After this wanton massacre of innocent islanders, Metcalf returned to Hawaii and lay on and off Kealakekua Bay waiting for theFair American, which had by now arrived off Kawaihae, the seaport of the present Parker Ranch, which we had seen when we passed through.
Chief Kameeiamoku went out with a fleet of canoes as if to trade, and when the eighteen-year-old skipper of the schooner was off guard, threw him outboard and dispatched the crew with the exception of Isaac Davis, the mate.
Simultaneously, John Young, the original of the Youngs of Hawaii, found himself detained ashore, and all canoes under tabu by orders of Kamehameha, in order that Metcalf should not hear of the loss of his son and the schooner. TheEleanorcontinued lying off and on, firing signals, for a couple of days, and finally sailed for China.
John Young and Isaac Davis were eventually raised by Kamehameha to the rank of chiefs, endowed with valuable tracts of land; and they in turn lent the great moi their service of brain and hand in council and war, though carefully guarded for years whenever a foreign keel hove in sight.
Small cannon, looted from theFair Americanas well as from other vessels which had been “cut out,” were of priceless worth in the experienced hands of the white men in enabling Kamehameha eventually to win his war of conquest, especially over the Maui armies under the sons of Kahekili.
All of which is preamble to the pleasant fact that we are enviable guests of Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Shipman, of Hilo, at their volcano residence, Mrs. Shipman being the granddaughter of the gallant Isaac Davis. Also we find she is half-sister to our friend Mrs. Tommy White. Such a healthy, breezy household it is; and such a wholesome, handsome brood of young folk, under the keen though indulgent eye of this motherly deep-bosomed woman. Her three fourths British ancestry keeps firm vigilance against undue demonstration of the ease-loving strain of wayward sunny Polynesian blood she has brought to their dowry.
The tropic wine in her veins has preserved her from all age and decay of spirit. During this day and evening I have more than once failed to resist my desire to lay my tired head upon her breast, where it has been made amply welcome.
A social and domestic queen is Mrs. Shipman, and right sovranly she reigns over her quiet, resourceful Scotch spouse, in whose contented blue eye twinkles pride in her efficient handling of their family. Although models of discipline and courtesy, their offspring are brimming with hilarious humor, while ofttimes their mother’s stately, silken-holokued figure is the maypoleof a dancing, prancing romp. Those holokus are the care of the two elder daughters, who never tire of planning variations of pattern and richness, with wondrous garniture of lace and embroidery.
Mrs. Shipman—and again we are in Kakina’s debt—had telephoned our latest hostess to extend an invitation to this suburban home; and according to arrangement Jack and I met her on the up-mountain train from Hilo to the terminal station, whence the Shipman carriage carried us ten miles farther to this high house in a garden smothered in tree-ferns.
Today we had our first glimpse of Hilo, the second city of the Territory, on its matchless site at the feet of Mauna Loa, divided by two rivers, the Wailuku tearing its way down a deep and tortuous gorge. Nothing could be more impressive than the pretty town’s background of steadily rising mountain of sugar cane and forest and twisted lava-flow. The rivers are spanned by steel bridges, the main streets broad and clean and shaded by enormous trees, with many branching lanes over-arched by blossoming foliage and hedged with vines and shrubbery.
Hilo Harbor was once called after Lord Byron, cousin of the poet, who nearly a century ago dropped the anchor of his frigateBlondein the offing, and surveyed the bay as well as the Volcano Kilauea. Captain Vancouver, that thoroughgoing benefactor of Polynesia, saw the possibilities of this port, for he wrote:
“Byron Bay will no doubt become the site of the capital of the island. The fertility of the district of Hilo, ... the excellent water, and abundant fish pools which surround it, the easy access it has to the sandalwood district, and also to the sulphur, which will doubtless soon become an object of commerce, and the facilities it affords for refitting vessels, render it a place of great importance.”
“Byron Bay will no doubt become the site of the capital of the island. The fertility of the district of Hilo, ... the excellent water, and abundant fish pools which surround it, the easy access it has to the sandalwood district, and also to the sulphur, which will doubtless soon become an object of commerce, and the facilities it affords for refitting vessels, render it a place of great importance.”
It was theBlondewhich brought back in that year of 1825, to his native land the remains of KamehamehaII, Liholiho, and his queen, Kamamalu, from England, where they had been made much of at court. Both fell victims to measles—always one of the deadliest of diseases to islanders throughout the South Seas.
Poor things! Three years before, this favorite queen of Liholiho, Kamamalu, on the last day of a long revel, had been the most gorgeous object ever described by a reverend missionary:
“Thecar of statein which she joined the processions passing in different directions consisted of an elegantly modeled whaleboat fastened firmly to a platform of wicker work thirty feet long by twelve wide, and borne on the heads of seventy men. The boat was lined, and the whole platform covered, first with imported broadcloth, and then with beautiful patterns of tapa or native cloth of a variety of figures and rich colors. The men supporting the whole were formed into a solid body so that the outer rows only at the sides and ends were seen; and all forming these wore the splendid scarlet and yellow feather cloaks and helmets of which you have read accounts; and than which, scarce anything can appear more superb. The only dress of the queen was a scarlet silkpa’uor native petticoat, and a coronet of feathers. She was seated in the middle of the boat and screened from the sun by an immense Chinese umbrella of scarlet damask, richly ornamented with gilding, fringe and tassels, and supported by a chief standing behind her, in a scarletmaloor girdle, and feather helmet. On one quarter of the boat stood Karimoku (Kalaimoku) the Prime Minister, and on the other Naihe, the national orator, both also in malos of scarlet silk and helmets of feathers, and each bearing a kahili or feathered staff of state near thirty feet in height. The upper parts of these kahilis were of scarlet feathers so ingeniously and beautifully arranged on artificial branches attached to the staff as to formcylinders fifteen or eighteen inches in diameter and twelve to fourteen feet long; the lower parts or handles were covered with alternate rings of tortoise shell and ivory of the neatest workmanship and highest polish.”
King Liholiho had a very engaging streak of recklessness that more than once spread consternation amongst his following. As once in 1821, when he left Honolulu in an open boat for a short trip to Ewa. The boat was crowded with thirty attendants, including two women. But when off Puuloa, he refused to put in to the lagoon, and kept on into the very lively water around Barber’s Point. Then, with royal disregard of the fear and protests of his entourage, without water or provisions, he set the course for Kauai, ninety miles of strong head wind and sea.
“Here is your compass!” he cried to the helmsman, flinging up his right hand, the fingers spread. “Steer by this!—And if you return with the boat, I shall swim to Kauai, alone!”
Good seamanship and luck vindicated him, and they arrived safely off Waimea, Kauai, after a night of peril. And to think that themeaslesshould have had their way with such a prince as that!
From the second station out of Hilo, moored near the main wharf, we could make out the dear littleSnark.
The observation car was filled with well-to-do Hilo residents bound for the week-end at their volcano lodges, and I could see Jack planning two more island homes.
To Kilauea, at last, at last—my first volcano, albeit a more or less disappointing Kilauea these days, without visible fire, the pit, Halemaumau, only vouchsafing an exhibition of sulphurous smoke and fumes. But living volcano it is, and much alive or little, does not greatly matter. Besides, one may always hope for the maximum since Kilauea is notoriously capricious.
For eighteen miles the track up from Hilo slants almost imperceptibly, so gradual is the ascent through dense forest, largely of tree ferns, and, latterly, dead lehua overspread sumptuously with parasitic ferns and creepers. There seems no beginning nor end to the monster island. Despite the calm, vast beauty of many of its phases, one cannot help thinking of it as something sentient and threatening; of the time when it first heaved its colossal back out of the primordial slime. And it is still an island in the making.
The carriage, sent up the day before from Hilo, was driven by one Jimmy, a part-Hawaiian, part-Marquesan grandson of Kakela, a Hawaiian missionary to the Marquesas group, whose intervention saved Mr. Whalon, mate of an American vessel, from being roasted and eaten by the cannibals of Hiva-oa. Jimmy’s grandfather was rewarded by the personal gift of a gold watch from Abraham Lincoln, in addition to a sum of money from the American Government. “And don’t forget, Mate,” Jack reminded me, “your boat is next bound to the Marquesas!”
It was a hearty crowd that sat at dinner; and imagine our smacking delight in a boundless stack of ripe sweet corn-on-the-cob mid-center of the bountiful table! Among all manner of Hawaiian staples and delicacies, rendered up by sea and shore, we found one new to us—stewed ferns. Not the fronds, mind, but the stalks and stems and midribs. Served hot, the slippery, succulent lengths are not unlike fresh asparagus. The fern is also prepared cold, dressed as a salad.
The father of his flock rode in late from one of the headquarters of his own great cattle ranch, PuuOO, on Mauna Kea. These estates, in the royal manner of the land, often extend from half the colossal height of one or the other of the mountains, bending across the great valley to the nether slope of the sister mount,in a strip the senses can hardly credit, to the sea. This enables a family to enjoy homes from high altitudes, variously down to the seaside.
The flock as well as its maternal head rose as one to make their good man comfortable after his long rough miles in the saddle. In a crisp twilight, the men smoked on the high lanai, and the rest of us breathed the invigorating mountain air. It was hard to realize the nearness of this greatest of living volcanoes. Presently Jack and I became conscious of an ineffably faint yet close sound like “the tiny horns of Elfland blowing.” Crickets, we thought, although puzzled by an unwontedly sustained and resonant note in the diminutive bugling. And we were informed, whether seriously I know not, that the fairy music proceeded from landshells (Achatinella), which grow on leaves and bark of trees, some 800 species being known. Certainly therearemore things in earth and heaven—and these harmonious pixie conches, granting it was they, connoted the loftier origin. Jack’s eyes and mouth were dubious:
“I ha’e ma doots,” he softly warned; “but I hope itisa landshell orchestra, because the fancy gives you so much pleasure.”
September 8.
Kilauea, “The Only,” has a just right to this distinguished interpretation of its name, for it conforms to no preconceived idea of what a volcano should be. Not by any stretch of imagination is it conical; and it fails by some nine thousand feet of being, compared with the thirteen-odd-thousand-foot peak on the side of which it lies, a mountain summit; its crater is not a bowl of whatsoever oval or circle; nor has it ever, but once, to human knowledge, belched stone and ashes—a hundred and fifty years ago when it wiped out the bulk of ahostile army moving against Kamehameha’s hordes, thus proving to the all-conquering chief that the Goddess Pélé, who dwells in the House of Everlasting Fire, Halemaumau, was on his side.
Different from Mauna Loa’s own skyey crater, which has inundated Hawaii in nearly every direction, Kilauea, never overflows, but holds within itself its content of molten rock. It has, however, been known to break out from underneath. The vertical sides, from 100 to 700 feet high, inclose nearly eight miles of flat, collapsed floor containing 2650 acres, while the active pit, a great well some 1000 feet in diameter, is sunk in this main level.
In the forenoon we visited the Volcano House on the yawning lip of the big crater, and sat before a roomy stone fireplace in the older section, where Isabella Bird and many another wayfarer, including Mark Twain, once toasted their toes of a nipping night.
From the hotel lanai we looked a couple of miles or so across the sunken lava pan to Halemaumau, from which a column of slow, silent, white vapor rose like a genie out of underworld Arabian Nights, and floated off in the light air currents. No fire, no glow—only the ghostly, thin smoke. And this inexorable if evanescent breath of the sleeping mountain has abundant company in myriad lesser banners from hot fissures over all the surrounding red-brown basin, while the higher country, variously green or arid, shows many a pale spiral of steam.
Rheumatic invalids should thrive at the Volcano House, for this natural steam is diverted through pipes to a bath-house where they may luxuriate as in a Turkish establishment; and there is nothing to prevent them from lying all hours near some chosen hot crack in the brilliant red earth that sulphurous exudation has incrusted with sparkling yellow and white crystals.
Having arranged with Mr. Demosthenes, Greek proprietor of this house as well as the pretty Hilo Hotel, for a guide to the pit later on, Mrs. Shipman directed her coachman farther up Mauna Loa—the “up” being hardly noticeable—to see thriving as well as dead koa forest, and also the famous “tree molds.” A prehistoric lava-flow annihilated the big growth, root and branch, cooling rapidly as it piled around the trees, leaving these hollow shafts that are faithful molds of the consumed trunks.
The fading slopes of Mauna Loa, whose far from moribund crater is second in size only to Kilauea’s, beckoned alluringly to us lovers of saddle and wilderness. One cannot urge too insistently the delusive eye-snare of Hawaii’s heights, because an elastic fancy, continuously on the stretch, is needful to realize the true proportions. Today, only by measuring the countless distant and more distant forest belts and other notable features on the incredible mountain side could we gain any conception of its soaring vastitude.
For a time the road winds through rolling plains of pasture studded with gray shapes of large, dead trees, and then comes to the sawmills of the Hawaii Mahogany Company. Here we went on foot among noble living specimens of the giant koa, which range from sixty to eighty feet, their diameters a tenth of their height, with wide-spreading limbs—beautiful trees of laurel-green foliage with moon-shaped, leaf-like bracts. It was in royal canoes of this acacia, often seventy feet in length, hollowed whole out of the mighty boles, that Kamehameha made his conquest of the group, and by means of which his empire-dreaming mind planned to subdue Tahiti and the rest of the Society Group. As a by-product, the koa furnishes bark excellent for tanning purposes.
(1) Alika Lava Flow, 1919. (2) Pit of Halemanman.
(1) Alika Lava Flow, 1919. (2) Pit of Halemanman.
Great logs, hugely pathetic in the relentless clutch of machinery, were being dragged out by steel cable and donkey-engine, and piled in enormous and increasing heaps. Jack, who is inordinately fond of fine woods if they are cut unshammingly thick, left an order for certain generous table-top slabs to be seasoned from logs which we chose for their magnificent grain and texture.
In addition to their flourishing koa business, these mills are turning out five hundred ohia lehua railroad ties per day, and filling orders from the States. But one can easily predict a barren future for the forests of Hawaii if no restraint, as now, is enforced in the selection of trees.
In the bright afternoon, horseback, with a Hawaiian guide, we made descent into Kilauea.
The morning’s cursory view had been no preparation for the beautiful trail, on which we were obliged to brush aside tree-branches and ferns and berry bushes in order to see the cracking desolation of the basin. Abruptly enough, however, we debouched upon its floor, under the stiff wall we had descended, now hundreds of feet overhead. Before us lay a crusted field of copperish dull-gold, where whiffs and plumes of white rose near and far from awesome fissures—a comfortless waste without promise of security, a treacherous valley of fear, of lurking hurt, of extermination should a foot slip.
On a well-worn pathway, blazed in the least dangerous places, we traversed the strange, hot earth-substance. The horses, warily sniffing, seemed to know every yard of the way as accurately as the tiny Hawaiian guide. But I recalled Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, for at every hand yawned pitfalls large and small and most fantastic—devilish cracks issuing ceaseless scalding menace, broken crusts of cooledlava-bubble of metallic dark opalescence; jagged rents over which we hurried to avoid the hot, gaseous breath of hissing subterranean furnaces.
Now and then the guide requested us to dismount, and then led, crawling, into caverns of unearthly writhen forms of pahoehoe lava, weirdly beautiful interiors—bubbles that had burst redly in the latest overflow of Halemaumau into the main crater. On through the uncanny, distorted lavascape cautiously we fared under a cloud-rifted sky, and finally left the horses in a corral of quarried lava, thence proceeding afoot to the House of Fire.
Perched on the ultimate, toothed edge, we peered into a baleful gulf of pestilent vapors rising, forever rising, light and fine, impalpable as nightmare mists from out a pit of destruction. Only seldom, when the slight breeze stirred and parted the everlasting, unbottled vapors, were we granted a fleeting glimpse, many hundreds of feet below on the bottom of the well, of the plummetless hole that spills upward its poisonous breath. If the frail-seeming ledge on which we hung had caved, not one of us could have reached bottom alive—the deadly fumes would have done for us far short of that.
A long silent space we watched the phenomenon, thought robbed of definiteness by our abrupt and absolute removal from the blooming, springing, established world above the encircling palisade of dead and dying planetary matter. Jack’s comment, if inelegant, was fit, and without intentional levity:
“A hell of a hole,” he pronounced.
Pélé, Goddess of Volcanoes, with her family, constituted a separate class of deities, believed to have emigrated from Samoa in ancient days, and taken up their abode in Moanalua, Oahu. Their next reputed move was to Kalaupapa, Molokai, thence to Haleakala,finally coming to rest on the Big Island. In Halemaumau they made their home, although stirring up the furies in Mauna Loa and Hualalai on occasion, as in 1801, when unconsidered largess of hogs and sacrifices was vainly thrown into the fiery flood to appease thehuhu(angry) goddess. Only the sacrifice of a part of Kamehameha’s sacred hair could stay her wrath, which cooled within a day or two.
Many, doubtless, have there been of great men and women in the Polynesian race; but the fairest complement to the greatest, Kamehameha, seems to have been that flower of spiritual bravery, Kapiolani. A high princess of Hawaii, she performed what is accounted one of the greatest acts of moral courage ever known—equal to and even surpassing that of Martin Luther. Woman of lawless temperament, her imperious mind became interested in the tenets of Christianity, and swiftly she blossomed into a paragon of virtue and refinement, excelling all the sisterhood in her intelligent adoption of European habits of thought and living.
Brooding over the unshakable spell of Pélé upon her people, in defiance of their dangerous opposition, as well as that of her husband, Naihe, the national orator, she determined to court the wrath of the Fire Goddess in one sweeping denunciation and renunciation. We have it, however, that Naihe later cultivated an aloha for the missionaries, and was buried where are now only the ruined foundations of the first mission station, established by Ely and Ruggles in 1824 and 1828, mauka of Cook Monument.
It was almost within our own time, in 1824, when she set out on foot from Kaawaloa on Kealakekua Bay, a weary hundred and fifty miles, to Hilo. Word of the pilgrimage was heralded abroad, so that when she came to Kilauea, one of the pioneer missionaries, Mr.Goodrich, was already there to greet her. But first the inspired princess was halted by the priestess of Pélé, Who entreated her not to go near the crater, prophesying certain death should she violate the tabus. Kapiolani met all argument with the Scripture, silencing the priestess, who confessed thatke akua, the deity, had deserted her.
Kapiolani proceeded to Halemaumau. There in an improvised hut she spent the prayerful night; and in the morning, undeserted by her faithful train of some fourscore persons, descended over half a thousand feet to the “Black Ledge,” where, in full view and heat of the grand and awful spectacle of superstitious veneration, unflinchingly she ate of the votive berries consecrate to the dread deity. Casting outraging stones into the burning lake, she fearlessly chanted:
“Jehovah is my God!He kindled these fires!I fear thee not, Pélé!If I perish by the anger of Pélé,Then Pélé may you fear!But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,Him alone must you fear and serve!”
“Jehovah is my God!He kindled these fires!I fear thee not, Pélé!If I perish by the anger of Pélé,Then Pélé may you fear!But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,Him alone must you fear and serve!”
“Jehovah is my God!He kindled these fires!I fear thee not, Pélé!If I perish by the anger of Pélé,Then Pélé may you fear!But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,Him alone must you fear and serve!”
“Jehovah is my God!
He kindled these fires!
I fear thee not, Pélé!
If I perish by the anger of Pélé,
Then Pélé may you fear!
But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,
And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,
Him alone must you fear and serve!”
Vision how this truly glorious soul then knelt, surrounded by the bowed company of the faithful, in adoration of the Living God, while their mellow voices, solemn with supreme exaltation, rose in praise. One cannot help wondering if Mr. Goodrich, fortunate enough to experience such epochal event, was able, over and above its moral and religious significance, to sense the tremendous romance of it.
Scarcely less illuminating, was the conversion of that remarkable woman, Kaahumanu, favorite wife of Kamehameha, to whom I have already referred as one of the most vital feminine figures in Polynesian annals. Far superior in intellect to most of the chiefs, shehad been created regent upon the demise of her husband, ruling with an iron will, haughty and overbearing.
At first disdainful of the missionaries, finally her interest was enlisted in educational matters, whereupon with characteristic abandon she threw herself into the learning of the written word as well as the spoken. An extremist by nature, born again if ever was human soul, from 1825 to her death in Manoa Valley, Honolulu, in June of 1832, she held herself dedicate to the task of personally spreading virtue and industry throughout the Islands. Her last voyage was to pay a visit to Kapiolani, after which she lived to receive the fourth re-enforcement of American missionaries, who arrived in theAvericka month before her passing. The crowning triumph of her dying hours was to hold in her fingers the first complete copy of the New Testament in the Hawaiian tongue. Alexander writes:
“... Her place could not be filled, and the events of the next few years (of reaction, uncertainty, and disorder in internal affairs) showed the greatness of the loss which the nation had sustained. The ‘days of Kaahumanu’ were long remembered as days of progress and prosperity.”
“... Her place could not be filled, and the events of the next few years (of reaction, uncertainty, and disorder in internal affairs) showed the greatness of the loss which the nation had sustained. The ‘days of Kaahumanu’ were long remembered as days of progress and prosperity.”
And yet, according to all research, the ancient Hawaiians were essentially a religious people according to their lights. As already said, almost every important undertaking was led by prayer to widely diverse gods, unfortunately not all beneficent. The “witch doctor,” orkahuna, exerting a disastrous influence in all phases of racial development, has not to this day entirely ceased to blight the minds, to the actual death, of certain classes. “Praying to death” is the most potent principle of kahunaism, and in the past played an important part in holding down the population of this never-too-prolific race. One prayer alone, related at length by J. S. Emerson, enumerates elevenmethods of causing death to any subject selected, and illustrates the unsleeping brain and artistry of the sorcerers, “assassins by prayer,” who invented it. Still, kahunas were not an altogether enviable faction in the past, since on occasion they employed their own mental medicine against one another. A certain class of these metaphysicians bore a reputation of being more like evil spirits than human beings, so feared and hated that their practices constituted a boomerang, resulting in themselves being stoned to death.
All the foregoing, and more, we lazily discussed at length on the precarious shelf in Pélé’s mansion, though often speech was interrupted by sulphur fumes that blinded and suffocated. Once more in the pure air, we agreed that even in the quiescent mood of its least spectacular aspect, Kilauea is more than well worth a long voyage.
At the Volcano House, Mr. Demosthenes led the way to his guest book in the long glass sun-room, and showed many celebrated autographs, reaching back into the years. Jack, upon request, added his own sprawling, legible signature that always seems so at variance with his small hand. With a friend, our joint contribution was as follows, Jack leading off:
“‘It is the pit of hell,’ I said.
“‘Yes,’ said Cartwright (another guest). ‘It is the pit of hell. Let us go down.’
“‘And where Jack goes, there go I.’ So I followed them down.”
Next Day.
This bright, blue and crystal morning, despite the bustle of packing for the return to Hilo, Mrs. Shipman was found seated amidst cut flowers of her own tender care, weaving crisp leis for our shoulders and hats.That in itself was not surprising; but in view of the fact that she was to accompany us, it seemed the very acme and overflow of hospitality. Jack, gazing upon this mother-of-many, his eyes brimming with appreciation, broke out: “To me, Mother Shipman is the First Lady of Hawaii!”
To the garlands were added necklaces of strung berries, bright blue and hard as enamel, and strands of tiny round rosebuds, exquisite as pale corals from Naples. It was a custom in less strenuous years to present these plant-gems laid in jewel cases of fresh banana bark split lengthwise, the inside of which resembles nothing so well as mother-of-pearl.
And so, wreathed in color and perfume, we rumbled down the fragrant mountain, ourselves a moving part of the prevalent luxuriance of flower and fern and vine. One mile is as another for unspoiled beauty, though turns in the magical pathway open up pictures that surpass beauty if this may be. Great trees, living or dead, their weird roots half above ground, form hanging gardens of strange blooms and tendrilly creepers imagined of other planets or the pale dead moon. Giant ferns, their artificial-looking pedestals set inches-deep in moss on fallen trunks, crowd the impenetrable, dank undergrowth. Climbing-palms net the forest high and low with fantastic festoons, and star the glistening wildwood with point-petaled waxen blossoms of burnt-orange luster, while the decorativeie-iesets its rust-colored candelabra on twisted trunk and limb. If you never beheld else in all Hawaii Nei, the Volcano Road would impress a memory of one of the most marvelous journeys of a lifetime. Of the thirty miles, the twenty nearest to Hilo wind through this virgin forest garden, into the picturesque outskirting lanes of the old town. If I mistake not, Kakina, when Minister of the Interior, was the pioneer road-builder ofthis region. Before that, men and women made their way on foot or horseback; and Mrs. Shipman relates how she carried her babies on the saddle before her.
When the carriage left the bridge that crosses Wailuku’s roaring gorge into the Shipmans’ driveway to their castle-white house overlooking Hilo, a pair of white-gowned daughters, brunette Clara, and Caroline tawny-blonde, ran to meet mother and father and younger ones as if from long absence, and lo, also Mary, now Mrs. English, who proved to be an old classmate of Jack’s in the Oakland High School. Behind them, Uncle Alec, another hale example of Hawaii’s beneficence to the old, stood apple-cheeked and smiling under his thatch of vital, frosty hair, and joined in a welcome that seemed to seal us forever their very own.
Wainaku, September 15.
As often happens, one of our giddiest experiences came through a remembered suggestion of Mr. Ford, who has long wished to coast the cane-flumes of the Big Island. Jack made a tentative bid to the Baldings for this rather startling entertainment, and the pair entered into the spirit of the idea, which, however, was not altogether new to them.
One of the flimsy aqueducts runs just beyond their rear fence, on the seaward slope; and any week-day we can follow with our eyes the loose green faggots slipping noiselessly toward the toothed maw of the sugar mill, the whistle of which measures the working hours of its employees.
To the right is a gulch, crossed, perhaps two hundred feet in air, by the flume’s airy trestle; and over this, in swimming-suits, a merry party of us essayed the narrow footboard that accompanies the flume elbow high at one’s side.
Each had his or her own method of preserving balance, mental and bodily, above the unsettling depths. Jack sustained his confidence by letting one hand slide lightly along the edge of the flume, with the result that his palm, still calloused from theSnark’sropes, picked up an unnoticed harvest of finest splinters that gave us an hour’s work to extract. My system was first deliberately to train my eyes on the receding downward lines to the tumbling gulch-stream, and at intervals, as I walked, to touch hand momentarily to the flume. Martin, of theSnark, debonair stranger to system of any sort under any circumstances, paced undaunted halfway across, and suddenly fell exceeding sick, grasping the waterway with both hands until the color flowed back into his ashen face.
The wooden ditch is just wide enough in which to sit with elbows close, and the water flows rapidly on the gentle incline. If one does not sit very straight, he will progress on one hip, and probably get to laughing beyond all hope of righting himself. With several persons seated a hundred yards apart, the water is backed up by each so that its speed is much decreased, and there is little difficulty in regulating one’s movements and whatever speed is to be had—and mind the nails! Supine, feet-foremost, arms-under-head, the maximum is obtained; sit up, and it slackens.
It was capital fun, and, safely on the ground once more at our starting point, Jack was so possessed with the sport that he telephoned to Hilo for “hacks” to convey us a mile or so up the road to a point where the flume crosses. A laughable party were we: the men, collarless, with overcoats on top of their dripping suits, the women also in wet garments under dry ulsters.
In a sweltering canefield we were directed how to build small, flat bundles of the sweet-smelling sugar stems; then still with the fear of nails, howeversmoothed and flattened, strong upon us, remembering tragical cellar-doors of childhood, we embarked upon our sappy green rafts.
Picture lying on your back, the hour near sunset, in a tepid stream of clear mountain water, slipping along under the bluest of blue skies with golden-shadowed clouds, breathing the sun-drenched air; then lifting slowly to glance, still moving and strangely detached, over the edge, to canefields far beneath and stretching from timber line to sea rim; picking out rocky water-courses, toy bridges and houses, and Lilliputian people going about their business on the verdant face of earth; while not far distant a gray-and-gold shower-curtain rainbow-tapestried, blows steadily to meet you in midair, tempering the vivid peacock hues of sea and sky and shore. In the void betwixt ourselves and the shimmering green earth, ragged bundles of cane, attached to invisible wires, drawn as by a spell toward the humming mill at sea-rim, looked for all the world like fleeing witches on broomsticks, with weird tattered garments straight behind. You glide in an atmosphere of fantasy, “so various, so beautiful, so new,” in which every least lovely happening is the most right and natural, no matter how unguessed before.
Over-edge and on the ground again, at exactly the proper spot to obviate feeding one’s shrinking toes into the cane grinder, one can only think of a longer ride next time—perhaps with a ten-mile-away start.
Belike our latest skipper is a better man at sea than ashore. Certain rumors lead us to this hazard. Perhaps a professional sailor is always “a sailor ashore”; and doubtless the captain has by now read my easy-going husband well enough to know that he will not be left to settle the personal bills incurred in Hilo over and above his salary.
Hilo, October 7.
Tomorrow the dream-freightedSnark, carrying only three of her initial adventurers, Jack, Martin Johnson, and myself, sails from Hilo for the Marquesas Islands lying under the Line, toward which Jack’s sea-roving spirit has yearned from boyhood, since first he devoured Melville’s tale, “Typee,” of months guarded in the cannibal valley on Nuka-Hiva. I, even, have early memories of the same incomparable record. And soon, by the favor of wind and current, we shall drop our modern patent hook in Melville’s very anchorage at Taiohae Bay, which was also that of Robert Louis Stevenson’sCascoin later years; and together we shall quest inland to Typee Vai.
Besides the captain, there is a new Dutch sailor, Herrmann de Visser, delft-blue of eye, and of a fair white-and-pinkness of skin that no lifetime of sea-exposure has tarnished. The berth of the sorely regretted Tochigi, who could never outlive seasickness, is occupied by a brown manling of eighteen, Yoshimatsu Nakata, a moon-faced subject of the Mikado, who speaks, and kens not, but one single word of English, same being the much overtaxed Yes; but his blithe eagerness to cover all branches of the expected service promises well. Martin has been graduated from galley into engine-room; and Wada, a Japanese chef of parts, bored with routine of schooner schedule between San Francisco and Hilo, is in charge of our “Shipmate” range and perquisites in the tiny, below-deck galley.
We had confidently assumed, after four months’ repairing in Honolulu, that the new break in the seventy-horse-power engine could easily be mended, and that in a week or ten days at most we might resume the voyage. But alas, as fast as one weakness was dealt with another appeared, until even thatlong-suffering patience which Jack displays in the larger issues, was worn to a thread. At times I could see that he was restless and unhappy, though he worked doggedly at his novel.
Among other exasperating discoveries, the cause of a hitherto unaccountable pounding of the engine was found to lie in an awryness of the bronze propeller blades, probably caused at the time the yacht was allowed to fall through the inadequate ways in the shipyard at San Francisco. This corrected, something else would go wrong, until we became soul-sick of sailing dates and hope deferred.
One day, packed and ready for an early departure, Jack, who had answered the telephone ring, called that the captain wanted to talk to me. As I passed Jack whimsically remarked: “I hope it isn’t something so bad he doesn’t want to break it tome!”
It was precisely that, and the captain’s opening words made me swallow hard and brace for the worst.
Some day I may learn that inSnarkaffairs nothing is too dreadfully absurd nor absurdly dreadful to occur. This time the five-horse-power engine that runs the lights had fractured its bedplate, and the repairs would hold theSnarkin port at least a week longer. This engine and the big one are of different makes, built in different parts of the United States; and yet each had been set in a flawed bedplate! Jack was forced to laugh. “I see these things happen, but I don’t believe them!” he repeated an old remark. We named no more sailing dates for a while—until to-day, whenalmostwe believe we shall get away to-morrow at two o’clock. In our cool bathroom lie the farewell leis, of roses, and violets, mailé and ginger, that the Shipman girls, entirely undiscouraged by the remembrance of more than one withered supply, have already woven.
In face ofSnarkannoyance, our more than kind friends have seemed to redouble their efforts to beguile us from the not unreasonable fear of outstaying our welcome. Always the carriage is at our disposal, and beautiful saddlers.
One day the girls have taken us horseback to see where the latest lava-flow encroached to within five miles of the town, threatening to engulf it. This having been in 1881, the inhabitants probably thought Mother Shipton’s notorious prophecy was coming to pass.
Another fine afternoon, to Rainbow Falls we rode, to which no photograph, nor even painting, can do justice, because the approach is impossible to the use of lens or brush. One rides peacefully along a branch trail from the road, when unexpectedly, into a scene that has hinted no chasm or stream, there bursts a cataract of the Wailuku, eighty feet, into a green shaft lined with nodding ferns, where the fall, on a rainless day, sprays its deep pool with rainbows. Farther up the Wailuku, reached on foot from the main drive through cane fields, there is a succession of pools in the lava river-bed, known as the Boiling Pots from the wild swirling of cascading waters. They form a close rival to the beauty of Rainbow Falls.
One favorite spot to me will always remain the boat landing at Waiakea village, at the mouth of the Waiakea river, on Hilo’s southwestern edge. This little settlement in 1877 was washed away by a wave caused by an earthquake in Peru. It is an essentially oriental picture, except for haoles and Hawaiians arriving or departing in ship’s boats. It is a sequestered nook of Nippon; from the sea approached under a bridge, and partially bounded by rickety, balconied houses, hung with colorful Japanese signs and flags and rags. Downthe marshy little river, after turbulent weather, come the most fairy-like floating islets, forested in miniature with lilac-tinted lilies. Past the bannered buildings and the brilliantly painted sampans, under the bridge they move in the unhurrying flood, on and out to sea; to me, following their course, freighted with dreams.
There came a day of “Hilo rain,” when Mrs. Shipman tucked us into the curtained rig and haled us about town to observe an example of what the burdened sky can do in this section. Since Hiloites must endure the violent threshing of crystal plummets from their overburdened sky, they wisely make of it an asset. The annual rainfall is 150 inches against Honolulu’s 35 on the lee side of Oahu. And we must see Rainbow Fall, now an incredibly swollen, sounding young Niagara born of the hour. Chaney wrote: “It rains more easily in Hilo than anywhere else in the known world.... We no longer demurred about the story of the Flood.... Let no man be kept from Hilo by the stories he may hear about its rainfall. Doubtless they are all true; but the natural inference of people accustomed to rain in other places is far from true. There is something exceptional in this rain of Hilo. It is never cold, hardly damp even. They do say that clothes will dry in it. It is liquid sunshine, coming down in drops instead of atmospheric waves.... Laugh if you will, and beg to be excused, and you will miss the sweetest spot on earth if you do not go there.” And that is Hilo.
Aboard theSnark, October 7.
Half-past one, and early aboard. With the help of moon-faced, smiling Nakata, all luggage has been stowed shipshape in our wee staterooms, and we await a few belated deliveries from the uptown shops, and the friends who are to see us off.
Frankly, I am nervous. All forenoon, doing final packing, I have startled at every ring of the telephone, apprehensive of some new message of the Inconceivable and Monstrous quivering on the wire. And Jack—has done his thousand words as usual on the novel,Martin Eden.
He now stands about the shining, holystoned deck, unconsciously lighting cigarettes without number, and as unconsciously dropping them overboard half-smoked or dead full-length. He is not talking much, but nothing of the spic-and-span condition of his boat escapes his pleased blue sailor eye. And he hums a little air. Over and above the antic luck that has stalked her since the laying of her iron keel, theSnarkindubitably remains, as Jack again assures, “the strongest boat of her size ever built”; and we both love her every pine plank, and rib of oak, and stitch of finest canvas.
Later: We got over the good-byes somehow—even the Shipmans’ Uncle Alec came to see us off. I hope nothing better than to have a kiss of welcome from the old, old man years hence when we come again to beautiful Hilo, which means “New Moon,” fading yonder against the vast green mountain in a silver rain.
“And there isn’t one of them ever expects to lay eyes on us again,” Jack laughed low to me as the captain pulled the bell to the engine-room for Martin to start the bronze propeller, and the little white yacht began to stand out from the wharf on her outrageous voyage. They tried their best to look cheerful, dear friends all, and Mrs. Balding’s “Do youreallythink you’ll ever come back alive?” would have been funny but for the unshed tears in her violet eyes. Little convinced was she, or any soul of them, by Jack’s vivid disquisition on this “safest voyage in the world.”
Waving our hands and calling last good-byes, we made our way out through no floating isles of amethyst lilies from the Waiakea River’s marshes, for Hilo Bay lies clear and blue, in a fair afternoon that gives herald of a starry night. The captain of the BarkAnnie Johnson, in port, a favorite poker antagonist of Jack’s the past week, accompanied us a distance in the Iron Works engineer’s launch, and the big American-Hawaiian freighter,Arizonan, unloading in the stream, with a Gargantuan sonorous throat saluted the tinySnark, who answered with three distinct if small toots of her steam-whistle.
A westering sun floods with golden light the city brightening from a silver shower, and we know that some at least of her thoughts are with us happy estrays on the “white-speck boat” adventuring the pathless ocean.
And one beside me in a hushed voice repeats:
“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,And the deuce knows what we may do—But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trailWe’re down, hull down on the long Trail—the trail that is always new!’”
“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,And the deuce knows what we may do—But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trailWe’re down, hull down on the long Trail—the trail that is always new!’”
“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,And the deuce knows what we may do—But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trailWe’re down, hull down on the long Trail—the trail that is always new!’”
“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And the deuce knows what we may do—
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail
We’re down, hull down on the long Trail—the trail that is always new!’”
Thus, on our Golden Adventure, we set out to sea once more, answering its clear call; and it is Good-by Hawaii—Hawaii of love and unquestioning friendship without parallel. Her sons and daughters, they have been kind beyond measure.
Great love to you, Hawaii—“until we meet again,” the words of your sweetest song of parting grief and joyful welcome:
“Aloha oe.”