sometimes putting out a foot and withdrawing it again in favour of better footing, and sometimes gathering his four feet under him and sliding or jumping. The Mexican saddle has great advantages on these tracks, which are nothing better than ledges cut on the sides of precipices, for one goes up and down not only in perfect security but without fatigue. I am beginning to hope that I am not too old, as I feared I was, to learn a new mode of riding, for my companions rode at full speed over places where I should have picked my way carefully at a foot’s pace; and my horse followed them, galloping and stopping short at their pleasure, and I successfully kept my seat, though not without occasional fears of an ignominious downfall. I even wish that you could see me in my Rob Roy riding dress, with leather belt and pouch, a lei of the orange seeds of the pandanus round my throat, jingling Mexican spurs, blue saddle blanket, and Rob Roy blanket strapped on behind the saddle!
This place is grandly situated 600 feet above a deep cove, into which two beautiful gulches of great size run, with heavy cascades, finer than Foyers at its best, and a native village is picturesquely situated between the two. The great white rollers, whiter by contrast with the dark deep water, come into the gulch just where we forded the river, and from the ford a passable road made for hauling sugar ascends to the house. The air is something absolutely delicious; and the murmur of the rollers and the deep boom of the cascades are very soothing. There is little rise or fall in the cadence of the surf anywhere on the windward coast, but one even sound, loud or soft, like that made by a train in a tunnel.
We were kindly welcomed, and were at once “made at home.” Delicious phrase! the full meaning of which I am learning on Hawaii, where, though everything has the fascination of novelty, I have ceased to feel myself a stranger. This is a roomy, rambling frame-house, with a verandah, and the door, as is usual here, opens directly into the sitting-room. The stair by which I go to my room suggests possibilities, for it has been removed three inches from the wall by an earthquake, which also brought down the tall chimney of the boiling-house. Close by there are small pretty frame-houses for the overseer, bookkeeper, sugar boiler, and machinist; a store, the factory, a pretty native church near the edge of the cliff, and quite a large native village below. It looks green and bright, and the atmosphere is perfect, with the cool air coming down from the mountains, and a soft breeze coming up from the blue dreamy ocean. Behind the house the uplands slope away to the colossal Mauna Kea. The actual, dense, impenetrable forest does not begin for a mile and a half from the coast, and its broad dark belt, extending to a height of 4,000 feet, and beautifully broken, throws out into greater brightness the upward glades of grass and the fields of sugar-cane.
This is a very busy season, and as this is a large plantation there is an appearance of great animation. There are five or six saddled horses usually tethered below the house; and with overseers, white and coloured, and natives riding at full gallop, and people coming on all sorts of errands, the hum of the crushing-mill, the rush of water in the flumes, and the grind of the waggons carrying cane, there is no end of stir.
The plantations in the Hilo district enjoy special advantages, for by turning some of the innumerable mountain streams into flumes the owners can bring a great part of their cane and all their wood for fuel down to the mills without other expense than the original cost of the woodwork. Mr. A. has 100 mules, but the greater part of their work is ploughing and hauling the kegs of sugar down to the cove, where in favourable weather they are put on board of a schooner for Honolulu. This plantation employs 185 hands, native and Chinese, and turns out 600 tons of sugar a year. The natives are much liked as labourers, being docile and on the whole willing; but native labour is hard to get, as the natives do not like to work for a term unless obliged, and a pernicious system of “advances” is practised. The labourers hire themselves to the planters, in the case of natives usually for a year, by a contract which has to be signed before a notary public. The wages are about eight dollars a month with food, or eleven dollars without food, and the planters supply houses and medical attendance. The Chinese are imported as coolies, and usually contract to work for five years. As a matter of policy no less than of humanity the “hands” are well treated; for if a single instance of injustice were perpetrated on a plantation the factory might stand still the next year, for hardly a native would contract to serve again.
The Chinese are quiet and industrious, but smoke opium, and are much addicted to gaming. Many of them save money, and, when their turn of service is over, set up stores, or grow vegetables for money. Each man employed has his horse, and on Saturday the hands form quite a cavalcade. Great tact, firmness, and knowledge of human nature are required in the manager of a plantation. The natives are at times disposed to shirk work without sufficient cause; the native lunas, or overseers, are not always reasonable, the Chinamen and natives do not always agree, and quarrels and entanglements arise, and everything is referred to the decision of the manager, who, besides all things else, must know the exact amount of work which ought to be performed, both in the fields and factory, and see that it is done. Mr. A. is a keen, shrewd man of business, kind without being weak, and with an eye on every detail of his plantations. The requirements are endless. It reminds me very much of plantation life in Georgia in the old days of slavery. I never elsewhere heard of so many headaches, sore hands, and other trifling ailments. It is very amusing to see the attempts which the would-be invalids make to lengthen their brief smiling faces into lugubriousness, and the sudden relaxation into naturalness when they are allowed a holiday. Mr. A. comes into the house constantly to consult his wife regarding the treatment of different ailments.
I have made a second tour through the factory, and am rather disgusted with sugar making. “All’s well that ends well,” however, and the delicate crystalline result makes one forget the initial stages of the manufacture. The cane, stripped of its leaves, passes from the flumes under the rollers of the crushing-mill, where it is subjected to a pressure of five or six tons. One hundred pounds of cane under this process yield up from sixty-five to seventy-five pounds of juice. This juice passes, as a pale green cataract, into a trough, which conducts it into a vat, where it is dosed with quicklime to neutralize its acid, and is then run off into large heated metal vessels. At this stage the smell is abominable, and the turbid fluid, with a thick scum upon it, is simply disgusting. After a preliminary heating and skimming it is passed off into iron pans, several in a row, and boiled and skimmed, and ladled from one to the other till it reaches the last, which is nearest to the fire, and there it boils with the greatest violence, seething and foaming, bringing all the remaining scum to the surface. After the concentration has proceeded far enough, the action of the heat is suspended, and the reddish-brown, oily-looking liquid is drawn into the vacuum-pan till it is about a third full; the concentration is completed by boiling the juice in vacuo at a temperature of 150°, and even lower. As the boiling proceeds, the sugar boiler tests the contents of the pan by withdrawing a few drops, and holding them up to the light on his finger; and, by certain minute changes in their condition, he judges when it is time to add an additional quantity. When the pan is full, the contents have thickened into the consistency of thick gruel by the formation of minute crystals, and are then allowed to descend into an heater, where they are kept warm till they can be run into “forms” or tanks, where they are allowed to granulate. The liquid, or molasses, which remains after the first crystallization is returned to the vacuum pan and reboiled, and this reboiling of the drainings is repeated two or three times, with a gradually decreasing result in the quality and quantity of the sugar. The last process, which is used for getting rid of the treacle, is a most beautiful one. The mass of sugar and treacle is put into what are called “centrifugal pans,” which are drums about three feet in diameter and two feet high, which make about 1,000 revolutions a minute. These have false interiors of wire gauze, and the mass is forced violently against their sides by centrifugal action, and they let the treacle whirl through, and retain the sugar crystals, which lie in a dry heap in the centre.
The cane is being flumed in with great rapidity, and the factory is working till late at night. The cane from which the juice has been expressed, called “trash,” is dried and used as fuel for the furnace which supplies the steam power. The sugar is packed in kegs, and a cooper and carpenter, as well as other mechanics, are employed.
Sugar is now the great interest of the islands. Christian missions and whaling have had their day, and now people talk sugar. Hawaii thrills to the news of a cent up or a cent down in the American market. All the interests of the kingdom are threatened by this one, which, because it is grievously depressed and staggers under a heavy import duty in the American market, is now clamorous in some quarters for “annexation,” and in others for a “reciprocity treaty,” which last means the cession of the Pearl River lagoon on Oahu, with its adjacent shores, to America, for a Pacific naval station. There are 200,000 acres of productive soil on the islands, of which only a fifteenth is under cultivation, and of this large area 150,000 is said to be specially adapted for sugar culture. Herein is a prospective Utopia, and people are always dreaming of the sugar-growing capacities of the belt of rich disintegrated lava which slopes upwards from the sea to the bases of the mountains. Hitherto, sugar growing has been a very disastrous speculation, and few of the planters at present do more than keep their heads above water.
Were labour plentiful and the duties removed, fortunes might be made; for the soil yields on an average about three times as much as that of the State of Louisiana. Two and a half tons to the acre is a common yield, five tons, a frequent one, and instances are known of the slowly matured cane of a high altitude yielding as much as seven tons! The magnificent climate makes it a very easy crop to grow. There is no brief harvest time with its rush, hurry, and frantic demand for labour, nor frost to render necessary the hasty cutting of an immature crop. The same number of hands is kept on all the year round. The planters can plant pretty much when they please, or not plant at all, for two or three years, the only difference in the latter case being that the rattoons which spring up after the cutting of the former crop are smaller in bulk. They can cut when they please, whether the cane be tasselled or not, and they can plant, cut, and grind at one time!
It is a beautiful crop in any stage of growth, especially in the tasselled stage. Every part of it is useful--the cane pre-eminently--the leaves as food for horses and mules, and the tassels for making hats. Here and elsewhere there is a plate of cut cane always within reach, and the children chew it incessantly. I fear you will be tired of sugar, but I find it more interesting than the wool and mutton of Victoria and New Zealand, and it is a most important item of the wealth of this toy kingdom, which last year exported 16,995,402 lbs. of sugar and 192,105 gallons of molasses. {121} With regard to molasses, the Government prohibits the manufacture of rum, so the planters are deprived of a fruitful source of profit. It is really difficult to tear myself from the subject of sugar, for I see the cane waving in the sun while I write, and hear the busy hum of the crushing-mill.
I.L.B.
LETTER IX.
ONOMEA, HAWAII.This is such a pleasant house and household, Mrs. A. is as bright as though she were not an invalid, and her room, except at meals, is the gathering-place of the family. The four boys are bright, intelligent beings, out of doors, barefooted, all day, and with a passion for horses, of which their father possesses about thirty. The youngest, Ephy, is the brightest child for three years old that I ever saw, but absolutely crazy about horses and mules. He talks of little else, and is constantly asking me to draw horses on his slate. He is a merry, audacious little creature, but came in this evening quite subdued. The sun was setting gloriously behind the forest-covered slopes, flooding the violet distances with a haze of gold, and, in a low voice, he said, “I’ve seen God.”
There is the usual Chinese cook, who cooks and waits and looks good-natured, and of course has his own horse, and his wife, a most minute Chinese woman, comes in and attends to the rooms and to Mrs. A., and sews and mends. She wears her native dress--a large, stiff, flat cane hat, like a tray, fastened firmly on or to her head; a scanty loose frock of blue denim down to her knees, wide trousers of the same down to her ancles, and slippers. Her hair is knotted up; she always wears silver armlets, and would not be seen without the hat for anything. There is not a bell in this or any house on the islands, and the bother of servants is hardly known, for the Chinamen do their work like automatons, and disappear at sunset. In a land where there are no carpets, no fires, no dust, no hot water needed, no windows to open and shut--for they are always open--no further service is really required. It is a simple arcadian life, and people live more happily than any that I have seen elsewhere. It is very cheerful to live among people whose faces are not soured by the east wind, or wrinkled by the worrying effort to “keep up appearances,” which deceive nobody; who have no formal visiting, but real sociability; who regard the light manual labour of domestic life as a pleasure, not a thing to be ashamed of; who are contented with their circumstances, and have leisure to be kind, cultured, and agreeable; and who live so tastefully, though simply, that they can at any time ask a passing stranger to occupy the simple guest chamber, or share the simple meal, without any of the soul-harassing preparations which often make the exercise of hospitality a thing of terror to people in the same circumstances at home.
People will ask you, “What is the food?” We have everywhere bread and biscuit made of California flour, griddle cakes with molasses, and often cracked wheat, butter not very good, sweet potatoes, boiled kalo, Irish potatoes, and poi. I have not seen fish on any table except at the Honolulu Hotel, or any meat but beef, which is hard and dry as compared with ours. We have China or Japan tea, and island coffee. Honolulu is the only place in which intoxicants are allowed to be sold; and I have not seen beer, wine, or spirits in any house. Bananas are an important article of diet, and sliced guavas, eaten with milk and sugar, are very good. The cooking is always done in detached cook houses, in and on American cooking stoves.
As to clothing. I wear my flannel riding dress for both riding and walking, and a black silk at other times. The resident ladies wear prints and silks, and the gentlemen black cloth or dark tweed suits. Flannel is not required, neither are puggarees or white hats or sunshades at any season. The changes of temperature are very slight, and there is no chill when the sun goes down. The air is always like balm; the rain is tepid and does not give cold; in summer it may be three or four degrees warmer. Windows and doors stand open the whole year. A blanket is agreeable at night, but not absolutely necessary. It is a truly delightful climate and mode of living, with such an abundance of air and sunshine. My health improves daily, and I do not consider myself an invalid.
Between working, reading aloud, talking, riding, and “loafing,” I have very little time for letter writing; but I must tell you of a delightful fern-hunting expedition on the margin of the forest that I took yesterday, accompanied by Mr. Thompson and the two elder boys. We rode in the mauka direction, outside cane ready for cutting, with silvery tassels gleaming in the sun, till we reached the verge of the forest, where an old trail was nearly obliterated by a trailing matted grass four feet high, and thousands of woody ferns, which conceal streams, holes, and pitfalls. When further riding was impossible, we tethered our horses and proceeded on foot. We were then 1,500 feet above the sea by the aneroid barometer, and the increased coolness was perceptible. The mercury is about four degrees lower for each 1,000 feet of ascent--rather more than this indeed on the windward side of the islands. The forest would be quite impenetrable were it not for the remains of wood-hauling trails, which, though grown up to the height of my shoulders, are still passable.
Underneath the green maze, invisible streams, deep down, made sweet music, sweeter even than the gentle murmur of the cool breeze among the trees. The forest on the volcano track, which I thought so tropical and wonderful a short time ago, is nothing for beauty to compare with this “garden of God.” I wish I could describe it, but cannot; and as you know only our pale, small-leaved trees, with their uniform green, I cannot say that it is like this or that. The first line of a hymn, “Oh, Paradise! oh, Paradise!” rings in my brain, and the rustic exclamation we used to hear when we were children, “Well, I never!” followed by innumerable notes of admiration, seems to exhaust the whole vocabulary of wonderment. The former cutting of some trees gives atmosphere, and the tumbled nature of the ground shows everything to the best advantage. There were openings over which huge candle-nuts, with their pea-green and silver foliage, spread their giant arms, and the light played through their branches on an infinite variety of ferns. There were groves of bananas and plantains with shiny leaves 8 feet long, like enormous hart’s-tongue, the bright-leaved noni, the dark-leaved koa, the mahogany of the Pacific; the great glossy-leaved Eugenia--a forest tree as large as our largest elms; the small-leaved ohia, its rose-crimson flowers making a glory in the forests, and its young shoots of carmine red vying with the colouring of the New England fall; and the strange lauhala hung its stiff drooping plumes, which creak in the faintest breeze; and the superb breadfruit hung its untempting fruit, and from spreading guavas we shook the ripe yellow treasures, scooping out the inside, all juicy and crimson, to make drinking cups of the rind; and there were trees that had surrendered their own lives to a conquering army of vigorous parasites which had clothed their skeletons with an unapproachable and indistinguishable beauty, and over trees and parasites the tender tendrils of great mauve morning glories trailed and wreathed themselves, and the strong, strangling stems of the ié wound themselves round the tall ohias, which supported their quaint yucca-like spikes of leaves fifty feet from the ground.
There were some superb plants of the glossy tropical-looking bird’s-nest fern, or Asplenium Nidus, which makes its home on the stems and branches of trees, and brightens the forest with its great shining fronds. I got a specimen from a koa tree. The plant had nine fronds, each one measuring from 4 feet 1 inch to 4 feet 7 inches in length, and from 7 to 9 inches in breadth. There were some very fine tree-ferns (Cibotium Chamissoi?), two of which being accessible, we measured, and found them seventeen and twenty feet high, their fronds eight feet long, and their stems four feet ten inches in circumference three feet from the ground. They showed the most various shades of green, from the dark tint of the mature frond, to the pale pea green of those which were just uncurling themselves. I managed to get up into a tree for the first time in my life to secure specimens of two beautiful parasitic ferns (Polypodium tamariscinum and P. Hymenophylloides?). I saw for the first time, too, a lygodium and the large climbing potato-fern (Polypodium spectrum), very like a yam in the distance, and the Vittaria elongata, whose long grassy fronds adorn almost every tree. The beautiful Microlepia tenuifolia abounded, and there were a few plants of the loveliest fern I ever saw (Trichomanes meifolium), in specimens of which I indulged sparingly, and almost grudgingly, for it seemed unfitting that a form of such perfect beauty should be mummied in a herbarium. There was one fern in profusion, with from 90 to 130 pair of pinnæ on each frond; and the fronds, though often exceeding five feet in length, were only two inches broad (Nephrolepis pectinata). There were many prostrate trees, which nature has entirely covered with choice ferns, specially the rough stem of the tree-fern. I counted seventeen varieties on one trunk, and on the whole obtained thirty-five specimens for my collection.
The forest soon became completely impenetrable, the beautiful Gleichenia Hawaiiensis forming an impassable network over all the undergrowth. And, indeed, without this it would have been risky to make further explorations, for often masses of wonderful matted vegetation sustained us temporarily over streams six or eight feet below, whose musical tinkle alone warned us of our peril. I shall never again see anything so beautiful as this fringe of the impassable timber belt. I enjoyed it more than anything I have yet seen; it was intoxicating, my eyes were “satisfied with seeing.” It was a dream, a rapture, this maze of form and colour, this entangled luxuriance, this bewildering beauty, through which we caught bright glimpses of a heavenly sky above, while far away, below glade and lawn, shimmered in surpassing loveliness the cool blue of the Pacific. To me, with my hatred of reptiles and insects, it is not the least among the charms of Hawaii, that these glorious entanglements and cool damp depths of a redundant vegetation give shelter to nothing of unseemly shape and venomous proboscis or fang. Here, in cool, dreamy, sunny Onomea, there are no horrid, drumming, stabbing, mosquitoes as at Honolulu, to remind me of what I forget sometimes, that I am not in Eden. {128}
I.L.B.
LETTER X.
WAIPIO VALLEY, HAWAII.There is something fearful in the isolation of this valley, open at one end to the sea, and walled in on all others by palis or precipices, from 1,000 to 2,000 feet in height, over the easiest of which hangs the dizzy track, which after trailing over the country for sixty difficult miles, connects Waipio with the little world of Hilo. The evening is very sombre, and darkness comes on early between these high walls. I am in a native house in which not a word of English is spoken, and Deborah, among her own people, has returned with zest to the exclusive use of her own tongue. This is more solitary than solitude, and tired as I am with riding and roughing it, I must console myself with writing to you. The natives, after staring and giggling for some time, took this letter out of my hand, with many exclamations, which, Deborah tells me, are at the rapidity and minuteness of my writing. I told them the letter was to my sister, and they asked if I had your picture. They are delighted with it, and it is going round a large circle assembled without. They see very few foreign women here, and are surprised that I have not brought a foreign man with me.
There was quite a bustle of small preparations before we left Onomea. Deborah was much excited, and I was not less so, for it is such a complete novelty to take a five days’ ride alone with natives. D. is a very nice native girl of seventeen, who speaks English tolerably, having been brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Austin. She was lately married to a white man employed on the plantation. Mr. A. most kindly lent me a favourite mule, but declined to state that she would not kick, or buck, or turn obstinate, or lie down in the water, all which performances are characteristic of mules. She has, however, as he expected, behaved as the most righteous of her species. Our equipment was a matter for some consideration, as I had no waterproof; but eventually I wore my flannel riding dress, and carried my plaid in front of the saddle. My saddle-bags, which were behind, contained besides our changes of clothes, a jar of Liebig’s essence of beef, some potted beef, a tin of butter, a tin of biscuits, a tin of sardines, a small loaf, and some roast yams. Deborah looked very piquante in a bloomer dress of dark blue, with masses of shining hair in natural ringlets falling over the collar, mixing with her lei of red rose-buds. She rode a powerful horse, of which she has much need, as this is the most severe road on horses on Hawaii, and it takes a really good animal to come to Waipio and go back to Hilo.
We got away at seven in bright sunshine, and D.’s husband accompanied us the first mile to see that our girths and gear were all right. It was very slippery, but my mule deftly gathered her feet under her, and slid when she could not walk. From Onomea to the place where we expected to find the guide, we kept going up and down the steep sides of ravines, and scrambling through torrents till we reached a deep and most picturesque gulch, with a primitive school-house at the bottom, and some grass-houses clustering under palms and papayas, a valley scene of endless ease and perpetual afternoon. Here we found that D.’s uncle, who was to have been our guide, could not go, because his horse was not strong enough, but her cousin volunteered his escort, and went away to catch his horse, while we tethered ours and went into the school-house.
This reminded me somewhat of the very poorest schools connected with the Edinburgh Ladies’ Highland School Association, but the teacher had a remarkable paucity of clothing, and he seemed to have the charge of his baby, which, much clothed, and indeed much muffled, lay on the bench beside him. For there were benches, and a desk, and even a blackboard and primers down in the deep wild gulch, where the music of living waters, and the thunderous roll of the Pacific, accompanied the children’s tuneless voices as they sang an Hawaiian hymn. I shall remember nothing of the scholars but rows of gleaming white teeth, and splendid brown eyes. I thought both teacher and children very apathetic. There were lamentably few, though the pretty rigidly enforced law, which compels all children between the ages of six and fifteen to attend school for forty weeks of the year, had probably gathered together all the children of the district. They all wore coloured chemises and leis of flowers. Outside, some natives presented us with some ripe papayas.
Mounting again, we were joined by two native women, who were travelling the greater part of the way hither, and this made it more cheerful for D. The elder one had nothing on her head but her wild black hair, and she wore a black holuku, a lei of the orange seeds of the pandanus, orange trousers and big spurs strapped on her bare feet. A child of four, bundled up in a black poncho, rode on a blanket behind the saddle, and was tied to the woman’s waist, by an orange shawl. The younger woman, who was very pretty, wore a sailor’s hat, leis of crimson ohia blossoms round her hat and throat, a black holuku, a crimson poncho, and one spur, and held up a green umbrella whenever it rained.
We were shortly joined by Kaluna, the cousin, on an old, big, wall-eyed, bare-tailed, raw-boned horse, whose wall-eyes contrived to express mingled suspicion and fear, while a flabby, pendant, lower lip, conveyed the impression of complete abjectness. He looked like some human beings who would be vicious if they dared, but the vice had been beaten out of him long ago, and only the fear remained. He has a raw suppurating sore under the saddle, glueing the blanket to his lean back, and crouches when he is mounted. Both legs on one side look shorter than on the other, giving a crooked look to himself and his rider, and his bare feet are worn thin as if he had been on lava. I rode him for a mile yesterday, and when he attempted a convulsive canter, with three short steps and a stumble in it, his abbreviated off legs made me feel as if I were rolling over on one side. Kaluna beats him the whole time with a heavy stick; but except when he strikes him most barbarously about his eyes and nose he only cringes, without quickening his pace. When I rode him mercifully the true hound nature came out. The sufferings of this wretched animal have been the great drawback on this journey. I have now bribed Kaluna with as much as the horse is worth to give him a month’s rest, and long before that time I hope the owl-hawks will be picking his bones.
The horse has come before the rider, but Kaluna is no nonentity. He is a very handsome youth of sixteen, with eyes which are remarkable, even in this land of splendid eyes, a straight nose, a very fine mouth, and beautiful teeth, a mass of wavy, almost curly hair, and a complexion not so brown as to conceal the mantling of the bright southern blood in his cheeks. His figure is lithe, athletic, and as pliable as if he were an invertebrate animal, capable of unlimited doublings up and contortions, to which his thin white shirt and blue cotton trousers are no impediment. He is almost a complete savage; his movements are impulsive and uncontrolled, and his handsome face looks as if it belonged to a half-tamed creature out of the woods. He talks loud, laughs incessantly, croons a monotonous chant, which sounds almost as heathenish as tom-toms, throws himself out of his saddle, hanging on by one foot, lingers behind to gather fruits, and then comes tearing up, beating his horse over the ears and nose, with a fearful yell and a prolonged sound like har-r-r-ouche, striking my mule and threatening to overturn me as he passes me on the narrow track. He is the most thoroughly careless and irresponsible being I ever saw, reckless about the horses, reckless about himself, without any manners or any obvious sense of right and propriety. In his mouth this musical tongue becomes as harsh as the speech of a cocatoo or parrot. His manner is familiar. He rides up to me, pokes his head under my hat, and says, interrogatively, “Cold!” by which I understand that the poor boy is shivering himself. In eating he plunges his hand into my bowl of fowl, or snatches half my biscuit. Yet I daresay he means well, and I am thoroughly amused with him, except when he maltreats his horse.
It is a very strange life going about with natives, whose ideas, as shown by their habits, are, to say the least of it, very peculiar. Deborah speaks English fairly, having been brought up by white people, and is a very nice girl. But were she one of our own race I should not suppose her to be more than eleven years old, and she does not seem able to understand my ideas on any subject, though I can be very much interested and amused with hearing hers.
We had a perfect day until the middle of the afternoon. The dimpling Pacific was never more than a mile from us as we kept the narrow track in the long green grass; and on our left the blunt snow-patched peaks of Mauna Kea rose from the girdle of forest, looking so delusively near that I fancied a two-hours’ climb would take us to his lofty summit. The track for twenty-six miles is just in and out of gulches, from 100 to 800 feet in depth, all opening on the sea, which sweeps into them in three booming rollers. The candle-nut or kukui (aleurites triloba) tree, which on the whole predominates, has leaves of a rich deep green when mature, which contrast beautifully with the flaky silvery look of the younger foliage. Some of the shallower gulches are filled exclusively with this tree, which in growing up to the light to within 100 feet of the top, presents a mass and density of leafage quite unique, giving the gulch the appearance as if billows of green had rolled in and solidified there. Each gulch has some specialty of ferns and trees, and in such a distance as sixty miles they vary considerably with the variations of soil, climate, and temperature. But everywhere the rocks, trees, and soil are covered and crowded with the most exquisite ferns and mosses, from the great tree-fern, whose bright fronds light up the darker foliage, to the lovely maiden-hair and graceful selaginellas which are mirrored in pools of sparkling water. Everywhere, too, the great blue morning glory opened to a heaven not bluer than itself.
The descent into the gulches is always solemn. You canter along a bright breezy upland, and are suddenly arrested by a precipice, and from the depths of a forest abyss a low plash or murmur rises, or a deep bass sound, significant of water which must be crossed, and one reluctantly leaves the upper air to plunge into heavy shadow, and each experience increases one’s apprehensions concerning the next. Though in some gulches the kukui preponderates, in others the lauhala whose aërial roots support it in otherwise impossible positions, and in others the sombre ohia, yet there were some grand clefts in which nature has mingled her treasures impartially, and out of cool depths of ferns rose the feathery coco-palm, the glorious breadfruit, with its green melon-like fruit, the large ohia, ideal in its beauty,--the most gorgeous flowering tree I have ever seen, with spikes of rose-crimson blossoms borne on the old wood, blazing among its shining many-tinted leafage,--the tall papaya with its fantastic crown, the profuse gigantic plantain, and innumerable other trees, shrubs, and lianas, in the beauty and bounteousness of an endless spring. Imagine my surprise on seeing at the bottom of one gulch, a grove of good-sized, dark-leaved, very handsome trees, with an abundance of smooth round green fruit upon them, and on reaching them finding that they were orange trees, their great size, far exceeding that of the largest at Valencia, having prevented me from recognizing them earlier! In another, some large shrubs with oval, shining, dark leaves, much crimped at the edges, bright green berries along the stalks, and masses of pure white flowers lying flat, like snow on evergreens, turned out to be coffee! The guava with its obtuse smooth leaves, sweet white blossoms on solitary axillary stalks, and yellow fruit was universal. The novelty of the fruit, foliage, and vegetation is an intense delight to me. I should like to see how the rigid aspect of a coniferous tree, of which there is not one indigenous to the islands, would look by contrast. We passed through a long thicket of sumach, an exotic from North America, which still retains its old habit of shedding its leaves, and its grey, wintry, desolate-looking branches reminded me that there are less-favoured parts of the world, and that you are among mist, cold, murk, slush, gales, leaflessness, and all the dismal concomitants of an English winter.
It is wonderful that people should have thought of crossing these gulches on anything with four legs. Formerly, that is, within the last thirty years, the precipices could only be ascended by climbing with the utmost care, and descended by being lowered with ropes from crag to crag, and from tree to tree, when hanging on by the hands became impracticable to even the most experienced mountaineer. In this last fashion Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyons were let down to preach the gospel to the people of the then populous valleys. But within recent years, narrow tracks, allowing one horse to pass another, have been cut along the sides of these precipices, without any windings to make them easier, and only deviating enough from the perpendicular to allow of their descent by the sure-footed native-born animals. Most of them are worn by water and animals’ feet, broken, rugged, jagged, with steps of rock sometimes three feet high, produced by breakage here and there. Up and down these the animals slip, jump, and scramble, some of them standing still until severely spurred, or driven by some one from behind. Then there are softer descents, slippery with damp, and perilous in heavy rains, down which they slide dexterously, gathering all their legs under them. On a few of these tracks a false step means death, but the vegetation which clothes the pali below, blinds one to the risk. I don’t think anything would induce me to go up a swinging zigzag--up a terrible pali opposite to me as I write, the sides of which are quite undraped.
All the gulches for the first twenty-four miles contain running water. The great Hakalau gulch we crossed early yesterday, has a river with a smooth bed as wide as the Thames at Eton. Some have only small quiet streams, which pass gently through ferny grottoes. Others have fierce strong torrents dashing between abrupt walls of rock, among immense boulders into deep abysses, and cast themselves over precipice after precipice into the ocean. Probably, many of these are the courses of fire torrents, whose jagged masses of a-a have since been worn smooth, and channelled into holes by the action of water. A few are crossed on narrow bridges, but the majority are forded, if that quiet conventional term can be applied to the violent flounderings by which the horses bring one through. The transparency deceives them, and however deep the water is, they always try to lift their fore feet out of it, which gives them a disagreeable rolling motion. (Mr. Brigham in his valuable monograph on the Hawaiian volcanoes quoted below, {138} appears as much impressed with these gulches as I am.)
We lunched in one glorious valley, and Kaluna made drinking cups which held fully a pint, out of the beautiful leaves of the Arum esculentum. Towards afternoon turbid-looking clouds lowered over the sea, and by the time we reached the worst pali of all, the south side of Laupahoehoe, they burst on us in torrents of rain accompanied by strong wind. This terrible precipice takes one entirely by surprise. Kaluna, who rode first, disappeared so suddenly that I thought he had gone over. It is merely a dangerous broken ledge, and besides that it looks as if there were only foothold for a goat, one is dizzied by the sight of the foaming ocean immediately below, and, when we actually reached the bottom, there was only a narrow strip of shingle between the stupendous cliff and the resounding surges, which came up as if bent on destruction. The path by which we descended looked a mere thread on the side of the precipice. I don’t know what the word beetling means, but if it means anything bad, I will certainly apply it to that pali.
A number of disastrous-looking native houses are clustered under some very tall palms in the open part of the gulch, but it is a most wretched situation; the roar of the surf is deafening, the scanty supply of water is brackish, there are rumours that leprosy is rife, and the people are said to be the poorest on Hawaii. We were warned that we could not spend a night comfortably there, so wet, tired, and stiff, we rode on another six miles to the house of a native called Bola-Bola, where we had been instructed to remain. The rain was heavy and ceaseless, and the trail had become so slippery that our progress was much retarded. It was a most unpropitious-looking evening, and I began to feel the painful stiffness arising from prolonged fatigue in saturated clothes. I indulged in various imaginations as we rode up the long ascent leading to Bola-Bola’s, but this time they certainly were not of sofas and tea, and I never aspired to anything beyond drying my clothes by a good fire, for at Hilo some people had shrugged their shoulders, and others had laughed mysteriously at the idea of our sleeping there, and some had said it was one of the worst of native houses.
A single glance was enough. It was a dilapidated frame-house, altogether forlorn, standing unsheltered on a slope of the mountain, with one or two yet more forlorn grass piggeries, which I supposed might be the cook house, and eating-house near it.
A prolonged har-r-r-rouche from Kaluna brought out a man with a female horde behind him, all shuffling into clothes as we approached, and we stiffly dismounted from the wet saddles in which we had sat for ten hours, and stiffly hobbled up into the littered verandah, the water dripping from our clothes, and squeezing out of our boots at every step. Inside there was one room about 18 x 14 feet, which looked as if the people had just arrived and had thrown down their goods promiscuously. There were mats on the floor not over clean, and half the room was littered and piled with mats rolled up, boxes, bamboos, saddles, blankets, lassos, cocoanuts, kalo roots, bananas, quilts, pans, calabashes, bundles of hard poi in ti leaves, bones, cats, fowls, clothes. A frightful old woman, looking like a relic of the old heathen days, with bristling grey hair cut short, her body tattooed all over, and no clothing but a ragged blanket huddled round her shoulders; a girl about twelve, with torrents of shining hair, and a piece of bright green calico thrown round her, and two very good-looking young women in rose-coloured chemises, one of them holding a baby, were squatting and lying on the mats, one over another, like a heap of savages.
When the man found that we were going to stay all night he bestirred himself, dragged some of the things to one side and put down a shake-down of pulu(the silky covering of the fronds of one species of tree-fern), with a sheet over it, and a gay quilt of orange and red cotton. There was a thin printed muslin curtain to divide off one half of the room, a usual arrangement in native houses. He then helped to unsaddle the horses, and the confusion of the room was increased by a heap of our wet saddles, blankets, and gear. All this time the women lay on the floor and stared at us.
Rheumatism seemed impending, for the air up there was chilly, and I said to Deborah that I must make some change in my dress, and she signed to Kaluna, who sprang at my soaked boots and pulled them off, and my stockings too, with a savage alacrity which left it doubtful for a moment whether he had not also pulled off my feet! I had no means of making any further change except putting on a wrapper over my wet clothes.
Meanwhile the man killed and boiled a fowl, and boiled some sweet potato, and when these untempting viands, and a calabash of poi were put before us, we sat round them and eat; I with my knife, the others with their fingers. There was some coffee in a dirty bowl. The females had arranged a row of pillows on their mat, and all lay face downwards, with their chins resting upon them, staring at us with their great brown eyes, and talking and laughing incessantly. They had low sensual faces, like some low order of animal. When our meal was over, the man threw them the relics, and they soon picked the bones clean. It surprised me that after such a badly served meal the man brought a bowl of water for our hands, and something intended for a towel.
By this time it was dark, and a stone, deeply hollowed at the top, was produced, containing beef fat and a piece of rag for a wick, which burned with a strong flaring light. The women gathered themselves up and sat round a large calabash of poi, conveying the sour paste to their mouths with an inimitable twist of the fingers, laying their heads back and closing their eyes with a look of animal satisfaction. When they had eaten they lay down as before, with their chins on their pillows, and again the row of great brown eyes confronted me. Deborah, Kaluna, and the women talked incessantly in loud shrill voices till Kaluna uttered the word auwé with a long groaning intonation, apparently signifying weariness, divested himself of his clothes and laid down on a mat alongside our shake-down, upon which we let down the dividing curtain and wrapped ourselves up as warmly as possible.
I was uneasy about Deborah who had had a cough for some time, and consequently took the outside place under the window which was broken, and presently a large cat jumped through the hole and down upon me, followed by another and another, till five wild cats had effected an entrance, making me a stepping-stone to ulterior proceedings. Had there been a sixth I think I could not have borne the infliction quietly. Strips of jerked beef were hanging from the rafters, and by the light which was still burning I watched the cats climb up stealthily, seize on some of these, descend, and disappear through the window, making me a stepping-stone as before, but with all their craft they let some of the strips fall, which awoke Deborah, and next I saw Kaluna’s magnificent eyes peering at us under the curtain. Then the natives got up, and smoked and eat more poi at intervals, and talked, and Kaluna and Deborah quarrelled, jokingly, about the time of night she told me, and the moon through the rain-clouds occasionally gave us delusive hopes of dawn, and I kept moving my place to get out of the drip from the roof, and so the night passed. I was amused all the time, though I should have preferred sleep to such nocturnal diversions. It was so new, and so odd, to be the only white person among eleven natives in a lonely house, and yet to be as secure from danger and annoyance as in our own home.
At last a pale dawn did appear, but the rain was still coming down heavily, and our poor animals were standing dismally with their heads down and their tails turned towards the wind. Yesterday evening I took a change of clothes out of the damp saddle-bags, and put them into what I hoped was a dry place, but they were soaked, wetter even than those in which I had been sleeping, and my boots and Deborah’s were so stiff, that we gladly availed ourselves of Kaluna’s most willing services. The mode of washing was peculiar: he held a calabash with about half-a-pint of water in it, while we bathed our faces and hands, and all the natives looked on and tittered. This was apparently his idea of politeness, for no persuasion would induce him to put the bowl down on the mat, and Deborah evidently thought it was proper respect. We had a repetition of the same viands as the night before for breakfast, and, as before, the women lay with their chins on their pillows and stared at us.
The rain ceased almost as soon as we started, and though it has not been a bright day, it has been very pleasant. There are no large gulches on to-day’s journey. The track is mostly through long grass, over undulating uplands, with park-like clumps of trees, and thickets of guava and the exotic sumach. Different ferns, flowers, and vegetation, with much less luxuriance and little water, denoted a drier climate and a different soil. There are native churches at distances of six or seven miles all the way from Hilo, but they seem too large and too many for the scanty population.
We moved on in single file at a jog-trot wherever the road admitted of it, meeting mounted natives now and then, which led to a delay for the exchange of nuhou; and twice we had to turn into the thicket to avoid what here seems to be considered a danger. There are many large herds of semi-wild bullocks on the mountains, branded cattle, as distinguished from the wild or unbranded, and when they are wanted for food, a number of experienced vaccheros on strong shod horses go up, and drive forty or fifty of them down. We met such a drove bound for Hilo, with one or two men in front and others at the sides and behind, uttering loud shouts. The bullocks are nearly mad with being hunted and driven, and at times rush like a living tornado, tearing up the earth with their horns. As soon as the galloping riders are seen and the crooked-horned beasts, you retire behind a screen. There must be some tradition of some one having been knocked down and hurt, for reckless as the natives are said to be, they are careful about this, and we were warned several times by travellers whom we met, that there were “bullocks ahead.” The law provides that the vaccheros shall station one of their number at the head of a gulch to give notice when cattle are to pass through.
We jogged on again till we met a native who told us that we were quite close to our destination; but there were no signs of it, for we were still on the lofty uplands, and the only prominent objects were huge headlands confronting the sea. I got off to walk, as my mule seemed footsore, but had not gone many yards when we came suddenly to the verge of a pali, about 1,000 feet deep, with a narrow fertile valley below, with a yet higher pali on the other side, both abutting perpendicularly on the sea. I should think the valley is not more than three miles long, and it is walled in by high inaccessible mountains. It is in fact, a gulch on a vastly enlarged scale. The prospect below us was very charming, a fertile region perfectly level, protected from the sea by sandhills, watered by a winding stream, and bright with fishponds, meadow lands, kalo patches, orange and coffee groves, figs, breadfruit, and palms. There were a number of grass-houses, and a native church with a spire, and another up the valley testified to the energy and aggressiveness of Rome. We saw all this from the moment we reached the pali; and it enlarged, and the detail grew upon us with every yard of the laborious descent of broken craggy track, which is the only mode of access to the valley from the outer world. I got down on foot with difficulty; a difficulty much increased by the long rowels of my spurs, which caught on the rocks and entangled my dress, the simple expedient of taking them off not having occurred to me!
A neat frame-house, with large stones between it and the river, was our destination. It belongs to a native named Halemanu, a great man in the district, for, besides being a member of the legislature, he is deputy sheriff. He is a man of property, also; and though he cannot speak a word of English, he is well educated in Hawaiian, and writes an excellent hand. I brought a letter of introduction to him from Mr. Severance, and we were at once received with every hospitality, our horses cared for, and ourselves luxuriously lodged. We walked up the valley before dark to get a view of a cascade, and found supper ready on our return. This is such luxury after last night. There is a very light bright sitting-room, with papered walls, and manilla matting on the floor, a round centre table with books and a photographic album upon it, two rocking-chairs, an office-desk, another table and chairs, and a Canadian lounge. I can’t imagine in what way this furniture was brought here. Our bedroom opens from this, and it actually has a four-post bedstead with mosquito bars, a lounge and two chairs, and the floor is covered with native matting. The washing apparatus is rather an anomaly, for it consists of a basin and crash towel placed in the verandah, in full view of fifteen people. The natives all bathe in the river.
Halemanu has a cook house and native cook, and an eating-room, where I was surprised to find everything in foreign style--chairs, a table with a snow white cover, and table napkins, knives, forks, and even salt-cellars. I asked him to eat with us, and he used a knife and fork quite correctly, never, for instance, putting the knife into his mouth. I was amused to see him afterwards, sitting on a mat among his family and dependants, helping himself to poifrom a calabash with his fingers. He gave us for supper delicious river fish fried, boiled kalo, and Waipio coffee with boiled milk.
It is very annoying only to be able to converse with this man through an interpreter; and Deborah, as is natural, is rather unwilling to be troubled to speak English, now that she is among her own people. After supper we sat by candlelight in the parlour, and he showed me his photograph album. At eight he took a large Bible, put on glasses, and read a chapter in Hawaiian; after which he knelt and prayed with profound reverence of manner and tone. Towards the end I recognized the Hawaiian words for “Our Father.” {148} Here in Waipio there is something pathetic in the idea of this Fatherhood, which is wider than the ties of kin and race. Even here not one is a stranger, an alien, a foreigner! And this man, so civilized and Christianized, only now in middle life, was, he said, “a big boy when the first teachers came,” and may very likely have witnessed horrors in the heiau, or temple, close by, of which little is left now.
This bedroom is thoroughly comfortable. Kaluna wanted to sleep on the lounge here, probably because he is afraid of akuas, or spirits, but we have exiled him to a blanket on the parlour lounge.
I.L.B.
LETTER X.--(continued.)
We were thoroughly rested this morning, and very glad of a fine day for a visit to the great cascade which is rarely seen by foreigners. My mule was slightly galled with the girth, and having a strong fellow feeling with Elisha’s servant, “Alas, master, for it was borrowed!” I have bought for $20 a pretty, light, half-broken bay mare, which I rode to-day and liked much.After breakfast, which was a repetition of last night’s supper, we three, with Halemanu’s daughter as guide, left on horseback for the waterfall, though the natives tried to dissuade us by saying that stones came down, and it was dangerous; also that people could not go in their clothes, there was so much wading. In deference to this last opinion, D. rode without boots, and I without stockings. We rode through the beautiful valley till we reached a deep gorge turning off from it, which opens out into a nearly circular chasm with walls 2,000 feet in height, where we tethered our horses. A short time after leaving them, D. said, “She says we can’t go further in our clothes,” but when the natives saw me plunge boldly into the river in my riding dress, which is really not unlike a fashionable Newport bathing suit, they thought better of it. It was a thoroughly rough tramp, wading ten times through the river, which was sometimes up to our knees, and sometimes to our waists, and besides the fighting among slippery rocks in rushing water, we had to crawl and slide up and down wet, mossy masses of dislodged rock, to push with eyes shut through wet jungles of Indian shot, guava, and a thorny vine, and sometimes to climb from tree to tree at a considerable height. When, after an hour’s fighting we arrived in sight of the cascade, but not of the basin into which it falls, our pretty guide declined to go further, saying that the wind was rising, and that stones would fall and kill us, but being incredulous on this point, I left them, and with great difficulty and many bruises, got up the river to its exit from the basin, and there, being unable to climb the rocks on either side, stood up to my throat in the still tepid water till the scene became real to me.
I do not care for any waterfall but Niagara, nor do I care in itself for this one, for though its first leap is 200 feet and its second 1,600, it is so frittered away and dissipated in spray, owing to the very magnitude of its descent, that there is no volume of water within sight to create mass or sound. But no words can paint the majesty of the surroundings, the caverned, precipitous walls of rock coming down in one black plunge from the blue sky above to the dark abyss of water below, the sullen shuddering sound with which pieces of rock came hurtling down among the trees, the thin tinkle of the water as it falls, the full rush of the river, the feathery growth of ferns, gigantic below, but so diminished by the height above, as only to show their presence by the green tinge upon the rocks, while in addition to the gloom produced by the stupendous height of the cliffs, there is a cool, green darkness of dense forest, and mighty trees of strange tropical forms glass themselves in the black mirror of the basin. For one moment a ray of sunshine turned the upper part of the spray into a rainbow, and never to my eyes had the bow of promise looked so heavenly as when it spanned the black, solemn, tree-shadowed abyss, whose deep, still waters only catch a sunbeam on five days of the year.
I found the natives regaling themselves on papaya, and on live fresh-water shrimps, which they find in great numbers in the river. I remembered that white people at home calling themselves civilized, eat live, or at least raw, oysters, but the sight of these active, squirming shrimps struggling between the white teeth of my associates was yet more repulsive.
We finished our adventurous expedition with limbs much bruised, as well as torn and scratched, and before we emerged from the chasm saw a rock dislodged, which came crashing down not far from us, carrying away an ohia. It is a gruesome and dowie den, but well worth a visit.
We mounted again, and rode as far as we could up the valley, fording the river in deep water several times, and coming down the other side. The coffee trees in full blossom were very beautiful, and they, as well as the oranges, have escaped the blight which has fallen upon both in other parts of the island. In addition to the usual tropical productions, there were some very fine fig trees and thickets of the castor-oil plant, a very handsome shrub, when, as here, it grows to a height of from ten to twenty-two feet. The natives, having been joined by some Waipio women, rode at full gallop over all sorts of ground, and I enjoyed the speed of my mare without any apprehension of being thrown off. We rode among most extensive kalo plantations, and large artificial fish-ponds, in which hundreds of gold-fish were gleaming, and came back by the sea shore, green with the maritime convolvulus, and the smooth-bottomed river, which the Waipio folk use as a road. Canoes glide along it, brown-skinned men wade down it floating bundles of kalo after them, and strings of laden horses and mules follow each other along its still waters. I hear that in another and nearly unapproachable valley, a river serves the same purpose. While we were riding up it, a great gust lifted off its surface in fine spray, and almost blew us from our horses. Hawaii has no hurricanes, but at some hours of the day Waipio is subject to terrific gusts, which really justify the people in their objection to visiting the cascade. Some time ago, in one of these, this house was lifted up, carried twenty feet, and deposited in its present position.
Supper was ready for us--kalo, yams, spatchcock, poi, coffee, rolls, and Oregon kippered salmon; and when I told Halemanu that the spatchcock and salmon reminded me of home, he was quite pleased, and said he would provide the same for breakfast to-morrow.
The owner of the mare, which I have named “Bessie Twinker,” had willingly sold her to me, though I told him I could not pay him for her until I reached Onomea. I do not know what had caused my credit to suffer during my absence, but D., after talking long with him this evening, said to me, “He says he can’t let you have the horse, because when you’ve taken it away, he thinks you will never send him the money.” I told her indignantly to tell him that English women never cheated people, a broad and totally unsustainable assertion, which had the effect of satisfying the poor fellow.
After Halemanu, Deborah, Kaluna, and a number of natives had eaten their poi, Halemanu brought in a very handsome silver candlestick, and expressed a wish that Deborah should interpret for us. He asked a great many sensible questions about England, specially about the state of the poor, the extent of the franchise, and the influence of religion. When he heard that I had spent some years in Scotland, he said, “Do you know Mr. Wallace?” I was quite puzzled, and tried to recall any man of that name who I had heard of as having visited Hawaii, when a happy flash of comprehension made me aware of his meaning, and I replied that I had seen his sword several times, but that he died long before I knew Scotland, and indeed before I was born; but that the Scotch held his memory in great veneration, and were putting up a monument to him. But for the mistake as to dates, he seemed to have the usual notions as to the exploits of Wallace. He deplores most deeply the dwindling of his people, and his manner became very sad about it. D. said, “He’s very unhappy; he says, soon there will be no more Kanakas.” He told me that this beautiful valley was once very populous, and even forty years ago, when Mr. Ellis visited it, there were 1,300 people here. Now probably there are not more than 200.
Here was the Puhonua, or place of refuge for all this part of the island. This, and the very complete one of Honaunau, on the other side of Hawaii, were the Hawaiian “Cities of Refuge.” Could any tradition of the Mosaic ordinance on this subject have travelled hither? These two sanctuaries were absolutely inviolable. The gates stood perpetually open, and though the fugitive was liable to be pursued to their very threshold, he had no sooner crossed it than he was safe from king, chief, or avenger. These gates were wide, and some faced the sea, and others the mountains. Hither the murderer, the manslayer, the tabu-breaker fled, repaired to the presence of the idol, and thanked it for aiding him to reach the place of security. After a certain time the fugitives were allowed to return to their families, and none dared to injure those to whom the high gods had granted their protection.
In time of war, tall spears from which white flags were unfurled, were placed at each end of the enclosure, and until the proclamation of peace invited the vanquished to enter. These flags were fixed a short distance outside the walls, and no pursuing warrior, even in the hot flush of victory, could pursue his routed foe one foot beyond. Within was the sacred pale of pahu tabu, and anyone attempting to strike his victim there would have been put to death by the priests and their adherents. In war time the children, old people, and many of the women of the neighbouring districts, were received within the enclosure, where they awaited the issue of the conflict in security, and were safe from violence in the event of defeat. These puhonuas contain pieces of stone weighing from two to three tons, raised six feet from the ground, and the walls, narrowing gradually towards the top, are fifteen feet wide at the base and twelve feet high. They are truly grand monuments of humanity in the midst of the barbarous institutions of heathenism, and it shows a considerable degree of enlightenment that even rebels in arms and fugitives from invading armies were safe, if they reached the sacred refuge, for the priests of Keaweknew no distinctions of party.
In dreadful contrast to this place of mercy, there were some very large heiaus (or temples) here, on whose hideous altars eighty human sacrifices are said to have been offered at one time. One of the legends told me concerning this lovely valley is, that King Umi, having vanquished the kings of the six divisions of Hawaii, was sacrificing captives in one of these heiaus, when the voice of his god, Kuahilo, was heard from the clouds, demanding more slaughter. Fresh human blood streamed from the altars, but the insatiable demon continued to call for more, till Umi had sacrificed all the captives and all his own men but one, whom he at first refused to give up, as he was a great favourite, but Kuahilo thundered from heaven, till the favourite warrior was slain, and only the king and the sacrificing priest remained.
This valley of the “vanquished waters” abounds in legends. Some of these are about a cruel monster, King Hooku, who lived here, and whose memory, so far as he is remembered, is much execrated. It is told of him that if a man were said to have a handsome head he sent some of his warriors to behead him, and then hacked and otherwise disfigured the face for a diversion. On one occasion he ordered a man’s arm to be cut off and brought to him, simply because it was said to be more beautifully tattooed than his own. It is fifty-four years since the last human sacrifice was exposed on the Waipio altars, but there are several old people here who must have been at least thirty when Hawaii threw off idolatry for ever. Halemanu has again closed the evening with the simple worship of the true God.
I.L.B.
LETTER XI.
HILO, HAWAII.There is a rumour that the king is coming as the guest of Admiral Pennock in the Benicia. If it turns out to be true, it will turn our quiet life upside down.
We met with fearful adventures in the swollen gulches between Laupahoehoe and Onomea. It is difficult to begin my letter with the plain prose of our departure from Waipio, which we accomplished on the morning after I last wrote. On rising after a sound sleep, I found that my potted beef, which I had carefully hung from a nail the night before, had been almost carried away by small ants. These ants swarm in every house on low altitudes. They assemble in legions as if by magic, and by their orderly activity carry away all that they do not devour, of all eatables which have not been placed on tables which have rags dipped in a solution of corrosive sublimate wound round their legs.
We breakfasted by lamplight, and because I had said that some of the viands reminded me of home, our kind host had provided them at that early hour. He absolutely refused to be paid anything for the accommodation of our party, and said he should be ashamed of himself if he took anything from a lady travelling without a husband.
It was such a perfect morning. The full moon hung over the enclosing palis, gleaming on coffee and breadfruit groves, and on the surface of the river, which was just quivering under a soft sea breeze. The dew was heavy, smoke curled idly from native houses, the east was flushing with the dawn, and the valley looked the picture of perfect peace. A number of natives assembled to see us start, and they all shook hands with us, exchanging alohas, and presenting us with leis of roses and ohias. D. looked very pretty with a red hibiscus blossom in her shining hair. You would have been amused to see me shaking hands with men dressed only in malos, or in the short blue shirt reaching to the waist, much worn by them when at work.
I rode my mare with some pride of proprietorship, and our baggage for a time was packed on the mule, and we started up the tremendous pali at the tail of a string of twenty mules and horses laden with kalo. This was in the form of paiai, or hard food, which is composed, as I think I mentioned before, of the root baked and pounded, but without water. It is put up in bundles wrapped in ti leaves, of from twenty to thirty pounds each, secured with cocoanut fibre, in which state it will keep for months, and much of the large quantity raised in Waipio is exported to the plantations, the Waimea ranches, and the neighbouring districts. A square mile of kalo, it is estimated, would feed 15,000 Hawaiians for a year.
It was a beautiful view from the top of the pali. The white moon was setting, the earliest sunlight was lighting up the dewy depths of the lonely valley, reddening with a rich rose red the huge headland which forms one of its sentinels; heavy snow had fallen during the night on Mauna Kea, and his great ragged dome, snow-covered down to the forests, was blushing like an Alpine peak at the touch of the early sun. It ripened into a splendid joyous day, which redeemed the sweeping uplands of Hamakua from the dreariness which I had thought belonged to them. There was a fresh sea-breeze, and the sun, though unclouded, was not too hot. We halted for an early lunch at the clean grass-house we had stopped at before, and later in the afternoon at that of the woman with whom we had ridden from Hakalau, who received us very cordially, and regaled us with poi and pork.
In order to avoid the amenities of Bola Bola’s we rode thirty-four miles, and towards evening descended the tremendous steep, which leads to the surf-deafened village of Laupahoehoe. Halemanu had given me a note of introduction to a widow named Honolulu, which Deborah said began thus, “As I know that you have the only clean house in L,” and on presenting it we were made very welcome. Besides the widow, a very redundant beauty, there were her two brothers and two male cousins, and all bestirred themselves in our service, the men in killing and cooking the supper, and the woman in preparing the beds. It was quite a large room, with doors at the end and side, and fully a third was curtained off by a calico curtain, with a gorgeous Crétonne pattern upon it. I was delighted to see a four-post bed, with mosquito bars, and a clean pulu mattrass, with a linen sheet over it, covered with a beautiful quilt with a quaint arabesque pattern on a white ground running round it, and a wreath of green leaves in the centre. The native women exercise the utmost ingenuity in the patterns and colours of these quilts. Some of them are quite works of art. The materials, which are plain and printed cottons, cost about $8, and a complete quilt is worth from $18 to $50. The widow took six small pillows, daintily covered with silk, out of a chest, the uses of which were not obvious, as two large pillows were already on the bed. It was astonishing to see a native house so handsomely furnished in so poor a place. The mats on the floor were numerous and very fine. There were two tables, several chairs, a bureau with a swinging mirror upon it, a basin, crash towels, a carafe and a kerosene lamp. It is all very well to be able to rough it, and yet better to enjoy doing so, but such luxuries add much to one’s contentment after eleven hours in the saddle.
Honolulu wore a green chemise at first, but when supper was ready she put a Macgregor tartan holuku over it. The men were very active, and cooked the fowl in about the same time that it takes to pluck one at home. They spread the finest mat I have seen in the centre of the floor as a tablecloth, and put down on it bowls containing the fowl and sweet potatoes, and the unfailing calabash of poi. Tea, coffee and milk were not procurable, and as the water is slimy and brackish, I offered a boy a dime to get me a cocoanut, and presently eight great, misshapen things were rolled down at the door. The outside is a smooth buff rind, underneath which is a fibrous covering, enormously strong and about an inch thick, which when stripped off reveals the nut as we see it, but of a very pale colour. Those we opened were quite young, and each contained nearly three tumblers of almost effervescent, very sweet, slightly acidulated, perfectly limpid water, with a strong flavour of cocoanut. It is a delicious beverage. The meat was so thin and soft that it could have been spooned out like the white of an egg if we had had any spoons. We all sat cross-legged round our meal, and all Laupahoehoe crowded into the room and verandah with the most persistent, unwinking, gimleting stare I ever saw. It was really unpleasant, not only to hear a Babel of talking, of which, judging from the constant repetition of the words wahine haole, I was the subject, but to have to eat under the focussed stare of twenty pair of eyes. My folding camp-knife appears an object of great interest, and it was handed round, inside and outside the house. When I retired about seven, the assemblage was still in full session.
The stars were then bright, but when I woke the next morning a strong breeze was blowing, the surf was roaring so loud as almost to drown human voices, and rolling up in gigantic surges, and to judge from appearances, the rain which was falling in torrents had been falling for some hours. There was much buzzing among the natives regarding our prospects for the day. I shall always think from their tone and manner, and the frequent repetition of the names of the three worst gulches, that the older men tried to dissuade us from going; but Deborah, who was very anxious to be at home by Sunday, said that the verdict was that if we started at once for our ride of twenty-three miles we might reach Onomea before the freshet came on. This might have been the case had it not been for Kaluna. Not only was his horse worn out, but nothing would induce him to lead the mule, and she went off on foraging expeditions continually, which further detained us. Kaluna had grown quite polite in his savage way. He always insisted on putting on and taking off my boots, carried me once through the Waipio river, helped me to pack the saddle-bags, and even offered to brush my hair! He frequently brought me guavas on the road, saying, “eat,” and often rode up, saying interrogatively, “tired?” “cold?” D. told me that he was very tired, and I was very sorry for him, for he was so thinly and poorly dressed, and the natives are not strong enough to bear exposure to cold as we can, and a temperature at 68° is cold to them. But he was quite incorrigible, and thrashed his horse to the last.
We breakfasted on fowl, poi, and cocoanut milk, in presence of even a larger number of spectators than the night before, one of them a very old man looking savagely picturesque, with a red blanket tied round his waist, leaving his lean chest and arms, which were elaborately tattooed, completely exposed.
The mule had been slightly chafed by the gear, and in my anxiety about a borrowed animal, of which Mr. Austin makes a great joke, I put my saddle-bags on my own mare, in an evil hour, and not only these, but some fine cocoanuts, tied up in a waterproof which had long ago proved its worthlessness. It was a grotesquely miserable picture. The house is not far from the beach, and the surf, beyond which a heavy mist hung, was coming in with such a tremendous sound that we had to shout at the top of our voices in order to be heard. The sides of the great gulch rose like prison walls, cascades which had no existence the previous night hurled themselves from the summit of the cliffs directly into the sea, the rain, which fell in sheets, not drops, covered the ground to the depth of two or three inches, and dripped from the wretched, shivering horses, which stood huddled together with their tails between their legs. My thin flannel suit was wet through even before we mounted. I dispensed with stockings, as I was told that wearing them in rain chills and stiffens the limbs. D., about whom I was anxious, as well as about the mule, had a really waterproof cloak, and I am glad to say has quite lost the cough from which she suffered before our expedition. She does not care about rain any more than I do.
We soon reached the top of the worst and dizziest of all the palis, and then splashed on mile after mile, down sliding banks, and along rocky tracks, from which the soil had been completely carried, the rain falling all the time. In some places several feet of soil had been carried away, and we passed through water-rents, the sides of which were as high as our horses’ heads, where the ground had been level a few days before. By noon the aspect of things became so bad that I wished we had a white man with us, as I was uneasy about some of the deepest gulches. When four hours’ journey from Onomea, Kaluna’s horse broke down, and he left us to get another, and we rode a mile out of our way to visit Deborah’s grandparents.
Her uncle carried us across some water to their cook-house, where, happily, a kalo baking had just been accomplished, in a hole in the ground, lined with stones, among which the embers were still warm. In this very small hut, in which a man could hardly stand upright, there were five men only dressed in malos, four women, two of them very old, much tattooed, and huddled up in blankets, two children, five pertinaciously sociable dogs, two cats, and heaps of things of different kinds. They are a most gregarious people, always visiting each other, and living in each other’s houses, and so hospitable that no Hawaiian, however poor, will refuse to share his last mouthful of poi with a stranger of his own race. These people looked very poor, but probably were not really so, as they had a nice grass-house, with very fine mats, within a few yards.
A man went out, cut off the head of a fowl, singed it in the flame, cut it into pieces, put it into a pot to boil, and before our feet were warm the bird was cooked, and we ate it out of the pot with some baked kalo. D. took me out to see some mango trees, and a pond filled with gold-fish, which she said had been hers when she was a child. She seemed very fond of her relatives, among whom she looked like a fairy princess; and I think they admired her very much, and treated her with some deference. The object of our visit was to procure a lé of birds’ feathers which they had been making for her, and for which I am sure 300 birds must have been sacrificed. It was a very beautiful as well as costly ornament, {165} and most ingeniously packed for travelling by being laid at full length within a slender cylinder of bamboo.
We rode on again, somewhat unwillingly on my part, for though I thought my apprehensions might be cowardly and ignorant, yet D. was but a child, and had the attractive wilfulness of childhood, and she was, I saw, determined to get back to her husband, and the devotion and affection of the young wife were so pleasant to see, that I had not the heart to offer serious opposition to her wishes, especially as I knew that I might be exaggerating the possible peril. I gathered, however, from what she said, that her people wanted us to remain until Monday, especially as none of them could go with us, their horses being at some distance. I thought it a sign of difficulties ahead, that on one of the most frequented tracks in Hawaii, we had not met a single traveller, though it was Saturday, a special travelling day.
We crossed one gulch in which the water was strong, and up to our horses’ bodies, and came upon the incorrigible Kaluna, who, instead of catching his horse, was recounting his adventures to a circle of natives, but promised to follow us soon. D. then said that the next gulch was rather a bad one, and that we must not wait for Kaluna, but ride fast, and try to get through it. When we reached the pali above it, we heard the roaring of a torrent, and when we descended to its brink it looked truly bad, but D. rode in, and I waited on the margin. She got safely across, but when she was near the opposite side her large horse plunged, slipped, and scrambled in a most unpleasant way, and she screamed something to me which I could not hear. Then I went in, and
“At the first plunge the horse sank low,
And the water broke o’er the saddle bow:”
but the brave animal struggled through, with the water up to the top of her back, till she reached the place where D.’s horse had looked so insecure. In another moment she and I rolled backwards into deep water, as if she had slipped from a submerged rock. I saw her fore feet pawing the air, and then only her head was above water. I struck her hard with my spurs, she snorted, clawed, made a desperate struggle, regained her footing, got into shallow water, and landed safely. It was a small but not an agreeable adventure.
We went on again, the track now really dangerous from denudation and slipperiness. The rain came down, if possible, yet more heavily, and coursed fiercely down each pali track. Hundreds of cascades leapt from the cliffs, bringing down stones with a sharp rattling sound. We crossed a bridge over one gulch, where the water was thundering down in such volume that it seemed as if it must rend the hard basalt of the palis. Then we reached the lofty top of the great Hakalau gulch, the largest of all, with the double river, and the ocean close to the ford. Mingling with the deep reverberations of the surf, I heard the sharp crisp rush of a river, and of “a river that has no bridge.”
The dense foliage, and the exigencies of the steep track, which had become very difficult, owing to the washing away of the soil, prevented me from seeing anything till I got down. I found Deborah speaking to a native, who was gesticulating very emphatically, and pointing up the river. The roar was deafening, and the sight terrific. Where there were two shallow streams a week ago, with a house and good-sized piece of ground above their confluence, there was now one spinning, rushing, chafing, foaming river, twice as wide as the Clyde at Glasgow, the land was submerged, and, if I remember correctly, the house only stood above the flood. And, most fearful to look upon, the ocean, in three huge breakers, had come quite in, and its mountains of white surge looked fearfully near the only possible crossing. I entreated D. not to go on. She said we could not go back, that the last gulch was already impassable, that between the two there was no house in which we could sleep, that the river had a good bottom, that the man thought if our horses were strong we could cross now, but not later, etc. In short, she overbore all opposition, and plunged in, calling to me, “spur, spur, all the time.”
Just as I went in, I took my knife and cut open the cloak which contained the cocoanuts, one only remaining. Deborah’s horse I knew was strong, and shod, but my unshod and untried mare, what of her? My soul and senses literally reeled among the dizzy horrors of the wide, wild tide, but with an effort I regained sense and self-possession, for we were in, and there was no turning. D., ahead, screeched to me what I could not hear; she said afterwards it was “spur, spur, and keep up the river;” the native was shrieking in Hawaiian from the hinder shore, and waving to the right, but the torrents of rain, the crash of the breakers, and the rush and hurry of the river confused both sight and hearing. I saw D.’s great horse carried off his legs, my mare, too, was swimming, and shortly afterwards, between swimming, struggling, and floundering, we reached what had been the junction of the two rivers, where there was foothold, and the water was only up to the seat of the saddles.
Remember, we were both sitting nearly up to our waists in water, and it was only by screaming that our voices were heard above the din, and to return or go on seemed equally perilous. Under these critical circumstances the following colloquy took place, on my side, with teeth chattering, and on hers, with a sudden forgetfulness of English produced by her first sense of the imminent danger we were in.
Self.--“My mare is so tired, and so heavily weighted, we shall be drowned, or I shall.”
Deborah (with more reason on her side).--“But can’t go back, we no stay here, water higher all minutes, spur horse, think we come through.”
Self.--“But if we go on there is broader, deeper water between us and the shore; your husband would not like you to run such a risk.”
Deborah.--“Think we get through, if horses give out, we let go; I swim and save you.”
Even under these circumstances a gleam of the ludicrous shot through me at the idea of this small fragile being bearing up my weight among the breakers. I attempted to shift my saddle-bags upon her powerful horse, but being full of water and under water, the attempt failed, and as we spoke both our horses were carried off their vantage ground into deep water.
With wilder fury the river rushed by, its waters whirled dizzily, and, in spite of spurring and lifting with the rein, the horses were swept seawards. It was a very fearful sight. I saw Deborah’s horse spin round, and thought woefully of the possible fate of the bright young wife, almost a bride; only the horses’ heads and our own heads and shoulders were above water; the surf was thundering on our left, and we were drifting towards it “broadside on.” When I saw the young girl’s face of horror I felt increased presence of mind, and raising my voice to a shriek, and telling her to do as I did, I lifted and turned my mare with the rein, so that her chest and not her side should receive the force of the river, and the brave animal, as if seeing what she should do, struck out desperately. It was a horrible suspense. Were we stemming the torrent, or was it sweeping us back that very short distance which lay between us and the mountainous breakers? I constantly spurred my mare, guiding her slightly to the left, the side grew nearer, and after exhausting struggles, Deborah’s horse touched ground, and her voice came faintly towards me like a voice in a dream, still calling “Spur, spur.” My mare touched ground twice, and was carried off again before she fairly got to land some yards nearer the sea than the bridle track.
When our tired horses were taking breath I felt as if my heart stopped, and I trembled all over, for we had narrowly escaped death. I then put our saddle-bags on Deborah’s horse. It was one of the worst and steepest of the palis that we had to ascend; but I can’t remember anything about the road except that we had to leap some place which we could not cross otherwise. Deborah, then thoroughly alive to a sense of risk, said that there was only one more bad gulch to cross before we reached Onomea, but it was the most dangerous of all, and we could not get across, she feared, but we might go and look at it. I only remember the extreme solitude of the region, and scrambling and sliding down a most precipitous pali, hearing a roar like cataract upon cataract, and coming suddenly down upon a sublime and picturesque scene, with only standing room, and that knee-deep in water, between a savage torrent and the cliff. This gulch, called the Scotchman’s gulch, I am told, because a Scotchman was drowned there, must be at its crossing three-quarters of a mile inland, and three hundred feet above the sea. In going to Waipio, on noticing the deep holes and enormous boulders, some of them higher than a man on horseback, I had thought what a fearful place it would be if it were ever full; but my imagination had not reached the reality. One huge compressed impetuous torrent, leaping in creamy foam, boiling in creamy eddies, rioting in deep black chasms, roared and thundered over the whole in rapids of the most tempestuous kind, leaping down to the ocean in three grand broad cataracts, the nearest of them not more than forty feet from the crossing. Imagine the Moriston at the Falls, four times as wide and fifty times as furious, walled in by precipices, and with a miniature Niagara above and below, and you have a feeble illustration of it.
Portions of two or three rocks only could be seen, and on one of these, about twelve feet from the shore, a nude native, beautifully tattooed, with a lasso in his hands, was standing nearly up to his knees in foam; and about a third of the way from the other side, another native in deeper water, steadying himself by a pole. A young woman on horseback, whose near relative was dangerously ill at Hilo, was jammed under the cliff, and the men were going to get her across. Deborah, to my dismay, said that if she got safely over we would go too, as these natives were very skilful. I asked if she thought her husband would let her cross, and she said “No.” I asked her if she were frightened, and she said “Yes;” but she wished so to get home, and her face was as pale as a brown face can be. I only hope the man will prove worthy of her affectionate devotion.
Here, though people say it is a most perilous gulch, I was not afraid for her life or mine, with the amphibious natives to help us; but I was sorely afraid of being bruised, and scarred, and of breaking the horses’ legs, and I said I would not cross, but would sleep among the trees; but the tumult drowned our voices, though the Hawaiians by screeching could make themselves understood. The nearest man then approached the shore, put the lasso round the nose of the woman’s horse, and dragged it into the torrent; and it was exciting to see a horse creeping from rock to rock in a cataract with alarming possibilities in every direction. But beasts may well be bold, as they have not “the foreknowledge of death.” When the nearest native had got the horse as far as he could, he threw the lasso to the man who was steadying himself with the pole, and urged the horse on. There was a deep chasm between the two into which the animal fell, as he tried to leap from one rock to another. I saw for a moment only a woman’s head and shoulders, a horse’s head, a commotion of foam, a native tugging at the lasso, and then a violent scramble on to a rock, and a plunging and floundering through deep water to shore.
Then Deborah said she would go, that her horse was a better and stronger one; and the same process was repeated with the same slip into the chasm, only with the variation that for a second she went out of sight altogether. It was a terribly interesting and exciting spectacle with sublime accompaniments. Though I had no fear of absolute danger, yet my mare was tired, and I had made up my mind to remain on that side till the flood abated; but I could not make the natives understand that I wished to turn, and while I was screaming “No, no,” and trying to withdraw my stiffened limbs from the stirrups, the noose was put round the mare’s nose, and she went in. It was horrible to know that into the chasm as the others went I too must go, and in the mare went with a blind plunge. With violent plunging and struggling she got her fore feet on the rock, but just as she was jumping up to it altogether she slipped back snorting into the hole, and the water went over my eyes. I struck her with my spurs, the men screeched and shouted, the hinder man jumped in, they both tugged at the lasso, and slipping and struggling, the animal gained the rock, and plunged through deep water to shore, the water covering that rock with a rush of foam, being fully two feet deep.
Kaluna came up just after we had crossed, undressed, made his clothes into a bundle, and got over amphibiously, leaping, swimming, and diving, looking like a water-god, with the horse and mule after him. His dexterity was a beautiful sight; but on looking back I wondered how human beings ever devised to cross such a flood. We got over just in time. Some travellers who reached Laupahoehoe shortly after we left, more experienced than we were, suffered a two days’ detention rather than incur a similar risk. Several mules and horses, they say, have had their legs broken in crossing this gulch by getting them fast between the rocks.
Shortly after this, Deborah uttered a delighted exclamation, and her pretty face lighted up, and I saw her husband spurring along the top of the next pali, and he presently joined us, and I exchanged my tired mare for his fresh, powerful horse. He knew that a freshet was imminent, and believing that we should never leave Laupahoehoe, he was setting off, provided with tackle for getting himself across, intending to join us, and remain with us till the rivers fell. The presence of a responsible white man seemed a rest at once. We had several more gulches to cross, but none of them were dangerous; and we rode the last seven miles at a great pace, though the mire and water were often up to the horses’ knees, and came up to Onomea at full gallop, with spirit and strength enough for riding other twenty miles. Dry clothing, hot baths, and good tea followed delightfully upon our drowning ride. I remained over Sunday at Onomea, and yesterday rode here with a native in heavy rain, and received a warm welcome. Our adventures are a nine days’ wonder, and every one says that if we had had a white man or an experienced native with us, we should never have been allowed to attempt the perilous ride. I feel very thankful that we are living to tell of it, and that Deborah is not only not worse but considerably better. E--- will expect some reflections; but none were suggested at the time, and I will not now invent what I ought to have thought and felt.
Due honour must be given to the Mexican saddle. Had I been on a side-saddle, and encumbered with a riding-habit, I should have been drowned. I feel able now to ride anywhere and any distance upon it, while Miss Karpe, who began by being much stronger than I was, has never recovered from the volcano ride, and seems quite ill.
Last night Kilauea must have been tremendously active. At ten P.M., from the upper verandah, we saw the whole western sky fitfully illuminated, and the glare reddened the snow which is lying on Mauna Loa, an effect of fire on ice which can rarely be seen.
I.L.B.
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