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PROPERTY OF
HENRY STULL.




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HAWAII NEI












Young Hawaiian Girt.
6r,




HAWAII NEI
BY
MABEL CLARE CRAFT Y.. v- I
_


ILL USTRATED


WILLIAM DOXEY
AT THE SIGN OF THE LARK
SAN FRANCISCO
1899




Copyright 1898
By William Doxey




(47.
^-^7^
/- 7- 3)s
TO THOSE WELL-REMEMBERED ONES
DWELLERS, SOME, IN PEACEFUL, OCEAN-GIRT HAWAII
VOYAGERS, OTHERS, FARING UPON MANY SEAS
WHOSE GENTLE COURTESY ADDED
UNFORGETTABLE PLEASURE TO THE
MIDSUMMER'S JOURNEY, OF WHICH
SOME ACCOUNT IS HERE SET DOWN
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
A TOKEN OF GRATEFUL APPRECIATION
AND ESTEEM




I




TO BEGIN WITH


MANY travelers before me have felt Hawaii's spell -that
subtle influence which touches your lips and eyes when
first you see the islands floating like purple morningglories on the sea. And until you leave them glimmering astern, the witchery never departs-so dangerous a
fascination has this siren of the south for stern Ulysses of
the north. It is an illusive charm that is not altogether
describable; the languor of the island life must be lived.
But tarry not too long, lest the clinging hands from the
coral reef bind you fast in willing chains.
The old island life is fading like a wraith. Faint mists
of it still linger about the mountains, in nooks and vales
where Caucasian feet have not left too many hob-nailed
tracks.  The emigrant and the tourist improve few
lands, and the old savagery and its calm content are but
memories.
I am aware that my criticism of the Hawaiian republic will not be received with favor in Honolulu's narrow
governmental circles. I do not believe that might necessarily makes right, and I have but reflected the political
sentiments of the majority of Hawaiians as I found them
during the summer of annexation, when hearts were peculiarly stirred by the culmination of an injustice that
amounted to crime. The Hawaiian republic knew nothing of the "consent of the governed."  The most signifi



viii
Vlll


TO BEGIN WITH


cant commentary on the late unlamented republic is, that
at its last election about 2,600 voters were registered,
and about i,800 voted; while at the last election under
the Queen about 4,800 were registered, and some 3,200
voted.
In Hawaii is the old spirit that abides in unhappy
Poland, that burns in the breasts of Alsace-Lorraine.
The looting of the Hawaiian monarchy by a few Americans was a sort of successful Jameson raid, and not an
exploit over which any American need thrill with pride.
What I have said is only what every unprejudiced
observer who goes to original sources may find for himself. Official sources are not always safe guides. The
registration reports are open to all-so are the landtitles-and the white oligarchy, which seventy years ago
was a hungry missionary band with emaciated purses,
speaks for itself.
I have friends devoted to annexation and friends who
are stanch royalists.  My own opinion was formed
entirely during my stay in the islands. It is merely an
individual opinion, but a sincere one.
"And each in his separate star
Shall draw the Thing as he sees it,
For the God of Things As They Are."
It is the thing as I saw it.
A few chapters of this book appeared originally in
the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Sun, the
New York Tribune, the Philadelphia Press, and other
American newspapers, in the form of letters from Honolulu, written on the eve of and immediately following the
formal transfer of Hawaii to her new sovereignty. Such




TO BEGIN WITH


ix


revision as these chapters have undergone has been chiefly
for the sake of condensation.
During my visit, Liliuokalani was at home and making a tour of the islands, and I had a chance to contrast
her reception with the greeting of the Annexation Commissioners from America, also touring the islands. Some
of the scenes I had the good fortune to witness may not
occur again. They pass with the old. In the chapter
on folk-lore, I am indebted to Liliuokalani, to Rollin M.
Daggett's work on "The Legends and Myths of Hawaii," and to Judge Abram Fornander's "Account of
the Polynesian Race; Its Origin and Migrations."
Old customs, old ways of living are rapidly disappearing, but some things remain unspoiled. The landscape,
in all its beauty, is Hawaii's inalienable heritage, and
there remains, too, a generous, hospitable, simple people,
with handsome brown faces, illuminated by as kindly
hearts as God ever placed in human breasts. Wrong
has not embittered them. They give you greeting for
your own sake, hoping only that you may see the truth
and do them justice. Coming, their hands are first to
greet you; going, the leis that they twine about your
neck binds you to them, long after the odorous flowerwreaths have faded and have been cast upon the hill of
waters rising between you.
And so from dreams the islands grow to realities, then
fade to dreams again-fair Hawaii nei, little sister of the
States.
M. C. C.
San Francisco, October 5, I898.




I
I




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                   PAGE
I-VOYAGING ISLANDWARDS......... I
II-HAWAII'S CAPITAL........... 8
III-THE TROPIC REPUBLIC.........         I4
IV-THE AMERICAN COLONY..........35
V-NATIVE LIVING............. 46
VI-THE TRANSPLANTED ORIENTAL....... 63
VII —HAWAII BECOMES AMERICA........ 76
VIII-A QUEEN'S HOME-COMING.........91
IX-How ROYALTY IS BURIED.........IOI
X-THE KAHUNA PASSES........          109
XI- THE DIVER..............123
XII-PICTURESQUE OAHU.......... 32
XIII-IN HAWAII'S LEE...........          45
XIV-WINDWARD HAWAII........ 172
XV-LEGENDS AND FOLK-LORE.........83








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A Typ;ca1 hawaiian Sky
A Typicail Hawalaiia Sky.




HAWAII NEI
CHAPTER I
VOYAGING ISLANDWARDS
IT is a geographical blessing that one cannot reach
Hawaii by rail. To arrive there with soot in the eyes
and dust in the garments, tired and travel-stained, with
the throb of the rails sounding in the ears, and desirous
only of a bath and a bed, would be like appearing before
royalty in old clothes. But to slip smoothly down through
six days of delicious rest and languor is fit preparation
for entering into the presence of this queen of the sundown sea.
The days at sea are full of dreams and laziness. It is
a rest cure on a gigantic scale, with a hundred people
taking it all at once. There is absolute lack of anything
exciting from without; and woe to them who do not
carry that store of memories within which makes gay the
gravest day. Sometimes the voyager watches through the
glass another steamer, plowing the parallel miles. Sometimes he may see a deep-laden sugar barkentine, beating
up the wind in the distant horizon. There are magnificent sunrises and moonrises, like ships on fire; and the




2


HAWAII NEI


sun sets in a glory of clouds and sky to be seen nowhere
on dry land.
For the first few days the sea air is so sharp that rugs
are a comfort, and then it grows so soft and warm that
the canopied deck is a necessity. About the same time
the sea changes from green to blue-a blue like lapis
lazuli, more blue than the sapphire.  Somebody has
called it " cold suds and blueing," but it is far too beautiful to be compared with anything so prosaic. And with
the wonderful sea-color, the flying-fish appear.  They
seem a piece of the sea; for they too are blue, and
ocean, sky, and fish are shades of the same color. There
was never a voyage when a flying-fish did not make for
the lighted saloon windows and dash himself to death on
the cabin floor. It is the marine version of the moth-andcandle story. There never was a chief steward who did
not take the flying-fish tenderly in his hands and carry
him around to show to the passengers, pretending that
the coming of one on board was an unusual thing, and
giving that pleasant sense of difference and distinction
that every traveler loves. It is so pleasant to say to
your friends in Honolulu: "And we had a flying-fish.
He dashed himself to death against the windows of the
cabin." To which they invariably reply: "Yes; they
always do that the fourth day out."
Ah, the wily steward, who made us believe it was an
Occurrence!
The blue sea and the blue fish, with their gauzy
butterfly wings and their scales like blue metal, are signs
of the tropics. The ocean becomes an oily plain, and
the waves are smoothed out into the long, lazy swell of
low latitudes. By day there is not even a pillar of cloud




HAWAII NEI


3


to guide us, but by night it is a favorite diversion to
watch the phosphorescent gleam of tiny lights around
the ship's prow. Minute animal organisms they may
really be, but we prefer to think them fireflies of the
deep, or reflected stars.
And now the convalescent passengers creep on deck,
saffron in tint as contrasted with the ruddy people who
spend their nights in sweet sleep, their days in a brisk
canter about deck, and who eat at every possible opportunity-sometimes six times a day.
Here is a young man said to be "in coffee," just up
from a hospital operation, who crawls with transparent
white hands fastened to a stick. His skin is pale and
luminous, and his features are out of all proportion to his
cheeks. He eats on every occasion. He has an early
cup of coffee in bed, a more substantial tiffin at eight, a
luncheon at noon, a cup of tea and a fresh cookie at four,
a dinner at half-past six, and a cup of something hot at
ten. And before the six days are passed his thin cheeks
are filling out, his hands are browner and have lost their
transparency, and sometimes he forgets his cane for
hours.  There are other passengers interesting to
watch-elderly globe-trotters with short skirts, many
shawls, and a courier.
During the early days of the trip there are many
vacant seats at table- the places of those who have fallen
by the wayside. Trays go to cabin doors and come back
untouched. The purser goes to the ship's library, and
Stoddard's book on the islands, which talks of "drifting
to Paradise on an even keel," is cleverly abstracted; for
the early days are a bit choppy, and the purser hates to
be asked angrily a hundred times a day if this is drifting




4


HAWAII NEI


to Paradise on an even keel! But gradually the chairs
fill up and are at a premium; for after all it is really the
mildest sort of an ocean experience.  The delightful
drifting before a fair wind with all sails set, and an average of 354 miles a day, must come to an end some time.
In fact, we have been going faster than the wind, and our
idle, flapping sails merely steady the ship and look well
in the log-book. A day or two before Honolulu the
guide-books come out. Heads bend over them, and little
pencils scratch on tiny tablets. The students of guidebook and encyclopedia find that the islands are not properly called "South Sea Islands," but constitute, instead,
the only important group in the North Pacific; that they
have no connection with the South Sea groups beyond
certain affinities of race and language; that they are so
advantageously placed as to be about equidistant from
California, Mexico, China, and Japan; and that they are
in the torrid zone, extending from I8~ 54' to 22~ 15',
north latitude, with a longitude from I54~ 50' to I60~ 30'
west from Greenwich. Old Spanish charts prove that the
Spanish navigators knew of them, but, according to
Spanish custom, kept their knowledge from the world,
until the islands were rediscovered by Captain Cook, in
I778.
The distance of Hawaii from the Californian coast is
a little more than two thousand miles. The islands lie at
the cross-roads where the great ocean routes to Australia
and China cross. They are called " Hawaiian " from the
name of the largest island. Captain Cook gave them the
name of the Sandwich islands, in honor of his patron, the
Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the British Admiralty; but the English name has almost passed from use,




HAWAII NEI


5


and is seldom heard. It is a vulgarism, like the name
"Kanaka," as applied to the natives of the islands.
"Kanaka" is a native name, meaning simply "man,"
and the natives like it as a cognomen about as well as a
respectable Chinese likes to be called "John Chinaman."
The travelers, over their guide-books, raise their heads
with exclamations of surprise. The islands are so much
larger than they thought them —six thousand seven hundred square miles in all, about equal to the principality
of Wales or the kingdom of Saxony, with Hawaii, the
principal island, nearly as large as the State of Connecticut. There are eight inhabited islands, extending from
northwest to southeast, over a distance of about 380
miles. The names, some of them unfamiliar, are Hawaii,
Maui, Kahoolawe, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, Kauai, and
Niihau. Nor did the tourists dream that Hawaii contains the highest mountains of any island in the world,
only a few peaks of the Alps being as high as Mauna Loa
and Mauna Kea, while Haleakala, on Maui, is about
equal to Mount Etna in extent and elevation, and is,
moreover, the largest extinct crater in the world.
People look up from their books to inquire if the cocopalm, which produces coir rope, cocoanuts, and a hundred other useful things, is the same which produces
chocolate, not knowing that the tall, ragged palm, on its
slender stem, with its long and useful life of two hundred
years or more, is not the same plant as the cacao-bush,
or anything like it. There is also a persistent belief that
the islanders were formerly cannibals, a sturdy theory
that will not down, and is based on some legend as to the
eating of Captain Cook. I was careful to run down that tale.
One day, at dinner, I asked the great-granddaughter




6


HAWAII NEI


of a chiefess who was present at the killing of the distinguished navigator about this reputed feast. She said
that the heart of Captain Cook became mixed with
some dog-meat and was eaten by mistake. The testimony of the lineal descendant of an eye-witness ought to
be good authority. As a matter of fact, the Hawaiians
never were cannibals.  Their sacrifice of human life
merely marked a form of worship common to many
pagan creeds.  The idea of eating human flesh was
abhorred. Why should they feast on one another when
pig was plentiful and good?
And having discussed the cannibal question with some
warmth, the travelers go back to the exhuming of more
statistics. They find that the island idols exist only in
museums; that the islanders cast them away voluntarily
in 1819, at the very time when the first missionaries were
on their way around Cape Horn; that the natives, who
were decreasing rapidly in the seventies, and were threatened with total extinction, have since then gained some
ground, and are not now decreasing so rapidly; that the
population of the islands in I896 was 109,020, 31,OI9
being Hawaiians, 8,485 part Hawaiians, 3,086 Americans,
15,000 Portuguese, 4,000 other Europeans, 24,000 Japanese, and 2I,ooo Chinese; and that the soil, which is
described in prospectuses as flowing with milk and honey
and producing wild all sorts of luxuries, is in reality poor,
with nature yielding little spontaneously.  Later they
find that the valleys are fertile and productive, but limited
in extent, and that the dry plains may be made fertile by
irrigation. Intending settlers are sorry to discover that
most of the available land is already taken up, and they
will be still further astonished to learn the price of land




HAWAII NEI


7


in the valleys. There is not much left in Hawaii for the
poor man, and even the capitalist will have some difficulty making an entrance where everything is already
owned and incorporated.
But there is other knowledge that is more pleasant.
Everybody knows that Hawaii's is the most salubrious
climate on earth, but everybody does not know that it is
almost absolutely equable, and that a man may take his
choice between broiling all the year round at the sealevel, on the leeward side of the islands, at a temperature
of 85~, or may enjoy the charms of a fireside at an altitude where there is frost every night in the year. To
get any desired climate, you need only to follow Mark
Twain's advice, and mark the place on the thermometer
that suits you best; then climb until the mercury drops
to the mark. It is a simple recipe for getting the needed
change of season.
The physical geographists will tell you that the volcanoes died out from north to south, which makes Kauai,
the garden isle, to the north, the oldest of its brethren
and the most fertile. You can see for yourself that Maui
and Hawaii are the youngest and most restless of the
group. Unfinished Hawaii is still smoking, and its trackless wastes of lava, unfit for cultivation, are destined to
lie idle for hundreds of years.
And then one yawns and lounges to the cabin, where
less serious-minded people play at cards, waiting to learn
geography from personal observation, which is, after all,
the best and the only unforgettable way.




8


HAWAII NEI


CHAPTER II
HAWAII'S CAPITAL
AGAINST a background of green and shimmering valleys, full of showers and sunshine and arched with rainbows, Honolulu sits and dabbles her feet in the sea.
Never was a city more beautifully located-nor have
painters found a more delicious landscape than this
changeful one in the South Pacific, variable as some
women, but always lovely and never losing its fickle
charm. One gets up at five in the morning to see the
faint gray, blurred outlines of barren Molokai and to
make a first study of a Hawaiian sky —a sketch in watercolors, where huge masses of feathery clouds tumble and
pile and change against a curtain of iridescent hues that
gradually merges into one of divinest blue. And presently it is the huge truncated cone of Diamond Head
that comes into view-one of the sentinels that have kept
watch over Oahu these thousand years. The volcano
blew its head off years and years ago, and the unsightly
wound has healed with the wonderfully recuperative powers of nature in this part of the world. It is not a high
mountain now, but before that terrific explosion it must
have been a soaring peak with a lofty head in the blue.
Now its ragged sides seem to have slipped waterward,
and its well-known profile is one of the landmarks of the
coast.




A Typical Half-White.




I




HAWAII NEI                   9
I looked in vain for the palms that fringe the coast of
fiction —those "feather-dusters in a cyclone" that are
the sign and symbol of the tropics. Not a coco-palm
raised its plumed head on slender, willowy trunk. All
was dry, sandy, and unprofitable. But presently a bend
in the coast, and then the green shore of pictures and
imagination-a broad belt of freshness and verdure —
and against the yellows and browns of the ragged range,
bending cocoanut-palms and fluttering bananas to lend
the tropical touch. And from the land, into the face of
the rising sun, crept that perfumed breeze that blows in
dreams of Araby. It is, indeed, a land of ten thousand
Junes.
And we, bending over the rail in the languorous airs
of early morning-for here is no chill freshness of
dawn-note that the sea is changing from the ultramarine of the mid-Pacific to the emerald of the shallows,
beneath which lie the shining sands and the living coral
of the reef.
The harbor of Honolulu is difficult and set with
dangers, and the good ship feels her way cautiously along
the channel. Buoys mark out the narrow road which
leads to safety, the path of righteousness being one of
twists and turns, and the ship is at last snugly harbored
where hull rubs hull within narrow confines. The bay
of Honolulu is an overcrowded inn, where every guestchamber is taken.
Around the ship darts a school of divers - brown boys
who leap like dolphins at play.  Nothing could be
smoother orslimmer than their graceful, gleaming bodies.
They skim and dive for silver, and come from the green
depths with the coins in their mouths to show you their




A


IO                HAWAII NEI
agility and skill. They shriek shrilly to attract your
attention, and go wriggling to the very bottom of the
bay after the coin. A penurious person from east of the
Mississippi flips a copper, and the divers detect it instantly
and laugh contemptuously.
The pier is covered with people-a blare of bright
colors against a background of white. The black garments to which our eyes are accustomed are utterly lacking, and the sun beats down on the white, and is reflected 
back again with an increase of heat. Behind the low
white town, umbrellaed in shade, radiate beautiful valleys
like the spokes of a wheel. They are so filled with
verdure, that they seem to be lined with green velvet,
and, like horns of plenty, they have emptied all their
treasure on the scant shore where Honolulu sits and
threatens to slide into the sea. Behind the city is the
commanding eminence of Punchbowl, another dead and
buried crater, whose quenched fires must once have
turned midnight to midday where Honolulu now stands.
Peaks and towers and domes rise behind, making mountainous lacework against the sky, each telling his tale of
those tremendous upheavals when this still unfinished
land rose from the sea.
If you arrive in the summer it is a moist and sticky
morning, and you press through the warm and clinging
crowd into one of the waiting hacks, which are not hacks
at all, but surreys, and the Honolulu hackman fastens
his talons upon you. Strangers are his legitimate prey.
To residents he is kindly and indulgent-to travelers
merciless. He looks at you, estimates your resources,
and demands them all. And you, a poor limp rag,
bathed in perspiration, and with a moral fiber melted


&




HAWAII NEI


II


with heat, fall into the inevitable Honolulu indolence and
call a carriage to go three blocks. The result is an
impaired liver, a digestion gone wrong, and perhaps,
accumulated weight. The curse of Honolulu is not the
climate, but the laziness it engenders. Meanwhile the
hackmen with their rubber-tired vehicles and their soft
cushions and their cool linen rugs fatten like spiders.
Just before you come away you learn that the regular
price for any fare within the city proper is twenty-five
cents, and that for long trips the same rule applies as
elsewhere in the world, and it is imperative to drive a
bargain in advance.
But even the octopus of a hackman cannot make you
forget the streets through which you spin. The ponciana
regia is bursting over your head in a crimson crown, the
Golden Shower is throwing pendent clusters of yellow
at your feet, the scarlet hibiscus nods at you from hedgerows, like eglantine in an English spring, and the thirsty
banyan, with hundreds of drinking feelers which have
sapped the earth beneath and rendered it verdureless,
invites you to stop and rest in its heavy shade. Tattered
bananas offer sunnier shelter, where light and shadow
tremble alternately. There are no trees to remind you
of home. All leaves are light and feathery, like the tamarind, or heavy and polished and waxen, like the breadfruit. You look in vain for a familiar tree-face in all that
green and thronging crowd. These are the trees of the
Tropic of Cancer, and the temperate zone is only a
memory.
The air is heavy with the perfume of myriads of tuberoses and waxen pomerias. The streets are narrow and
crooked, amazingly intricate at first sight. They branch




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HAWAII NEI


in every direction as if from a common center. They
are muddy from the showers that fall every night and
almost every day, and the trees meet overhead in a
soft dense shade. After the wharves come little lowbrowed shops and some pretentious stores; but even in
the best of them primal colors jostle others of opposite
disposition, and the quarreling combination shows that
these people, so rich in wondrous color effects, have
never studied the sequence in their own rainbows. The
screaming juxtaposition is said to be for the benefit of
the native who still has the brilliant taste of barbarism.
The houses are so modest among the shade-trees that
the first glimpse tells little of their architecture. They
smack of New England with blinds and gables, but they
are without chimneys, and the twenty-foot-wide verandas
are a Southern innovation.  The tropical trees that
surround them, the giant ferns and the fruits are importations from across the island, for this side of Oahu is not
naturally tropical.  In the verandas, inclosed for the
most part, and called lanais, the family life goes on.
There are cushions and couches, cool braided mats, and
writing-tables.  Often the family dines here, and one
could sleep on the veranda in comfort. Here callers are
received, and the household life ebbs and flows in the
open air.
At last there is the hotel- the Royal Hawaiian - built
by the government in the days of kings, and now floating the American flag. The hotel is set in the deepest
shade of all. The dry pods of tamarinds rattle far overhead, the sunlight trickles in thin streams between many
leaves both broad and thick, and tremulous aspen shadows
flicker on the natural sward. Myna-birds, each with its




HAWAII NEI


I3


single white feather, dart about on the grass. These birds,
were introduced to remove a pest, but now, multiplied
in this warm, nourishing climate, are themselves become
a plague, like so many other imported blessings. Beyond
the trees may be seen the soaring tower of the Government Building, which was not long ago lolani Palace. It
was the home of a king, and saw its dynasty rise and
fall. It has looked unmoved on little revolutions, and
has been a royal prison. Over a stone wall, with a
wealth of vine atop, is a lofty church -a monument to
missionary forehandedness. As the church rose, the
palace toppled and fell.
The hotel lanai is big and luxurious, with palms and
growing green things, and gold-fish sporting in a big glass
bowl. Everything is cool except the traveler, who mops
an unaccustomed brow and orders a lemonade. It comes
in a big, deep, wide -lipped glass, the ice tinkling against
the thin sides. A huge mosquito, with chinchilla legs,
striped in gray and black, settles down upon you and
bids you welcome to Honolulu.




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HAWAII NEI


CHAPTER III
THE TROPIC REPUBLIC
THERE is nothing in American public life to cause an
association of ideas between politics and religion, but in
the islands they go hand and hand. To be in politics
under the late republic one needed also to be in religion;
but after a study of the political conditions of the islands,
I have come to the conclusion that in Hawaii, as in
America, true religion and "practical politics" have not
even a bowing acquaintance.
The men who went to Hawaii to teach the native the
way in which he should go, began by being the power
behind the throne, and ended with being the power in
front of it. When the missionary could no longer rule
in the shade of the cloak of yellow feathers, he boldly
threw off the sheltering garment and took the scepter for
his own. There ended the most picturesque of island
monarchies. I was not bred a royalist, and monarchical
forms are not my forms, but seeing the republic of
Hawaii in its expiring days, I cannot but think what an
ideal place this must have been when native chiefs and
chiefesses ruled in the islands of Hawaii. At the mere
mention of their names the missionaries hold up their
hands in horror. They cannot speak of Hawaii's latest
sovereigns without a pious imprecation. To their crosseyed mental vision all luans were orgies and all pleasure




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HAWAII NEI


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unholy. Doubtless some of these strictures are just;
but, as an offset, it should be remembered that many of
these profligate personages were also the kind and generous patrons of the missionary clan. The advisers of
royalty were mainly white, and it was not until there rose
up a woman whom they could not control that the missionaries found the royal yoke intolerable. And as for
Hawaiian royalty, its behavior was much the same as
that of royalty in other lands-much as it will always be
while wealth and power buy everything in the world
except happiness.
And so any glimpse of the incongruous tropic republic that was transplanted to this land of royal traditions
must begin with the missionaries who came in the brig
Thaddeus, arriving off the coast in the spring of 1820.
The first of these gospel families settled in Kailua, and
that little peaceful town is pointed out as the place where
civilization first came to the islands. Some people call it
the spot where the serpent entered Eden, but that
depends on the point of view. At any rate, the advent
of the missionary was the turning-point in Hawaiian history. There had been centuries of civil war and pillage,
with intervals of peace and prosperity under an occasional
strong chief who knew how to protect his people. The
great Kamehameha, whose commanding bronze figure
still reigns over Honolulu-the strutting infant republic
not having banished him-had subdued his rivals and
brought the islands under a single sovereignty. This
native chief was the first to conceive the imperial idea,
and he carried it out through a long life. There is a
decided tendency in missionary publications to belittle
Kamehameha, and a concentrated effort to make it appear::.   I: A:; $




HAWAII NEI


that all his victories were won because of the assistance of
whites and firearms. Nothing is said of the fact that
Kamehameha was the first chief to apply the use of firearms to island warfare. In one Hawaiian history it is
emphasized that the corner-stone of Kamehameha's empire
was laid in blood. I do not recall any historical cornerstones which were laid otherwise.
The second Kamehameha was even braver than the
island Napoleon who preceded him; for he dared to meet
and fight with the ancient superstitions of his race, and
to throw off the galling yoke of the ancient tabus. It
was an act comparable to the freeing of the serfs in
Russia —not forced in any way, and one by which the
king gave up many privileges, that he might easily have
continued to exact.
The strenuous laws of the tabu carried originally the
most frightful penalties; but as nothing followed the
breaking of all their cherished tables of stone, the
islanders, quick to reason from effect to cause, turned
from their idols and deserted their temples. The soil
was ripe for a new religion, and about half the missionaries' work was done.
I have visited the old Thurston house at Kailua, on
the island of Hawaii. It is a good type of the missionary
house all through the islands, and in its decay it is eloquent
of the motives and methods of these men who came to
preach the gospel to the heathen, and to cry aloud in
the tropical wilderness. To New England the natives
were heathen. Bigotry still esteems them such. There
was not the slightest attempt to conform to native architecture. Instead, a frame house came out from the old
country, and soon a New England manse, all gables and




HAWAII NEI


17


eaves and doors with fan-lights, reared its head on the
green sloping hill that backs Kailua. The house must
have been very hot and uncomfortable, entirely unadapfed
as it was to the island climate. The attic rooms must
have been close and stuffy, and the lack of wide verandas
a real deprivation. The old garden with its high and
frowning fence may still be seen. Within this inclosure,
Mrs. Thurston kept the little Thurstons, with strict
injunctions that under no circumstances were they to
hold converse with the natives. It was her boast that
her children were to be brought up like New England
children-no settlement idea this. The very house
shows its desire to be exclusive. It is set half-way up
the hillside in a maze of green, at some distance from the
grass houses that fringed the sea, where the gregarious
natives huddled as close together as possible.  That
there was some doubt of the sincerity of the friendly
natives in the minds of these early teachers, is shown by
the little peep-holes in the doors, like loop-holes in an
Indian blockhouse. Everywhere the most determined
effort was made to graft the civilization of New England
upon this land of the banana and the coco-palm. Mrs.
Thurston wanted a milk-house like the one at home, and
she took for that purpose a cave at the back of the house.
It was a cool grotto, and there she set her milk-pans, and
did everything in the good old way. What did she care
that the cave went underground all Sthe way to the sea,
coming out at last in a delicious cove at the water's edge,
which was tabu and sacred to the chief who used to bathe
there? Surf-bathing was no part of the New England
curriculum, and bathing au naturel was wicked. And
so the tabu cave and subterranean passage was used as a




HAWAII NEI


dairy, until one day one of the earthquakes that happen
along almost every day in this new island of Hawaii,
tumbled huge bowlders about the milk-house, and threw
stones into the Thurston pans, and after that the lady of
the manse relished the place no more.
The trouble with the missionary plan here, as in most
places, was that it purposed to establish out of hand a
scheme of civilization for which the islanders were all
unprepared. It ignored all the preparation and gradual
growth of Anglo-Saxon ideals, and sought to transplant
the full-grown tree to another and entirely dissimilar land,
where no condition was the same. It was as if England
had skipped from John to Victoria. The result was that
the islanders were plunged into the swift, unaccustomed
current, and speedily ingulfed. When the missionaries
taught them religion, they should also have taught them
how to maintain themselves in the throat-cutting civilization of the Anglo-Saxon.
The natives died in shoals, and the survivors to this
day say, "The white man is too smart for us."
It is the missionary fallacy that the Gospel and civilization are the best things in the world for the "benighted
savage," the aforesaid "benighted savage" being represented as eating fresh wild fruits in the (lay and sleeping
under the stars, spending the interval up in a coco-palm
scanning the horizon for a missionary sail, and waiting to
be discovered by civilization and rescued from a state of
perfect contentment, which he can never by any chance
regain.
The islands were still in the feudal period. There was
no such thing as a fee-simple in land. On the death of a
high chief, the land was re-apportioned. The common




HAWAII NEI


19


people paid tribute to petty chiefs, the petty chiefs
to more powerful ones, and so on. The immediate
followers of the moi, or king of the island, were bound
to furnish him with a certain stated number of armed
retainers in time of war. It was, in little, a perfect feudal
state, with all the civil war and trouble that attended
feudalism in Europe. And upon this basis, constantly
changing with the ambitions of petty chieftains, the missionaries expected to rear New England systems, and
New England ideas. History does not like to jump five
hundred years. Her protest meant the diminution and
gradual extermination of the natives.  The strongest
ones made a desperate effort to keep pace with the
whites; the weaker fell by the wayside. The happiest
Kanaka is the dead Kanaka, and the land is honeycombed with their burial-places.
This view does not find much sympathy in the islands
or elsewhere.  There is a prevailing idea that lurks
under white skins, that the Anglo-Saxon civilization is
the only one worth having, and that it is destined to
spread over the earth. The terrible monotony of this
thing when it shall have come to pass never occurs to
any one. A little well-meant regret for the passing of
the good-tempered, good-looking Polynesian, is greeted
with the contemptuous remark: "Oh, that is mere sentiment. We do not want a picturesque government. We
want one that we can make money under. No white
man is going to be ruled by a black one."
The suggestion that the white man might have stayed
at home, is received with scorn and answered with
silence.
As fast as the natives were ready, they passed on to




20


HAWAII NEI


the better and more kindly world for which they had
been prepared, and no one stopped to consider whether
it was better to be a live savage than a dead Christian.
As the native population grew less and less, the only
recognition of the fact was a pious whisper that God's
will should be done. And in a few years it came to pass
that the teeming island was decimated-the island once
so populous in spite of civil strife that a string of ten
thousand natives stretched from hills to coast and
passed up from hand to hand the coral blocks for the
building of a heiau, or heathen temple. Wild tobacco
now grows on the hillsides within the tumble-down walls
of deserted kuleanas, as the natives call their homesteads, and it is only under the sod that Hawaii is populated with her native citizens. The Kanaka found the
burden of civilization too heavy, and so laid him down
and died.
There is nothing to be said against the motives of the
pious exiles who immured themselves in this beautiful
land, though I should think that the change from the
bleak New England hillsides and the stony New England
farms to this land whose teeming soil yielded all sorts of
delicious fruits, and whose landscape was a panorama of
beautiful scenes, would have been like the change from
Purgatory to Paradise, and by no means a form of martyrdom. The missionaries meant well by the natives. They
began by showing them their sins of omission and commission. The bewildered Kanaka, who never intended
to do anything that was wrong, found that he had all
along been committing the most heinous sins unconsciously. In the first place, he was unclothed. His only
garment was the malo, a strip of kapa cloth bound around




HAWAII NEI


21


his waist, and knotted adroitly about the loins.  His
women wore an ample skirt of kapa, extending from
waist to knee, and consisting of many folds of the cloth
that is beaten from the inner bark of trees, and which
rustles like the cast-off skins of ten thousand serpents.
Clothes are a superfluity in Hawaii, and worn only for
conventionality's sweet sake. The first thing the missionary had to do was to teach the native to be ashamed,
no reptile busybody or kindly tree having brought selfconsciousness to this island Eden. For the men the
hideous pantaloon and the shirt were introduced to hide
the brown satin skin that always looks dressed to Caucasian eyes. For the women the more hideous holoku
was devised to cover the turn of a trim ankle and the
dimple of a dainty elbow. No doubt the shapeless prototype of the "Mother Hubbard," with its square yoke,
was easy for missionary Dorcas societies to turn out in
untold numbers, and the missionary ladies never dreamed
that these hopelessly unbecoming garments, in which the
charms of maid and matron were alike swallowed up,
could ever be made to suggest as well as to reveal.
The missionaries even sought to prohibit the wearing
of the lei-the charming wreath of strung flowers that
is characteristic of the South Seas. They thought the
custom indicative of a light mind, when, in reality, it was
only the sign of a light heart. But the love of flowers
was too deep to be rooted out, and the natives who had
meekly gone into their trousers and holokus refused,
gently but firmly, to abandon their leis.
Having taught the natives that it was sinful to go comfortably unclothed, the missionaries, or their relatives and
friends from New England, opened stores and sold them




22


HAWAII NEI


the necessary cloth. They taught them that the Hawaiian
custom of cleaning the bones and laying the skeleton to
rest in burial-caves was unchristian.  Coffins were the
thing, and they sold them coffins. It was six days in the
store and one in the sanctuary, and the natives, gentle,
tractable, and easily led, grew rapidly in the direction
pointed out to them. Gradually, by some occult process, the little kuleanas began to slip from their uncommercial fingers, the small holdings were gradually
consolidated in the hands of a few Americans, and the
first great fortunes had their rise in Hawaii.
It was all by due form of law, I have no doubt. Nothing is so unjust as justice, and none know so well as the
American how to fit the forms of law over things that
equity abhors. Usually, the native mortgaged his land
for a small amount to give a feast, or to entertain his
friends. Though the loan was small, the interest was not,
and the idea of paying the interest never occurred to the
native. It was not long before the mortgaged kuleana
was the property of the coming land barons.   The
records are all quite straight and aboveboard. They
tell how many feet to the mauka side, which is toward
the mountain, and how many feet makai, toward the sea,
the kuleanas ran. How many of the natives understood
the true meaning of a mortgage, and who took the
trouble to explain it to them? A people which has
never been allowed to alienate its land, merely holding it
as tenants at will, cannot be trusted with the absolute
right of its bestowal. In this case, the Hawaiians were
better off under their feudal system with the slender
claim of fealty on their land, than as free men without
any land at all. At first they did not know what it




HAWAII NEI


23


meant. Had they really parted with all their taropatches and cocoanut-groves? Once every man had his
bit to cultivate. Now they stand landless and emptyhanded.
More and more the whites gained the confidence of
the island monarchs. Some of these were strong and
kindly, and willing to do much for their people. Some
were merely good imitators, aping in miniature the royal
manners and morals of sovereigns elsewhere. Always
the whites, often the missionaries, were chief counselors
of the kings, and always the commercial Anglo-Saxon
waxed more powerful in exact proportion to his money:
for in Hawaii, as elsewhere, money is the common term
to which all problems are at last reduced-the universal
solvent.
At last there came a time when commercial interests
demanded annexation. The whites practically owned
the islands. They objected to being heavily taxed for
the support of a gay and extravagant court. The morals
of the court were also objected to, but the morals were
as they always had been. It was the sensitive pocket
rather than the sensitive conscience that was touched.
The monarchy died easily. The natives are not fighters,
and they were not well led. Gin was substituted for
generalship, and the result was what might have been
expected.
There followed the most unrepublican of republicsnot even excepting Mexico. This was not an enlightened
despotism, nor a dictatorship, but an oligarchy-a government which at its best never represented more than a
small minority of the inhabitants of the islands. It never
derived its powers from the consent of the governed,




24


HAWAII NEI


since only a fraction of the governed assented to it in
any way. But this minority, though small numerically,
was powerful commercially. It included almost all the
moneyed men of the islands. It was a dollarocracy of
the latest and most improved type. Before a man could
vote he must take an ironclad oath of fealty which bound
him not to attempt to restore the queen or to assist in
any revolution looking toward monarchical restoration.
To vote for senator, he must have an income of fifty
dollars a month.  The oath caught one part of the
royalists, and the property qualification the other. The
wealthy ones would not subscribe to the new thirty-nine
articles, and the poor ones could not vote if they would.
And between this Scylla and Charybdis the "family
compact," or missionary party, had it all their own way.
Fifty dollars a month may not seem a high qualification,
but in a country where a native superintendent of railway
construction -a man capable of surveying and constructing twelve miles of as well-balanced road-bed as exists
even in America-gets but thirty-five dollars a month,
the effect on the native vote may be imagined. Only
the families of chiefs, and not all of them, had money
enough to escape the sweeping provisions of the law, and
for them to take an oath of fealty to the new government
was out of the question.
And in all the years that passed, the natives never forgot
their enmity to the government, which they regarded to
the last as the creation of a band of usurpers.
An ordinary Hawaiian boatman, a man with a common-school education, a good average type of his people,
said to me one day: "I have left the native church. I
am going to belong either to the Mormon church or the




HAWAII NEI


25


Catholic. They, at least, did not rob us. The missionaries came here with a Bible in one hand and a butcherknife in the other.  They told us about heaven, and
while we were looking up, they took everything we had."
There are some missionaries who died poor-the
more honor to them for their worldly unsuccess. But
inquire into the ancestry of the island millionaires, and
you will almost invariably find a missionary pedigree.
The missionaries reared their sons to secular occupations.
The records of the republic show that these, at least,
considered themselves bound by no vow of poverty.
Financially and governmentally, the missionary farilies have prospered. Instead of the missionary families,
they are now the millionaire families, and only the fact
that in almost every family one or two feeble-minded
children form a blot on the scutcheon, reminds the
unclerical observer that the Lord still chastens them that
he loveth.  Except for this sign, one might almost
imagine that the Giver had lost all aflection for those
who came to christianize the islands, and had decided to
let them grow so rich that not one of them could hope to
enter the kingdom of heaven.
There were some good men in the missionary republic-some men undoubtedly earnest and sincere. Some
of them even came to have a sort of popularity with the
natives; but the government, as a whole, never felt sure
enough of itself, nor certain enough of the depth of the
grave in which the hatchet had been interred, to allow
the native to vote. The registration of voters under the
republic was always extremely low, and at the last
election so small a number voted that the farcical character of the "republic" was apparent.




26


HAWAII NEI


The personnel of the republic was peculiar. The
native Hawaiians have nothing but scorn for those officials who "kowtowed" most industriously under the
monarchy, and were the first to undermine it. They
were the ones -Americans, too- from whose lips "Your
Majesty" flowed most obsequiously and unnecessarily.
No royalist from birth ever paid such servile court as
they. They even kissed the royal hand-a dark handand have been known to crawl on marrow-bone into the
presence of the queen. Nothing in all Liliuokalani's
book excited as much mirth in Honolulu as her passages
concerning the struggle for precedence in her Lilliputian
court. The best things about these tales is that every one
in Honolulu knows they are true. But these people,
who were willing to crawl on all-fours to win favor at
the hands of a king, and who did win favors of many
sorts, mainly pecuniary and official, were the very first to
cry, "Down with the monarchy!" and to make a great
outcry about republicanism and the equal rights of free
men, when their knees were still aching from the constant
wear and tear. Such time-servers as these, put prominently forward in a government, bring the whole scheme
into contempt.
One gentleman in particular, himself a foreigner, had
the greatest suspicion and dislike of strangers. He distrusted them all, and checkmated newcomers as far as
possible. He never missed one of his many opportunities to snub a stranger, and played the czar in his own
small realm. He was so vulnerable and so fearful of
criticism that he sought uniformly to gag all expressions
of honest opinion, and would not even disclose what
was of public interest and importance.  The whole




HAWAII NEI


27


government was noted for intolerance and hypocrisy.
With a muzzled press and a close corporation of voters,
what remains of republican ideals?
The newspapers in Honolulu have always been owned
by political cliques, and only one ever dared to indulge
in fearless criticism. The President was spoken of as
though he were a god, and any disposition, even to
inquire, was put down with all the savage intolerance of
the descendants of those men who are responsible for
that little episode at Salem. Here, under the palms, in
a climate that would be expected to soften anything,
appeared again that adamantine bigotry and intolerance
which made the name of Puritan feared and hated, and
which blackens their memory in spite of many virtues,
even to this day.
The one newspaper that dared to criticise is mentioned
in the street with bated breath —never at all in polite
missionary circles. The gag in the mouth of journalism
extended not only to the official acts and private characters of public personages, but even to the news, which
should know no color and no bias. Proprietors and
stock companies were so timid of criticism that news of
prime importance was not allowed to be published in
Honolulu until it had been sent to the Pacific Coast, there
published, and in due form returned to Honolulu. Then
it might be copied, forsooth! Even as late as the summer of I898, only two years before the beginning of tht
twentieth century and one hundred and thirty-six years
after Wilkes, a great turmoil was caused in one newspaper office because the paper published a thrilling
account of an attempt to blow up one of the United
States transports, during the war with Spain-an event




28


HAWAII NEI


which had a peculiar local interest, because it occurred as
the ship was nearing Honolulu. No one questioned the
truth of the story. The issue was made on the propriety
of printing the tale, though it hurt no one and was legitimate news. The real reason for the suppression of such
matters and the utterly tame and unprofitable character
of the Honolulu press, is that the vice of Honolulu has
always been gossip. Gossip, scandal sometimes, is the
mental dissipation of a place where mails are few and
uncertain, and where their insular position prevents the
inhabitants from having anything big to think about.
The human mind must have food, and if there is nothing
large and soul-filling to occupy it, tittle-tattle will take its
place. There are certain fcOuntainheads of information
in Honolulu, and these gentlemen are actually jealous of
the newspapers. To have a thing published makes it
public property and destroys their occupation. These
men, spinning yarns like grandams in the ingle-nook, are
the worst enemies of the dissemination of news through
proper and legitimate channels. They have fought the
papers all along. It is only since annexation was accomplished that the Hawaiian press has ventured to stretch a
timid hand from the swaddling-clothes wherein it has been
almost smothered to death. The saving grace of the telegraph and the growth of party politics, with all its bitterness and strife, will be a tonic for Honolulu. It will make
it a better and more wholesome place to live in. No
longer will people go to band concerts solely to see if
Mr. Somebody is talking to Mr. Somebody Else's wife.
Reputations will be safer, for formerly Caesar's wife or
Hamlet's love, chaste as ice, could not escape calumny.
If a tale was spicy, they were not even careful to keep




HAWAII NEI


29


the original actors in the cast, but changed the characters
as stage-managers shift their players. Such a state of
affairs is not only uncomfortable for well-intentioned and
well-behaved persons who are willing to submit to all
reasonable demands of conventionality, but is, besides,
exceedingly harmful to the colony of gossipers itself. No
one knows when he is safe or liable to misconstruction,
and the mind of the teller of tales grows smaller and more
twisted and warped with each recital.
Besides its extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism,
which is usually the sign of an uneasy conscience, the
Hawaiian republic has distinguished itself for arbitrariness
and injustice. Take, for instance, the form of government. The President of the republic was also Governor
of Oahu and Mayor of Honolulu. There was no municipal government; and while this might have been forgiven in Honolulu, it could not be overlooked that there
was no municipal government anywhere else. Centralization in its most extreme and objectionable form prevailed.
The republic was really worse than the monarchy; for
under the later kings there was at least a governor for
each island. And, besides, the monarchy had few ideals,
while the republic was violating every tradition of republicanism. It was simply wearing the robes of democracy,
while it behaved in tyrannical fashion.
There is the case of Hilo, the second city in size in
the islands, and a district of thirteen thousand inhabitants. Hilo has never been allowed a municipal government, nor even a recorder of deeds. It is more than two
hundred miles from Honolulu.  Every deed recorded
must travel four hundred miles, and twenty days must be
wasted. The consequence is that most of the deeds at




30


IHAWAII NEI


Hilo are unrecorded. To build a sidewalk or to pave a
street, permission must be sought and an appropriation
gained from the national legislature. Is it any wonder
that Hilo welcomed annexation with open arms as a relief
from tyranny, or that she has all the love for Honolulu
that St. Louis bears Chicago or that Minneapolis claims
from St. Paul? These things charged to republicanism
make the blood boil. I sometimes think that the men
who planned and executed the government of Hawaii
must have been away from America so long that they had
forgotten everything about Liberty except her name.
I have charged the late Hawaiian government with
hypocrisy. The deeds that merit the name might amount
to nothing in other climes, but when one considers the
traditions and antecedents of this government, some of
its acts are shocking. One glaring instance of this political immorality existed in Hawaii for years in the shape
of a system of contract labor, with penal enforcement,
which differed little from Southern slavery. They will
tell you down there that this labor was necessary for the
development of the island -that sugar could not be produced without it, and that without sugar the islands
would never have been rich. And what they tell you is
perfectly true. For sugar the contract-bound Chinese
and Japanese were necessary, and for the commercial
prosperity of the islands there must be sugar. I believe
that the Southern owners of cotton plantations pleaded a
similar necessity for almost a hundred years.
The contract laborer is a wage-slave. For a long
time he had no name, being known only by a number,
like a convict, until public opinion forced a change. His
contract was penally enforced, and if he ran away he was




IAWAII NEI


3I


recaptured and brought back and forced to serve out his
time. The only difference between this slavery and that
of the South is that the Hawaiian slaves are paid a certain
wage, and that the consuls look after the rights of their
countrymen when abuses become too flagrant. There is,
too, a suggestion of free-will in the fact that the Orientals
are supposed to bind themselves willingly in their own
countries. But there are on the island of Hawaii whole
villages of fugitive laborers, hidden in inaccessible places
in the mountains —camps whither other laborers flee,
somewhat as they did to the Dismal Swamp.
It is something of a shock to the calloused Westerner
to find a government almost entirely composed of the
thin, cool New England blood-the blood of Phillips
and of Garrison-so calmly determining that the labor
the country needs must be given it. If the kings had
done it, there would have been no surprise-they
knew no better; but these political sons of priestly
sires, who had overturned a government because they
believed in the equality of all men-how could they
reconcile it with their consciences? It seems almost as
though in their anxiety to instruct the natives, the missionaries had forgotten to teach the Golden Rule to their
own sons.
These crimes, 0 Industry! were committed in thy
name, permitted by a government avowedly more religious than any other known -in a land where church-bells
fill the air on Sundays, and business on the Lord's day is
unknown. Yet a legislative bill to abolish the penal
enforcement of labor contracts was quietly shelved a few
months ago. There is one virtue the old Hawaiian legislature cannot bequeath as a legacy-that of consistency.




32


HAWAII NEI


After annexation had become a fact, the republic of
Hawaii dated back several labor contracts, under which a
few hundred more laborers were brought into the country.
There is something about this clinging to the letter of the
law, without regard for its spirit, that would be ludicrous
if it were not sad, considering that every member of the
late government was of missionary extraction or a devoted
and zealous worshiper at the big stone church around
the corner.
Another case: The republic of Hawaii did a thing that
only France has ever dared do-it licensed prostitution.
This missionary government, these men of churchly traditions, had the courage to stand up and look the evil in
the face, as they do in Paris. It takes the breath awaythis sudden transition from Puritanism to Parisianism.
The law is that the women of the half-world who are
examined and registered according to its provisions, and
who have paid the fees it prescribes, shall not be interfered with in the conduct and extension of their business.
It is practically a legal recognition of the social evil. To
cap the climax, the republic christened this legislation
"the act to mitigate the evils of prostitution." In the
islands the members of the government speak of it only
as "the act to mitigate."  It is a long time before
strangers know what is meant by the misleading phrase.
At first blush, it seems as though an act to mitigate must
certainly be a wise and good thing, as anything that can
be mitigated should be. When the full meaning and
title of the law break on one for the first time, it is in
the nature of a shock, and one closes the statute-book
with a bang, the juxtaposition of sanctity and worldly
wisdom is so startling.




HAWAII NEI


33


To be consistent in their desire to "mitigate" evils,
the Hawaiian government should have recognized that
wherever there is a large Chinese population there will
always be opium. It might have put a heavy import
duty on the drug, and so regulated its entrance to the
republic, simultaneously discouraging the crime of smuggling and reaping the financial benefit, instead of having
the profit go to private parties, some of them of decided
r   respectability, but still smugglers. But in this respect
the Hawaiian republic stood firm. It would not lay a
duty on opium-never. It was one of the chief grievances of the missionaries against Liliuokalani that she
was said to be in favor of admitting opium. They could
find it in their hearts to license prostitution, but never the
importation of opium.
The same rule was applied to the selling of liquors.
The making of native gin is prohibited, and it is exceedingly difficult to get a license for the selling of liquor,
especially in the country. In Honolulu there are several
saloons, but the government evidently did not think that
these privileges should be extended to the rural districts.
In Hilo one cannot have a glass of wine at table, but is
escorted down a crooked passage to a room with drawn
blinds, to have a glass of claret and water. The absolute prohibition of liquors, except in certain favored districts, is about as successful in the islands as it has been
elsewhere.
For these reasons, and others in the same line, the
death of the Hawaiian republic was unregretted save by
its office-holders. They will regret it still more when the
practical politician sails over from the main land and sets
them an example of how local politics is done. But it is




34                HAWAII NEI
doubtful if even these gentlemen, learned in ward politics,
can teach the Hawaiian politician much about skillful manipulation, or can instruct him in the gentle art of how to
leave large portions of the population unrepresented.








SufCanoeing off Diamond Hlead




HAWAII NEI


35


CHAPTER IV
THE AMERICAN COLONY
THROUGH the years Honolulu has been far-famed for
hospitality, and if its people are growing a little more
cautious now, and do not fall upon the neck of every
stranger as he comes down the gangplank, it is because
the wings of their faith have been clipped and their
hospitality sometimes abused.  Nowadays a letter of
introduction or two will facilitate the stranger's entrance
to the very pleasant inner social circle of Honolulu, about
which the rest of the place revolves.  Every year, of
course, the city becomes less provincial, and under
a       American rule the change will unhappily be accelerated.
Increased immigration must destroy, in a measure, the
pleasant neighborly air, and Honolulu, like everything
else, will have to pay the penalty of wealth and greatness.
The Americans in Honolulu are not like any other
Americans in the tropics.  One hears much of the
enervating climate and sees its effects among the women,
but the men are a busy, bustling lot, and show strongly
their New England ancestry. The business day begins
at eight o'clock and lasts until five, when the city's commerce suddenly runs down and stops with a bang. In
Mexico, where it is infinitely cooler and more invigorating, everybody takes a siesta between twelve and two;
but that is a Latin idea, and the Hawaiians by adoption




36


HAWAII NEI


have never even thought of such a thing. Business is
lively, and the streets are full of animation. Bicycles
dart about, and there is a stock-board and other feverish
importations. At eight o'clock the carriages come down
the Waikiki road. They are the private conveyances of
the gentlemen who live at this delightful suburb-by-thesea. Their wives drive them, and after the head of the
house has been dropped at his office, the lady driver goes
to the market and makes her purchases for the day.
Drivers for private carriages have scarcely obtained a
foothold in Honolulu, and even wives of millionaires
drive themselves. Sometimes the stableman is pressed
into service, but liveries, except for the servants of legations, have scarcely been known. The Princess Kaiulani
drives sometimes with a footman up behind, but this is
an innovation which has won no popularity, and is hardly
suited to this land. Kaiulani's footman, secure behind
his mistress, bows to his friends as he passes them on the
road to Waikiki, from which one can see that the idea of
the impassive flunkey has not taken deep root in this
land of smiles and glittering teeth.
The American women complain much of the climate
and its enervating effects. The chief trouble with them
is lack of exercise.  They hate to walk, since exertion
means perspiration, and the hack habit is at the root of
their ill-health. To be sure, there are street-cars, but
these run in three directions only, and are many minutes
apart.  Besides, the ban is laid upon them, and riding in
them means social outlawry. They are patronized by
natives, Orientals, and strangers. The visitor has an
advantage in that. He may ride in these go-as-you-please
conveyances, and plead ignorance of the social law. An




HAWAII NEI


37


electric transportation company will some day bind all the
suburbs to the city, and will add white patronage to the
native. Unfortunately, the same company will probably
erect its hideous poles over the Pali, and then one of the
most beautiful views in the world will be destroyed.
The women of the wealthier classes, and even of the
middle classes- for most of the Americans in the islands
are well-to-do-give up their days to dolce far niente. It
is a place of many servants, a fashion introduced by the
English who came by way of India and Japan, where
servants are plentiful as flies. The great numbers of
Orientals fostered the custom, and now it is a necessity.
People of the middle class who would have a maid-of-allwork at home, or two servants at the most, have four and
five in the islands. Any modest establishment has its
Japanese nurse, if there be a young child, and two, if there
be several children. There is a cook, either Chinese or
Japanese, and a waiter of the same nationality. Often
the waitress is Japanese; and the picturesque figure, in its
dainty kimono, the noiseless footfall, and the constant
attention are pleasant in the extreme. An outside man
is kept to look after the garden, the horses, and the bathhouse.
Most of the house-servants are Orientals. The natives
do not work for the whites to any great extent. Wealthy
Hawaiian families have old retainers of their own blood,
and Caucasian servants are seldom seen. Unskilled labor
is almost entirely performed by the men of darker skin.
With such a colony of dependents, one might expect
wages to be low, but they are not. Few house-servants
receive less than four dollars a week, and an average of
sixteen dollars for four servants is not at all exorbitant.




38


HAWAII NEI


The little serving colony lives in small detached buildings
in the grounds, after the style of plantations in the Southern States. It is a pleasant, patriarchal mode of life, and
the big baths of stone or marble, sunk in the grounds
and screened by trees, with the shaded lanais, where meals
are spread in dry weather and where the five o'clock teatable gathers a crowd of guests, combine the pleasures of
the Orient and the Occident.
It is well that the American colony is sufficient unto
itself, inasmuch as diversions from the outside are few and
far between. There are fragmentary theatrical performances, delightful dinners and luncheons, and sometimes
small house-dances. Card-parties are not in much favor.
The mosquitoes are such a plague, especially after nightfall, that it would require a philosopher to keep his mind
on a whist game and pursue these blood-drinking pests
at the same time.
I always wonder when I hear the hackneyed phrase,
"Paradise of the Pacific," if the speaker has ever been
to Hawaii. It may well have been a paradise before the
mosquitoes came-imported, like all the bad things.
But now they make living one long struggle. They are
clever mosquitoes, and they have divided the twenty-four
hours into day and night watches. Those that skirmish
by daylight are bad enough, but their fellows of the
evening are infinitely worse. They serenade gently, bite
unmercifully, and go away only to pilot countless millions
of their kind through some private entrance to your
" mosquito-proof" room. The only remedies that prevail
against them are so ill-smelling that the mosquitoes are
preferable.
Dinner in Honolulu is not at all like dinner on the




HAWAII NEI


39


mainland. The only thing conventional about it is the
dress. After all the guests are announced and before
dinner is served, a servant, or perhaps the hostess,
passes about the drawing-room, her arms full of leis,
which are long garlands of stemless flowers, strung on
threads and ready to be knotted at the back of the neck
in fragrant wreaths. Each guest chooses a garland suited
to toilette or complexion. Invitations to a dinner are
always invitations to attend a luau, and the modern feast
is modeled after the old ones at which the Hawaiians,
from king to lowest peasant, made merry.
The tables are almost entirely covered with ferns and
garlands of maile, the fragrant vine that is the Hawaiian
smilax. Leis of waxen pomeria, of bright golden ilimas,
and of carnations, red, pink, and white, are laid among
the green. Calabashes of polished cocoanut-shells, small
gourds, or wooden bowls of the brilliantly polished koa, are
at each place, for poi, generally the prized pink poi, is
served at all these ceremonious affairs. Other dishes are
served in courses much as they would be at home, except
that baked taro is among the vegetables, the delightful
alligator-pear is probably the salad, the fish is steamed in
ti-leaves and served in its leafy covering, and there is an
abundance of island fruit. The wines are all imported.
Beer is very generally drunk in Honolulu, and the natives
are particularly fond of it. The government has prohibited the manufacture of native gin, and beer has almost
usurped its place in the affection of the common people.
Imported gin is drunk by the natives, to their own great
detriment, and gin cocktails are served in American
homes more frequently than anything else. At all
modern luaus there are tables and chairs. The old days,




40


HAWAII NEI


when the merrymakers sat on mats and the viands were
served on the floor, are past. Even at Liliuokalani's
luaus, the guests sit on chairs and eat from tables, and
the common calabash has taken a fine new satin finish,
and is full of photographs in the best room. The luau
has been Americanized. Only once in the island of
Hawaii did I see a native luau of pristine simplicity.
The feast was in honor of an American whose unfailing
kindness to the natives has won him a wide regard.
Everything was primitive as possible, and the poi in the
great koa calabash was common property. There was
mullet steamed in ti-leaves; ahi, dried fish; ina, a seaweed
condiment; olope, oysters; aki, liver; hoolua, roast pork
that had been cooking for a day and a night; and kalua,
pork that had been roasted for an hour or two All this
was put on the table at once. I fear that I enjoyed the
fruit and the soft, green cocoanuts scooped out of the
shell with a spoon, more than I did the elaborate "made
dishes. " One must go a long way from Honolulu to find
such a feast. In the city they are always spoiled by some
significant intrusion of the new.
The wealthy Hawaiian often gives a hula in honor of
some noted visitor.  People of standing attend these
affairs, though the hula is frowned upon by the American
women whose word is the cachet to the best Honolulu
society.  American men visitors are not ostracized for
going to these native ballets, but American women cannot afford to do it, so rigorously is the dance condemned
in the best American circles. The Hawaiians, however,
have their own standards. It was not a week after the
raising of the American flag, that the heart -broken
Kaiulani was at a hula given by a prominent Hawaiian




HAWAII NEI


4I


lady. The hula-dancers wore skirts and anklets only.
From the waist up their bodies were bare, except for the
leis of maile, and the ill-smelling ylang -ylang that they
wore. American men were there, and the Princess, for
all her English schooling, seemed to think nothing of it.
That is where comes in the wide difference between the
civilizations. The Princess went and applauded, and
thought no harm. It is the old non-moral idea.
The government has tried very hard to abolish hula
dancing. Hulas, in the altogether, are expressly forbidden, and the law is enforced; but I am told that
American men, passing through Honolulu on their way
to the East, are often edified with one of the dances as
they were in Kalakaua's time. On steamer nights the
sound of the calabash, beaten as a drum, comes faintly
from distant places in the direction of Waikiki, and also
from the crooked, crowded section of the town. Thus a
moral nation helps to lift a non-moral one to higher
things.
On moonlight nights most delightful bathing-parties
are given at the villas of Waikiki. The great amusement is not so much dipping in the surf, though every one
swims like a fish, but canoeing. Many people have their
own canoes, and there are boats to be hired, with natives
to guide them. The canoes are built on the old Hawaiian
model, which could not well be improved upon. Each
one is hollowed from a single trunk, and I have skimmed
the surf in a canoe in which the great Kamehameha
himself went a-voyaging. There is an outrigger of heavy
wood to give steadiness, and the paddles are huge, flat
wooden spoons. There are usually two natives to paddle and one to steer, though some of the Americans




42


HAWAII NEI


who live by the water have learned the difficult art of
steering. It is a most delightful sport, though timid
people do not enjoy it. It has in it that spice of danger
which charms. The canoe-riders all wear bathing-suits,
for it is as wet inside the boat as outside. Unless the
canoe is extraordinarily large, not more than two passengers who do not work can be carried. As a consequence, some of the ladies at Waikiki have learned to be
expert oarswomen.
The canoe is pushed off from the shelving shore and
paddled out toward the reef, over which the tide rolls in
big breakers, the bigger the better.  Too much wind
blowing off shore spoils the sport, as it prevents the
canoe from attaining sufficient momentum. All hands
paddle going out, and presently, about a quarter of a
mile from shore, the rowers turn the canoe, and wait for
a huge roller. Sometimes when the surf runs high, even
the outward-going is exciting. The canoe goes over big
incoming breakers, and drops squarely down to the level
water with something of the shock of the chutes. Two
or three rollers may pass the canoe before one is selected.
It is chosen far out, and the helmsman gives the signal,
" Hoi! hoi!" which means to paddle like mad   The
rowers bend to the paddles, and the firm, quick strokes,
send the canoe bounding forward while the motion thrills
the bark as the wind thrilled it long ago, when it was a
young tree in the forest. All this effort is to give the
boat sufficient momentum to keep up with the wave when
the latter shall have finally caught up with its freight.
If the boat is not going fast enough, the breaker overwhelms it and passes on, leaving the canoe swamped and
half-full of water, or, perhaps, capsizing it in spite of the




HAWAII NEI


43


outrigger. To be in a careening boat with a heavy outrigger that has a way of knocking innocent people on
the head is not agreeable, nor is it fun to have to swim in
with the waterlogged canoe, sometimes a task of several
hours. Those who cannot swim must sit in the canoe
and add their weight to that of the water. But if the
canoe is going fast enough, none of these disagreeable
contingencies occur. The wave, fresh from its victorious
fight with the reef, rises behind in a great green translucent wall, curling white at the top, as though to show
its teeth. From far below it, you look up into it fascinated. There is a moment of breathless suspense, and
then the canoe is lifted up and flung forward with incredible speed. It is like sliding downhill over water instead
of land, and there is all the fancied pleasure of drowning
with none of its pangs. It is one long toboggan to the
shore. Once or twice, if the paddlers with their wonderfully sympathetic water-sense feel the boat slackening,
they give a vigorous push or two and the canoe is again
coasting down the wave. In front, where the canoe cuts
the water, a blinding sheet of spray is thrown upward
and backward, and the two cowcatcher seats are all
afloat. But the steersman has no sinecure.  With his
paddle he must guide this long canoe, which is not an
easy task, considering that the wave has several motions,
and does not travel in a straight line. If he feels a rotary
motion inside the circling water, he must correct it with
his paddle. He is obliged to shift the paddle from side
to side of the boat, and he must do it with swiftness and
certainty. A second's indecision on his part would capsize the canoe. Often he clutches his paddle with both
hands and bends all his weight to keep the canoe from




44                 HAWAII NEI
swerving in this maelstrom of waters.  Sometimes the
rowers, feeling that the wave is too strong for the single
paddle, lend their oars to counteract the oblique motion
of the water.
Borne on irresistibly, the canoe is carried to the shore,
and then the paddlers bend to their task once more, and
the exhilarating run is made over again. The enjoyment
is heightened when there are three or four canoes out, all
in experienced hands. They race on every incoming
wave, and as the wave does not run at the same speed in
all places, there is a fair chance for one canoe to shoot in
ahead of the others. If the wave dies out at one point,
or if one of the canoes is left in the rear, a derisive shout
goes up from the rest. This is sea-racing in a new form,
with nature to do the work.
You can have anything you want in Hawaii, and if
you live in an equable land of perpetual summer it is
your own fault. You can take your choice of simmering by the seashore, where it is always June, or you can
climb a mountain and meet vigorous December. These
mountain pilgrimages are growing in favor. At present
there is but one hotel at any considerable altitude, but in
time there will be mountain hostelries for those who love
frost. Even winter is within reach in this most indulgent
land.
Sometimes a drive is planned to the Pali, or a coaching party goes around the cool precipice and down to one
of the country places on the windward side of Oahu.
House-parties are given at country places, with pighunting or wild-goat or dove shooting for diversion.
There are yachts and excellent sailing, and exciting shark
hunts at times. All things are practicable in the open




HAWAII NEI                  45
air. Houses are built with verandas, closed on three
sides. The fourth side is open, with Japanese shades to
keep out wind or sun. The constant trade-winds come
to cool the lanais, and the life there is very pleasant.
The lanai is sometimes an arbor, separated from the
house and covered with the hau-tree, which has broad
leaves and gives as good shelter as a grape-vine.
Perhaps it is the open lanai life that makes the popular interest in every one's affairs so great. From the
house with the tin lions to the aisle of royal palms with
their green foliage and gray stems, all secrets are common
property. Who went to the last hula, and who drank
too much at the luau, are matters of common concern.
A cable and the big affairs of the world to occupy mind
and eye and active tongue will make the social life of
Honolulu and Waikiki, that dream city by the sea, even
more delightful than it is now.




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CHAPTER V
NATIVE LIVING
THERE are not left in Honolulu a half-dozen grass
houses, and those that remain are mere curiosities on rich
men's grounds. One charming relic on the Macfarlane
place, at Waikiki, has a history, and one on the grounds
of Minister Damon, at Moana Lua, is furnished in the old
fashion. They are oblong, steep-roofed dwellings, and
their interiors show that the Hawaiians were sybaritic
savages, and knew what comfort was. Fine braided
mats, soft as meadow-grass, make the carpets. One half
the room is a raised platform, and over a layer of rushes
are many mattings of pandanus leaves and grass. This
was the bed, a soft and luxurious couch, big enough for
a dozen persons. There are massive seats of cocoanut
stumps, ancient spears, carved of wood and tipped with
bone, an old piece of furniture from a heiau, which looks
like a chopping-block, and has horrid associations, being
stained with blood and time.
I asked mournfully where all the brown huts of the
story-books, that clustered so prettily under the palms
and melted so charmingly into the landscape, had gone,
and was told that the grass grew no more, but that is a
fiction. In truth, the grass house cost a deal of labor.
There were many ceremonies connected with its inception, and the work of thatching the straw, to make it




i      ii-i               The DisappearingPiFmtevaliDwelling.




I




HAWAII NEI


47


impervious against the persistent floods that alone mark
the Hawaiian winter, was a labor of many hands for many
days. With the white man came many deadly pests.
Foreign ships brought mosquitoes as well as centipedes
and scorpions. The native does not mind the mosquito,
and the mosquito does not find the native toothsome;
but the scorpions and centipedes are no respecters of
person, and would as lief sting a brown heel as a white
one. The floorless grass houses were admirable hidingplaces, and cozy breeding-grounds for insects, and the
fact had much to do with their abandonment The
natives, who recover easily from trouble and losses,
settled quite comfortably into houses of frame, with roofs
of corrugated iron. The newer dwellings are not beautiful, but they are more comfortable than houses on the
ground, damp in the winter floods, infested with creeping
things, and so inflammable that they went up like rockets
at the first touch of a match.
The old hillside kuleanas, where the natives used to
live, and which they were free to leave if they wished to
enter the service of another chief, are mostly abandoned
now, and the grass houses that stood within the inclosures, have returned to the earth from which they came,
or were burned down long ago. Only on the picturesque
lee shore of the island of Hawaii does the grass house
still nestle under the palms. Even here, where tradition
is most tenacious, they are not rebuilt. When one goes
up in smoke, the house that replaces it is a claptrap of
boards and iron. Like the hoary cocoanut-groves, the
grass house is doomed. Few people know that the
cocoanut-groves are rapidly passing. When the process
of extinction shall have been completed, one of the most




48


HAWAII NEI


beautiful and picturesque features of the island landscape
will have been obliterated.  Lately, awakened to the
rapid diminution of the coco-palm, and its wanton
destruction, the islanders have begun to plant new
groves, but it will be a hundred years before these can
replace the old. The cocoanuts are exceedingly slow of
growth, and the present trees were as tall as they are
now when the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the
natives of to-day were alive.  The oldest men of the
villages will tell you that they have it from their grandfathers that these trees were waving their high tops in
the wind when they were boys. Without the grass
house and the garments of kapa, it is but half Hawaii;
with the cocoanuts gone, it would not be Hawaii at all.
Inside, the little frame houses are quite comfortable.
The natives are surprisingly clean. In a country where
it showers every day, where clothes are few and baths frequent, there is no excuse for dirt. But these natives are
so much cleaner than the people of our own slums that
we, who came to patronize, remain to pattern. The
Hawaiians wear no superfluous clothing, and their cotton
garments are always immaculate, though their feet are
sometimes bare and often dusty.
Only the lowest class goes unshod. The lei-women
on the street go barefooted. It is evidently considered a
reflection on social standing, and every one aims to be
shod. As far as beauty goes, the slender brown feet
need no covering. Their feet are well formed, and civilization's shoes have not been worn long enough to deform
them. The Kanakas walk with a swinging stride that
tells of long years of perfect freedom. Their straight
backs are a legacy from generations who sat on the floor.




HAWAII NEI


49


The women, in particular, have a walk that' marks them
the whole world over. There is a swing of hip and
shoulder that is unique and inimitable.   A  stately
Hawaiian wahine in a loose holoku, swinging down the
street and managing to extract a considerable amount of
grace and dignity from her stiff and rustling garment, is
indeed a wonder.
Racially, the Hawaiians are closely connected with the
Samoans and the aborigines of New Zealand, and there
are many affinities of language, religion, and legend that
connect them. There are striking physical resemblances,
as well as these spiritual ones. There are old tales, histories intoned, which tell of long voyages by sea, and it
is supposed that many centuries ago there was a chain of
small islands between Hawaii and the archipelagoes of the
South Seas, by which the navigators were guided. With
the disappearance of these sea-marks, the bold voyages
were discontinued, and race differences, engendered by
climate and situation, began to appear.
The full-blooded Hawaiians, now becoming so scarce
that it is difficult to study the type, are distinguished by
that slight overfullness of the lips and broadening of the
nose characteristic of the Polynesian peoples. The skin
is brown, but not much darker than that of a Spaniard,
and not nearly as dark as the Mexican-never dark
enough to be mistaken for Ethiopian. It shows the
grossest ignorance when the Hawaiians are called "niggers," as they sometimes are. The effect of the constant
sunshine is to make all brunette skins much darker. In
a few generations, white men, transplanted to the islands
and not allowed to leave them, would be quite as dark as
the natives themselves. I recall, in particular, the case




50


HAWAII NEI


of a handsome young woman of English parentage, who
was born in the islands less than thirty years ago, and
who has never been away from them. Though naturally
fair, with blue eyes and dark hair, she is so dark that she
is frequently mistaken for a half-white. Americans should
be chary how they apply terms of contempt to the natives.
Their own descendants in the islands may be quite as
dark. Heretofore the color-line has not been drawn in
the islands. It will be one of the most grievous consequences flowing from annexation if it is to be drawn in
the future. Already the natives are sensitive about the
matter as never before.
In years gone by, when the first white men came
to the islands, and the land was under the rule of the
dusky princes of the sovereign race, there could be no
question of color. If there was any color-line at all, the
brown man was above the salt and the paleface below.
In those days, the most stiff-backed republican was glad
to bow the knee —anything to be allowed to live in this
land where much money was to be made. When the
white men took the government, the change was slight.
Too many white men had married native women, and the
blood was too thoroughly mixed for immediate reprisals.
Many of the best foreign families of the islands are intermarried with natives, and one has only to see the graceful,
handsome Hawaiian women and to meet them in their
homes to understand their charm. Many of the native
families were rich in lands, and had social prestige and
power. They were learned in matters of precedence,
and the Hawaiian-born Americans are sticklers for precedent. For instance, President Dole, on his official trip to
America, had with him as factotum and aide a man who




HAWAII NEI


5I


went with Queen Kapiolani and Princess Liliuokalani to
the Victorian Jubilee. He was not sure of the President's
name, and registered him as "Sandford B. Dole," instead
of "Sanford B. Dole," but he is considered the most eminent authority in court etiquette and state procedure on
the islands.
It is amusing to go to the native church at Honolulu
and be seated apart from the congregation, in a raised section at the back of the house. Other Americans are put
in this same reserved space, and as the congregation files
out one is inspected, respectfully but critically. It is a
new experience for the lordly white and a salutary one.
We are not used to having the color-line drawn in that
way. I wished that some of my friends who say "nigger," and decline to sit at table with a colored man, or
next a Chinese in the train, might have been there.
Perhaps it is this feeling of equality that gives the
Hawaiians their dashing air. It will be a great pity if
annexation or restrictions on the franchise combine to set
these people off from their neighbors. It would be grave
injustice to the half-whites who are educated, refined, and
handsome-much the best half-castes I have ever seen.
They have not the vicious or indolent qualities which
usually distinguish the cross in the blood. They have not
developed the weaknesses of both parents, as is too often
the case in other countries. Instead, they are big and
fine-looking, industrious, clever, and more prolific than
the native Hawaiians. They bid fair to last. It is an
odd thing that the least admixture of blood turns the
heavy black hair of the Hawaiian, which is naturally
straight, into curls and kinks. It does not seem to matter what the cross is. The Gilbert Islanders, who came




52


HAWAII NEI


to Hawaii in considerable numbers, have curly hair, and
some observers attempt to account for the phenomena in
that way, but it is odd that the children of Chinese and
Hawaiian parents have curly hair that could come from
neither side of the house. Another peculiarity of the
Hawaiian-Chinese children is their light color. Strangely
enough, the Oriental-Polynesian mixture produces a
fairer skin than the admixture of Polynesian and Caucasian blood. Such queer pranks Nature plays!
The Hawaiian women who have married Americans
are extremely jealous of their prerogatives, and their
husbands are jealous of them as well. New settlers will
perhaps be squeamish as to differences of birth for a little
while, but they will soon find that these women are as
well-born, well-bred, and well-educated as themselves,
and the prejudice must wear away as the dark skin
becomes an old story.
The real danger to the Hawaiian race lies in quite
another direction. The Hawaiians are threatened with
extinction on two sides. The upper-class women seldom
marry men of their own blood, but almost always whites.
The lower-class women become the wives of Chinese.
Thus the purity of blood is threatened in two directions.
Even the ruling family was not of pure strain. The chiefs
were so superior to the common people in size, and so
much handsomer, that it seemed as if they must be of a
different race. Away back in the misty years of their
sagas, it is related how strange vessels were wrecked on
their coasts. From the descriptions of the shipwrecked
survivors, and from ships that went astray and were
never heard from, historians conjecture that the wrecks
were of Japanese junks and Spanish ships, blown out




HAWAII NEI


53


of their courses. The survivors intermarried with the
families of chiefs, and became the progenitors of a lightcolored race.
The popularity of the Chinese as husbands is due to
the fact that they are excellent providers, which the
native Hawaiians are not. Since there are no penalties
attached, these marriages are freely made. The only
trouble is that the Chinese husbands who become wealthy
have an unpleasant way of going home to China to die,
abandoning their Hawaiian families for the sake of their
Cantonese wives and their Cantonese ancestors.  But as
the Chinese husband usually leaves his island family well
provided for, and as Hawaiian wives, like many in more
cultured lands, are sometimes mercenary, it does not
matter particularly. There has never been the slightest
prejudice in the islands against admixtures of Chinese
blood. If the family have money enough and demean
itself well, it is not asked whether the head of the house
wore queue or malo.    There is the well-known and
somewhat hackneyed case of the Honolulu family whose
progenitor was a Chinese, and whose portrait, in a celestial
blouse, is the most prominent ornament of the drawingroom where young Caucasians with shoulder-straps go
to pay court to the charming and amiable daughters of this
somewhat mixed house. Other examples of this social
tolerance are found at Hilo, where many of the "first
families" have the Chinese tang in the blood. Occasionally a child occurs with an almond eye and eyelids
inclined to pucker at the scanty corners, but ordinarily
the children look like other people, and are received
wholly on their merits and bank accounts.
Clothing and gin well-nigh proved fatal to the natives.




54


HAWAII NEI


They succumb easily to pulmonary diseases, but are
fairly hardy and long-lived. Their small families and
high death-rate are the direct cause of the decline in the
native population. The natives are much more industrious than we give them credit for. Nearly all of them
work. They cultivate taro, they clerk in stores, they
fish, they row boats, and they guide canoes through the
surf for the pleasure of visitors to the islands. I recollect but one Hawaiian beggar in all Honolulu, and he
was a blind man who had been a court official. He
played the jew's-harp excruciatingly. To give him alms
was a real pleasure; for while he stopped playing to put
the coin away one might get out of hearing. One beggar in a city of thirty thousand people, struck me as a
real tribute to a lazy population.
The industry of the natives is largely a habit contracted from the whites. In the old days amusement was
the thing and work was only secondary. The taro-patches
yielded abundantly, a field of forty square feet supporting
a family of six. But after the taro was dug, nobody
thought of planting more until the stock was exhausted.
With the delightful hospitality that prevailed among the
natives, the family visited some of its neighbors until the
taro had grown again. The children ate wherever they
happened to be, and the easy-going parents never even
counted their broods at night to see if all were at home.
But American methods put a stop to all this Arcadian
vagabondage. The native found himself caught up in
civilization's big wheel, which goes ever faster and faster,
and now he works from early morning to late at night,
with little time for his swimming and sporting in the surf,
and less time for flower-weaving and the feasts and jollity




IAWAII NEI


55


that he loves. Native boat-crews work until the perspiration flows down their faces, rowing the heavy canoes
through the surf at the many landings. They are at it
early and late, at a wage of a dollar a day, and even then
they are so generous that they invite all the steerage passengers who are without provisions to share with them
their rations of fish and joi, until frequently their store
gives out before the end of the voyage, and they must
do their hard work on empty stomachs.
And the extreme cheerfulness with which they do their
work! Life for them is seasoned with smiles. My boatman, Picoi, bending his fine brown back and straining
his marvelous arms that I may have the joy of riding
down hill on a breaker, smiles through the sweat that
drips in his eyes because I call him, "Picoi, good boy."
He is a revelation of willing service.
To Caucasian eyes the beauty of the Hawaiian people
is marred by their tendency to lay on flesh. The stayless women are shapeless heaps of fat, and the men are
not much better, except that exercise keeps them in
somewhat better form. But I doubt if such a tendency
to rotundity would be found in any but a cheerful people.
They laugh at their work, and they laugh at their play.
A Cassius face is never seen among them. Everybody is
round as a pudding, and every face dimples with smiles
like the bay in a breeze. They are courteous, affable,
and kindly-polite even to those whom they hate politically, and too good-natured to harbor resentment long.
They are so amiable that their jails are empty. There
are few malefactors, and the native policemen have
nothing to do but to grow plump. An occasional arrest
is made, but rarely for anything more serious than




56


HAWAII NEI


disturbing the peace or fast driving. The Hawaiians are
reckless reinsmen, dashing around corners at breakneck
speed. Moreover, they drink more than is good for
them, and then celebrate on the street. But murder is
almost unknown, and stealing entirely so. The white
residents of Honolulu never locked their doors until the
American soldiery arrived. You may leave money in
full view of a Hawaiian-even a poor one, whose necessities in other countries would be taken as excuse-and
it will not be touched.
Nothing is more indicative of the character of these
good-natured, overgrown children than their fondness
for flattery and the sugared things of life. They cannot
endure criticism, and they will not love their critic, no
matter how close their interests are to his heart. This
quality accounts largely for their mistakes in government.
They would not listen to their friends, and they believed
their flatterers implicitly.
They are naturally a religious people, and not nearly
as superstitious as they are represented to be. They are
said to believe in ghosts, but I note that they live nearer
the graves of their dead than we care to do. Once they
believed that the air was inhabited by unseen things, but
so did our ancestors at a time so recent that we cannot
afford to accuse the Hawaiians of superstition on this
account.
The Hawaiians are naturally credulous as well, and so
it happened that they were converted en masse, and built
churches as uncomplainingly as they had fashioned their
heathen temples. They were used to being ordered
about. When the churches were finished they filled
them-a simple, devout, loving people, silhouetting the




HAWAII NEI


57


white walls with a myriad of dark faces. But when their
government was taken from them, resentment burned
fiercely behind the placid brown faces. Many of the
natives deserted the Protestant churches and went to the
Catholics and the Mormons. The Mormon church has a
large following in the islands, and almost all its members
are natives.
The Hawaiians cling to their simple living. Their
wants are few, and the unhappy complexity of civilization
has not yet mastered them. Inside their neatly kept
houses you will find good furniture-carved four-post
koa beds that an antiquary would envy - heirlooms in
poi-bowls of hard wood, feather kahilis, if the family had
any connection with a chief by blood or service, and
perhaps a rare piece of kapa, instead of a counterpane.
The kapa and the poi calabashes are becoming rare.
Good prices are obtainable for both articles, and the
natives are learning that porcelain is cheaper than poibowls and coverlids than kapa. And so, as with the
peasantry of other countries, the choice old things are
disappearing from the cottages.
Their menu is simpler yet. The main dishes are
still, as they have been for centuries, fish and poi. Fish
is plentiful, and the native likes it in any style. He likes
it raw, and even alive, and it is a curious sight to see him
eat live shrimps on the coast of Hawaii. He likes his
fish wrapped in big, cool li-leaves, and steamed in an
underground oven. He likes it salted, and he likes it
particularly with poi, which is his staple, taking the place
of both bread and potatoes.  It is pure starch, and to
the enormous consumption of it is due, no doubt, much
of the native rotundity. Poi is hard to prepare, and the




58


HAWAII NEI


liking for it is a cultivated taste, which most of the white
residents of the islands have acquired. It goes with the
climate, and suits it so well that doctors recommend it as
a sovereign cure for dyspepsia, and poi flour is even
exported to this country, to be used for dyspepsia.
Newcomers take to poi most kindly when mixed with
milk in a gruel-like concoction, misleadingly called a poi
cocktail.
The preparation of poi has fallen on evil days. In
Honolulu it is made by Chinese almost exclusively. Much
of it is pounded by machinery, and it is only in remote
country districts that one may see the taro-beaters with
stone trough and pestle, pounding the tough root which
is their staple of life.  The tenderfoot is told by his
friends of longer residence to see poi made once and he
will never care to taste it. But it is not true. Most of
the Chinese who pound poi by hand at the sign of the
white flag are exceedingly clean. It is hard work, and
blouses are cut away until there is scarcely anything left
of them, displaying backs and chests that are networks
of muscle, laced under a tea-rose skin. The drops of
perspiration that trickle in little streams, are wiped away
with towels, and the pestle is occasionally dipped in a
bucket of clean water. The taro is a light lilac in color,
and obstinate as molasses candy. The pestle falls with a
monotonous clangor like a new anvil-chorus.  When
served at table, poi is a light lavender. Pink poi is called
royal poi, and is prepared from the taro of certain localities. It used to be eaten with the fingers, but the imitative natives now twist it dextrously around forks, and
only the newcomer, anxious to show his conformity,
dips in the unaccustomed finger.




HAWAII NEI


59


All poi is allowed to ferment slightly before it is
eaten, and iconoclasts say that it tastes like sour billsticker's paste, which is a libel. It seems to me that poi
is almost tasteless, and makes a good background for a
meal.  This universal vegetable takes the place of all
cereals, vegetables, and fruits to the Hawaiians. They
care little for the island fruits, and eat less of bananas
and pineapples than one would expect. They are fond
of cocoanut-milk, but mangoes and guavas are almost
untouched by them. Most delicious strawberry-guavas
grow wild near Hilo, but the natives do not even take
the trouble to gather them, and our native hackman
laughed inordinately when we asked him to get some
for us.
I dined one night with the family of a Kanaka boatman-the same handsome fellow who stands at the
water-steps that reminds you of Venice, and whose
strong arms will ferry you all around the bay in less time
than it takes to write it. I was invited to come any time,
but he expected that I would give him notice, and the
family was dreadfully embarrassed when I dropped in
unannounced.
But I did not want an American dinner of fried steak
and potatoes. I wanted to partake of the usual family
dinner, and I had to keep my eye on half a dozen children at once, to see that none of them was sent out to
procure foreign elements for the feast. Presently dinner
was served, and the shy Hawaiian wife apologized for
the humble fare. But it was very nice -poi in a huge
common bowl, as it used to be when the gregarious
natives ate from the same dish and wore each other's
clothes, and when leprosy spread unchecked in the land.




60


HAWAII NEI


There was also roasted taro -a gray vegetable, cooked
in //-leaves in the umu, or underground oven, and tasting
something like sweet potato. The fish was dried and
salty, but it went excellently with the poi.  There was
also a condiment of seaweed.   For dessert was the
national Hawaiian sweet, a pudding composed of grated
laro and cocoanut-milk.  It was a simple feast, but
offered with great hospitality, and there was genuine
pleasure after the first embarrassment had worn away.
My host talked politics with an understanding of his subject possessed by few Americans of corresponding station.
After dinner I was shown his pardon, signed by the
President of Hawaii, and sealed with the great seal. It
granted amnesty to my friend for his part in one of the
opera-bouffe revolutions and restored him to a citizenship
that he would not accept.
From this humble peasantry up to the ex-queen there
is a wide diversity of living.  Liliuokalani has money,
and keeps quite a retinue within her beautiful grounds at
Washington Place. This house is her private residence,
coming to her from her husband. It is a big fine building, in the old Southern plantation style, with a veranda
all around, and pillars that suggest the White House.
Inside is a wide vestibule that runs frankly to the kitchen,
with square, rather plain rooms at either side.  They
are sparsely finished, except for the big feathered kahilis
which shadow the corners. These kahilis are immense
fly-brushes, mounted on hard wood, often inlaid with
pearl or ivory. They are doubtless the legitimate
descendants of the fly-brushes with which retainers used
to fan sovereigns in years gone by. No one but a chief
is entitled to have them, though you will find stolen




HAWAII NEI


6I


trophies boldly set out in several drawing-rooms where
they have no lawful place.
Ordinarily the queen dines alone, fanned by white
kahilis, wielded by pretty native girls. Her tastes are
simple, and have not been changed by travel or years of
exile. She is still an ardent lover of poi and of fish
au naturel, and she drinks cocoanut-milk dextrously
from the shell. She is the only person I have seen who
can eat a mango gracefully. The queen still wears the
national holoku with extreme grace. She has a good
figure, and of late years an increasing slimness has much
improved her. Even more than any other woman in
the islands, she has the upright carriage of the head and
the sweep of the shoulders that make of each Hawaiian
woman a very queen. She is exceedingly gracious to
Americans, but with her former subjects she maintains
that reserve which is a royal prerogative.
The menage of Princess Kaiulani at Ainahau (cool
place), on the road to Waikiki, is much more Americanized. She clings outwardly to Hawaiian customs, and
seldom appears without a royal lei of oo feathers, but her
household is Caucasian. Her ladies-in-waiting are not
Hawaiian, and her thoughts and tastes run in new lines.
Her drawing-room is entirely modern, with its photographs and fadteuils, and might be in Belgravia or Fifth
Avenue. The feather kahilis that adorn the corners are
the only reminders of barbaric royalty. Certainly there
is nothing in the aquiline features of Kaiulani to suggest
her broad-nosed ancestry. Had she ascended her ancestral throne, the old arguments against island royalty would
have had to be shelved and a new set devised. This
refined and gently bred girl is a model of the feminine




62                 HAWAII NEI
graces and proprieties. Only a royal temper and a will
of her own that brooks no contradiction have descended
to this daughter of fiery chiefs.
It is a far cry from Kalakaua, with his houses of
revelry and his seraglio of hula-dancers and lomi-lomi
women, to this delicately sublimated niece of his. The
question of Hawaiian morality is still a hotly disputed
one. There are Americans in Honolulu who declare to
you that the Hawaiian women are without chastity, and
they point triumphantly to the fact that there is no word
in their language to express this virtue.
And there are other equally reputable American
men-husbands of Hawaiian wives   before whom these
critics would not dare to make this remark. The truth
lies somewhere between the extremes. The Polynesian's
ideal of morality is far below the Caucasian's. His practice is about the same.








Is..k.;6
6,  &,
o
41'
Q. I
I                                             I
I                                            I
I
j
iI
ii
I 1, 1]
It's the Little Kanaka That Spoils the Cane.




HAWAII NEI


63


CHAPTER VI
THE TRANSPLANTED ORIENTAL
PLANTATION life in Hawaii, once the real heart of it is
reached, is like life in the South before I86I. Everybody is welcome to see the surface, but few strangers look
below. It is patriarchal in a way. There is a big house,
where the high-salaried manager lives, with wide verandas
and a delightful hospitality, and a little army of softfooted attendants. When it spreads along the countryside that the plantation has a visitor, quartets of goodlooking boys, with sweet native instruments, come to
serenade and to sing the liquid words and deathly sweet
tunes of their nativity. Inside the cool and softly-lighted
house is an office where a big case of guns, always oiled,
always loaded, leans against the wall. It is the watchful
preparation against possible riot and murder, but the visitor is not expected to know or to notice. Nevertheless,
when you hear a sound in the night on the veranda, or
when the rising moon, caught in the mango branches,
gives the effect of a village on fire, you remember those
guns with a shudder.
By day you are taken for a horseback-ride in the
upland cane, over slippery paths to the highlands, where
the tall cane thrusts out tremulous arms as you pass.
You hear how many tons each acre yields, and sometimes
you draw in your breath sharply when you hear-it is




64


HAWAII NEI


such a prodigal nature. Perhaps you go to the mill and
see the cane rushing to its death down the water- flume.
Mangled, stripped, bleeding, the great canes hurry along,
urged by the resistless force of the water beneath. At
the mill is a cascade, and here the canes fall in a heaving
heap, their jagged ends tangled and protruding, like
splintered timbers after a railroad wreck. You go inside
and are conducted from department to department,
watching the cane in its progress from a crushed, hopeless
mass, through the black, syrupy stages, to the purification
of this sticky, viscous, ill-smelling mud, when it emerges
in the form of pale golden, delightfully clean and deliciously flavored sugar, sewn into a great bag with two
alert ears, by a little Japanese woman in a holoku. The
machinery is all tended by Japanese, too- and you are
brought vividly face to face with what the Oriental has
done in the islands.  Voteless these people may be,
treated as animals and dumb under oppression, but without their active, lean, brown hands, I doubt if we would
have considered the islands worth annexing.
Perhaps the manager will take you through the laborers' villages, though he will not encourage your desire
for sociological exploration. The Japanese huts are probably nearest to the plantation-house; for the Japanese are
quick to pick up the ways of Occidental civilization, and
the managers like to have them under their own eyes,
where they can watch them the closer. The Chinese village is often far up a hillside, perhaps a mile or two from
the manager's house. The coolies are usually so quiet
and well-behaved that they can be safely trusted.
The villages are commonplace enough-rows and
rows of houses all alike, so that there can be no quarrel




HAWAII NEI


65


as to domicile. There are few comforts, but the houses
are as good as Hawaiian houses of the lower class. There
is a hot little veranda for each, but as laborers are obliged
to put in ten hours a day, there is little chance to sit on
them. Near by is the plantation store, where the laborers are compelled to buy, and where prices, I regret to
say, are usually far too high. Through this store much
of the wage of the laborers goes back to the plantation.
Once watch the laborers going to work in the tepid
early morning, and you will be more reminded of the
sunny southland than before, with sugar substituted for
cotton and yellow men for black. The scenes at plantations which are near Honolulu are not at all those of
plantations that are remote. Public opinion counts for
something even in Hawaii. On some plantations regarded
as models, white lunas (overseers) drive the laborers to
the field with blacksnakes, and laborers have been kicked
to death in some sugar-fields. No doubt many of the
deported laborers are little better than criminals. The
scourings of the streets, the roughs of Hongkong and
Canton, sometimes compose a shipload. There have
been dangerous riots and battles, with picks and shovels
and clubs, or whatever else happened to be handy. The
lunas are often drinking men, cross and surly. They
have almost absolute power over their gangs of men,
and, worse still, over the women, too. There have been
bitter complaints from some of the remote plantations,
especially in the north, and when investigated by the
labor commissioner, the charges were found to be true. At
one plantation, the great clock whose slow hands measure
the working-day was manipulated from the inside,
with the result that the hours lengthened imperceptibly,




66


HAWAII NEI


and the hands were toiling twelve hours a day instead
of ten. At some plantations the sun always rises at six
and sets at six for plantation purposes, and a big bell
booms out the beginning and end of working-hours.
As in the Southern States, the personality of the manager who lords it so absolutely over the plantation makes
all the difference in the world. He is a little czar, and
holds the power of life and death, almost. The courts
consult him as to sentences, and if he says that he cannot
spare the labor of one of his men, the courts will permit
the contract laborer to serve the time of his sentence on
the plantation-that is, his days are spent in the cane,
and his nights in a sort of improvised calaboose.
There are many kindly men who do not abuse their
power, and who believe in living and letting others live.
On one plantation you will find laborers docked for a
half-day if they are absent for a half-hour from the field,
and at an adjoining one wages will be gradually increased
in return for good service, until some of the laborers
earn a fair stipend. On some plantations every possible
fine is levied, and sick men are charged for medical
services, until the wages are stripped down to six dollars
and a half a month. On others, laborers are cared for
in a manner almost paternal. And, like the Scriptural
rain, which falls alike on the just and the unjust, the
sugar from these unjust plantations tastes quite as sweet
as that from the others. Worse still, the owners make
quite as much money. Of course, it is all wrong- a
system which permits such abuses, and which relies on
man's humanity to man. Laws to protect the weak are
not based on the theory of the innate justice of the
strong.




HAWAII NEI


It was the realization among the islanders that Uncle
Sam would regard the contract laborer as an abomination in the nostrils of free men-for the Hawaiian
republic has always had the grace to be ashamed of contract labor-that hurried so many Oriental coolies across
the ocean in July and August of I898, and put every
tramp-ship under contract. During these last days of
independence, when annexation was already a fact, but
had not reached formal ratification, laborers were netted
like fish along the waterways of China, and were herded
from the populous districts of Japan. How many of
them were shanghaied or coerced or deceived, no one
will ever know or care to inquire.  The last official act
of the Hawaiian republic was the signing of a receipt on
a human bill of lading.
Not even Castle Garden could parallel the scenes at
Honolulu in the days when hundreds of low-class Orientals, only ten days from home, were landed at the
quarantine station. Such a hurrying, scurrying, frightened, jabbering mob as they were. The shipload I saw
had been jammed, five hundred and forty-six of them,
on a small tramp steamer, the Kee Lung, with about as
much food and air and water as a blackbirding expedition
in the old days gave to its passengers. The laborers
were caked with dirt, tired, uncertain on their legs, and
they were driven down the bridge from deep water to the
bright pink buildings of the quarantine settlement like so
many sheep. The bridge is six feet wide, perhaps, and
half a mile long, over coral-reef thinly veiled with sand.
Women carrying beady-eyed, silent Japanese babies,
and men with wearing apparel, bedding, and eating utensils, they stumbled along the long gangplank, their




68


HAWAII NEI


wooden shoes making a queer clacking and clattering.
Men who travel thousands of miles for the privilege of
earning twelve dollars and a half a month are not
expected to be opulent, but these carried clean kimonos
in neat bundles, mats for beds, wooden blocks for pillows,
and blue bowls for rice. That they were dirty was not
their fault. Their desire was to be clean; for as soon as
the big bath-tubs, eight by ten feet, were shown them,
they scuttled in in squads of ten with all speed, and then
was heard a great spattering and splashing, as though a
million canaries were dashing their wings at once in a
million bathing-dishes of porcelain.
There is something pathetic about these cotton-clad
laborers-the slaves of Hawaii. They bind themselves
to work in the cane or coffee for three years or more,
and if they desert, the whole police power of the republic
is thrown against them. They are captured as fugitive
slaves were before the war. If they prove repentant,
they are sent back to the plantation. If they are still
runaways at heart —and heaven knows there is reason
enough why they should be —they are sent to "'the reef"
to work out their sentence, and after that even the stifling
work among the cane is welcome. It seems odd that the
fugitive slave law over which men fought and bled forty
years ago should be in force in a republic at the end of
the century.
Of course, there is the world-old argument - that
these Chinese and Japanese coolies are no better off in
their own country; that they are too lowly in station even
to belong to the army, except to be attached as bearers
and camp-followers, and take the place of government
mules in the food trains. Very likely this is true. The




HAWAII NEI


69


world must be centuries older yet before men will cease
trying to make two wrongs come out a right.
The quarantine buildings where these imported laborers have their first taste of "Western civilization" are
long, low salmon-pink buildings on a green and sedgy
island, where the grass turns brown in the salt and the
high tide almost drowns the settlement. It looks like a
rose-pink fishing village floating on a looking-glass sea.
Inside are wonderful ovens, where fifty pounds of
sulphur are burned at once and great tanks whence no
germ comes out alive.  There are vats for fumigating
clothing and tanks for purifying bodies. The rule is that
all steerage passengers must be detained until they have
been eighteen days from the nearest port. If they make
a quick passage from Yokohama, there is all the more
time to stay in the hot, sun-baked yard and the bright
pink buildings. Medical men presume that disease germs
that are going to take root will sprout within the eighteenday limit, but there are records of small-pox cases that
developed the twenty-first day from port.
Every morning at sunrise the guards send these hundreds of detained passengers scampering from their beds.
Sometimes there are twenty-four hundred of them, and
each one is examined, even the little children, which
takes until well along in the morning. The examination
is to determine if any of the dreaded Oriental plagues
have developed overnight. Later a physician examines
them as to soundness of wind and limb, for only ablebodied men and women are wanted. The poor, scared
Orientals, unable to speak a word of Hawaiian or English,
must think it takes a deal of prodding and poking,
of listening through a stethoscope and feeling of the




70


HAWAII NEI


ribs to secure the privilege of earning thirteen dollars a
month.
They lodge like cattle. There is i o separation of
women from men-not even at bathing-time. The officer in charge of the quarantine station says it would breed
a riot if he attempted such a thing, and so they sleep in
one huge room, warm as to temperature, foul as to air,
but fairly cleanly considering the numbers who lodge
there. There are tiers of bunks and great areas of bare,
square beds, with low partitions between them, but no
passageway. Four or five persons sleep in a single bunk
by night, and sit tailor-fashion in the gloomy depths of
the cavernous place by day. It is a fortunate thing that
the Japanese babies, with their shaven polls and lonesome
lock behind, or their circular bang around a shaven place
as big as a dollar, do not cry. If they did, there would
be no sleep for any one in this vast caravansary. As the
black, almond eyes peered at me through the half dark
of the place of beds, it reminded me of a huge rookery
where birds cluster and jostle and push for place.
It may breed a riot to separate the sexes, but when
Hawaii gets into working order as an American territory
the dozen guards at the house of quarantine will be reenforced so that the entrance of these Orientals into
Western civilization will be a real entrance. A woman
doctor and female attendants could do more for these
Japanese women than a hundred missionary sermons.
The day I was at quarantine there were seven hundred
and twenty inmates, fifty of them women. Chinese and
Japanese were in the same yard, living in a sort of
armed neutrality. The officers say that a Chinese is a
gentleman compared with a Jap.    The Chinese are




HAWAII NEI


71


friendly, civil, and easy to manage - the Japs hot-headed,
surly, and difficult to control. On the plantations Chinese
are in demand and much preferred to Japanese. The
Chinese are always industrious and always willingthe Japanese dissatisfied, ambitious, striving for better
things, ready to organize and eventually to strike. In
short, to look the matter in the face, the Japanese
is too much like us, rapidly civilizing himself, and,
like a plant, turning his leaves toward our sun. Overseers hate him for it, much as parents punish in
children the outcropping ugliness of honestly inherited
tempers.
In the great yard of the station, hundreds of Japanese
men and women were pouring to the fences. They
behaved as though they had never seen a white woman
before.  Few Caucasian women ever set foot across that
long and spidery bridge. It seemed to me that it would
be better if the wives and daughters of Honolulu would
open their eyes on the flat pink village and think of what
goes on within. Sometimes I am enamored of the
thought of home missions.
When I entered the big yard it was almost noon, and
the midday meal was being prepared by the quarantined
men and women. Bushels of feathery white rice were
being removed from immense cauldrons in common
shovels. A sufficient quantity for twenty persons was
placed in a pan and transferred to the pretty blue ricebowls, where the chop-sticks were soon clattering.
Besides, there were boiled turnips and meat -all paid for
by the plantation owners.
Wherever I went, a string of sturdy, silent, curious
Japanese followed. One evil-looking old man kept partic



72                HAWAII NEI
ularly close, but no inducement could induce him to pose
for the camera. At sight of it, he ran like a rat to his
hole. The Japanese interpreter moved on before us, and
in the distance tucked-up kimonos dropped like curtains
and were decently folded over brown and beautifully
muscled chests.
They teach the conventionalities of the West, if not
the moralities, at quarantine.
One great fellow-a giant among Japanese-was
girt about the loins with a figured blue cloth, covered
with cabalistic symbols. He might have been a priest in
some far-away province in the cold north, or a man
shanghaied for reasons of state or personal hatred. At
any rate, he frowned and held aloof from his companions,
and glowered when asked to stand still for my camera's
sake.
In spite of the lack of mirrors, many of the women
had arranged elaborate coiffures, and on their pretty and
guileless faces was that look of innocent ignorance which
shows that the tree of knowledge never grew in a
Japanese Eden. Eve was not Oriental.
The hot yard where these slaves to modern commercialism are caged is not always as peaceful as it was when
I was there. Even then, the enforced quiet reminded me
of the Warden's incongruous garden at San Quentin,
where hundreds of convict faces peer over among the
flowers and wear the shut-in look that is more oppressive
to a free man or woman than anything in life- aye, or
in death, for that matter.
Sometimes a real or fancied grievance starts a battle
in the inclosure. The big billets of wood that lie about
are convenient weapons to enforce argument. Some




HAWAII NEI


73


fearful fights have been witnessed from the unblinking
windows in the pink building.
"I have only twelve guards to six hundred men," my
courteous guide, the superintendent, explained. " Sometimes I have only twelve guards to twenty-four hundred
men and women. Naturally my men must learn to think
quickly and act instantly. There is no time to be lost;
for what begins in a duel often assumes the proportions
of a battle. My men depend on their organizationthe others have no chance to combine, and organization
is everything. The Chinese are given to fighting among
themselves. When a row starts, my men rush in with
clubs and we do 'em up."
"And is anybody killed? " I inquired.
"Well, no," he laughed; "but sometimes they come
pretty near it."
"And the punishment?"
"Oh, well," he replied, shrugging, "there are different things. There are the clubs. Sometimes we beat
'em, and sometimes we chain 'em to those pipes you see
there and warm 'em up with electricity."
Heavens! What must they think of our vaunted
Western civilization? Clubs and electricity! And yet
the men who can administer such punishment and quell
such disturbance are not strong enough to keep the
women separated from the men.
"But usually we keep them tame by persuasion,"
added the superintendent.  "I tell them they are not
landed until they get away from here and they believe
me. I tell them I will send them home again unless
they behave well. And then I have a good Japanese
interpreter. He scares them with the things he tells




74


HAWAII NEI


them. I never inquire too particularly into what he
says —at any rate, we manage to keep them in order."
An unusually pretty and merry young girl caught my
eye.  Her pudding-face was dimpling all over with
laughter, like the bay in a breeze. I inquired if she too
was bound to the hard plantation life for which the
women receive only eight dollars a month, and under
which they fade almost instantly, losing all their flowerlike prettiness.
"Oh, no; she is a 'free' woman," replied the superintendent, unconsciously emphasizing the real social
difference between this one and the slaves about her.
"She is the wife of a storekeeper in Honolulu, but as
she traveled by steerage, she is detained like the rest."
After the men and women have passed the medical
inspection for the plantations, they are posed in groups
on the veranda, each one plainly numbered, and officially
photographed. Thousands of pictures are kept to assist
identification, should the bond-servants try to escape.
Many women with their babies were being photographed
the day I was there. At the snap of the shutter the
photographer waved them away, and each group melted
into the quivering heat around the corner, while another
dozen of olive-skinned, bare-legged, kimonoed beings
took their places. Each woman smoothed her obi as she
settled demurely into the chair in front of her lord.
" Of course, nobody knows whether they are married
or not.  We don't ask for certificates," remarked a
coarse attendant with a grin. A man registers a woman
as his wife, and no questions are asked."
As a matter of fact, many of these fresh - looking,
pretty girls never go to the plantations at all. Most of




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75


them had only the vaguest ideas of where they were
going. They only knew it was somewhere on what
appeared to be the mainland, at which they gazed across
the bilge-water through their palings.
In Honolulu, house-servants, nursemaids, gardeners,
chambermaids, cooks, waiters, stewards, laundresses —
all are Orientals. There are Japanese and Chinese
keepers of restaurants, tailors, hackmen, dressmakers,
butchers, bakers, grocers, fruiterers, barbers, bootblacksalmost anything under the sun commercially-and they
do not cater to their own people alone, but to the whites.
Whole streets are given up to them.
Many of these busy, contented, prosperous Japanese
and Chinese merchants are said to have come to the
islands as contract laborers. If so, I have every respect
for their courage and faithfulness; for the hopeless owned
emigrant and the well-fed tradesman are further apart
than the towpath and the Presidency.
Whenever you glance up from the facilities introduced for the correction of physical evils, you see the
great human wall of Japanese, with their bristly pompadours, like black shoe-brushes, and their shrewd, questioning eyes. They are herded like animals in a pasture.
Strangers from a score of separated provinces in Japan -
the scum of their towns, perhaps-perhaps a country
population misled by tales of a land of promise beyond
the seas, and so induced to leave their decent, clean
houses and their work among the cool ooze of the ricefields to labor among the hot, green leaves of the rustling
cane.




HAWAII NEI


CHAPTER VII
HAWAII BECOMES AMERICA
FRIDAY, the 12th of August, I898, will be celebrated for
generations to come as Hawaii's natal day. As a sight,
the raising of the American flag over the capital of the
Kamehamehas was most impressive, not because of the
size of the crowd, for it was not large, nor for the tumult,
for all was singularly silent, nor for elaborate ceremonial,
for the exercises were very simple, but because a nationality was that day snuffed out like a spent candle, and a
bigger, clearer, more certain light was set in its place. It
was but another roll of the juggernaut car in which the
lordly Anglo-Saxon rides on to his dream of universal
empire.
It was not as joyous an occasion as far-off America
may have imagined. When it was over women who wore
the American emblem wiped their eyes, and men who
had worked for annexation for years said, with a throb
in the throat, "How sad it was."  As for the Hawaiians,
they were not there. It was self-denial on their part; for
the Kanaka loves music and color and crowds, and
that invisible fluid which flows from man to man, and
which we call excitement.
But on this day of days the Hawaiians were at home.
They were not on the streets; they were not in the stores.
They were shut up in their houses, and from the Queen's




I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~s
A Typical Hawaiiian Lad.
F~F
1, -0 








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77


stately home to the meanest shed the open windows and
closed shutters were lonely and somber as places of death.
Those who were obliged to be abroad slipped through
back streets and crooked lanes. They wore on their hats
the twisted golden ilima that tells of love of royalty, and
on their breasts the old flag and lettered badges that
spoke their aloha for Hawaii to all the world.
So few Hawaiians were in front of the Executive Building that it might have been any capital rather than their
own. There were Americans, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, but almost no Hawaiians, and those who were there
showed marks of diluted blood. About the ceremonies
was all the tension of an execution. Though the Hawaiians were not there to weep, others did it for them, and few
Americans had the heart to gloat over this sorry triumph.
It was the realization of Hawaii's divided house which
caused Admiral Miller to prevent anything like a jubilation. Such a thing would have been brutality; for in
Hawaii is the old heartache that drove the Britons to the
mountain fastnesses of Wales-the same spirit that filled
the beaten hosts of Harold when the Conqueror came
over from Normandy —the bitterness that throbbed in
the burning veins of the South in the days after unsuccessful secession.
There was something very fine and strong and rare in
the restraint the Admiral put upon the annexationists in
their hour of triumph. There was little of that blowing
of horns and shrilling of whistles that the American loves
so well. Only one man drove about in a carriage groaning under a load of red, white, and blue, and he was not
an American at all, but a Greek. A few small boys had
the horn of torture of New Year's eve. but they were the




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veriest riffraff. There was absolutely no speechmaking,
except a few dignified words from Minister Sewall, no
spread-eagleism, no marching, no cheering.
I had long before found out that the faculty and the
desire to cheer are alike confined to the temperate zone,
but this was self-restraint on a large scale that I had never
seen before. That thousands were glad to the bottom
of their souls was as true as that other thousands were
grieved to the core, but it meant a great deal when the
conquering thousands agreed to temper the wind to the
shorn lamb.
It was useless to deny that we had taken to ourselves
an unwilling bride. There was much about the ceremony
that smacked of a marriage of convenience, but it must
be remembered that these new relatives of ours are the
most amiable people in the world, which is our great
good luck, and perhaps their ill-fortune. The stronger
the Hawaiian the more resentful he is-it will take kindness and patience and time's soft obliteration to deal with
this difficult problem. Some few Hawaiians were there —
four on the platform reserved for distinguished folk, where
diplomats and cabinet ladies and ministers' wives were
seated in order of their husbands' prominence. One of
these - the only native woman on the platform - was the
wife of a prominent lawyer and politician. He was of
the new order of things, and came for business reasons,
and she came because he required it of her.
In facial characteristics she was not unlike the exQueen, and many people mistook her for Liliuokalani. She
came down the stairs on her husband's arm, very proud
and dignified and stately, in a flowing holoku of black
and violet, and hat plumed with the royal yellow. She




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79


held her head very high among her lighter neighbors,
and she bore up very well until the Hawaiian Band commenced to play "Hawaii Ponoi" for the last time as a
national anthem. At the first note she covered her eyes
with her fan and the tears dropped softly. She did not
raise her eyes again, and she did not see the Hawaiian
flag as it floated, then sank for the last time.  Other
natives who were forced to be there covered their faces.
An old Kanaka woman who stood near me never moved
her eyes from the flag as it drooped and came down the
halyards, but the steady lids slowly brimmed over and a
rain of tears fell on her cheeks.  Hawaiians in the ranks
of the National Guard covered their faces, or fixed their
eyes on the ground. When "Hawaii Ponoi," which
means "Our very own Hawaii," in a dear and intimate
way, came to be played, the brass had a lump in its throat
and the drums a sob. It was a weakly strain; for all the
natives had thrown away their instruments and had fled
around the corner, out of sight if not of hearing. Only
ten men, none of them Hawaiian, were left to play. The
men had begged their leader to be relieved from playing
what was to them a dirge, and he, being kind, consented.
It would have been like asking a child to sing at the
funeral of a parent. The release of the musicians from
the flag-lowering took away something of the sting from
the sending of invitations to the ex-Queen and the Princess Kaiulani.  It was the very refinement of cruelty
that reserved seats should be offered them, and the act
caused fierce resentment among upper-class Hawaiians.
The day began with heavy showers and threatening
clouds. On the previous night, when the melancholy
taps sounded from the barracks and marked the close of




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the last night of the life of Hawaii, rain was falling
heavily. The kahunas all over the islands were praying
for rain, but they prayed to too good purpose, for the
rain came quickly and most of it had fallen before the
morning of the flag-raising, while the evening of Annexation Day was perfection.
The day began at io o'clock, when the Hawaiian
National Guard formed at the barracks, preparatory to
escorting the Philadelphia's men from the docks to the
Executive Building. The men were in fresh white ducks,
with brown leggings and blue coats, and as Colonel
Fisher reviewed them for the last time as a Hawaiian
organization, they presented a very fine appearance.
The color-sergeant carried the flag bound with a golden
lei-the red, white, and blue of Hawaii, which has
known many vicissitudes, and which was soon to rise
above the horizon in a new combination. It was a holiday crowd that gathered near the barracks —a crowd
agape with curiosity and wearing no heart on its sleeve.
There were any number of Japanese, dainty little women
in kimonos, with their husbands and babies in American
clothes, and other Japanese women quite as petite, but
minus all the daintiness and charm, rustling about in
hideous, shapeless, starched holokus. There were swarms
of Portuguese children, their grandmothers with orange
handkerchiefs tied over their heads, and their mothers in
the baglike dress of the country. Many Americans were
tricked out with ugly badges representing Uncle Sam
and Miss Hawaii (a negress), and the motto, "This is
our wedding-day," which may have been funny when it
first appeared as a cartoon, but had long been shorn of
its humor. Two or three Hawaiians looked on, their




HAWAII NEI


hats twined with ilimas, and their mild eyes full of
trouble.
And still the atmosphere of an execution grew.
Everybody felt as though a man were condemned to die
at 12 o'clock, and the suspense in the air was as horrible
as that which rests over a field on the eve of battle.
There was a touch of that comedy which lights the face
of tragedy when the National Guard went down to
meet and escort the Philadelphia's men. The guard was
preceded by a corps of police officers, all of them natives,
but with that rotundity in perspective which characterizes
the peace-officer all over the world. These men seldom
march and never drill, and when ordered to fall in line
they were at a loss whether to make the line at their toes
or at their belts. The orders were as amusing as the
marching. "All ready there?" sang out a militia officer.
The policemen nodded sagely. "Well, go ahead, then,"
yelled the officer. They went "ahead."
Long before the military procession reached the
Executive Building, the crowd was passing through the
gates which were open to receive it. The scene of the
flag-raising, christened Iolani Palace, dates from the time
of Kalakaua, the merry monarch, and is a beautiful
building, planned on noble and stately lines and set in a
square of densely tropical shade, cut out in four avenues
of light and bordered by the moonlight stems of gray
and green royal palms, which lead up to the four great
doors. Nestling at one side is the famous old bungalow
of Kalakaua, whose walls could unfold a tale, and whose
mirrors reflect a picture that would startle even the gay
Parisians; for here the last Hawaiian King lived as kings
have lived since time began.




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From the mauka door-that is, toward the mountain-a stand had been built, upon which one of the most
impressive ceremonies of the century was soon to take
place -the ceremony of making American soil of foreign
territory. The tingle of great events was in the air.
The people who poured through the gates were of all
classes, with a tremendous variety of race. They were of
all degrees, from the moderately rich, who came in
hacks, and the very wealthy who arrived in their own
carriages, to those who came on foot in true democratic
fashion. On the lawn in the date-palms' shade, under
leaves of rustling mangoes and papaya trees, seats had
been built on the soft natural sward. While the morning
was yet cool, Chinese women, with little almond-eyed
babies, and Portuguese women with children in arms,
their eyes black as sloes, came and pre-empted these seats,
which were outside the pale- that is, outside the rope.
Special guests were admitted through the lower hall
of the great stone building. It was a difficult and delicate task to seat these special guests. Many seats on
both upper and lower balcony were merely reserved for
first-comers, but in the erected stand the representatives
of the Foreign Office, buried beneath gold braid and
brass fringes, had a dreadful time adjusting nice social
balances, which varied not a hair's weight, and seating
the dignitaries of the little republic whose numbered
minutes were rapidly ticking away. They were always
sticklers for form and precedent in Hawaii.
The platform, decorated with entwined Hawaiian and
American flags, was divided into halves. The front row
of seats on one side was reserved for President Dole and
his cabinet; that on the other side for Minister Sewall,




IIAWAII NEI


83


Admiral Miller, and his staff. The wife of the President
had the place of honor on one side —that is, within full
view of the multitude-the wife of Minister Sewall had
the place on the other. Next to Mrs. Dole, in her black
frock and simple bonnet, came the cabinet ladies, and
behind them the wives of ministers and ex-ministers,
seated next their husbands, and then the foreign diplomats and consuls and their wives -a minimized epitome
of the world waiting to see this miniature republic ingulfed
in the events of the universe, forfeiting the independence
of ages, because the navies and armies of a great country,
just feeling its strength, demanded it as a resting-place,
while Baby Switzerland, in its mountain fastnesses, had
stood safely between the upper and the nether millstone
these hundreds of years.
Almost the last to come on the platform were several
native gentlemen and ladies. These were all politicians -
men who could not afford to stay away. There was the
Speaker of the last House of Representatives, a counselor
of state and his wife, and a circuit judge. Before I1:30
the sharpshooters, with American flags around their hats,
and the Citizens' Guard had arrived-both organizations
composed of men who saw service and stood shoulder to
shoulder in opposition to the monarchy.
Soon after their coming a whiff of martial music,
blown through the trees, announced the approach of
another organized body of men, and the National Guard
of Hawaii, preceded by the Government Band, came
through the mauka gate, the Hawaiian flag floating, and
the band playing Hawaiian music. Behind them were
the blue-jackets of the Philadelphia, as American in looks
as the guard was foreign; for the latter was largely made




84


HAWAII NEI


up of dark-skinned men, and the faces of all were brown
from the sun. Separated from their comrades, walking
apart in a space, were three men from the Philadelphia
with a great roll in their arms. This prosaic-looking
bundle was the American flag, soon to be raised.
The mauka drive was striped with close rows of
American sailors in blue and white. The spaces to the
side were crowded with soldiers with brown faces.  Then
from  the central door, on which all eyes  ciwec fxf d,
appeared a quartet of men in gold lace, heavy (I l -ets,
and the senseless full-dress hats of the navy.  A man
next me whispered in awe, "They must be K-'   I ts cof
Pythias."  Everybody supposed it was the Adni::i, b'lut
it was not yet. These were officers of the Alice,1icl,
and they were almost as gorgeous as the gentlemen from
the Foreign Office.
Truth to tell, the Admiral had little to do with it. He
it was who had brought the President's written v ishes
and who set the machinery in motion.  He; l,)o laced
the stamp of simplicity on the proceedings, Qut thereafter he had nothing to do, except to signal the proper
moment for the flag to go up.
At I1:45 o'clock, President Dole and his cabinet
entered, everybody standing as they came on the platform. The President looked like a man about to atterd
an afternoon tea, though his grave face was in crltrast
with his gay attire. The men of his cabinet xr(re 1 ot all
so correctly dressed. There were silk hats of evn e  i:ocl
since the missionaries first came to Hawaii -- lr" s xihose
first appearance dates within the remembrance (;f no person now living, whose blocks longf since went to make
koa calabashes for sale to unsuspecting tourists.




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85


The President and his best men were followed almost
immediately by Minister Sewall and Admiral Miller and
his staff. Just at this time a gentle rain was fallingliquid sunshine, they call it in Hawaii -and the sense of
oppression grew as the atmosphere became heavier and
more difficult to breathe.
Then came the last prayer of a religious government,
a prayer for the safety of Hawaii's native sons and daughters, every one standing uncovered the while and Minister
Sewall fingering restlessly a large blue, official-looking
envelope, which he carried under his arm. There was a
brief interchange of formalities between Minister and
President. The blue envelope containing a copy of the
resolution of annexation was transferred to President
Dole, who offered the sovereignty and public property of
the Hawaiian Islands to Mr. Sewall.
The President's voice rose for a moment, and the
words, "With full confidence in the honor, justice, and
friendship of the American people," came out in the
clear tones of a bell. It made the hearts of Americans
thrill.
Again the President's voice sank to a low key, and
thereafter all went as though it had been rehearsed, except
that a cabinet minister or two occasionally got up or sat
down in the wrong place, like Protestants strayed into a
ritualistic church by mistake.
Mr. Sewall took up the refrain in recitative.  "Mr.
President," he said, "in the name of the United States, I
accept the transfer of the sovereignty and property of
the Hawaiian Government. The Admiral commanding
the United States naval forces in these waters will proceed
to perform the duty intrusted to him."




86


HAWAII NEI


And so was heralded the great event for which every
one had been holding the breath, and feeling that qualm
akin to seasickness, with which sensitive people await an
event that is desired yet dreaded. By this time it lacked
but six minutes of noon, and the quavering strains of
'"Hawaii Ponoi"' were heard, coming up with but half the
usual volume. It sounded as the voices of the Pilgrim
Fathers may have when they tried to sing the songs of
home in a far-off land, or as homesick travelers sing
"Home, Sweet Home" on distant shores. There was a
sob and a heartbreak in it, and before the end came an
almost complete breakdown. Even the leader's baton
was moving through a mist of tears; for he had written
the music years before, and the memory of the times
when he had played it rushed over him with irresistible
force.
Handkerchiefs were out on the platform now, and
ministers' wives and cabinet ladies who had been born
under this flag, with its eight stripes of red, white, and
blue, and the English jack in the corner, were not
ashamed to wipe their eyes. The men were frowning
fiercely and trying to wink back the tears, but some of
them wept audibly and forgot to be ashamed. President
Dole made a signal to Colonel Soper, who waved a white
handkerchief to some one in the crowd. The troops
presented arms, and far away was heard the deep bass
boom of the Philadelphia's salute, and the nearer treble
of the Hawaiian battery in melancholy duet. There
were twenty-one guns, the last national salute of the Hawaiian flag. During the salute there was a vigorous wigwagging of signal flags from the central tower, upon
which, as well as upon the side-towers, men had been




HAWAII NEI                  87
posted all the morning. The bugles rose and fell in the
ever-melancholy "taps," and while every one held the
breath the beautiful flag of Hawaii trembled for an instant,
then started, and slowly, gracefully sank down the halyards to the ground, where it was caught by loving hands
and reverently folded. Just as it started in its descent,
the clouds broke away, and a square of the blue Hawaiian
sky showed itself as if in farewell and blessing. A great
sigh went up from the thousands of upturned faces, and
many upon whom the flag had no claim wept for sympathy. Every man within sound of the saluting guns stood
uncovered, and far away at the water front, Kanaka
boatmen, plying their trade, bared and bowed their
heads as religious peasants at sound of the far-flung
Angelus.
At the moment when the tension was so great that it
could not be borne an instant longer, the Admiral nodded
to his flag-lieutenant, who gave the order, "Colors roll
off," and the cheery American bugles cut the air. It
was a tremendous relief. Then the well-loved strains of
"The Star-Spangled Banner" came from the Philadelphia's band, and every one who knew the words hoped
from the depths of a fervent heart that this banner might
wave over territory that should be in reality a land of the
free and a home of the brave.
The American flag that was by this time climbing to
its lofty position was an immense piece of bunting, what
is known in navy parlance as a "No. i regulation." It
was thirty feet long and eighteen feet wide, and as it went
up the halyards it seemed to cover and tenderly protect the
entire front of the building. Almost simultaneously with
the raising of the official flag its smaller brethren were run




88


HIAWAII NEI


up on the side-towers, and again was heard the salute
to the new sovereignty —as though the guns were
saying, "The King is dead; long live the King!" The
central flag was so immense that though it hung limp and
lifeless for a moment, it was but a second before it caught
the breath of a passing breeze, and flung itself in wide
magnificence. Then for the first time there was a cheerstrong from the direction of the sharpshooters and the
Citizens' Guard, weak from the places where were seated
America's new citizens of alien blood.
Minister Sewall read the President's proclamation,
which left everything official unchanged in Hawaii. Then
he made a speech, which was the valedictory of the old,
the salutatory of the new.
There followed the giving and the taking of the oath -
always an impressive ceremonial, even when given glibly
in a modern court of law. The Chief Justice in a black
holoku administered it. He should have taken it previously himself, but Hawaii's Chief Justice is a dictatorial
person, and gave the oath without being an American
citizen himself. The President took it alone, his cabinet
officers followed, their hands shaking like aspen-leaves.
Then the band played "Columbia, the Gem of the
Ocean," the Philadelphia men went back to the waterfront, and the crowd filtered slowly out through the
gates, casting many a longing, lingering glance behind
at the new flag, flaunting its red, white, and blue against
the sea of tropical green. The skies ceased to weep
over it, and the sun came out and warmed and blessed it.
Most of the Americans made their way to Kalakaua's
old barracks, there to see the National Guard take the
oath. The enlisted men were told to remove their caps -




HAWAII NEI


89


those who wished to swear. The ranks were by no
means full, many men having stayed away in anticipation
of this. There was a moment of suspense as the men
were given an instant to decide at the parting of the
ways. It was like that moment of deadly delay before
the altar when one is allowed to speak or else forever
after hold his peace.  A  corporal's guard sturdily
remained covered and did not raise a hand, a proceeding
requiring moral courage of the highest order. Afterward came the humiliating order to step from the ranks
and surrender their arms —and all because they were
true to the flag of their nativity. President Dole presented a flag to the new Americans —the faded colors
which once belonged to the Boston, dim and begrimed
from years in camphor. Mr. Dole said that the Hawaiian
flag had gone down in "honorable surrender." and the
soldiers hung their heads as though no surrender was
ever honorable.
Officially, Annexation Day was over. In the evening,
brilliant fire-balls climbed the still, dark skies, and wild
noises disturbed the silent tropical night - these the
contribution of the Annexation Club. Later, there was a
ball —mixed as to guest, and varied as to detail —a ball
in the old throne-room of Iolani Palace where the dark,
disapproving faces of rows of Kamehamehas looked down
on dancers from every country under the sun except
their own. There was scarcely a Hawaiian face among
them all - one or two pretty half-breeds - and yet you
will find people who will tell you in dead earnest that the
natives were absolutely pining for annexation. Stranger
still, these people expect you to believe them.
Long after midnight the lights went out under the




90                 HAWAII NEI
stems of the ghostly royal palms, keeping their vigil of
years, and Honolulu slept under the protection of the
American flag.
The missionary had rendered his account.








Wher Fise Leapand Play.




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91


CHAPTER VIII
A QUEEN'S HOME-COMING
THERE is nothing festive about the home-coming of a
throneless queen. It is more of a funeral than a fete;
but when the loss of caste does not carry with it loss of
loyalty, and when the affection of a people is beyond
taint or hurt, then adversity has compensations, for true
love shines best in the darkest days. Had Liliuokalani
remained a queen, she would never have known how
much her people loved her.
In a few years, when the families of royal blood and
those of the rich merchants are inextricably mingled,
when every one in Hawaii shall have a moi as ancestor on
one side and a shop-keeper on the other, when all the
coats-of-arms shall have been quartered with a ham or a
cheese, and the old women with yards of historical
legends at their tongues' end are all dead, it will be
impossible to have such a home-coming as was Liliuokalani's on the night of the Ist of August, in the year
of grace and annexation. Such a home-coming will
not be possible then, because the young Hawaiians
are ignorant of the sagas of their race.  Historians
with more or less sympathy have committed the oral
histories to writing, but there are no young olioli
singers who know how to half-carol, half-yodel the
deeds of the illustrious ancestors of the royal house.




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HAWAII NEI


The living histories are dying year by year, and more's
the pity.
The home-coming of Liliuokalani was inexpressibly
sad. It was marked by a barbaric ceremonial and a
heartfelt joy, tempered by sorrow; for annexation was a
thing determined upon. Always before when Liliuokalani came home after fruitless diplomatic journeys, there
was some hope, but this time there was none. The
Hawaiian monarchy had been swallowed by America.
The little Hawaiian republic had committed suicide, but
in its death-grip it had strangled the monarchy too.
It was past midnight of August Ist when the Gaelic
was sighted off Koko Head. At the announcement,
hundreds of natives tumbled from their beds, and others
who had kept an all-night vigil lest the Queen should
come unannounced, hurried to the wharf, like those wise
and vigilant virgins, until the whole water-front was a
mass of moving figures. Of these, few were Caucasians,
and the sprinkling of palefaces was not enough to conventionalize that heartfelt welcome nor to temper the
savage splendor of it all.
Those who had thought that the Queen would remain
quietly aboard the steamer until daylight, had reckoned
without her love of Hawaii nei.  She was not only
awake, but had been pacing the deck for hours, straining
for a glimpse of the lights that warn mariners of the
sharp-toothed coral reefs that encircle her country. It
was a perfect midnight.  The sky was a deep purple,
set with stars and curtained with clouds. At intervals
the light of the full moon spilled over the rim of the
cloud-bank and showed the city crowded between the
green water and the green hills, those wonderful hills




HAWAII NEI


93


and perpetually weeping valleys which girdle Honolulu,
and which are fresher than any other verdure in the
world.
One by one the buoys sparkled into life, marking the
road for the ship, and the natives murmured their joy
that the steamer was coming in. The pilot-boat darted
out, and soon the twin vertical lights of the Gaelic
were sending a long ray over the water. Not a sound
disturbed the deathly stillness of the dock. The huge
hulk of the Gaelic slid deftly into place and the gangplank went up. The passengers were all on deck; for
queens do not come home every day. Americans among
the crowd picked out faces they knew and saluted boisterously, but still the natives gave no sound.
The Princess Kaiulani looked on in the moonlight,
and the Hawaiian women clung to each other sobbing.
Prince David, with a few tried and trusted royalists, went
up the gangplank and found the Queen in a little inclosure of canvas, arranged to shelter her from curious eyes
during the trip. It was several moments before she
appeared, and then she walked down the gangplank on
the arm of Prince David, stately and dignified, stepping
as slowly as if it were a royal progress and the feather
robe of the Kamehamehas under her feet. She was all
in black, and her face under the black plumes looked sad
and worn.
Still that deathly silence! Not a cheer broke the
quiet, and the. throneless Queen looked from side to side,
while not an upturned face strayed for a moment from
her. She seemed a little pained at the silence. Finally
she herself broke the spell.
"Aloha, aloha," she said in a sweet and low but




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powerful voice, smiling sadly upon them. They had all
the time been standing with uncovered heads, but
instantly a storm of "Alohas" broke from the crowd, and
they pressed to the gangplank and made as though they
would touch her. Suddenly from the crowd a wizened
old woman struck up a weird chant, rising and falling in
barbaric cadence. It was a sound so appropriate to coralreefs and cocoanut-groves, so utterly out of key with the
big modern ship and the electrically lighted pier and all
the elaborate paraphernalia of modern life that everybody
started. The song was of the time of the malo and the
calabash, and as the ancient crone sang, lifting her
wrinkled arms and her shriveled fingers to heaven, all
the years and all the teachings since the first missionaries
came to the islands seemed to fall away as a mantle, and
it was again old Hawaii, the beautiful land of Kamehameha.
The Queen did not appear to listen, but her face
lighted as the old minstrelsy fell on her ear. She and
her suite and Prince David seated themselves in Kaiulani's
carriage, with its white horses, and then, for the first
time, some one proposed three cheers. They were given
heartily, in American fashion, but they did not accord
with the rest of the greeting. There was a dash of white
horses, a nodding of heads to left and right, fervent
alohas mingled with sobs, and Liliuokalani was gone.
The men and women whom she left behind were unashamed of their wet eyes.
But the scene of the night was at Washington Place,
the private residence of the Queen, where were enacted
such things as have not been known in the islands for
many years and may never be again. It was a fit setting




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95


for the passing of a dynasty. The house of Keawe-aheulu went out with all the primitive savagery with which
it had begun. One could shut his eyes and imagine himself in the heart of Africa, but never in the latest of
American provinces, within a stone's throw of the biggest
of foreign churches and within a square of a modem
hotel.
The home of Liliuokalani was once the property of
her husband's family. It is a big square white house,
built after the plan of plantation-houses in the Southern
American States. An immense balcony encircles it, and
the house itself is lost in a wilderness of tropical foliage.
Upon Liliuokalani's arrival, liveried servants cropped up
as if by magic, like those armed men who sprang from
the dragon's teeth. Two chamberlains in black broadcloth and tall silk hats with fluttering white rosettes, were
stationed by the great entrance-gates, and two more were
at the broad flight of steps that led to the front door.
These men were straight and stiff as posts, and they held
in their hands kukui-nuts bound in ti-leaves. The oily
nuts blazed and flared like torches of pitch, and gave off
a soft white vapor, with the pungent smell of prayersticks in a Chinese temple. The burning of kukui-nuts
is a prerogative of Liliuokalani's family, and all through
the night her torch-bearers stood stiffly erect.  They
were old men who had performed the same service at the
palace in other and better days, but when one saw them
first at half-past two and last at half-past five, their old
backs were quite as straight and their old hands as steady
as in palmier days.
The windows and doors in the great house had been
thrown open and the lights from within streamed out




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HAWAII NEI


through the trees.  The white pillars and door-frames
had been wound with green garlands, and over the door
was a Hawaiian   welcome, "Pumehama."     Lamps,
shaded with red, gave a cheerful glow, and the brilliant
moon and flaring torches made the grounds as bright as
day. Under the ragged banana-leaves, where the dews
of early morning were congealing, and where the fragrance of jasmine and stephanotis and strange odorous
spider-lilies was almost overpowering, a score of native
men squatted in tailor-fashion, as though chairs had
never come into use in Hawaii. The women crowded
near tle house where they could see through the open
French windows.  In the dining-room the Queen was
breaking bread in her own home. She was seated in
state at a plain deal table of a pattern found in many
American kitchens, but there was no one in all that
gathering of high enough rank to sit at the board. Such
are the strange contrasts of this defunct monarchy.
There were attendants in plenty. Pretty young girls
waved slowly white feather kahilis, and others brought
the fruits of the island to the ex-Queen. She was still
queen to them. She was dressed in black and lavender,
with a soft sparkle of diamonds about the hands. In the
light she looked extremely handsome with the strong
lines that sorrow and anxiety have etched in her face, and
with all the obstinate self-will and vanity quite gone.
All the while the Queen was at table the priestesses outside kept up the melancholy oliolis, queer recitatives
recounting the deeds of valor of the ancestors of the
royal house, set to barbaric music reminiscent of Aida.
Sometimes the natives took up the refrain in a sort of
chorus, the women's voices blending in perfect thirds,




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97


and the men wailing after the old fashion for the
dead.
For hours the chant went on without interruption,
seemingly endless. The figures of the old women were
bending and swaying as they gesticulated wildly, their
voices cracking and breaking like those of some Deborah
of old. Much of the history told in the song sagas was
unintelligible to the young Hawaiians present; for the
language is rapidly changing and many of the old words
are entirely obsolete, but the old people understood and
hung on every word uttered by Mahoe and Hana, drinking in the old tale of prowess and valor as though they
had never heard it before.
When the Queen was sufficiently refreshed, her old
retainers passed before her. At the veranda outside they
fell on their knees, and, walking thus, passed to the
woman whom they still regard as their chiefess. Almost
all those who knelt were old and white-haired, and the
spontaneous act of loyalty must have been hard for old
knees. Whatever a republican may think of such practices, there was something pathetic in this train of old,
bent forms, wending its slow way before the Queen —the
Queen, who is but a common mortal, and can no longer
enforce one small prerogative that once was hers by
right. But all that loyalty could give was rendered to
her as freely as though the power of life and death were
yet in her hands.
One old man, whose hair was white and whose eyes
were sightless, groped with his cane, then fell on his
knees with the rest, and needed no eyes to find the
Queen's hand to kiss. She called each by name, and
wiped her own eyes as the tears fell on her hand. The




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old retainers backed out of her presence, still on their
knees, as though it were yet tabu to let one's shadow fall
upon a king. Later some subjects of higher degree were
permitted to kiss the royal hand without preliminary
kneeling, and some few favored women remained kneeling
about the Queen, like children in kindergarten circle,
while they talked and exchanged the experiences that
had thronged their lives since last they met.
Outside, while the comfortable gossipy conference
went on within, and no one even dreamed of going to
bed, while the Queen occasionally smiled at some story
told by her women, the witches of the night sang their
mournful lays. The old Mahoe had worked herself into
a frenzy as she ran singing about the place. An old
man who is a familiar street character joined her, and
simultaneously they burst into the melody and the rhythmic movements of one of the old-time hulas, the real
hula, when it was a war-dance and had not been ruined
by the interpretation of foreigners. As they swayed and
swung and rippled their muscles and made strange, enticing gestures with their shriveled hands, it began to
grow pink and pearl beyond the frayed-out leaves of the
bananas, and the foliage of the cocoanut-palm swayed in
the first chill breeze of dawn.
Still the natives crooned among the trees, still the
Queen opened her heart once again to those whom she
trusts, and still the endless story of the deeds of the kings
went on, though the voices of the singing women were
growing faint with fatigue. In front, the torch-bearers,
forgotten by every one, were erect and solemn as British
footmen, and the kukui-nuts still flared, though a greater
light had eclipsed theirs. Women with bundles of twigs




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99


in their hands bent double to clear the drive of the flowers
that had been cast in the path of their crownless Queen.
The next day saw a hookupu, or gift-bearing, to the
Queen at Washington Place; but though the natives
flocked in great flower-decked crowds, bringing all sorts
of gifts, from modest taro wrapped in li-leaves to live
chickens tied by the legs, and live pigs, squealing, nothing in the garish, bright-tinted day could eclipse the
memory of the strange, barbaric, sweet-scented night,
when under the moon and the kukui flame the Queen
who has no throne except in the hearts of her countrymen came again to that country which will be loyal to
her as long as there is a single native of pure blood on
the island.  From Ioane, the blind player of the jew'sharp, who was once ballet-master to Kalakaua, and who,
because of the ravishing sights he saw, has been condemned to blindness by a not unjust Providence-from
Ioane, with his coat all rags, to descendants of chiefs
still rich in land and cocoanuts, all the natives flocked and
crowded to see the Queen. Shops were closed, and all
native business was suspended. For the first time I saw
my favorite boatman dry and clothed.  Even tie canoes
must idle while all respect and reverence was paid to the
Queen.  Outside on the lawn, in a fainting, palpitating
pile, the gifts were gathered. Many of them were living
things, some of which were passed from hand to hand to
the kitchen. There was faint possibility and no desire
that the Queen should ever know who sent the gifts.
The natives were paying their old feudal rent, paying it
in kind, and as cheerfully as though the chicken were not
the only one spared by the mongoose, or the pig the last
of his tribe.




100               HAWAII NEI
The hookupu is, I suppose, the legitimate ancestress
of the donation party or the birthday surprise, but oh,
how different! Here were no parsimonious farmers
bringing frost-bitten potatoes and damaged things they
did not want for themselves. Instead, the offerings were
without spot or blemish-the very best that they had.
Sometimes the gift from the slender store meant that the
family would have to go without, but even that thought
did not dim a single native smile. In all that crowd of
bright-faced people on the green turf, not one was there
expecting any favor-not one in search of office or
preferment.
Happy Hawaii!








/.f K  I
(        o.
S    A
N     ".,,
%i- 
I N
Immorm                          I    I I I
The Old Regime.




HAWAII NEI


TO1


CHAPTER IX
HOW ROYALTY IS BURIED
IT is not every day that one sits at the death-bed of a
nation, with an eye on a dying face and a finger on a
fluttering pulse. Nationalities, happily, are not snuffed
out so often; and while I am as glad to be an American
as I should have been glad to be something else, had I
been born elsewhere, I would rather be an American by
birth than to be made one by treaty.
During the last days of independent Hawaii, the
Americans were happy. They went around with faces
quietly beaming, as of travelers returning home. Why
should they care that the Hawaiians were to be ingulfed
in the resistless Caucasian stream, and a hundred years
hence would be but a speck in the blood, a spot on the
skin-a people passed from history? The death-knell
that had sounded was not for them. Why repine at the
sad but inevitable history of the nations? In this world
few men have time for the blood on other lintels.
Nothing was more typical of the old order that
passeth away than a royal funeral that swept through the
streets of Honolulu less than a month before the Hawaiian
flag went into eternal eclipse. It was symbolic of that
interesting barbarism, the tinsel and ceremony of that
feathered monarchy that has gone forever. Considered
from the standpoint of the picturesque, it is a pity that




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the peaceful pageantry of the little island monarchy could
not have survived. The climate fitted it, the beautiful
landscape suited it, the natives adored it. But as one of
the young planters put it, tersely, —a young planter
whose grandfather was a missionary, and whose father
is a millionaire,-"We don't want a picturesque government. We want a government under which we can
make money."
Well, well, so we do; so we do! I apologize to you,
O practical, hard-headed Nineteenth Century, for regretting a cloak of canary feathers and a grass house. The
canary cloak is in the museum, and the grass house has
a roof of corrugated iron; the beautiful native wears
hideous clothes, and the whole world is mad with moneymaking.
To go back, the Crown Princess of Tahiti was to be
buried from the Catholic church around the corner, and
when I said I was going, they laughed me to scorn.
Fancy any one caring to see a royal corpse in this nineteenth century! But I cared to see it. I seemed to be
about the only haole who did-the other Americans
present being residents apparently.
On the opposite side of the street was drawn up the
carriage of the American Minister, his Kanaka servants
in braided liveries of white duck. A squad of men from
the United States steamer Mohican made a white column
in the hot little street, and there were several companies
of the Hawaiian National Guard. But these had nothing
to do with the royal funeral. They were grouped about
a black hearse, where an undertaker of conventional pattern, with black gloves recently inked and a coat of
sage-green, was putting the finishing touches. Inside




IAWAII NEI


I03


was the flag-draped casket of the bandmaster of a
regiment of Minnesota volunteers. It was smothered
in strange waxen tropical flowers, with an odor that
swept you off your feet. They were already drooping-emblems of the sudden death and swift decay
of the tropics.  The Hawaiian Band was playing
"Nearer, My God, to Thee," at this burial by strangers
of a soldier who had not lived to reach the battlefield. Sad as it was, there were stranger things across
the way.
The Catholic buildings are low-browed and screened
behind walls. They dwell in the perpetual shimmering
shade of Honolulu. Quivering light-rays fall on their
faces through branches of the tamarind and the heavier
shade of the thirsty banyan-tree. Palms wave overhead,
and you can hear the cocoanuts click softly, like castanets, if you have the listening ear.
The wide doors of the church were open and music
streamed out, chiefly the native voice, flat and twanging,
as though the vocal chords lacked a sufficient soundingboard. People were packed between the light plastered
walls of the church and the street- such a strange, mixed
assemblage. At one side were six native men, in their
hands kahilis of feathers, shaped like huge bottlebrushes, the wooden handles tied with yellow ribbons.
The men themselves wore black clothes and black silk
hats, and around their necks were wide ahuulas, or
collarettes of canary and red feathers. These were
retainers of old and noble families, and the kahilis have
been carried for generations in royal processions and
corteges. Stout native women, in trailing holokus of
rich black silk, were looking after this part of the




104


HAWAII NEI


ceremony ---women with English as correct and accent
as refined as that of any Colonial dame.
A motley crowd peeped and peered into the incenseladen interior through the open doorway. There was a
daughter of China, in short blue blouse and loose flopping
trousers, anklets of jade on her slim brown legs, and her
bare feet thrust into embroidered slippers. Her shiny
black queue was lengthened with rose-pink silk, the Chinese color of youth, and her ears were disfigured with
their weight of jade and gilt. On her head was rakishly
poised a white sailor hat of unmistakably modern cut!
At the other side of the door a small Japanese maid,
with demure mouth, stood in her scant kimono and perfectly tied obi, her feet in clacking stilted slippers. Kanakas, Portuguese, Ethiopians, and Americans made up
the fringe of the crowd, all hobnobbing, rubbing elbows,
and craning necks in simple democratic equality.
And within high mass was being said for the soul of
a princess of Tahiti.  On one side of the street the
funeral procession of a soldier-boy from the far Northwest, on the other the feather-trimmed retainers of a
Tahitian princess-such are the sharp contrasts of this
newest American possession.
One of the ladies in black silk holokus told me about
the woman who was dead. The latter was Mrs. Ninito
Sumner, Crown Princess of Tahiti, and a first cousin of
Pomare, Queen of Tahiti. In her youth, Mrs. Sumner
came to Hawaii as the betrothed of one of the Kamehamehas. But the kings of the fast-dying race of the
great Kamehameha reigned briefly. Before the Tahitian
princess arrived her fiance was dead, and she never ruled
in Hawaii. The family was very polite about it. The




HAWAII NEI


105


prince next in line was away, and the Tahitian princess
was invited to remain and be betrothed to him when he
returned. She did remain, but she did not wait for him.
John K. Sumner, a wealthy half-white, saw and admired
her, wooed and wed her. In time the strong racial ties
of Polynesia drew the princess and her foreign husband
back to Tahiti. Sometimes they stayed there for ten
years, returning always to Hawaii. There were no children-there seldom are in these royal families- and the
Sumners grew old together. In spite of their wealth,
they loved the old, simple life of pre-civilized days, and
sometimes they would live in one of the warm, moist,
tropical valleys back of Honolulu for months at a time,
their home a grass house, their bed a braided mat, their
diet a calabash of poi. It was a relapse into simplicity.
In later years troubles came to them. The aged husband
inherited the trustfulness of his mother's race, and was
easily imposed upon by white men. On one of Sumner's
trips he met a plausible stranger who persuaded him to
give him a power of attorney over all his lands. The old
man was made to believe that the success of certain lawsuits depended on his leaving the islands at once. After
he had gone, his friends heard of the transaction, brought
the matter to the attention of the courts, and urged the revocation of the power of attorney and the appointment of
a guardian for the old man. The worry of it hastened the
death of Mrs. Sumner.
While I was listening to the world-old story of the
oppression of the dark skins by the white, and of the
fraud, the deceit, the treachery that goes with civilization,
poured in my ear by my soft-voiced friend in the trailing
holoku, my eyes were becoming accustomed to the soft,




io6


HAWAII NEI


velvety gloom of the interior of the church. Near the
door, outside of which I was standing, were many chairs,
piled feet upward -a wild chaos of legs that told of a
dwindling congregation. Far down the aisle were more
feather kahilis, as symbolic of power as the fasces of the
Roman lictor or the mace of modern representative
assemblies. The same motley throng, all colors, all ages,
all nationalities, sat in the pews. There was a tiny white
child, with yellow curls straying over her bare white
shoulders, sitting next to a brown Kanaka, whose shining
face looked fresh from the cocoanut-oil of the South
Pacific. Near the chancel was the casket, with its tapers,
and behind it a sweet-faced old bishop in his miter-a
man that I can very well believe is well beloved-surrounded by his priests- missionaries who have taken the
vow of poverty.
The interior of the church was of conventional pattern, for the Catholic church is the same the world over.
Only the kahilis gave a touch of the islands. At the
right of the nave, in an inclosed space, knelt the Ladies
of the Sacred Heart, from their convent near by, their
white robes flowing in Milton's "majestic train," and
their clasped hands hidden in the folds of their diaphanous white veils. The kneeling nuns in white, the bishop
with his little retinue, the dusky bowed heads in the
church, and the barbaric feathered kahilis made up a picture not elsewhere to be duplicated.
The high mass for the daughter of Tahiti was over,
and the congregation streamed down the aisle. Over its
cheap, brightly colored carpet they came, under the
tender picture of St. Veronica, with its infinite, everlasting pity. The mourning color in Hawaii is black, and




HAWAII NEI


I07


no negro ever loved crepe more than they. The chieftain families of the islands are much intermarried and
have a wide connection, and it seemed as though every
one in the church wore mourning. Rusty black crepe
veils, the state mourning of decades, swept the floor.
They showed by signs of unmistakable wear how frequent
have been the deaths in past years. Some women wore
capes of crepe, and very few had heart enough for the
yellow leis that tell of royalty.
The casket was hidden under quantities of yellow
flowers, the royal color, with a few garlands of deathly
sweet oleanders yielding up their fragrant lives. Behind
the casket walked the aged husband, a little old man in
black broadcloth, the wrinkled back showing where he
had shrunk away from the lines of thirty years ago. A
six-inch band of crepe on his hat and a sash of black
crepe on his arm made his identity and his widowhood
unmistakable, but his face was calm and unmoved. Even
death could not disturb the calm of senility. He had
outlived grief, and it passed him by.
The hearse was marked with four immense white
plumes, and four more, shaped like kahilis, were stuck
at the heads of the black horses. On the top of the
hearse was a representation of the Hawaiian crown-an
immense confection of red plush and gold-leaf, only used
on special occasions, and this time shrouded in crepe.
I stood inside the fence, near a lay brother in his
black garb, and pressed my forehead against the iron
palings as the cortege moved slowly away. The crownsurmounted hearse scarcely attracted a glance in the
narrow, bustling streets, where Oriental and Occidental
civilization forget to nod as they pass by. Of late years




108               HAWAII NEI
there have been many royal funeral pageants as impressive as this. Many times has the crown been borne
above the hearse, as the short lives of chiefs and chiefesses came to an end. It seemed as though royalty found
the air of the republican continent unbearable.
Then the white-plumed hearse with its crown of yellow leis, the kahilis and their bearers, all the pomp and
circumstance of barbaric royalty, with the dazed old man
behind, passed from view beyond a grove of palms.
The Crown Princess of Tahiti is envied by some of
her kindred. She, at least, did not outlive her kingdom.








t
I
 i
ir  I
'I'lic Most Cel6vat, d of Island Kahuna,.
a




HAWAII NEI


o09


CHAPTER X
THE KAHUNA PASSES
IT is easier, infinitely, to find a needle in a haystack
than a kahuna in Hawaii. A kahuna, be it known, is a
relic of the ancient priesthood-a doctor, a wizard, an
impostor, a faith-curer, sometimes a bard, always a soothsayer. The kahuna's medical theory he shares with the
Chinese, preparing a feast of pig and awa which, eaten
by the relatives of the patient, acts only by indirection.
Probably the sick one is more likely to recover than if
this pot-pourri were fed to him. Sometimes the witchdoctor prescribes a dip in the surf for fever; the effect
may be imagined.
The kahunas are a class tabu in modern, republican,
Americanized Hawaii, even as they were feared, honored,
and respected in old Hawaii. Everything that was loved
in the old is hated in the new, and vice versa. The
kahuna is proscribed and prosecuted under the law of
these years of grace and freedom of religious belief, as a
doctor who practices medicine without a license. Let
him hang a talisman about the neck of a patient, and it is
all right; but let him prescribe a diet of herbs or a broth
of leaves, and the law is upon him. The patients of other
doctors die, and no one wonders; but let the patient of a
kahuna droop and wither, and the law exacts its life for a
life.




I IO


HAWAII NEI


It is because he is so persistently misunderstood that
the kahuna flees from a white man as he would from the
plague. He is afraid of bleached faces, and the presence
of a wahine haole (foreign woman) at his shrine sends his
gods away from home. One kahuna assured me gravely
that after 1 had visited him, his gods refused for a week
to hear his prayers.
The days I wasted hunting kahunas might have been
spent in a better cause, I am assured by a prosperous
churchman. I believe he is right. For instance, I might
have visited schools; but to my persistency and bad taste
I am indebted for one of the most fascinating experiences
of my stay in Hawaii.
In my first search I was led by a will-o'-the-wisp hackman, who pretended to be omniscient. Yes, he knew a
kahuna-knew him well-a great and good and holy
man. He lived in one of the valleys back of Honolulu,
and might he take me up? He might, and he did. We
went out through the Portuguese quarter, and suddenly
flung ourselves into a steep and narrow defile in the hills,
so rocky and so rough that the cab wheels might have
been climbing Jacob's ladder, such was the jolting. It
misted gently all the way, and the sun, shining in behind
us through the rifted rocks, threw fairy rainbows across
the valley, spanning it like the many arches of Mirza's
dream. All the people in this happy valley were Hawaiians. Women in holukus, very much tucked up, washed
serenely in a gutter by the roadside. Children, nearly
naked, scampered along by us, for evidently carriages
did not often pass that way. Girls on horseback, bareheaded and barefooted, acted as our outriders. Their
bare legs stuck out at either side, and their holokus




HAWAII NEI


III


floated behind them like the winged pau, the old ridingdress that has disappeared from the islands.
We stopped before a tumble-down shack, and the
driver clambered out. Only women appeared to be at
home in the valley, and the Amazonian relatives of the
kahuna poured out of the shanty. Kahunaism, unlike
other priestly professions, does not seem to be profitable
in this Edenic valley. The women of the kahuna were
as mad-looking as my imagination had painted the
master of sorcery. There was a young girl with matted
hair and the mark of Ethiopia in her face. She was
followed by her mother, an aged and wrinkled crone
with flowing white locks-a woman who could have
played a Macbeth witch without a make-up. They said
that the kahuna had gone to the top of a neighboring
peak to tend his herb-garden. He sometimes remained
away a week. The sight of silver did not tempt them to
send for him. He must not be disturbed at his herbgathering, else his charms would not work. I looked at
the cloud-draped mountain whither this mysterious Elijah
had retired, but it was inaccessible to man or beast. It
was covered with a jungle of creepers, and without knowing the path, it would take two weeks for a man and an
ax to penetrate its fastnesses. The kahuna might as well
have been in Samoa.
Of course the women promised to send me word
when he came down, and of course they did nothing of
the sort. On my way through the valley I stopped at
some of the native houses and questioned the inmates.
They heard me with a smile and a shrug, and denied
severally that they believed in kahunas. And yet every
one of them, at serious illness in the family, would send




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first for the kahuna, and then for a doctor; and if the
patient died, the blame would go to the doctor, and if he
recovered, the credit would go to the kahuna and his
prayers, and to the black pig of his sacrifice.
The next hunt for a kahuna took me through city
ways, down narrow streets and twisted turnings. It was
almost as successful as the other. My friend the deputymarshal sent me word that he had a kahuna for me.
Before we started he showed me a stone image of Kuula,
the fishermen's god, to whom the natives pray before
they go fishing. It weighed two hundred pounds, and
he had taken it from an old woman who lived out Waikiki
way. She had treated a patient with the steeped leaves
of the taro, and the woman had died from the effects; but
as the kahuna was old, and the poisoning could not be
proved, they had torn her idol from her and had bade
her sin no more.
The idol was about three feet high, with a rough head,
hewn by hand. It looked inoffensive, and I failed to see
why the woman could not keep her plaything. It could
not possibly injure any one. In the jail-yard I saw two
more creatures of kahunaism -two men of Kauai who
helped to burn a woman to death at the bequest of a
kahuna. All of which shows how sincere is the native
disavowal of belief in these things.
It was a long way to our kahuna's house, up and
down dale, across Nuuanu stream, through a country
lane sweetly bordered, and to a back gate which was
locked. We left our carriage to climb a freshly painted
stile, scale a gate, and thread a maze of back yards.
At the kahuna's house all was quiet. The doors
were locked and the windows closed. We peeped and




HAWAII NEI


Il3


peered, but no living thing was visible. We roused the
neighborhood, and a friendly key gained us admittance.
The kahuna had fled. There was his altar, hurriedly
swept bare, and his fires still burning. The altar was
covered with a red cloth -the priestly color since the old
days-but not a stone god had escaped the hurried
departure. The kahuna had left fine mats on the floor
and his four-post koa bed, but he himself had gone.
His gods had warned him that a foreign woman was
coming, so he chose as his city of refuge the ex-Queen's
garden, and as I did not care for him without his setting,
we left him in peace.
There is another kahuna at the other side of the town.
We dashed across the city without noticing the trees
glorious with the scarlet bloom of the ponciana regia.
We scarcely dared think of our destination, for fear the
stone gods which never sleep would warn this man too
that we were coming. Our route took us past the old
Kawaiaho church, in the sacred shadow of which our
magician dwelt unafraid.  We made inquiries for the
kahuna. The natives whom we asked eyed us doubtfully. They knew the man, but they thought that perhaps he might have moved. It was a charming study
of loyalty —the loyalty which circumstances keep the
natives from showing to their hereditary chiefs, and
which they have transferred to their hereditary priests,
whose stock is dwindling out in these aged kahunas. In
another generation the race of the kahuna will have been
run. Like so many other things in Hawaii, he is
finished -pau, as the Hawaiians say.
You will not lack for Americans to scoff at kahunas,
and to tell you that none of those now alive is genuine.




I4


HAWAII NEI


They will even deny that the old kahunas were ever
sincere. It is merely a species of religious intolerance.
Though a people of many gods, the Hawaiians had a
fairly well-defined Trinity before the Bible came to the
islands; and if they sacrificed human victims on their
temple altars, was there not an Abraham? The priests
were a hereditary and highly revered class —sacred next
to the kings, and sometimes much more worthy than
royalty. In the old days they frequently took the part
of the people against the oppression of the chiefs, and
the temple tabus and rights of the priests did not give
way even to the king himself. Nor is there a record of
a single disloyal priest who ever tried to usurp kingly
power.
The kahunas were revered like other men who have
the power of life and death. Even now you can see a
trace of the old feeling as a kahunu passes on the street,
known by the scarlet handkerchief he wears about his
neck. Within his house he is gay as a flamingo, but on
the street he does not dare show more than a glimpse of
the sacerdotal color. There is no doubt that many of
the kahunas of modern days, especially the younger
ones, are fakirs, and dangerous ones, too. But I have
heard of quack doctors, even in such a free and enlightened country as America, and it seems to me that these,
in their time, have killed more patients than all the
kahunas in Hawaii.
At last we were before the vine-covered abode of our
elusive quarry. I remained outside so as not to alarm
him. Two frightened native women came to the door.
The one we were seeking was not at home, they said.
Questioned more closely, they protested that he was not




IAWAII NEI


II5


a kahuna, and almost fell on their trembling knees as
they denied that they would harbor such a one. He was
a poor, inoffensive old man, they said. They could not
believe that we meant him no harm, and they besought
us to go and leave him in peace. Just then I saw a bent
brown shape flit from the rear door and bury itself in the
shade of the wild bananas. I felt sure it was the object
of our search, but I had no heart to pursue him. He
looked so dejected, and it seemed to me that we had
done harm enough for one day.
My next kahuna hunt took me into the hills midway
between Honolulu and Waikiki where lives a very old
woman versed in witchcraft and the black arts. She it
was to whom the stone Kuula in the jail belonged, and
her recantation and repentance were said not to have
been even skin-deep. I had been given careful directions
as to how to reach the place —turn to the left at the
stone bridge under the big shade-trees, then two miles
straight into the heart of the hills to the native village
where Kana lived.  Now, a woman kahuna is something
of a rarity.  The priests in Hawaii were all sons of
Aaron, and the magic attributes were not supposed to
descend to the daughters of the house. But Kana is the
last of her race, and her fame as one able to pray to
death an enemy and to heal the sick, has filled all the
countryside these many years. Her patrons are many
and her victims few. When she escaped prosecution for
the death of the woman who died of eating the wrong
end of the taro, she promised to turn from the evil of
her way, but you might as well dream of turning back
the tide of the Pacific as of keeping the natives from
their kahunas.




II6


HAWAII NEI


I found the village to be mostly whitewashed cottages
with corrugated iron roofs, but in one of two thatched
and tumble-down abodes Kana lived. I was too wise to
knock. I could hear voices; so I boldly pushed open the
door and entered. Ah, what a sight! In one corner of
the hut was an altar covered with red calico, and on it
were little stone gods-pieces of volcanic rock worn
round and smooth —pitiful little Kuulas set up in place
of the big fine one in Honolulu jail, doing penance for
the sins of Kana.
The only light came from burning kukui-nuts and
from a flaming rag set in a small calabash of grease in
the old, old primitive way. And there was Kana herself,
clad in a few yards of kapa cloth, in which she had
wound herself after the fashion of her ancestors. From
the waist up her shrunken body was naked, and the
brown skin was shirred and gathered in little pleats and
wrinkles, where the flesh had faded away beneath it.
She was posturing before the altar, intoning a sort of
prayer, throwing her arms above her head, and tearing at
her wild gray locks. She was feeding awa and brandy
to her gods, and they, being incorporeal, ate and drank
only the aroma, leaving the awa and the strong waters
to be absorbed by the devotee before the shrine. She
was so engrossed that she did not see me at first, and the
melancholy intoning and posturing continued. I learned
afterward that she was engaged in praying some one to
death, and that a lock of the victim's hair- the bait, as
they call it,- reposed on the altar.
Just then my shadow fell across the lurid shelf and
Kana turned and saw me. With a wild shriek she
recognized a stranger. More swiftly than I describe it,




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117


swifter than anything but a shaft of light, she turned and
sped past me, out through the door and away among
the trees, the kapa streaming behind her as she fled
screaming like one possessed. At the sound, Kanakas
swarmed from their huts, and for a little there was wild
hubbub in that village. I felt as though I were in the
heart of Africa instead of, at that moment, on American
soil.
We have annexed some queer things.
But my hack-driver was within call, and I pocketed
my fears, explaining to the natives who crowded about,
that I meant no harm, and had accidentally disturbed the
sorceress at her work. My third kahuna had been at
least visible, though I had had no speech with her. I
knew that she would steal back in the night to remove
her gods and that that place would know her no more.
My next kahuna came to me-in itself a suspicious
circumstance. A gentle rat-tat came at my door, and a
soft native voice said, "You want a kahuna?"  I still
wanted one; so I admitted the raven. He was a poor
old man with bare feet, tattered overalls, and a ragged
straw hat. His only decent garment was a sweater, and
this was of kahuna red.
I was doubtful of this uninvited guest, but he said,
looking stealthily around, "I a great kahuna. I make
people love you. I pray your enemies to death. You
tell no one, for they arrest me and put me in jail."
This was the genus kahuna, species fortune-teller.
He asked to see my palm, and pondered long and faithfully over it, muttering to himself in Hawaiian. I asked
if I could not go to his house, but he seemed unwilling.
I am convinced that he had none, though, perhaps, like




I18


HAWAII NEI


the others, he wished to protect his altar from disturbing
presences. He asked for a basin of water, and rejected
several until a great bowl gave the desired flat surface.
Then, from a lean and hungry purse, he took some
strange flowers with an odor deadly sweet. I had never
seen such flowers before. Throwing them in the water,
he stirred it with a lean brown forefinger, murmuring the
while a native prayer. A soft scum appeared on the
water, then a film, and then a cloud, the whole taking on
strange shapes, like vapor-forms building and unbuilding
in the sky. Covering the water with a red silk handkerchief, he allowed the waves he had caused to subside and
the ferment he had made to settle. Uncovering it, he
pretended to read from the cloud-forms my future, telling
me the same rosy tale that is told and re-told by fortunetellers in more enlightened lands-all the things that a
normal person is supposed to want.
Again he dropped his voice. Had I any enemies I
wanted prayed to death? He was a kahuna anaana, and
could do that also, only, of course, he must do it at home
and in secret. I refused to nominate mine enemy, but
he insisted and seemed not to comprehend when I said
that I thought living a worse punishment than dying.
When he did finally understand, he seemed to think me
scarcely a safe person to do business with. But as I
absolutely declined to furnish the nail-paring or the lock
of hair, without which mazna, or bait, the kahuna anaana
can do nothing, he gave me a melancholy smile and
took his departure, but not before he had given me a
little talismanic bag, said to be a sure prophylactic against
evil. On dissection, I found it to contain not the vampire's "rag and a bone and a hank of hair," but a tooth




HAWAII NEI


II9


and a bone and a pinch of sand. And when I asked his
fee for all this rose-colored future and this talismanic protection, he mentioned the sum of twenty-five cents. If I
had been inclined to trust him before, that settled it. A
decent old fellow, no doubt, made a quack by his necessities. This is the sort of kahuna the stranger must
beware of in Honolulu. The few genuine ones in the
city are so law-wise that no American has ever been
admitted into their presence. All the influence in the
world would not accomplish it; and as for their prayers,
any of the native-born whites can recite you a yard of
them.
I dropped the unprofitable study of witch-doctors
until I left Honolulu and the region where the law against
practicing medicine without a license is vigorously enforced. On the island of Hawaii, I found the very prince
of kahunas —a dyed-in-the-wool old medicine-man, with
all the picturesque accessories of his guild. His fame is
as broad as the island, and from Punaluu to Hilo the
country rings with his praises. Eighteen miles from
Honuapo dwells Kaurnualii, greatest of living kahunas,
and last lineal descendant of the great Paao, the high
priest who came from Tahiti in the eleventh century.
Kaumualii has all the fame he wants, and his patients go
to or send for him from all over the country. But he is
full of years and honors now, and perhaps by this writing,
the famous king of kahunas, Hawaii's Old Man of the
Mountain, is dead.
My hostess, whose father was a chief, and whose house
is always honored when royalty journeys that way, took
me to him. Driving straight into the mountains from the
prosperous plantation-house, we came suddenly upon the




I20


HAWAII NEI


most charming of native villages, nestling in a crotch of
the hills, a village so picturesque, so primitive, so old, and
so unsullied by the new, that I, who had given up finding
anything unspoiled in Hawaii, quite lost my breath. It
was a prosperous-looking place, in spite of its brownness
and its air of the antique, and here, untouched by civilization, lives the prince of kahunas, the last of his race in
Hawaii.
The natives told me all about him- how he was the
chief man of the village, how he doctored them in illness,
and how he advised them in time of stress. He is so
honest that when they take him money for his ministrations he lays it on the altar, and if, after praying, the
gods refuse to listen, and he can do nothing for them, he
returns the money. Could any licensed practitioner do
more?
The Hawaiian belief was, and to a large extent still
is, that all forms of sickness and disease are caused by evil
spirits. With these spirits the kahunas hold communication, hence their power. The most advanced Hawaiians
have grown away from the superstition, but the tenacity
of it in country districts is as amazing as are some
cherished superstitions of our own land.
I was received at the kahuna's house with the simple
dignity of a man who wears only a breech-clout of red,
but considers it full-dress. He was very old-so old that
he had lost his majestic straightness of back, which in a
Hawaiian is the last thing to go. Over his knees the
dark skin wrinkled deeply, while his sparse gray hairs fell
over his meager shoulders. But his eyes were piercing
as a hawk's, black and fearless, as though accustomed to
look unblinking into the future.




HAWAII NEI


121


I had heard of one woman whom this old man had
recently prayed, not to death, but into a madhouseand when I saw his eyes, I did not wonder that she went
down under their baleful gleam. The woman in the
asylum had a dispute over land with another. The
insane woman won the case, and her defeated opponent
threatened openly to have Kaumualii pray the successful
litigator to death. The threat was quite enough. In all
"praying to death," suggestion plays a large part. The
prospective victim was a Christian, and educated. Her
friends and relatives reasoned and argued with her in
vain. She worried over it, grew thinner and weaker,
and finally lost her reason. Such cases are not at all rare
in Hawaii.
Skeptics say that vegetable poisons figure actively in
these "prayings to death," and that the kahunas were,
and are, professional murderers, learned as the Borgias in
all deadly arts. Kaumualii is supposed to have in his
possession a portion of the poison-tree famed in Hawaiian annals. On that point alone he was silent.
But there were other and pleasanter things to hear of
this old man marvelous-how he had made the dead
come back to their old habitations by catching the
departed spirit and forcing it back into the dead body.
I asked him to do it, that I might see, but he said that
there was no one dead in the village, and that it was only
occasionally the gods would permit him to so upset the
scheme of the universe.  But he would tell me his
methods.
The manner is as old as the story of Lazarus, and
fabulous tales of it have come down from the earliest
Hawaiian days. First, catch your spirit; next, pry up




122


HAWAII NEI


the nail of the great toe, slip the spirit underneath, and
begin a vigorous massage. There is great difficulty in
getting the spirit past the ankle and knee-joints, but
vigorous rubbing will do it. At last, when the spirit
reaches the heart, that organ begins to beat again and
the deed is done, the dead one is raised up. There is
no doubt that certain cases of suspended animation have
been successfully treated in this fashion, hence the superstition. The massage to restore the circulation is the
most vigorous process imaginable. It is seldom resorted
to in later days, and when unsuccessful, the kahuna lays
the blame to the gods, which is a very convenient and
simple device, and not confined to Polynesia.
The gods of Kaumualii were ordinary, and his prayers
unintelligible, but his glance burned like fire, and his
touch was like the pricking of electric needles. He had
the pagan indifference to death, and I wondered if the
Christian doctrine of future punishment had aught to do
with the fearsome dying of the West.  The old kahuna,
with his old gods and his old ways, seemed the better
philosopher.
Very soon those who call the kahunas poisoners will
need to seek new texts. The sorcerer-priests are passing
from Hawaii as they passed long ago from Europe, and
as the witch craze passed from America. Far be it from
those who have the Salem page in their history to throw
the first stone.




a




The Diver.




HAWAII NEI


123


CHAPTER XI
THE DIVER
I WAS up with the sun, or before him, which is difficult in
more northern lands, but easy enough in this, and because
I was an early bird I had the proverbial reward. The
worm came in a canoe to the side of the steamer, rocking
idly on the smooth water that laps Hawaii's lee. In the
background was a pretty village of green and brown,
with waving cocoanut tops and a white, incongruous New
England steeple pricking through the green and aspiring
heavenward in a place where earth is beautiful enough to
make pagans of us all.
My friend, the missionary, deeply learned in Hawaiian
lore and somewhat tolerant of affection for the Polynesian, was at my side and caught for me the brown old
fisher, who came sweeping himself over the glassy swell
with a paddle for all the world like a broom -a sort of
Mr. Aleshine, by my faith.
There ensued a conversation in Hawaiian between the
spectacled scholar on deck and the fisherman with bright
old eyes, once brown, but now faded and rimmed with
violet. Hawaiian conversation ripples on in vowels interminable, with a meager consonant here and there by way
of guide-post. The traveler was asking the fisherman if
he would take the foreign woman to fish with him, and
the fisher was saying that he would- for a consideration.




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Our communication was confined to salutations. I
could say "aloha" and he "good-by," and so we formed
a conversational equation. Before the sun had so much
as shown the rim of his rosy face, I was over the side and
down the steep ladder to where the canoe lay rocking.
My friends, not missionaries, did not wholly approve.
"He may hold you up," they suggested, heartlessly;
"best leave your purse aboard."
Other friendly advice in this wise was shouted after me
as I went down. Happily my fisherman was deaf to
American gibes. I did not think of faltering, and went
straight on to where the tiny boat rose to meet me and
then dropped away a few feet, and selecting the proper
moment, half leaped, half fell into the canoe. It was
scarce twenty inches wide, hollowed out of a single trunk,
and it dated from those wondrous days when the war
fleets of Kamehameha crossed the sea in swarms-just
such fragile little canoes as these in the choppy inter-island
channels. On one side was an outrigger, made of limbs,
giving the boat a marvelous steadiness. The old man
beamed at me from the other end, and if we could not
converse, we could at least smile and beck and nod, and
use our hands -his eloquent, mine awkward, in the language of good will that is universal.
The broom-like paddle scooped us along with amazing
velocity. The boat was barely wide enough for me to
sit, and I heard dimly behind me, as we left the steamer
astern:
"He'll be as modest as most fishermen."
It was the voice of the missionary, and I smiled at
the inherited prudishness of Boston, lasting through two
generations. I had heard of black bottles, and of fishes




HAWAII NEI


I25


caught with a silver hook. A propensity for falsifying I
knew of, but I did not recollect any brand of modesty
belonging peculiarly to fishermen. Presently the words
came back to me.
My boatman's name was Kupaka, and I thought that
if he showed an intention to do me to death or take me
where I did not wish to go, I should conjure him by calling his name thrice in a loud tone of voice. But he was
mild as honeydew, and my word, which he did not
understand, was his law.
The ship we had left behind assumed trim lines, and
details faded out. She was a mile astern when a queer
thing happened. Kupaka stood up at his end of the
boat and took off his hat, and I discovered that he was
going back to that stage of undressed blessedness which
existed before the missionaries came. It was all very
deftly done. It reminded me of that painful moment at
the circus when the tight-rope walker, ascending to his
perch in street-clothes, slides out of them as a snake
sheds his skin, only to emerge in pink tights. Remembering the ultimate pink tights, with a faith born of many
circuses, I waited, and presently Kupaka, who had never
once glanced at me, and who had behaved as though disrobing on the high seas was the most common thing in
life, emerged in a beautiful brown skin, with a red mnalo
neatly and becomingly knotted around him, and made me
ashamed of my doubts and my self-consciousness.
He was an old man-sixty-two, he told me afterward-and his head was quite bald on top and what was
left of his hair was gray, but his brown skin was of satiny
texture and fitted him smoothly as a boy's. Seeing
Kupaka in a malo, and seeing Kupaka in his clothes, a




126


HAWAII NEI


lean, unslippered pantaloon, I wondered that he had ever
been prevailed upon to adopt our garments and decrease
his attractiveness by a full hundred per cent. While I
was thinking these thoughts, Kupaka paddled slowly.
Behind us the sun was coming up above the long slope
of Hualalai mountain, making the water into a huge
silver platter. I was lost in the beauty of the sun and
the exquisite green landscape that had suddenly been
gilded in all its high lights, but Kupaka had his eyes
bent on the green water. It seemed to be about twelve
feet deep where we were, a bright, delicate green, and so
clear that you could see the jagged top of the reef, which
everywhere, except where the fresh streams have flowed
from the mountains and killed it, guards these beautiful
shores.
Kupaka stood upright and laid down his paddle. By
this time we were on the reef and almost in the breakers,
and I was wondering if my meager skill at canoeing
would suffice to take me back to where the Mauna Loa
rode so securely at anchor. Suddenly Kupaka made an
exclamation that was principally a grunt. He seized in
his left hand a small net, stiffened at the top like a butterfly
net, and in his right hand a long palm-leaf, something the
worse for wear.  He stepped on the edge of the canoe,
the out-rigger mercifully balancing us, and, hovering
there for an instant, dived over the edge, palm-leaf, net,
and all. Fascinated, I too gazed into the green depths.
I could see him going down, down, the brown legs
jerking out behind him with a froglike motion. I saw a
school of unconscious fish. They were playing in the
reef, darting out and in of what may have been their
cave dwellings, for aught I know, recking nothing of this




IAWAII NEI


127


robber of the reef. Down, down, down, Kupaka went,
and I who had been breathless, began to count slowly, in
time to the ticking of a watch. Kupaka was doing queer
things in these interminable seconds. He was using his
palm-leaf as housewives use fly-brushes. He was actually
dusting the reef, and brushing the little fish into the open
mouth of his net, which he held in the other hand. My
monotonous counting had progressed to sixty and I
feared for the breath of my fisherman. At last the
surface rippled, and the bald brown head came out. As
soon as his mouth was above water, Kupaka gave a yell
that was a war-whoop loud enough to wake the echoes in
the distant rocks. He was treading water now, his eyes
red from being open under water, and his lungs drinking
in the blessed air. The palm-leaf and the net were still
in his hand, and with them he swam to the boat, for he
had come up at some distance from the place where he
went down, and the canoe had drifted while I, absorbed,
watched this wonderful performance on the reef.
Signaling to me to bend over the outrigger, and thus
trim the boat, he climbed in, and for the first time I saw
what manner of sea-treasures he had brought back. He
had seven fish in his net, and he counted them slowly
aloud. He was proud of them, and no wonder. There
were six manini, a reef-fish of delicate flavor and a beautiful striped body of white and black, and one kihikili or
sea-cock, most exquisite of reef denizens. This fish is
round as a balloon, with broad transverse bands of black
and canary, and a long transparent ribbon, attached to
the nose. The hues of a yellowjacket or a gorgeous Japanese butterfly are his, and in the water the long pale ribbon floating from the nose makes a train of iridescence.




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After a while the long gelatinous ribbon dries up, but the
delicate colors of the sea-cock never fade. He is far too
beautiful to eat. Who would not be beautiful, spending
a life under the warm, bright water, sporting in coral
groves?
Six times in half an hour Kupaka spied fish and
descended to their realm, his smallest catch being three.
Each time he came up puffing, but with breath enough to
give the tremendous shout with which his lungs rejoiced
again to be in their own element. At last the canoe was
carpeted with shiny creatures, beautiful as hummingbirds or butterflies, and we paddled back to the Mauna
Loa where prosaic people were eating prosaic breakfasts,
and the missionary was waiting to ask how I enjoyed my
fishing trip.
I begged him to ask Kupaka to sit still for a moment.
I had tried many times to take his picture as he went
over the side with his palm-leaf fan and his netted ululu,
but he had always been too quick for me or the rising sun
had been shining straight into my camera's eye. When
he was made to understand, Kupaka was delighted to be
photographed, dripping malo, polished skin, and all.
Twice again I saw him. That afternoon I visited him
at his cottage, a neat frame house, with a basement where
the family lives, and an upper story, reached by outside
stairs, where they entertain guests. They thought it as
strange that I should be more interested in the common
basement than in the conventional upper rooms as my
American friends thought it strange that I should care to
go to the house at all.
Kupaka the host is interesting, but Kupaka the fisher,
in his canoe and his malo, is infinitely more so. He is in




HAWAII NEI


I29


his native element in the water, and the house and the
civilized garb fit him not at all. The rooms are a dream
of fine mats, in which my feet sank inches deep. He
showed me his ancestral pipe, handed down from generations, and in use just at that moment between the lips
of his wife, Makahai. He showed me his many and
wonderful hooks, each to suit the taste of a different fish,
his wonderful bait, some of sea-eggs and some of seaweed especially prepared. He showed me his spear
with which he dives into the water and spears fish from
below, sometimes impaling two and three in a single
lunge. Then he took me upstairs and showed me the
carved four-poster koa bed in the room that is to spare,
and where he told me, through the missionary, I should
sleep when I came to visit them, and I promised him
that I would surely come, perfidious wretch that I am!
I saw on his walls the photographs of Kalakaua and
Liliuokalani and Lunalilo, through all of whose reigns
and more Kupaka has lived. There was also a picture
of Kaiulani, in whom the hopes of the Hawaiians were
bound up, and of whom he said something with tears in
his eyes-something that my missionary friend forgot
to translate.
I was allowed to peep into the umu, or underground
oven, outside where the taro and the fish for Kupaka's
household are baked in ti-leaves; and I was allowed to
make a picture of his granddaughter, who came riding
astride on a little burro which took the stone fence as
easily as if it had been a hurdle. After tasting of all
these family secrets, I was decked with a lei of tuberose —a yard of concentrated perfume -and allowed to
go with the distinct promise that I should come again




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some day and be their guest and go fishing every morning over the reef, where Kupaka gravely informed me
that he sometimes got sixty fish at a single catch, whereupon I recognized him as a true fisherman and a member
of the universal brotherhood. They followed me down
to the stone stile, all of them, and we parted with mutual
protestations of affection. I presume I could have been
adopted into the family had I cared to stay, and I must
say that I parted from Kupaka with sincere regret.
Afterward I found him to be the last of the Mohicans-the last of those expert fishermen who once
haunted the reef on Hawaii's lee. The new generation
is lazily content to sit in a boat and fish with rod and
line, and in a few years the lonely reef will know no
more the dextrous brown men who came down to rob
the nests of the fish.
Later I was again off that very spot near Kailua, on
the Kona coast, where I first met Kupaka. There was
no time to go to the house nor to sleep in the koa bed
under the picture of Kaiulani, for civilization was calling
me and I was soon to leave natureland. So I avoided
Kupaka and skulked by groups where I thought he
might be; for I knew if he saw me he would attempt to
carry me off —he and Makahai, his wife —and that
American protests and explanations would be in vain.
I thought I was safe. I was in a great boat, crowded
with passengers, midway between the landing and the
Kinau, and in a few moments I would have been safe.
The Kinau was steaming and puffing to be gone. The
whistle had blown, and we were the last boat. In a few
moments we would be up and away, and I should be
gazing my last at Kailua, which I had grown to love




H-AWAII NEI


I'3


very much indeed. Just then, as I was saying a silent
farewell to the pretty bay and the distant cot of Kupaka,
a slender canoe came alongside. There was Kupaka in
the full glory of his wardrobe of three pieces, trousers,
shirt, and hat. I sank down in the boat behind a stout
gentleman with broad shoulders, but too late. Kupaka's
canoe dropped astern, for we had a dozen oarsmen at
least. All at once he saw me. He greeted me with that
fierce yell with which he always rose with his prey from
the sea, and then he began paddling for dear life and
closing the distance between us. It was no use. We
reached the Kinau first, and I was the first one up the
stairs-fleeing from the fatal fascination of barbarism.
The simple life was so pleasant and easy, that I was
afraid I might spend my life without regret in sleepy
Kailua and be regularly adopted among the other grandchildren of Kupaka. He came to the side of the
steamer, took off his hat, stood up in the boat and held
out his hands imploringly, asking me in a hundred
melodious words why I had not come to the cottage as I
had promised. He promised to fish early and late, and
all day if I liked, and Makahai would cook the fish the
way I liked them best, and I should ride on his granddaughter's burro, and the cottage at Kailua should be
mine to do as I liked with. Had I dared to look back, I
should have been lost as irretrievably as Lot's wife. So
I hardened my heart, and left him pleading.




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CHAPTER XII
PICTURESQUE OAHU
EVER since the first whites came to Honolulu, the Pali
trip has been the famous excursion, and so it will remain
as long as there is an eye that loves a view or a heart to
be moved by a magnificent outlook. I had thought that
the prospect from the castle-walls of Chapultepec, overlooking the broad and populous valley of Mexico, was
the most beautiful of my seeing, but even this famous picture pales in the light that streams from the Pali. The
Pali view is not of white cities and of the works of man,
but a scene of nature's handiwork, and it must have been
as beautiful as it is now since first Oahu, like Venus, rose
from the sea, and drew over herself the green mantle that
now covers her. A red road winding below in snarls
impossible to untangle, cane plantations plotted in fresh,
pale greens, the distant Mormon settlement with its white
houses, and a straggling village that is called a town, are
part of a view which would be quite as beautiful without
them.
The road up the Pali has been built at government
expense, and the cost per square yard is ascertainable.
Personally, I am not interested in road construction,
except to be glad that the road is built. Indeed, I would
cheerfully walk up the Pali if there were no other way.
Walking parties go up almost every day, and bicycles




Nod
Hawallan Bumil caves




I




HAWAII NEI                 I33
make the tour, though it is by no means a good route for
wheeling, being rocky from Honolulu to the summit, and
a stiff climb, with a swift descent down the other side.
The Pali road leads through Nuuanu Valley, most famous
of Honolulu dales. It was settled by early foreign residents, and some of the finest gardens and most comfortable homes are still to be found there. Many of the trees
are not indigenous, and the whole valley is a mass of sunsaturated foliage. The Nuuanu Valley is that famous
place where it rains on one side of the street and shines
on the other, and a half-dozen rainbows are frequently
tangled there at one time. We look in astonishment at
the lacelike foliage of the algaroba, the mesquite of the
Southwest, with its sweet pods that cattle love. Except
for it and the Australian eucalyptus, that nomad among
the trees, there is no growth that is familiar. The hautree is in blossom, its flowers like pale-yellow poppies,
all of crape, with brown velvet centers. The tree is
not good for anything, and like many other absolutely
good-for-nothing things in this world, is very good to
look at. It is too crooked to be used for firewood, and
it helps to form dense thickets, when knit together with
a prolific trailer and the wild morning-glory, through
which nothing except a man with an ax can go, and he
but slowly. There are plenty of these absolutely impassable thickets up this road in the Nuuanu Valley.
This is the place to see the perfection of the breadfruit-tree, which sounds so Edenic and absolutely delicious. It has always reminded me of the manna that
fell upon the children of Israel, which tasted like anything
you please —ice-cream and candy to some, and caviar
sandwiches and salad to others. The breadfruit is a




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superb tree, often sixty feet high, with leaves a foot
broad, sharply cut, dark-green and shining, and of
exceedingly beautiful form. The pale-green fruit comes
out in daintiest contrast. Then there is the papaya, with
its soft indented stem, which runs up to a height of from
fifteen to thirty feet, to be crowned by a circle of large
indented leaves with long foot-stalks, and among, as well
as considerably below them, the fruit in all stages of
development. Some of it is always ripe, bright yellow,
and about the size of a muskmelon. Above all are the
slender shafts of the coco-palm, bending in imaginary
breezes, and waving plumes and perpetual fruitage.
Every house has its natural lawn, with ferns from Hawaii,
bright-colored foliage plants, an abundance of flowers,
especially lilies, and fragrant climbers, such as stephanotis, clematis, and jasmine. Whole hedges are of nightblooming cereus, and it is one of the sights lo come up
when the huge white cacti are in bloom. Everything is
found except the rose and the violet. The roses are all
killed by a Japanese beetle, and violets are the objects of
tenderest solicitude.
The road leads past the royal mausoleums, where the
Kamehamehas and the Keaweaheulus rest in peace, and
also past the foreign cemetery.  Higher up come taropatches, each plant growing on a small hillock surrounded
by water, and houses where fruit is for sale at little
stands.  In the distance are small gray-green patches
which are pineapple-fields, and excellent pineapples are
for sale at the gates at five cents apiece. There are figs
and grapes, imported by the Portuguese who are not
happy without their own vines and fig-trees. Now and
then you pass a native's cottage, with a taro-patch and




HAWAII NEI


I35


a large bed of carnations —red, pink, and white —
cultivated for the lei trade. An occasional white flag
indicates a poi factory. Native girls on horseback, one
behind the other, with bare feet in Mexican stirrups, leis
around neck and hair, and saddle-bags in front of them,
dash past. Women in holokus, with bare feet, ride past,
all of them astride. The young Kanaka girls are visions
of white teeth, bright eyes, fresh flowers, and bare legs.
Along the sides of the road are native women in clean
holokus, with bright red hibiscus flowers in their hair,
quite in the old style. This is the country.
In the region of perpetual showers, the ground is
covered with a fine grass, brilliant as Kentucky bluegrass, but of a more tender springlike green. It is really
a turf, and it covers the bare brown backs of the hills
and hides the savage marks of primitive volcanoes. Near
by are little dales filled with ferns, their long fronds
tipped with brown and red. The young leaves, not yet
unfolded, are crimson. Everywhere is the candlenut, the
wild banana, and a few coco-palms —natives of Oahu —
mixed with yellow flowers that look and smell like
yuccas, but are not. A few natives live in this higher
part of the valley, and little brown boys pick the yellow
flowers, and may be seen almost hidden in the long grass
in which they have made hollows like birds'- nests,
stringing the odorous blossoms into leis.
The road becomes rockier and steeper, the ferns and
thickets more numerous, the cultivated places fewer, and
long wisps of waterfalls slide silently over the precipice.
There is a quiet lake of a reservoir, and here the chill
breeze from over the Pali strikes you, and you put on a
wrap for the first time since arriving in Honolulu. The




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branches of the trees have clothed themselves in heavy
garments of moss, and are garlanded with big blue
morning-glories; streams dash along by the roadside,
and the cool green wilderness seems like the temperate
zone. In these altitudes all moisture is condensed, and
the warm steam of Honolulu is utterly forgotten. The
valley narrows and the mountains close in like walls. The
gray rock rises suddenly from a sea of green, quite bare
and naked to its summit, which is broken up into pinnacles and needles.
A thousand feet below you lies Honolulu-by-the-sea,
a fringe of masts in the bay, and Diamond Head in the
distance. The colors are beautiful, from the pea-green
water near the shore, to the purples and reds beyond
where the surf breaks white over the coral reef that protects the shore better than any armed fleet could do.
Suddenly a cold and boisterous wind seizes you.
Through a gash in the rocks, you come suddenly upon
the wonderful view of windward Oahu.  It is the top of
Pali.  The picture is framed at either side with immense
masses of black, ferruginous volcanic rock, nearly perpendicular for hundreds of feet. It extends on either
side for miles, this backbone of the island, a lofty mass
of rock with a top broken into strange and fantastic
peaks and pinnacles, as though Nature had blown hot
and blown cold, and left this mass of molten material to
cool as it would. The Pali is a wall from the windward
side, without the gradual approach that leads from Honolulu. It is buttressed by nature, and these buttresses
are covered with green. Huge trees on the floor of the
plain look like moss from this altitude. It is like the
Palisades along the Hudson, only infinitely more rugged




HAWAII NEI


I37


and fierce. Far beyond is the ocean with a ridge of
smaller hills along its edge, and the plains between, said
to have been originally the bottom of an ocean lake,
were filled in long since by the waste from the huge
carcass of the Pali.
Windward Oahu is fascinating. Spread out below
are considerable hills that become mere green ripples
upon the surface of the earth, as though a wind had
blown and ruffled the liquid land into tiny wavelets. The
new road, a long red ribbon, winds down the mountain
sides, picking its way and tying itself into bow-knots.
The stretch below is fringed with coco-palms and clothed
in green. The pale green marks the sugar plantations,
with here and there the tall stack of a mill. There are
white houses, and paths cut through dense thickets that
guard the virgin soil. Far away, level as mirrors and
placid as lakes, are the rice-fields, where blue sheets of
water are traced with the green lines of the grasslike
plants. From this height, the rice itself is invisible,
except for the green tinge it gives to the water. It is an
enchanted region, shut in by a wall of rock and an
ocean of indigo.  Some fragmentary islands dot the
coast. Kanehe Bay is cut out with a long inland sweep,
and Kanaloa Head, and Mokapu Point, are almost as
beautiful as Diamond Head. The ocean, guiltless of
sails, stretches in unruffled miles. Its coloring is exquisite-pale bright green near land, deepening to purple
and red a little way out, then blue to the horizon. The
coral reef, with its white and wavy line of endless surf,
borders the other side of this dream country.
Just at hand a shelf of falling rock shows where the
frightfully steep bridle-path, which was the only road for




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HAWAII NEI


ages, went down. It was said that no one but a drunken
man could drive down this trail, and there is a tradition
that such a one once took four horses down in safety.
Mounted natives, guiding loaded pack-animals, and men
in carts used to go over it, in spite of the fact that it has
a slope of nearly forty-five degrees.
The Pali is the scene of one of the historic tragedies
of this island. It was here that the forces of the last
King of Oahu were driven over the precipice by Kamehameha the Great, who combined all the island sovereignties in his own person. Some seven thousand natives
were forced up the Pali, over which they threw themselves in despair and madness, leaving Kamehameha
master of the island. This is not a fable, for skulls are
still picked up at the foot of the Pali, eight hundred feet
below, and it used to be a pastime with Honolulu boys
to go over the Pali on skull hunts.
There is a queer current of wind to study. It has
been known to catch an untethered hat, carry it a hundred feet below the edge of the Pali, bring it back to
hold it tantalizingly suspended in air above the owner's
head and then deposit it gently on the road some fifty
feet ahead. These antics are not played every day, and
I would not advise an extravagant risking of hats in the
pastime, but it is an interesting and quite common phenomenon.
The drive down is delightful, and much quicker than
than the journey up. Most people go part way down
the Pali on the other side, and by starting very early in
the morning with a good team and a brake, I am told
that the trip from ocean to ocean and back may be made
in a day. Standing on the Pali, with the Pacific behind




HAWAII NEI


139


you and the Pacific before you, you feel for the first time
the smallness of the island. A sense of insecurity and
distance never felt on a continent comes over you.
I turned my back on the Pali with distinct regret. In
an instant the rugged gap in the hills closed, the rock
curtain fell, and the view was blotted out. It was almost
as though I had not peeped into dreamland, after all. To
see this vision and not to go down into it, is like Moses
having his glimpse of the promised land. As for me, I
did not wish to go down. I would rather have my mindpicture of this spread-out loveliness than test its details
for myself. The near-by view of the cane and rice, with
bent-backed laborers sweating in the one, and patient,
weary Chinese oxen, shaped like hippopotami, with centuries of ill-usage in their sad eyes, ploughing knee-deep
in the mud of the other, would not be half as charming
as the panorama from the calm, clear heights above. It
is not well to explore dreams by daylight.
There are several other valley drives beside the one up
Nuuanu. The roads are indifferently good, but each valley
has its own particular charm, and each is beautiful.
The famous road to Waikiki is in the other direction
from the Pali, a long, level, well-made causeway, ideal
for bicycling, and with Kapiolani Park, Sans Souci, or
Diamond Head as objective points. It is a fine climb
into the ashy crater of Diamond Head, with a magnificent reward for the fatigue. All along the Waikiki sands
are hospitable villas and splendid beaches, where the
bathing is the best in the world. If you care to walk
by the beach beyond Diamond Head, you will cross an
old battle-field, and if the tide is right, there may be rich
treasure-trove in the shape of bleached and whitened




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HAWAII NEI


bones. I know a cabinet where the lower jaw of a fine
young brave, every tooth white and perfect, is one of the
treasures. This was a find on this very beach at the foot
of Diamond Head.
But even more interesting are the bones of those who
died in the ordinary way, though war itself was ordinary
in those far-off days. To find those you must seek out
the burial-caves, concerning which the most extraordinary
ignorance prevails in Honolulu. Ask for a burial-cave,
and your hearers will look as though they had never heard
of such a thing, and will assure you that the natives kept
those things profoundly secret, and that there is not
one within a radius of ten miles of Honolulu.  Do
not believe them. In a brief residence in Honolulu I
found three, and there may be thirty in the vicinage for
aught I know. There are some good caves on Judd
street, but, being the most accessible, they have been
rifled by residents and visitors, until now there is nothing
to pay for the dirty trip. There was a very famous head
in this cave-a Bismarckian visage, where the skin had
dried and left fierce eyebrows clinging to the frontal bone.
Some vandal took this to adorn a mantelpiece-or a
tale.
Near Diamond Head are some good burial-caves,
comparatively accessible and with many bones and much
mouldering kapa; but the best caves of all are at Moana
Lua (the two seas), where famous sacrifices were made in
the old days, and where the beautiful country-place of
Minister Damon now stands. The caves are some distance behind and above the Damon place, over a hilly
road for a mile, and then across the fields and up a hillside, when a close search must be made for the entrance.




HAWAII NEI


I41


These caves are hard for a novice to find, since the
mouths are low and unobtrusive, and, seemingly, too
small for a human being to crawl through. The idea of
the burial-cave was secret interment. Great care was
taken to keep the place of entombment a secret, and the
more important the dead the greater the secrecy. It is
told of one chief- a true story- that he begged a faithful retainer to dispose of his bones, so that no one would
ever find them to make fish-hooks of them-the most
deadly insult that could befall a chief. The retainer
promised. He scraped the flesh from the bones, as was
the custom, reduced the bones to powder and mixed it
with the poi to be eaten by the chiefs at a certain council. When asked if he had disposed of the bones, the
retainer said that he had, and mentioned that they were
already in the stomachs of the various chiefs. It is not
related that any one was shocked or ill, but merely that
the hearers applauded the old man's cleverness.
There is a landmark near the burial-caves of Moana
Lua. Near the entrance is a pile of bleaching bones on
a high shelf of rock. They came there in an odd way.
Years ago there was a chief in this valley who held a
large number of hostages. In a fit of anger the chief
slew the hostages, whose lives he had sworn to preserve.
By way of retaliation, the chief whose subjects had been
slain came down into that smiling valley and killed all of
the inhabitants who did not flee. Their bones were
piled on a shelf of rock as a warning, and remain there
to this day.
Near these bones are the burial-caves. The opening
is not over two feet high by perhaps three in breadth,
and the marvel is how these mummies were ever taken




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into the caves, or the bulky coffins that were used at a
later date. The conclusion is that the mouth of the cave
was partially walled up after the caves were full. For at
least ten feet one crawls on hands and knees, sometimes
lying flat to rest. A man with a bicycle-lamp leads on
before, but the faint glimmer does not amount to an
illumination, and the lamp only serves to eat up what
little oxygen there is.
Once through the narrow entrance the cave opens up,
and three people, grimy with smoke and dust, seat themselves on three coffins and look about. A gruesome
business this! One feels like a ghoul, and instinctively
drops the voice, though these ears have not heard for
centuries. There are three separate caves, with artificial
stone walls built up between them.  We climb over
the walls, slip shudderingly on coffins and bones, and
wonder how these good people ever expect to untangle
themselves on the Judgment Day. It is close and dark,
and there is a faint stifling odor. At last we reach the
furthest cave of the three, though there are indications
that this is not the last, but that other similar caverns
extend into the hill, literally honeycombing it. But the
third cave satisfies us and we decide to penetrate no
further. I have seen the mummies of Guanajuato, but
they are friendly and human compared to this medley of
the dead. The third cave is evidently the oldest. It was
filled first and then walled up, and the dead of the next
century were put in the next cave, and so on. The
bones are quite white and clean. It was the Hawaiian
custom to clean the skeleton before putting it away, or
else to salt and dry the body in a species of embalming.
The bones were scattered all over the place. There




HAWAII NEI


143


were quantities of separate feet, and hands, and skulls,
with mouldering bits of kapa, ill-smelling and damp with
the moisture of the terrible place. Everybody took as a
souvenir some bone that could be spared. A very dainty
little foot —that of a child or young woman —was given
to me.   There were no traces of calabashes or spears,
though we made nothing but a superficial search.
The fumes from my flash-lights made the air of the
inner chamber unbreathable, and we were forced to retreat
toward the entrance. In the second cave the bones,
skulls, and kapa were the same, except that the kapa was
in better condition. You could trace the pattern that had
been painted on it.
In the outermost cave, nearest the entrance, the bones
were much newer and the kapa much more unpleasant to
smell. There were coffins in this place, most of them
empty. They were plain, made of koa, and had lost
their polish, if they ever had any. They had been elaborately ornamented with iron handles and trimmings, in
ludicrous imitation of ours, but these had rusted and
were dropping from the wood. All these coffins were
lined with thick, soft kapa, and little tufted pillows of it
were all over the floor. Some of the coffins stood upright
around the edge with bodies inside, wrapped like mummies in innumerable folds of kapa. Other coffins, with
significant-looking bundles, were lying on the ground.
Some were overturned and the bodies spilled out, and I
was told that a mummy had been recently taken from
these caves to the Smithsonian Institution.
Stifled and just a bit nervous because of the uncanny
surroundings, afraid to look behind us to where the third
cavern loomed, laughing at each other and making




144               HAWAII NEI
strange, hollow noises, we left the caves in single file, the
little bicycle lamp fluttering and sputtering and gasping
for oxygen, and our own faces grimy and black.
My pilfered trophy was placed on my lanai, and that
night I had the troubled slumber that befits a robber of
graves. I dreamed that the sweet young Kanaka girl to
whom the foot belonged, hobbled in with it in her hand,
and reproached me.
Next morning when I went to my lanai, the foot was
gone. No one knew anything about it- no one had
seen it. The soft turf showed no traces of foot-prints.
It is my individual opinion that the foot walked the long
twelve miles to Moana Lua, and that it will be found in
the cave that is its rightful owner's home.




I




The Last Heiau of Kaehameha the Great.




HAWAII NEI


I45


CHAPTER XIII
IN HAWAII'S LEE
To END one's journey at Honolulu would be to know
nothing of the Hawaiian islands. The capital is as cosmopolitan as all seaports. After all, the country's the
place to study.  Of course, Kilauea is the objective
point-there is something to fascinate even about a
quiescent volcano, and no one can afford to miss the
sight of one of the earth's breathing-places. There are
ways and ways to go. One is short and one is long, and
the professional globe - trotter will always choose the
shorter; but it is the long way, down Hawaii's lee, that
gives the most interesting sights and scenes of all the
islands. In the Kona district live the natives of purest
blood. There has been less mixture of race here than
elsewhere, and the Kanaka has married a woman of his
own race, and has multiplied. You are astonished at
the number of little brown children that greet you at the
landings. The men and women are happy and flowertrimmed. What do they care for changing governments
and altered flags? They are safe and sheltered and far
away.
There is much talk in Honolulu of choppy channels
and the sickness of the sea, and, in truth, the sea is not
a mill-pond. But the Mauna Loa, which travels this
way every ten days, laden with passengers and freight, is




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a stanch little boat, and as comfortable as any steamer
in the world. When she was built the despised passenger was considered. The staterooms are large, and the
dining-room is on the upper deck, which is a boon to
the seasick. There is always a great quantity of freight,
and while it is being unloaded, passengers have an opportunity to go ashore. It is historic ground, every inch of
it, and one only regrets that there are not weeks instead
of days to give to exploration.
At the dock there is always a crowd, and many natives
taking passage, with groups of dusky friends to bid them
good-by. Every traveler is laden with flowers, hung from
his neck, twisted about his hat, girt about his waist, and
draped across his shoulders. Each man and woman is
covered from head to foot or from breast to knee, according to his or her popularity. The fragrance of the carnations, the delicate scent of the ilimas and the heavy
perfume of pomerias, with the odorous maile, hangs over
the place like an incense-cloud. One man is a mass of
pink carnations, another a mound of green maile. A
native girl has mingled in happy combination the yellow
ilima, that tells of love for royalty, with cardinal carnations. Only the man without a flower is disconsolate and
moody. The fact that he is much cooler than those who
stifle under a load of bloom does not at all console him.
After the Mauna has cast off her lines, she is followed
by the copper-colored native boys who dive for silver,
and with this darting convoy she slips out of the bay,
threads the buoys like a dainty maid doing a Virginiareel, and then down the coast in a parallel line, past the
alluring beach of Waikiki, past Diamond Head, with its
striped sides full of horizontal scars, and finally out into




IAWAII NEI


I47


the first choppy channel that divides Oahu from Molokai.
If the natives dared these inter-island seas in their tiny
canoes, surely we can in our stout little steamer, and,
indeed, she is so well-balanced that she rolls scarcely at
all, and her passengers draw a long breath of satisfaction.
In years gone by, these inter-island boats were of the
most democratic description. There were no separate
cabins, and the main saloons had berths up the side,
where the passengers slept fitfully, like an unhappy
family. It might be the Governor of Oahu next you,
and it might be a Chinese. Sometimes you awoke with
a start to find yourself using the head of a Personage for
a footstool, and sometimes the start was because the
Personage was putting your head to a similar plebeian
use. And always the mammoth cockroaches sported on
the pillows-perfectly harmless, but big enough to be
formidable. Somehow it is almost impossible to convince yourself that the Hawaiian cockroach means you
well, however innocent his eyes or discreet his behavior.
But those picturesque days are past. No longer does
one take a mat on deck to escape from the fumes of the
stifling cabin. Cabin passengers are a deal more comfortable now than on some larger boats. The picturesque
lingers only in the steerage. I made my way down there
at night to take pictures of the crowded lower deck, and
to see humanity sleeping with head over shoulder, like
young and friendly dogs in a kennel, or horses in an
open lot on a cold night.  The steerage passengers
furnish their own provisions and bedding, but they do
not need much covering. Everybody lies down as soon
as he comes on board. The passengers are in a row all
around the edge of the boat, a hundred of them perhaps,




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women and men all mixed in, but all unhappy-looking
and quite too weary to notice anything. Their heads are
propped on their few bundles of baggage, and they watch
you with incurious eyes. A woman is asleep with a very
little baby clasped close in her arms. The baby eyes
are wide and wondering. Men step over the woman, for
she lies, like all the others, in the only path around the
boat, but they are careful not to step on the baby. Several children lie cuddled up on their mother's crumpled
skirt, but the eyes of this woman are watching her brood
from under the half-dropped lids. All the women are
native, but many of the men are white and some are
Chinese. Around the necks of the sleeping women are
the leis, sickening sweet in their swift decay. Sometimes
a single blanket is drawn over a half-dozen fellowvoyagers-people who met by chance, but who are
willing to share with true island generosity. Far down
the dimly lighted alleyway, which is open on the sides to
the stars, and is merely roofed over, a deck-hand is playing a guitar and singing a hula. His eyeballs are red
with a recent debauch, and the veins are red and swollen.
One does not need to know Hawaiian to understand his
song. Another sailor is dancing to his music -a man
with no teeth and a hideous leer; but he dances well
according to native standards, and they applaud him
with a gurgle of sleepy laughter. A very little is quite
enough for us. This steerage deck is dreadful when the
rains come and the crowded place is awash and the
natives huddle together in drenched heaps. Fortunately
they do not mind wettings as we do. But on an August
night this open-air sleeping is very agreeable, only one
would like to have the undivided possession of more




HAWAII NEI


I49


deck space and not have the guitar twanging quite so
close.
One soon begins to make acquaintance with other
islands than Oahu. Molokai, like a big blue flower,
comes up to float on the sea. At a nearer view, the blue
petals unfold into frightful gashes in the mountain-side,
with vast precipices and unfinished peaks between.
Titan hands seem to have been playing at bowls, and
there is no resemblance at all to the fabled isles of milk
and honey. This island looks as if it would bear spears
and blood, if anything at all, for under its sod are the
graves of the unclean. The leper settlement, through
whose miseries Molokai has gained an undesirable fame,
is hidden away at the other side of the island. Presently
the isle of Lanai comes into view, and then Maui, fertile,
green, tender, plumed with palms, and shimmering in
the warm air like a fickle sea-green beauty.
Our first stop is at Lahaina, once the capital of the
island kingdom and the second seat of government. It
is a hot little town, built all on a half of a street, like a
Western railway town, where the track runs on one side
and the town on the other. Lahaina perpetually stares
at the sea, which is busy making music on its reef. The
beach is dazzling white, formed of pure white coral, and
the sea is blue as the sky. There is a tremendous growth
of tropical trees.  Their shade is so dense that the
shadows are black beneath them. A glorious banyantree makes a huge umbrella for the courthouse grounds,
for this tiny village, laying its warm length by the sea, is
the capital of Maui. Little country lanes, dark with
overhanging mangoes and bananas, or candlenut and
breadfruit trees, branch off at one side of the main street,




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which is broad as the ocean. Little white houses snuggle
beneath the shadows, and eyes peer out curiously at
you, for every one does not consider it worth while to
come ashore at Lahaina. There are several shops. One
advertises billiards and ice-cream, and another hosiery
and saddles. The idiosyncrasies of the signs do not impress the Lahainans. They do not see anything amusing
in having the telephone office in the barber-shop. There
are swarms of quaint dark native children under the
trees, and not an available carriage in the village. One
has gone to take the village doctor to a patient at the
other side of the island, and the horse of the other is
laid up for repairs.
The inhabitants dwell in sunny indolence, and it is
only after strenuous endeavors and with much baksheesh
that we persuade a village lad to secure us some burros.
Lahaina is not at all mercenary. At the far end of the
village is a small settlement of South Sea Islanders,
brought here no one exactly knows how, and living
clannishly by themselves. They braid fine hats and fine
mats for the tourist trade. Near by are the abandoned
consulates that were here when Lahaina was a background for court pageantry. Quite at the other end of
the place, past an interesting ruin of a house, is the site
of the old home of Kamehameha II. There are some
magnificent trees there, but the house is gone. It is
dusk by this time, and outside fires blaze like bonfires.
We repass the weird ruin, with its grim walls and sightless windows, and we can no longer see the strip of cane
at the back of the town, stretching like a pale-green
ribbon across the shoulder of the hillside. A whistle
sounds-it is the signal that belated wanderers must




HAWAII NEI


I5i


return to the steamer at once, and we all scuttle for the last
boat, our men cut through the dark waters, and we look
like a smuggler's boat putting out to a pirate craft, except
that I never heard that pirate crafts showed so many lights.
We leave Lahaina twinkling under her exquisite foliage,
basking in the few cool hours of her hot tropical day.
At Maalaea Bay the steamer stays far out. The boats
have a long way to row, and the company has adopted a
novel way to guide them over the broad black waste of
waters. The white boats are ordered to keep close
together, and from the bridge a powerful search-light is
kept upon them —a kindly light that makes a broad
gleaming path for them to follow. It is a charming sight
from the deck, the three boats rising and falling over the
water, brought near by this shaft of light that cuts the
darkness for them. It is like a scene in "Pinafore."  We
can see the drops silvering from the oars; we see them
land; we think they must be able to climb the ladder of
light behind them and see us too, and we wave our hands
impotently. Alas, to them we are merely the searchlight's source!
The island of Hawaii springs upon us unawares, like
a thief in the night. Our first stop is at Kawaihae, a
place of torture for animals, with an immense heathen
temple crowning the heights behind! Nothing could be
more appropriate than the cruel temple looking down on
a scene of Caucasian cruelty that even the savage could
not surpass. The Kanaka is merely an understudy. The
groans and tears of helpless animals that ascend from this
coast were never paralleled in the heiau, where prisoners
of war died silently, as became men of their caliber. But
to persecute animals! Ah, that is more cruel than to slay




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a prisoner of war, who would have been your executioner
had the victory been his.
The tragedy begins at the water's edge. From the
shore two horsemen dart out, one dragging an animal by
a rope, the other driving it forward with a biting goad
and loud cries. The steers rear and plunge, but the
horsemen pull steadily, and the terrible din and sharp
stings pursue from the rear. Near the shore is one of
the steamer's large boats, manned by sturdy Hawaiians.
The first steer is tied to the boat, his nose well up, his
horns over the edge, and there he remains, half standing,
half floating, half drowning, while another and another
and another is driven in, the first steer being in the water
half an hour before the boat is ready to move. The boat
starts, four steers at each side, floating, struggling, half
drowned, and wholly terrified.
"If they would stop struggling they'd be all right,"
remarked a man with an interest in this humane cattle
company.
Very likely-but how should the steers know?  And
no steer, happily, passes twice through this valley of the
shadow. As soon as the experience is gained, the animal dies. And so they struggle and writhe and froth at
the mouth until the water is white with foam. As the
small boat comes near the steamer, we can see the glazed
eyeballs rolled back in their sockets, and hear the heavy,
stertorous breathing rattling and whistling in the gasping
throats, and groans to send the fingers to the ears.
There came the second act. While the animals floated
in deep water near the ship, one of the men deftly fastened
a band about the body, and by means of tackle, the
steers were slowly hoisted to the deck. Sometimes the




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I53


tackle fouled on the rail and a horn was torn out, but
usually the trip was accomplished without accident.
Sometimes the belt slipped, and the frightened creatures
were lowered again into the water that it might be readjusted. The tackle-trip was incredibly slow. The cattle
kicked, shivered, hung suspended in air, whirled like a
top, revolved in the opposite direction, and finally settled
down on deck. The deck became slimy and slippery.
The poor beasts which had been in the water longest were
cold and cramped and stiff, and they sprawled and slipped
all over the deck, to the amusement of a dozen Kanakas,
and-I'm sorry to write it-to some Americans too.
The steers were tied in rows to the deck-rails, with about
three inches of rope, so that they could not move their
heads -much less alter their positions.
But the man who made himself a lightning-rod for the
ire of the passengers was the lord high chief twister of
tails. This personage and his assistants were big Kanakas, with cruel mouths that laughed all the while. The
moment a steer came within reach, long before the tackle
was loosened, they began to twist his tail. If he ran in
the wrong direction, his tail was twisted; if he ran in the
right direction, he received the same treatment. The
better a steer behaved, the worse he was treated. Virtue,
as elsewhere in the world, had no reward at all.
They do these things differently in London. There a
man gets six months in jail for twisting a steer's tail.
The pain is said to be very much the same as turning an
arm the wrong way, and the brutal exhibition off the
coasts of Hawaii-and Kawaihae is not the only portwould turn our English cousins, whom we are accustomed
to call stolid, sick with sympathy.




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detached, and there is an open lanai a little way from the
house where Kalakaua gave famous luaus and hulas, and
where his celebrated red chairs were set il rows. The
house is marked by the tabu-sticks set up at the doors,
sticks with white balls at the top, in imitation of the old
days when balls of white kapa at the top of the sticks
marked the residence of the king, within which common
people could not go on pain of death. Inside, the house
is a marvel of polished woods. There is a table of
satiny koa, the mahogany of the Pacific, the " royal tree,"
fit to make you weep. This table stands in the center
of the drawing-room, and around the walls are elaborate
carved chairs, vases, and fine pottery from China and
Japan. There are portraits of Kalakaua, Kapiolani, and
Liliuokalani, as well as busts of royalty. At the windows
are exquisite lambrequins of the finest kapa I saw on the
islands, painted in patterns, and some of it extremely old.
The big dining-hall across the vestibule has a fine
carved sideboard, and on it are a number of koa calabashes, polished, and marked inside with the crown and
royal coat- of- arms, etched with a poker. These calabashes all have covers, and were designed for pink poi.
It requires all of one's moral nerve to refrain from becoming a kleptomaniac. The water washes all day at the
foot of the royal house of Kailua. From the upper windows is a magnificent sea-view, and I can fancy that the
windows away from the sea are not much used by Kapiolani when she comes to occupy her house, which is always
in order. Across the street, on the land side, is the
oldest church on the islands, lately restored, but still
ancient-looking enough to satisfy the most exacting antiquary. It is built of lava blocks, and in the foundation




HAWAII NEI


I57


are huge stones smoothed by Umi, one of the ancient
kings of Hawaii, and probably intended for a heathen
heiau. The Christians took the old stones, without a
fear, for the foundation of their faith. Inside the church
is white and bare as a sepulcher. To it was transplanted
all the hideous bareness of New England. It has plain,
square, high-backed pews, a pulpit like a box, and white
walls, with high windows of dirty white glass, uncurtained, except by industrious spiders. The unstrained
light pours through the panes. And while New England
has been progressing, this child of hers has remained
stationary until, if the original builders could return to
their native land, they would wonder what wicked liberalism it was that had clothed their churches with new
beauty, and draped the grim skeleton of their faith. But
while the rest of the world passed on, the church at
Kailua remained the same. One's back slowly stiffens in
the straight-backed pews, and in a day-dream you see
long Puritan cheeks and square Puritan jaws, with pointed
hats and demure bonnets, and hear again anathemas
hurled from just such a pulpit as this. The church is
under a native pastor now, and the rigid doctrine is concealed under his soft vocalization. Vowels ripple and
gurgle over his lips, and his shabby black garments are
still partially paid for by American Boards. Before him
his silent congregation drinks in his words with implicit
faith, while the wind rattles at the tabu-sticks just across
the way. And if their queen should appear before them
suddenly, the worshiping natives would every one turn a
back on the native pastor and grovel before her in the dust,
paying her that due which those who at the bottom of their
hearts believe in the divine right of kings, delight to pay.




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I had a little example of this at Kailua. Liliuokalani
was aboard the steamer, and the natives had expected
that she would land for a luau. The house of kings was
open in her honor, and the feast was ready. The Annexation Commissioners from America were also there on
that day, and it had been arranged that there should be
a mass-meeting in the church. But the ex-Queen did
not feel equal to landing, and, as a consequence, the
natives did not mass. All along the little water street
were natives with leis in their arms, but these were not
thrown to the Commissioners. When the natives found
that the Queen was not coming to the luau they sent the
luau out to her. In royal calabashes, long unused, went
the royal pink poi, and on a long wooden trencher was
sent a roast pig.  Natives ran up cocoanut-trees and
plucked the green fruit. Other natives caught the last
fowls they owned and tied them by the legs to present to
the Queen. Fishermen brought the best of the catchlong, shining, striped uluas, still glistening with water.
The men leaped into their canoes, rowed out to the
steamer and clambered up the steps, literally swarming
on the decks. Before her they passed on their knees,
their honest faces dripping with perspiration, and happiness shining through the wet as they kissed her hands.
Their gifts were passed to the Queen's attendants, and
the meeting that was to have massed in the church was
held on the shaded deck. And yet men have the hardihood to say that the natives are enamored of annexation.
Anybody who has been in the islands, and is capable
of an honest opinion, knows that the natives are as loyal
to their rulers as Englishmen are; that with all their
faults they love them still. Nothing could change their




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I59


attitude. It is as though one criticised the Prince of
Wales to an Englishman, if one were so bad-mannered.
In such case, the Englishman would reply, "Considering
his temptations, he is a very good man." That is the
spirit of Hawaiian loyalty to Hawaiian royalty. The
only annexation natives are a few ultra-religious ones,
who are bound to the church party and partially supported by American money. Even there, the most prominent native pastor on the islands, and the most brilliant
native it was my fortune to meet, was a pronounced
royalist.
Unless one is interested in kingly relics, there is not
much at Kailua. To me it is the most interesting town
on the islands, brimful of history as it is. Further down
the Kona coast is Keauhou, where there are enough
grass houses to fill the eye for once, and where the cocopalms are tall and old and beautiful. No white faces
were there except our own, and even the post-office was
in the open air, under a palm-tree. A mounted native
police-officer, with riding-boots and clanking spurs, and
the native postmaster were the only living symbols of
law and authority. The postmaster called out the names
and delivered the letters to the whole town clustered
about him. The faces lightened and gleamed as the
missives were handed to them. An old couple with their
arms entwined received one from their boy at the Kamehameha school, and an aged woman on the outskirts of
the crowd was sorely disappointed because no letter
came for her.
The Keauhou people are both generous and thoughtful. They brought fresh leis for our tired boatmen, and
those weary rowers seemed refreshed by the flowers.




i6o


HAWAII NEI


Near Keauhou is the tremendous toboggan-slide of the
kings, where young chiefs used to slide from the top of
the hill to the bottom  on their papa holua, or long
sledges. It has been a long time since a bronzed Kanaka court came tearing down those tremendous slides,
but the track on the hillside is still a visible scar. Sliding
down hill must be eminently enjoyable when there is a
crowd of dependents to pull the sled up again.
Near Keauhou the lava begins, huge jagged masses,
with the ohia-trees as the first sentinels of vegetation. At
places the black rivers have plunged into the sea, cooling
in fantastic forms and remaining for all eternity a frozen
waterfall.
Kealakekua is the name of the steep pali above the
level place where Captain Cook received his just deserts,
and where the conventional white shaft rises to his
memory. The cliff above is honeycombed with burialcaves, and it is a place where ghosts do walk. Everybody lands at Kealakekua, as a matter of sentiment,
though the town on the other side of the bay (Napoopoo)
is much more interesting. Napoopoo is a charming
brown little hamlet, very warm and fragrant, with grass
houses, and roads that are but lanes, where great trees
meet overhead and mangoes and tamarinds vie to keep
the sun from your head. I walked about a quarter of a
mile, through fallen leaves two feet deep to stand in the
ancient heiau where Captain Cook was worshiped as the
god Lono, and which has many times been stained with
human blood. The heiau of Hiki Au was never a very
large one, and its terraces are now but piles of weatherbeaten stones. I prowled through the ruins, building
for myself the barbaric altar where human sacrifices were




HAWAII NEI


I6I


offered up to the many gods of the Polynesian pantheon.
Some of the stones were stained darkly, and I fancied
that the black stains were blood. I looked at them and
touched them with my finger until the gruesome imaginings of the place overcame me, and I fled along the
beach, as superstitious as any Kanaka, and hearing again
Kipling's haunting lines:
"Comes a breathing hard behind thee-snuffle-snuffle through
the night -
It is Fear, O little hunter, it is FEAR."
And it was fear. The person who could not conjure
the ghosts of dead warriors in the tumbled corridors and
trampled terraces of that blood-stained temple would be
without imagination. Such a background for a ghoststory was never conceived by a dreamer.
We bought cocoanuts and drank the sweetish water
that is called milk by courtesy, and we scooped out the
rich meat of soft young coacoanuts with spoons. There
is a great coffee region above this narrow rim of coast,
and supplies for the plantations were being handled.
Between Napoopoo and the next stop is an old city of
refuge, Honaunau, once the shelter-place of all th;s side
of the island. All roads led to Honaunau and criminals
fled there from all over the lee of Hawaii. The cities of
refuge were exactly the same as those of Hebrew Scripture,
but were founded by the Hawaiians long before they had
ever heard of the Jews. From this circumstance, and
others, historians with plenty of time and imagination,
have argued that the Hawaiians are the lost Israelitish
tribe, though if history could be trusted it would seem
that all the twelve tribes were lost, they have reappeared
in so many places. The city of refuge was the Hawaiian




i62


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idea of equity-a place where justice stepped in to soften
the harshness of law. It was a walled city, and the walls
are yet standing. Around the boundaries were idols, and
any man, no matter what his crime, who came within the
shadow of those walls was safe. This was absolutely
necessary; for the Hawaiian law prescribed death for
many things, and worst of all was the tabu. A man
might violate tabu accidentally and unconsciously, but
the penalty was the same. For such there was nothing
but the city of refuge. After a certain residence within
its limits, his crime was purged and he was free to go
abroad again. In war times, women and children of both
parties often flocked to Honaunau, and to their credit be
it said that no Hawaiian king or priest ever violated the
sanctity of those walls. On the windward side of the
island was another of these cities, and history says that
they were always populous.
Hookena's landing juts out into the water, and is
always crowded with a throng of dark-faced, pure-blooded
natives. Ancient cocoanut-groves bend against a hill,
where the entrances to the burial-caves may be plainly
seen. There is a legend that one of the skeletons is
wrapped in a cloak of canary-feathers, and it requires
strength of mind to turn steamerwards and not lose oneself seeking treasure-trove in that fascinating spot. They
point out to you Nohoneakauhi, where an ancient chief
of the island, an ardent shark-hunter, made his enemies
into hash and fed them to the sharks. The choice bait
brought sharks in numbers, and the royal hunter had
great sport spearing them. Sometimes he did not wait
for people to die, but chopped them anyway and fed
them to his prey. The big wooden platters on which the




HAWAII NEI


I63


sharks' feast was spread were preserved for years in the
island, but are now in the Bishop Museum. If you do
not believe the story, go look at the platters.
By the time we reach Hoopuloa it is growing dusk. A
solitary white man goes over the side, bidding us a sad
good-by. He is a school-teacher, and the only white in
the place. He tells me that he has not a relative in the
world, that he must walk two miles in the thick darkness
before he reaches his home, and that in his cabin a solitary and faithful dog watches for his coming. We pass
the night off the lee shore, so close that you can almost
see the spray on the beach, for one of the delights of this
leeward trip is that the steamer hugs the beach so close
that the trees, the towns, and all the landscape are like
your own front dooryard. And in the morning there is
a tempestuous passage around Kalae Point, a four-o'clock
landing at Honuapo or a five-o'clock one at Punaluu,
which is the end of the line, and the journey down Hawaii's lee -one of the most interesting and delightful sea
trips in the world-is done.
At Honuapo friends were waiting for me with fresh
horses and a good road, and a big, wide plantation-house
at the end. And there were days of pleasure in a native
village, and finally the trip to the volcano up the Kau side
of the mountain. I chose this way, though it is none of
the easiest, for the sake of going up one way and down
the other. We had a little ride by rail in sugar-cars, then
a private conveyance, and then the long ride of over
thirty miles, over a good road, to the volcano. The ride
is worth while, if for nothing but the study of lava. Some
of the flows are dated, but most of them were before the
memory of man. There are vast tracts of pahoehoe, the




i64


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smooth lava that has overflowed the land like an ocean
of molasses, and has dried in huge veils and mantles of
gray, shining stuff that looks like asphaltum. It lies in
ripples, in coils, in waves, as though a chill wind had
passed over it and it had frozen forever. It is in pools,
smooth and quiet, with caverns that are really burst
bubbles. It has a slightly rough surface, and horses go
over it, though it is slippery as ice wherever the surface
is smooth. The lava that is called aa is, on the contrary,
utterly impassable. It is jagged and rough, formed into
small mountains, interspersed with bowlders, and generally
more wicked in appearance than the pahoehoe. The landscape up this tremendously torn and seared side of Mauna
Loa is made up of these two elements. There are trees,
and occasionally a fleeting glimpse of a mongoose, with
which this country is infested, the first "rikki-tikki-tavi"
having been introduced to exterminate the rats that
gnawed the cane. The mongoose did its work thoroughly, and when it had finished with the rats it began
on the chickens, until now there is not a fowl on this
part of Hawaii, except carefully cherished ones nursed
in coops and kept as household pets on the front lawn.
There is a half-way house, where a lone hermit prepares
meals, being warned by telephone of your approach. He
is not a clean hermit, and he has pet chickens and turkeys
in the dining-room; but you are so famished for food,
after your early start, that by the time you reach his
lonely lodge nothing matters. A hamper on the way is
not a bad thing, and there should be plenty of drinkables, as there is no water on this side of the mountain.
Kau means dry, and it is well named. Ever above
you stretches the long blue slope of Mauna Loa (long




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I65


mountain) —an ascent so gradual that the summit is not
easy to distinguish. It is a popular fallacy that Kilauea
is a summit by itself, when it is but an open wound in
the flank of Mauna Loa.
And now for the first time you begin to realize Hawaii's birth in fire. It is the newest island of them all,
very likely not finished yet. It is actually being built up
at the present time, and these terrific excrescences of
pahoehoe are not vindictive eruptions bringing ruin to fertile regions, but furnished the materials for the architecture
of the island. Rock on rock, terrace on terrace, peak on
peak, the island has lifted itself from the sea. It is nearly
the height of Mont Blanc now, and forces not yet dead
are capable of adding still another story to these already
towering peaks. There are plenty of people on Hawaii
who will tell you about the days when the lava streams,
glowing a dull red, flowed sluggishly down the mountainside, to plunge hissing into the sea. The noise of the
steam could be heard for miles, and the red mass, now
black as a coal, remains as a monument. It is terribly
hot on this ride, so hot that the arms burn through cotton
sleeves, and an umbrella is a comfort. Often there is a
sudden shower, which cools the air, but the sun is steady
and insistent, and you will remember its steady shining
for many a day.
At last a faint blue cloud appears ahead, and sulphursmoke comes out through cracks in the ground. The
sun is not yet down, but it grows chilly, and all over the
face of the land smoke and steam congeal in clouds. You
are nearing the land of fire -a terra delfuego on a hilltop. A road branches off to a mountain farm, the source
of supplies for the Volcano House, a place where "pig,"




t66


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as the Hawaiians still designate pork, fresh beef, and vegetables are grown for the hotel, and where a huge oven
shows where the farmer bakes the root of the tree-fern to
feed to his hogs. It is said that long years ago the proprietor of this mountain farm was very poor, and for a
long while kept off starvation by eating baked fern-roots
himself. The story was told in my presence to a lady of
many ailments who was staying at the Volcano House.
"What was his complaint?" asked the lady, to whom
the whole world is but a collection of aches and pains.
" Poverty," was the laconic reply.
The Volcano House, perched on the rim of the big
crater, is a welcome sight, but the inferno in front of it,
filled with a gray-black ocean of lava and covered with a
cloud of steam, still bears the Plutonic trademark too
strongly to be agreeable. For one unused to volcanoes,
it seems an unsafe place to spend a night. What if the
house should totter over the brink in one of those earthquake tremors which so frequently occur? But it never
has, and within is a huge, crackling fire, in a pleasant
room, where the bare rafters are garlanded with green,
and the hair of the tree-fern forms a frostlike drapery
over everything. There is a faithful Chinese servitor, who
is everything from valet de chambre to caterer, and the
dinner is hot and savory and the beds soft, even if they
are cold. And you are very glad to view the crater by
moonlight at long range, and not venture over its trackless waste until the next morning.
Early in the dawn horses are brought saddled to the
door by a guide, for no one crosses the crater alone,
though the volcano itself has not been active for several
months. The horses crawl gingerly down the precipice, by




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a zigzag path, where ferns, wet with dew, sprinkle your
face and scatter a shower of drops over you. There are
pretty pink and white ohelo-berries, which taste like a
huckleberry, and are said to grow nowhere else on the
islands. How odd that these waxen berries should be
confined to this tremendous barren place, where the firegod has played from time immemorial! There are other
berries, not edible, of a beautiful shade of turquoise blue.
The pink and blue berries form a charming combination,
backed as they are with ferns of living green, their young
fronds a bright red. There are gleaming silver swords,
too, like ice-plants, all glistening in the sunrise. It is a
strange new world into which you go down. You look
back longingly at these unknown plants, with which
Nature has covered the ruin she has wrought; for it is a
strange feeling to be leaving the familiar earth behind.
Huge fissures, riven by earthquakes, are crossed by means
of little bridges, and the black plain, which looked level
from above, is in reality jammed like an ice-pack, where
the lava of past centuries has striven for place with later
flows. A blue river beyond is pointed out as the newest
flow of lava, the ashy mass looking like a multitude of
coiled hawsers. Every little while a beehive of lava
shows where a blow-hole made itself into a cone, like a
bubble on top of boiling jelly. Much of the lava is so
hot that you cannot touch it, and if you fall and attempt
to save yourself by clutching, it cuts like glass and makes
an end of your gloves or your hands. A match lights
almost anywhere, and if you are caught in one of the
passing showers, as you always are, you may dry your
clothes and warm your feet in the sulphur steam rising
from any of these cracks. Presently the horses are left




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in a paddock of lava, where there is a little cistern of rainwater, and the rest of the journey is made over a good
path beaten out on the solid lava. Vegetation has ceased
long since. Far behind, a lone fern is the last sign of
vegetation on the lava-crust, and if you have brought
gifts for Pele, in accordance with immemorial custom, you
must have brought them from the crater's brink.
A faint pillar of smoke points to Halemaumau, which,
by the way, does not mean "house of everlasting fire"
at all, in spite of some thousands of statements to that
effect. It means "house of ferns," and was probably so
called because of Pele's caprice in building a house of
lava and then tearing it down, just as bowers of ferns
were built and torn up in a short while.  " House of everlasting fire" is much more interesting, but it does not
happen to be true. We are at the brink now, looking
down into the pit, some fifteen hundred feet deep, for the
fires have sunk out of sight and carried the bottom of the
pit with them. This is where some captious people affect
to be disappointed. As well be disappointed at coming on
an Indian camp with the wigwams still standing and the
fires not yet out! Smoke comes from the deepest part
of the pit, and no man has ever been in this hole, in spite
of tales to the contrary. At any moment a jet of fire
may tell that Pele is at home again. My offering was a
pair of white gloves, which Pele would have to mend and
clean before they would be wearable. My gift was intentional, as was not that of a very good Hawaiian hat from
the head of a young man, who made a frantic grab as the
jaunty headgear floated away. He came near being the
first man ever in Halemaumau. The guide is careful, for
the edges of the pit look quite safe, but are not. There




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have been disastrous landslides, and fissures show where
another piece of earth is ready to slide into the smoking
pit. No one has ever been killed here, and the white
cross on the hillside marks the spot where a gentleman
with heart disease expired from over-exertion.
We throw stones into the cavern, hover on its brink,
laugh to cover our awe, and do all the things that mere
humans do to hide their embarrassment in the presence of
the infinite. I should like to have seen Kilauea in eruption; but I can imagine nothing grander than sunrise on
this sea of black and gray —then a peep into the center
of the earth- with everything familiar and small and
commonplace left behind.
There are other things to do at the Volcano House.
Kilauea is pitted with craters, and there are at least a
half-dozen that most people never see - side outlets equally
as interesting but not as grand as the main crater. There
is Kilauea iki, perfectly round, like a bowl with mush at
the bottom. Another crater has a historic point where
a Hawaiian lover leaped to his death. This is not one of
the mythical lover's leaps or devil's slides, but a real one.
It all happened not so long ago, in the days when Hawaiians were bound to work for other Hawaiians, and
there were cruelties and abuses in the land. This particular serf begged to be allowed to visit the woman he
loved, but his master would not grant him the desired
leave.  So the serf stole away in the night, and when
they missed him, they went at once to the home of
the woman at the other side of the island, and there
found him.   They brought him back, and he knew
well what whippings and cruelties awaited him. When
they reached the crater he broke away and threw




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himself over the brink. So it was a real lover's leap,
after all.
At the side of the Volcano House is a sulphur clift
where free sulphur shines yellow in the sun. In front of
it are many little small-pox pits in the earth, their sides
covered with flakes of sulphur and hot smoke pouring
from their yellow throats. Their vapors are so suffocating
that you cannot stand with the wind blowing toward you.
There are sulphur vapor baths in the Volcano House,
where you sit and steam in Nature's own bath, and, if it
is not hot enough to suit you, you may register your
complaint with Madam Pele.
Up behind the hotel is the most magnificent fern forest
in all Hawaii. Follow the road for a couple of miles, and
do not get discouraged, and you will come to a place
where the giant fronds meet over your head and where it
is always a cool green twilight.  The tree-ferns are
wrapped with a golden brown fiber, soft as silk, and the
wreck of their huge bodies makes the earth knee-deep in
mold.   They seem almost laughing at you - twenty,
twenty-five feet, thirty feet the huge ferns reach-as
you sit on a giant stump and think what a pigmy you
are, while the great leaves rustle in tree-talk over your
head. It is a good antidote for vanity.
There is something positively frightful about these
mammoth ferns. They carry you back to the days when
the whole new world was covered with gigantic fronds,
and at every gust of wind which sends a huge fern crashing somewhere in the depths of the forest, you start and
expect to hear the footfall of a mastodon breaking his
way through the uncanny growth.   The ohelo-berries
grow thick at your feet, but you are too absorbed to eat




HAWAII NEI                 171
them. In the forest, on the edge of the afternoon, no
human being will disturb you, no thing of the world come
near you, and, when you descend from that shadowy,
ferny fastness, you will feel as one who has seen the
burning bush or read the law on tables of stone in a far
mountain.




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CHAPTER XIV
WINDWARD HAWAII
HAWAII to windward and Hawaii to leeward are as
Phyllis to-day and Phyllis to-morrow. You may know
all about the one and nothing at all of the other. They
are the comic and tragic masks of the same face.
Each island is divided by a backbone of mountain
ridge, and the country, the climate, and the products are
as different on the two sides as though the regions were
separated by a thousand leagues of sea. It seems like a
paradox to say that the windward side is cooler, yet much
more tropical than the lee side, but it is true, and all
caused by the wonderfully persuasive action of the magic
rain. The windward side is wet, windy, and tropical,
while the leeward side is dry and hot. The high mountains catch the rain-clouds, and prevent them from going
over to the lee. Only a few showers succeed in passing
the dead-line, while on the windward side it is a constant
deluge. It has been known to rain thirty-six inches in
Molokai in thirty-six hours, and in hot little, moist little,
damp little Hilo they measure their rainfall in yards and
feet. Nine feet for a season is nothing remarkable, and
fifty inches in January is almost a drouth. It is no
wonder that waterfalls hang like bridal-veils over every
rock, or that clear little streams come purling down every
declivity in the land. It rains every day, and the dark




Pharaoh's Daughters and A Hawaiian Moses.
A5 X




I




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clouds hang over Mauna Loa almost constantly, and yet
housewives tell you that the air is much drier during a
shower than at any other time, and that is the time they
select for hanging their clothes out to dry.
The road from the Volcano House to Hilo is a marvel.
Though more lava poured down this side of the mountain than down the other, there is scarcely a lava block or
stream to be seen. The tremendous downpour of rain
and the everlasting patter of stinging drops has disintegrated the lava, and a thousand ferns grow where not
one grew before. The whole region is green. Giant
ferns border the road for thirty miles between the volcano and Hilo. They are infinitely various, and botanists
from all over the world come here to track the new and
unnamed specimen to his lair. When they get lost, as
wanderers often do in the fern forests, they climb a tree
and take their bearings over the billowy green tops of
these wondrous ferns. Here again civilization is the foe
of beauty. After the fork of the road where the path
turns off to the crater of Kilauea iki, come the cabinsvillas by courtesy-of those who like to spend part of
the year in the cool, bracing air of the heights. Some
of these houses are not bad-looking, but the clearing they
necessitated was fatal to the beauty of the road. The
fern thicket had to be removed, if one would live in a
domicile more substantial than an anchored balloon; and
so, in patches down this wonderful road, the ground has
been scorched and seared as though a reaper had gone
over it, and on bare, brown spots, cheap houses have gone
up. Sometimes a border of tree-ferns has been left at
either side of the driveway, but these are shorn of their
fronds half-way up, and look like plucked ostriches. All




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the deep mold, all the beautiful fallen ferns clinging to the
brown silk stalks are cleared away. The gardens of
these mountain villas are like plague spots on the road,
scars in the smooth flank of some beautiful animal.
And as the stage-coach rumbles down, stopping at
almost every house to take some garden-truck, or a few
letters, or an interminable list of orders for Hilo merchants, one wonders if there is a natural law that condemns
everything useful to be ugly.
It is a huge Concord stage which binds Hilo to the
volcano far above-a coach with a big boot, always full
of baggage, and always covered with tarpaulins, since
this journey was never made without showers at some
point. There are few glimpses of lava. The ground is
covered with green and leafy mold for a depth of perhaps
six feet, perhaps sixty. The vines are so thick that footpassengers walk over little streams on natural bridges,
which easily support the weight of the body. Far below,
the flowing water murmurs, but the carpet of green is so
thick that there is not a sight of the stream. The whole
region bubbles with brooks. Turn back this thick mantle
of green in which the earth has wrapped herself and you
will find masses of lava and savage bowlders-the tremendous implements with which the Architect of the
universe worked.
It is small wonder that where the fern forest has been
cleared coffee plantations thrive, and the spreading bushes
with glossy green leaves and flowers like snow, or berries
like cranberries, grow as weeds grow. The whole legion
has the look of prosperity. Seeing these trees, one is
almost inclined to believe the brilliant prospectuses; but
having no desire to mislead, I am forced to say that talks




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with a dozen planters from a dozen different Hawaiian
neighborhoods show that the culture is still an experiment, and that no one knows yet whether it will fail or
succeed. A number of "if's" must be solved before
coftee-planting will be safe.
There is a luncheon spread on the wide lanai of the
Half-way House at Olaa, and then a long spin down the
road to Hilo. The grade is so good and so gradual that
bicycles make the trip up from Hilo, and the road down
is one long slide. Native houses become more frequent,
but not one of grass. Telephone wires are in evidence
now. Between the wires huge spiders have woven webs in
which the constant showers leave many drops to hang like
jewels. The whole web is outlined in sparkling wet, and
in the center spiders big as filberts sit and wait for prey.
The forest is dense to the very edge of Hilo town - the
wonderful green drapery that nature has thrown over
this throbbing, restless, melting, discontented mountain
of Mauna Loa. There are magnificent koa-trees, fine
specimens of a tree that is becoming all too rare. Morning-glories twice as large as any of those cultivated in
American gardens climb to the tops of forest giants and
stretch out their delicate cups of white and mauve and
blue.  Many of the trees are almost strangled with
creepers, and far up their trunks and branches the ie
flings its scarlet crown. There are trees that have surrendered their own lives to a conquering army of vigorous
parasites that have clothed the dead trunks with beauty.
Tall ohias are full of bird's-nest fern, mammoth maidenhair, five-finger fern that could only have belonged to a
giant's hand, since each frond is four feet long, and many
rare, furry things catalogued only in botanical books.




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Hilo is a straggling village, and the approach to it is
through delightful country lanes, like the beautiful oleanderbordered ones of Tahili, in Oahu. The houses are wideeaved and hospitable-looking, the gardens big and crowded
with bloom, the grass green and lush.  It looks old,
and it looks like New England. A big blue stone church,
which belongs to the foreigner, is the only modern thing.
A still bigger white church on the hill, with a square tower
and a sweet-toned bell, is the native church -the famous
Haile Church. There is a good hotel, with clustering
cottages and a sloping sward, and down the incline to the
exquisite bay run the little streets that are devoted to
business.
And by the time you have seen this, the whole town is
blotted out behind a thick gray curtain of rain, and Hilo
is paying the penalty of her fertility. It pours and pours,
but no one pays the slightest attention.  Housewives
hang out the washing, girls come down the hill on bicycles,
the mud spurting in streams from their tires, and their
white duck skirts in some mysterious way kept unsullied.
No wheel except a Hilo wheel could keep itself upright
in such mud.
The bay is the most beautiful harbor in all Hawaii.
As elsewhere, there is no wharf, and landings to and from
the little steamers must be made in small boats. Around
the bay is a bold headland crowned with green, and the
water of the bay is an exceedingly clear and limpid
emerald.
Hilo has a number of show places. Cocoanut Island
is one of the landmarks of the harbor, a slender spit of
land jutting into the water and crowned with a grove of
cocoanuts, hoary with age. There are delicious coves



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coves where the water is a paler green, and where bathers
come to have the novel experience of bathing in warm
salt water while taking a cold shower in rain water from
above, for it always rains in the bathing-pool.
An island Charon ferries you across to Cocoanut Isle,
and assures you that there are "not very many sharks"
as he grates the prow of his boat against a rock. You
bathe in the cocoanut cove, but with some misgivings,
for a melancholy row of sharks' skulls with quadruple
rows of indented teeth attest to the fact that there have
been sharks at no remote period. The drive to and from
Cocoanut Isle is delightful, across the wide Wailuku
River, through lanes bordered with delicious wild strawberry guavas, which the natives do not even take the
trouble to gather.
On the other side of the town are the Rainbow Falls,
within easy riding or walking distance. As a walk it is
very charming. The road is lumpy and invariably muddy,
and almost impassable for wheeled vehicles, but fine for a
short skirt and stout shoes.  There are rippling little
streams to cross on foot-bridges where it is pleasant to
sit and dangle your feet and eat pineapples from the
neighboring field.  Behind the hospital, down a steep
little ravine, is a spring that gushes pure and cold from
the mountain. This is one of the finest, because it is the
coldest, in all Hawaii. It was for centuries a tabu spring,
sacred to the use of the high chief of this district. No
common man was allowed to slake his thirst there. If
one ever did, it was in the dead of night and at the peril
of his life, for the tabu sticks of white kapa guarded the
place day and night.
The road winds ever further up the valley. A short




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detour brings you to the famous lava flow of I88r, which
threatened to demolish Hilo and had the whole town in
an uproar. Princesses and princes, chiefs and chiefesses,
Queen Kapiolani herself, tried to stop the flood, but it
crept steadily toward Hilo. At last the Princess Ruth
Keelikolani, governess of Hawaii, sister of the fourth and
fifth Kamehamehas, a mountainous woman, whose fat
flowed, or rather overflowed, in waves, tried her hand at
it. There is some dispute as to what she did, but a black
pig, the sort that used to be sacrificed in the heiaus, and
a red silk handkerchief, were thrown into the advancing
lava and the flow stopped. Its glistening front still stands
like a wall of crystallized fire around Hilo.
"A remarkable coincidence," explained the relieved
whites, whose property had been saved, as soon as they
could get their breath.
"Pele!" gasped the natives, who had nothing to lose,
falling on their faces.
It was irreverently suggested by the whites, whose
alarm quickly faded into incredulity as soon as the danger
was removed, that perhaps the lava flow became discouraged at sight of the princess. Some idea of her superabundant plumpness may be gained from the fact that she
could not walk up to the stream, and so was carried in a
sort of palanquin specially gotten up for the occasion and
borne by about twelve men, who were relieved at intervals by other stout fellows. Fortunately lava travels
slowly, or the stream would have beaten the princess.
At the fork of the road is a charming grass house. It
was once a chiefs dwelling, built in the detached style
compelled by the tabu, where the women and men were
necessarily segregated. This was quite a palace, a hun



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dred feet long, perhaps, and standing in an elbow of the
hills. It has fallen on evil days now. The Japanese have
ingrafted upon it a thatched architecture of their own,
and have bound in sticks and staves and all sorts of things
to fill up the cracks in the grass walls  Near by a
Portuguese woman bends over a rapid stream, washing,
and her small daughters, their skirts tucked up and their
hair done into pugs above their preternaturally old faces,
bend with her over the stones that are their washingboards. A few feet ahead of them the stream plunges
twenty feet in a fine waterfall, but the scenic beauty of the
place is lost on them.
If there were serpents in Hawaii, this place would be
unbearable, for there is a short cut through deep, lush
grass. But happily the snake has not yet found his way
to this Eden. The way lies up the Wailuku River, concerning which, and this very fall, is told the pretty mythological tale of the maiden imprisoned in the fall by a cruel
dragon. The maid's demigod lover-such conveniences
were common in old Hawaii-changed the course of the
river and released her; but when the sun is right you may
still see her, or the rainbow garment which she wears,
behind the fall.
The fall is beautiful enough to be excuse for any story.
It is in basaltic formation, and you come on it suddenly
up the old bed of the river whose unaccountable change
made the foundation for the tale. There is a goodly
stream forever pouring into the basin and hollowing out
a deep, cold pool for itself. The fall is, perhaps, fifty
feet high, and its stone confines are lined with ferns and
moss. Before nine o'clock the most delicious rainbows
play through its spray, but at other hours it is hard to




I8o               HAWAII NEI
catch them. Usually there is a passing shower to make
the rocks slippery, but it is delightful to sit opposite the
fall and study the changes in prismatic coloring.
Further up the same river is another formation, even
more peculiar, called the Boiling Pots. This is another
prank of basalt blocks, the water having sought an underground channel and found it. In several places the water
boils and foams up from below, and presents exactly the
appearance of boiling water in a receptacle. The Boiling
Pots are some seven miles from Hilo, but it is a fine
walk on a shady day.
Coming down from these water-shrines we were caught
in a brisk shower —one of those where it rains an inch
an hour. We took refuge under a spreading mango-tree
which grew in the garden of a native house, and a number
of interesting native children came to keep us company.
It used to be the fashion in Hawaii to adopt and bring
up the children of others. Babies were the common
medium of exchange —a sort of legal tender.  In the
families of chiefs, the custom was fostered because it
cemented friendship. It was in vogue up to two generations ago, but now the Hawaiians are as fond of their
children as other people are, and adoption is no longer
the fashion.
The children, like all Hawaiians, were melodiousminded, and they sang for us simple songs of the fields
and the winds and the flowers, songs that would make
good kindergarten roundelays. But it began to be wet
under the mango-tree, so we took shelter in the cleanly
house of a Portuguese across the street. It is amazing
to see the improvement that education has wrought in
this transplanted people. When they first came from




HAWAII NEI


i8i


the Azores they were thievish, untrustworthy, and great
prevaricators. But their children have been obliged to
attend school, and the second generation is a great improvement on its predecessor. The children are cleanly,
they have learned the distinction between mine and thine,
and they are industrious. One of their best features is
the desire to beautify their homes. You can always tell
a Portuguese house by the green things that grow round
it. When we begged leave to sit on this little porch,
the daughter of the house brought out two chairs for our
comfort, and we had a glimpse of a speckless interior,
into which we were hospitably invited. But we preferred
the outside and the sweet breath of the wet earth. In
the little garden were the inevitable grape-vine and figtree, a fine papaya, an alligator-pear loaded with rich
fruit, a mango, and several varieties of red-leaved taro,
grown as foliage plants. Honeysuckle and jasmine clambered over the house.
At last the gray rain-clouds ceased to roll in from the
water, and we could go home. Each tree still flung a
shower of drops on every lingering breeze. Under the
mango-tree the native children still sang, and every glossy
tropical leaf had a new coat of varnish. This is the
deathless beauty of this dustless land.
The home-going from Hilo to Honolulu by way of
Windward Hawaii is a beautiful one. Here is no lowlying lava coast, but a clear profile of bold bluffs, with
fringes of waterfalls dashing themselves to death in the
sea below. Every river pours over the bluff, until the
coast is a succession of watered ribbons. Occasionally a
village is in view, but usually a spire and a cluster of
roofs atop the bluffs is all that is visible. Landing is




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difficult and dangerous.  The ocean beats in surges
against this cliff, and it is not at all like the quiet lee side.
This is excitement. One climbs over the edge of the
steamer, rocking in the swell, clambers down steps more
than perpendicular, waits for a propitious moment, and
then leaps into a row-boat. The row-boat goes as near
the coast as it dares, and the passengers are raised and
lowered to and from the cliff by means of a box, called a
basket, at the end of a long crane. It is not a safe
method, and sometimes, in bad weather, even this is
impossible. The daughter of Minister Stevens was killed
at one of these landings, and since then passengers have
sometimes been compelled to travel overland all the way
from Hilo, the steamers refusing to take the chances.
Windward Hawaii is not as rich in historical associations as the famous lee coast, though there are some
remarkable heiaus and some famous battle-grounds. As
a picture it is infinitely more lovely. There are deep
valleys where the sun only penetrates five days in the
year, and where the hot moist air is tremendously oppressive. Valley after valley, mere rents in the hills, lined
with green, stretch along the coast. Steep palls guard
them, and a horse must be sure-footed and a rider without
fear to make the descent into them and the climb up the
other side.  At the bottom of every gorge is a deep,
swift river. There is no coast line in all the world quite
like it-this new western coast of greater America.








Modern Hula Dancers.




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CHAPTER XV
LEGENDS AND FOLK-LORE
HAWAII'S folk-lore is exceedingly rich. Many of the
ancient legends and traditions are suggestive of the
Greek, and others of the Hebrew. Their tale of the
creation is Hebraic, or, at least, springs from the same
source as the Hebrew legend. From the beginning,
according to the sagas, existed a Hawaiian trinity- Kane,
the originator, Ku, the builder, and Lono, director of
the elements.  By the united will of these, light was
brought into chaos. The three created the heavens, the
earth, and the sun, moon, and stars. When man was
created, his body was formed of red earth, mingled with
the spittle of Kane, and the head was formed of whitish
clay, brought by Lono from the four corners of the earth.
According to some derivations, the meaning of Adam is
red, and the Hawaiian Adam was of that color. He was
made in Kane's image, and Kane breathed into his
nostrils and he became alive. A woman was fashioned
from one of his ribs, taken from his side while he slept.
The pair was placed in a beautiful paradise, through
which flowed three rivers of "the waters of life," on the
banks of which grew every sort of fruit, including the
tabu breadfruit-tree. Among the angels who had been
created was Kanaloa, the Hawaiian Lucifer, who was a
disturbing element in Heaven. Having failed to create




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a man of his own, he decided to destroy the handiwork
of Kane, and so entered the primitive paradise in the
form of a moo, or lizard, and tempted the simple pair to
commit some crime for which they were banished from
Eden by the "large white bird of Kane."  The Hawaiian
Adam had three sons, the second of whom was slain by
the first. Thirteen generations follow for the Biblical
ten, when occurred the Hawaiian deluge. The Hawaiian
Noah was called Nuu, and there is the tale of the ark and
the wife and sons, and the pairs of every living thing.
When the floods were over, the gods entered the ark and
commanded Nuu to go forth. In gratitude he offered a
sacrifice to the moon, mistaking it for Kane. Descending on a rainbow, Kane rebuked his thoughtlessness, but
left the bow as his perpetual token of forgiveness. There
passed ten generations between Nuu and Ku Pula, who
removed to a "southern country," taking with him as a
wife his slave woman, Ahu. Ku Pula established the
rite of circumcision, and had twelve great-grandsons, who
became the founders of twelve tribes, from one of which
the Hawaiians are descended. There is a story of Joseph
and the Exodus, but it is not so well authenticated, and
is probably a tale gotten from contact with some other
people; but the genealogical line from the Hawaiian Adam
to the Hawaiian Jacob has been brought down through
three distinct historical channels, whose agreement is
wonderful.  The one brought to the islands in the
eleventh century by the high priest Paao, and retained
by his successors, is regarded as most authentic.
With the Exodus and the settlement of the Menehune
people in the land set apart for them by Kane, the
Hawaiian legends cease to be Hebraic. How did the




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i85


Hawaiian priesthood become possessed of the stories
of the Hebrew genesis?   It was old to them when
the Resolution and the Discovery dropped anchor in
Kealakakua Bay, old to them when one or more chance
parties of Spanish sailors may have dropped in upon
them on their way to the Spice Islands, and, probably,
old to them when the Hawaiians found their present
home, in the sixth century, and when the Polynesians
left the coast of Asia, four centuries earlier. One theory
is that the story was acquired through Israelitish contact
with the ancestors of the Polynesians while they were
drifting eastward from the land of their nativity. A more
probable assumption, think the investigators, is that the
Hawaiian theogony, so strangely perpetuated, is an independent and perhaps original version of a series of Creation legends once common to the Cushite, Semitic, and
Aryan tribes, and handed down quite as accurately as
the Jewish version before the latter became fixed in
written characters.
The Hawaiian language was first reduced to writing
by the missionaries.  Previous to their coming, there
was not even a picture-writing like that of the Egyptians
and Aztecs. But the history was well remembered and
accurately repeated, and the rite of circumcision and the
cities of refuge remained until modern times.
The Hawaiians had an extensive pantheon, with all
sorts of gods for all sorts of things. Each of the great
gods was worshiped under various special attributes,
which afterward came to be regarded as different persons,
and still further increased the number of deities. The
powers of Nature were all personified, and the Hawaiians
made these phenomena into something human like them



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selves. Some of their wonder-stories are strongly reminiscent of the Greeks. They deified the powers of the
volcano.  Pele, their fire - goddess, more feared and
revered than any other deity on Hawaii, had her home
deep down in Kilauea, as Vulcan had his subterranean
forges. Pele was identical with the Samoan fire-goddess,
Fee. Oddly enough, there was no worship of the sun
or moon. The Hawaiians had a god of the winds, corresponding to the Grecian IEolus, a god who carried the
winds in a calabash. In the twelfth century, the Hawaiians date their story of Hina, the Helen of Hawaii, who
was stolen from her husband, and whose recovery was
a matter of long years and terrific battles.
A whole family of legends grew up concerning the
creation of the islands. There is a hiatus of twelve or
thirteen generations after the Exodus, and then the line
of the chiefs is brought down to Wakea and his wife,
Papa, mythical rulers with superhuman attributes, who
existed, if at all, before the Polynesians left the Asiatic
coast.  Papa is the name given to the earth by the
Maoris. This royal pair was mutually jealous. Wakea
found favor with the beautiful Hina (not the kidnaped
one), and the island of Molokai was their child. In
retaliation, Papa gave her love to a warrior called Lua,
and the island of Oahu was born of them. The old
names were Molokai-Hina and Oahu-a-Lua. Another
legend is that Hawaii-loa, a distinguished chief, sailed
westward, and, guided by the Pleiades, discovered the
Hawaiian group, giving to the largest island his own
name, and to the others the names of his children.
Quite as fanciful a story relates how an immense bird
laid an egg on the ocean (the ancient Finns conceived




HAWAII NEI


of the earth as an egg). This one was hatched by the
tropic winds, and the Hawaiian group came into being.
Came then a man and woman in a canoe from Kahiki,
with a pair of dogs, hogs, and fowls, landed on the
eastern shore of Hawaii, and became the progenitors of
the Hawaiian people. When Paao came from Samoa,
in the eleventh century, he added a fourth god to the
Hawaiian trinity, it being the Polynesian method to count
by fours. War-gods grew up, and each trade or profession had its tutelar deity. The beach of Kaloa, on the
southeast coast of Hawaii, was the favorite source of idols,
for here the stones were supposed to propagate of themselves. The land abounded with gnomes and fairies, and
the waters with nymphs and monsters, whose caprices
are the themes of many folk-lore tales.  With every
stream and gorge and headland some fairy story is connected, and the old-time bards kept these legends alive
among the people.
This abundant invention is used by some as a reproach
to the Hawaiians. Only scholars understand the spontaneous invention of a childlike people. It is delightful
to sit on the sheltered deck of a modern steamer and
have a cleft in a passing hill pointed out as the place
where the demigod Maui started to remove the mountain,
but just then the elepaio bird sang, after which no god
could do any work.
I sat six hours one night to hear the wonderful story
of Umi, the peasant prince of Hawaii, told by a native
story-teller. For six hours the following night the wonderful recital went on. Then I asked my singer of meles
if he could not condense, as Umi was then but in his
prime and my stay was drawing to a close, but the singer




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of sagas said that it would take twelve hours more to
complete the story. He had never told it in less time,
and he could not omit any of the details. I shall never
hear the end of Umi in the original.
No part of the Hawaiian history of later date is more
interesting than that relating to the tabus that prevailed
in regard to women. Women were not allowed to eat
with men, and certain foods-plantains, bananas, cocoanuts, swine -were denied them. They were not allowed
to take part in the heiau ceremonies, but neither were
they sacrificed to the gods. And, if the position of
women is to be taken as a criterion of civilization, the
Hawaiians were not so low in the scale. There was an
equal standard of morality. The chiefs had more than
one wife, but plural husbands for chiefesses was also the
rule. Women chose their own husbands, and rank and
descent were traced through the mother. A chief who
wished to have children of the highest rank could not
marry a peasant woman, but must raise his family through
marriage with a chiefess of higher rank than his own, or
with his own sister, niece, or daughter, which produced
descendants of the very bluest blood.  There was no
such thing as a family name, and the single name of the
child had no relation to that of the father. That custom
still prevails in Hawaii, though the European fashion of
Christian names is now being adopted, and the Hawaiian
name of the head of the family is taken as the family
name. Those who mistakenly pity Hawaiian women
should remember that it was the husband's duty to beat
the taro while the wife made the tapa-cloth, in a pleasant
division of domestic duties.  The Salic law was not
known in Hawaii. There were many queens in their




HAWAII NEI


I89


own right in the old days, and very often the chief counselor and prime minister of the king was a woman of
brains and rank. In the matter of sex equality, Hawaii
could give points to some of her more civilized sisters.
I have selected the story of Hiku and his rescue of his
dead love, which is the Hawaiian version of Orpheus
and Eurydice, as a typical Hawaiian wonder-tale. The
story follows:
Sailing away and away from the northern coast, where
the water is green and gray, and great storms sweep over
the face of the ocean, you come at last to a sea all blue
and silver, where winged bluefish skim the surface like
sea-butterflies, and the ocean seems like a platter of delft,
all gilded at sunset and silvered at moonrise. Over the
water sweet winds blow the fragrance of a million flowers
until your nostrils are weary, and you know that you have
reached the land where it is always June. A long, long
while ago, on the island of Hawaii dwelt a youth named
Hiku and his mother Hana. Their home was near the
top of Hualalai, a high mountain which looks like a whale
asleep. It has a long and gradual slope, and its curved
top is almost perpetually canopied with cloud. On Hualalai's sloping sides is a growth of fresh young sandalwood, but in Hiku's day there was a dense and fragrant
forest upon its hoary sides. Hana and Hiku were kapabeaters. They made cloth from the bark of the wauke
and mamake trees. They peeled off strips of the bark
and scraped away the outer coat with shells. After soaking a while in water, each strip was laid upon a smooth log
and beaten with a grooved mallet of hard wood until it
resembled thick, flexible paper, the strips being united by
lapping the edges and beating them together. Some of




I90o


HIAWAII NEI


the kapa they made was so fine that it resembled muslin,
and some of it was thick and tough, like wash-leather.
The malo that Hiku tied about his loins was of the thick
kapa, and Hana's pau consisted of five thicknesses of
the thinner cloth. Sometimes they bleached the kapa
or stained it with mineral dyes, impressing it with bamboo
stamps in a great variety of patterns and colors, afterward
glazing it with the resin that they collected from the trees.
Best of all, Hiku liked to paint pictures on the kapared spears or forked lightnings. Wielding the heavy
mallet made his arms ache.
Whenever it became necessary to get new shells from
the seashore to scrape the kapa, or when great piles of
the finished stuff were ready for exchange, Hana would
go down [the mountain to barter her wares for fish and
taro and seaweed and shells. On these occasions she
never allowed Hiku to accompany her, though he begged
hard to go. He had been born on Hualalai, and he had
never been to the seashore. There were no other children on the mountain, but Hiku made up interesting
little games of his own with old and bearded trees, and
played his ukeke, made of a flexible strip of bamboo,
with two or three strings of cocoanut fiber, and his kiokio,
or gourd, with three holes, one for the nose, and two for
the fingers.
To tell the truth, Hana was jealous of Hiku. She
wanted him to stay with her always, and she feared that
if he once went down to the village and found how merry
they were there, bathing, swimming, and skimming the
waves on surf-boards, he would never want to dwell on
Hualalai's lonely heights again. And so she kept him at
home, and invented new stories of the gods to tell him,




HAWAII NEI


I91


as the great mallets came down on the tree-fiber with a
cadence like a chorus of anvils.
And she saw Hiku grow from a round, brown child to
a tall, slim youth, with beautiful arms and legs, and with
fine muscles that were the result of much beating of kapa.
His eyes were black and piercing, and Hana knew, though
she did not tell him, that he could throw his wooden spear
further and straighter than any of the youths in the village below.
One fine night, when Hiku was about eighteen, the
constant trade-wind died away. The moon shone full and
clear, and the breaking surf could be plainly heard. There
could also be heard the booming of the hula-drums and
the voices of singers, which came clearly up through the
blue night-air to the grass house where Hiku and his
mother lived. And Hiku, who had been restless for
days, suddenly sprang to his feet, and tightening his
malo, declared that he was going down to the village, and
see what they did with the drums under the moon. And
though Hana hung about his neck and caressed him,
weeping piteously and begging him to stay, he would not
be restrained, and started out, and the best that she could
do was to win his promise that he would come back some
day.
And for days and days, the sound of Hana's wailing
could be heard through the forest, and her mallet was
silent. Hiku was wild with delight to see a whole street
of grass houses, instead of a single hut, and it was very
much warmer on the seashore than on the cold mountaintop. The slender stems of the cocoanuts bent in the
wind, and Hiku soon learned to run up them with
monkey-like agility, and to gather the green fruit. It was




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delightful to dive among the coral groves of the reef, and
Hiku soon added diving and swimming to his accomplishments. And while Hana mourned in the mountain, Hiku
was perfectly happy, and rarely thought of his old home.
One day Hiku met a girl in the village, whose name
was Kawelu. She was very beautiful-what fairy tale
heroine is not?-and she was the daughter of a chief.
She threw leis of maile over Hiku's head, and wherever he went she followed. And he was glad to have
her with him, and they paddled and swam and fished
together. But one day, the longing for the mountain,
which the hill children never quite lose, came suddenly
over Hiku, and he kissed the beautiful Kawelu good-by,
and told her he must return to his mother. And Kawelu
brought him opihii, tiny shell-fish from the rocks, and
rare seaweeds and spiked sea-eggs, and begged him to
stay with her. And Hiku ate the offerings, and then
started for Hualalai.
Kawelu wept, and begged to be allowed to go with
him, and, though she was a chief's daughter, she offered
to become a beater of kapa also. But Hiku did not think
Hana would fancy a daughter-in-law, and he was a selfish
fellow anyway, and feared that his mother might grow
in time to love the gentle Kawelu better than she did
him. Now Hiku had brought with him from the mountain
a magic staff that had been given to his mother by a great
magician, years before. One of the properties of this
staff was that when spoken to it would invariably answer.
Hiku did not dare to return without his staff. Without
it he could scarcely find his way up the tangled mountain,
and his mother would be terribly angry. And Kawelu,
seeing Hiku return for his staff, determined to follow




HAWAII NEI


193


him. So she crept along behind him, and when Hiku
slept, Kawelu would call softly to the staff, which never
failed to answer her.
But when Hiku found that the faithful and gentle
Kawelu was following, he was angry, and he called upon
the vines behind him to grow thick in Kawelu's path,
which they did for fear of the magic staff. Poor Kawelu,
tripped by the vines and bruised by falling, tried bravely
to find her way, but she was wet with the night-dews,
and wounded by the stout vines that clasped hands in
front of her. At last Hiku and his staff were so far ahead
of her that she could no longer hear the voice of the
staff.  Weak and exhausted, the poor little chiefess
turned back and returned to her village after nightfall.
Sick with longing, and broken-hearted at Hiku's cruel
treatment, Kawelu became ill, and though many black
pigs were ordered sacrificed for her in the heiau, she
died in a few days, and was wrapped in some of Hana's
finest kapa, and her body laid in state. While the wailing
was going on in the village, a deputation went up the
mountain to tell Hiku that his desertion had killed
Kawelu. This news touched the proud spirit and hard
heart of Hiku, and he tore out his hair and wept, for he
had all along intended to return to the village and Kawelu.
Hiku wandered out on the mountain with his staff, asking
himself what he should do to make reparation. At last
he spoke the question aloud, and the staff promptly
answered that he must bring back the spirit of Kawelu
from the land of Milu, and restore the spirit to the body.
It was not an easy matter to reach the abode of Milu,
for the great valley of Waipio, at the mouth of which is
the lua, or pit, of Milu, is quite at the other side of the




194


HAWAII NEI


island. But Hiku was determined to reach the reinga,
or leaping-place; so he lost no time, but, gathering a few
necessaries in a calabash, he started out. Before reaching
his destination, Hiku made for himself a swing of kaolivines which he bound to a koa-tree which grew conveniently near the reinga.  Now the kaoli-vine is the
Ipoula, which is own cousin to the morning-glory, and in
the South Seas grows to an enormous length. It is
very pliable, and not at all brittle, and Hiku's swing had
but one strand, in Hawaiian fashion, with a short stick
through a loop at the bottom. Astride this rope, and
across the stick, the swingers sit, facing each other, with
the heavier underneath.
Arrived at the jumping-off place, Hiku threw his
swing over the koa-tree, and anointed himself with rancid
cocoanut-oil that Milu and his subjects might think him
a person newly dead. The swing of kaoli-vines looked
long enough to lassoo the moon, and Hiku began to go
down gently, in one hand the two halves of a cocoanutshell, in which to place the captured spirit of Kawelu.
At first Hiku could see nothing. He was terribly afraid
and wished himself at home again, but the swing vibrated
in the dark, like a pendulum, and he was determined to
carry out what he had undertaken. Finally, the eyes of
the swinger became accustomed to the gloom, and he
could see thousands of spirits roaming about, chasing
butterflies and lizards, and reclining under the koa-trees,
which grow in those underground regions.
"Alas, how shall I find my dear Kawelu?" sighed
Hiku.
But he had not reckoned upon the deathless constancy
of Kawelu. She was the first to see him, and she flew




HAWAII NEI


I9S


to him and clasped him in her arms, in spite of the cocoanut-oil, which did not smell pleasant, and asked him
when he died. Hiku evaded the question, for he did
not want to frighten Kawelu away, and so he only told
her how much he loved her, and how sorry he was that
he had treated her so, and how he had intended to return
all the time. And Kawelu was so happy that she forgot
everything else, even the day of his death, and as they
talked they swung and swung in great arcs, and the
other spirits looked at them and smelled the rancid oil,
and remarked to each other that Kawelu, who had kept
much to herself, had met an old friend, and then they
went on catching butterflies. For a long time the pair
in the swing talked, Kawelu patting Hiku's cheek sometimes, and never noticing that the spirits at the bottom
of the lta were getting to look very small until, glancing
up, she saw that they were quite near the opening, and
she asked Hiku in alarm where he was taking her, for
she feared another desertion. And Hiku, who had his
cocoanut-husks all ready for this, answered not a word,
but clapped the shells over her head, and took captive
the spirit of poor Kawelu. Then he climbed up the
kaoli-vine, hand over hand, and was soon safe on the
sands of Waipio with the spirit of Kawelu in the cocoanutshell.
After a dip in the surf, Hiku started out for the leeward
side of the island, where Kawelu had formerly lived, with
the shell in one hand and the staff in the other. It was
a long way. Hiku lived on yams and wild bananas and
berries, and at every village he was invited to partake of
poi and dried fish. At last he reached the village by the
sea, at the foot of his own mountain. He went at once




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HAWAII NEI


to the house of Kawelu's father, distinguished by the
white tabu-sticks set before the door, and there he prostrated himself. The old chief was delighted to see him,
and sent at once for his principal kahuna, half doctor,
half magician, and told him that Hiku had brought back
the spirit of Kawelu from the land of Milu, and how
should they get it into her body, please?
The first thing that the kahuna did was to order the
body of Kawelu brought down from the burial-cave
where it had been laid. Retainers carried it tenderly,
wrapped in kapa, like an Egyptian mummy, and as brown
and satiny as it was the day it was embalmed and laid
away. The kahuna took the cocoanut-shell and began
his incantations. He first raised the nail of the great toe
and slipped the soul underneath.  Then he began to
press it upward. He had a hard time to get it past the
ankle-joint, but he smoothed and rubbed and patted and
pushed, and finally it slid by. There was a still harder
time to get it past the knee, but presently that, too, was
accomplished, and so it went on through the rest of the
body until it reached the heart, and then, slowly, almost
imperceptibly, the lungs of Kawelu expanded, and she
opened her eyes.
Then there was a great pounding of drums and a
shouting in the village, and all the people rejoiced that
the gentle soul of Kawelu had come home again, and the
old chief fell on Hiku's neck and thanked him. And
Hiku kissed Kaweiu, and they prepared to celebrate the
wedding. And the oddest part of it all was, that Kawelu
could remember nothing of the swing, or the nether
world.  The last thing she remembered was the vines
that grew behind Hiku, and the utter heart-weariness with




HAWAII NEI                 197
which she turned back to the village. Their marriage
was followed by a great feast, and when Kawelu's father
died, Hiku succeeded him, having as his counselors,
Kawelu his wife, Hana his mother, and his magic staff.
And Hiku loved Kawelu so well that, though by the law
of the country he was entitled to as many wives as he
chose, his affection for her occupied every nook in his
heart, and she had the distinction of being the only wife
of her husband, and in all Hawaii there was no pair so
happy.
In this wise loved Orpheus and Eurydice in Hawaii.




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RICHARD S.      V
37.7 West 48tk'




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