[2]In 1921—114,879.
[2]
In 1921—114,879.
[3]One statesman of the old régime, however, tells me this: “But for her determination to ‘rule’ instead of ‘reign’ as a constitutional sovereign, Liliuokalani might have lived and died a queen, with no stronger support than those who deposed her.”
[3]
One statesman of the old régime, however, tells me this: “But for her determination to ‘rule’ instead of ‘reign’ as a constitutional sovereign, Liliuokalani might have lived and died a queen, with no stronger support than those who deposed her.”
[4]In 1916 a specimen of the yellow-fin tuna sold in the Honolulu market weighing 287 pounds. The record yellow-fin tuna at Santa Catalina Island, California, was 51 pounds.
[4]
In 1916 a specimen of the yellow-fin tuna sold in the Honolulu market weighing 287 pounds. The record yellow-fin tuna at Santa Catalina Island, California, was 51 pounds.
[5]A few weeks after our ascent, one of the Japanese laborers fell 1500 feet in the clear.
[5]
A few weeks after our ascent, one of the Japanese laborers fell 1500 feet in the clear.
[6]Another way has been devised for the traveler who would see the Ditch Trail: by automobile from Wailuku to Pogue’s, thence on foot (stopping overnight at a rest house in Keanae Valley), to Nahiku on the coast, where a steamer calls. It is possible to travel by rail from Wailuku to Haiku, about nine miles from Pogue’s, and begin the “hike” at Haiku. The railway terminus is the home-steading settlement, and the railway ride is of unique interest.
[6]
Another way has been devised for the traveler who would see the Ditch Trail: by automobile from Wailuku to Pogue’s, thence on foot (stopping overnight at a rest house in Keanae Valley), to Nahiku on the coast, where a steamer calls. It is possible to travel by rail from Wailuku to Haiku, about nine miles from Pogue’s, and begin the “hike” at Haiku. The railway terminus is the home-steading settlement, and the railway ride is of unique interest.
[7]Ours was the last party that ever crossed this bridge. A new one was hung shortly afterward.
[7]
Ours was the last party that ever crossed this bridge. A new one was hung shortly afterward.
[8]Burned in 1920.
[8]
Burned in 1920.
[9]In a latePacific Commercial Advertiser, I notice the following cable:“Washington, August 13, 1917.Favorable report was made to the Senate to-day on the bill to empower the Hawaiian Legislature to extend suffrage to women and submit the question to voters of the territory.”
[9]
In a latePacific Commercial Advertiser, I notice the following cable:
“Washington, August 13, 1917.
Favorable report was made to the Senate to-day on the bill to empower the Hawaiian Legislature to extend suffrage to women and submit the question to voters of the territory.”
The other day a man stood, uncovered, beside the red bowlder that marks by his own wish the ashes of JackLondon, upon the little Hill of Graves on his beloved Ranch in the Valley of the Moon. Set in indestructible cement, about those ashes—for he desired to rest in the ashes rather than any dust of him—are wrapped two cherished leis of ilima that he had brought withered from Hawaii.
The man, there among the trees of the whispering ridge, told me how, only a week earlier, he had been talking with a simple ukulele-player in a Hawaiian orchestra at one of the San Francisco theaters. The Hawaiian boy had spoken haltingly, with emotion:
“Better than any one, heknewus Hawaiians... Jack London, the Story Maker.... The news came to Honolulu—and people, they seemed to have lost a great friend—auwe! They could not understand.... They could not believe. I tell you this: Better than any one, he knew us Hawaiians.”
Months before, a friend wrote from Honolulu: “These many weeks, when two or three who knew him meet upon the street, they do not speak. They cannot speak. They only clasp hands and weep.”
And another: “Jack’s death has done a wonderful thing. It has brought together so many of his friends who had not known one another before. More—it has brought together even those of his friends who did not previously care-to know one another.”
What sweeter requiem could be his?
It was not an easy nor a quick matter for Jack London to earn his kamaainaship. Nor did he in any way beg the favor. Time only has been the proof whether his two stories, “The Sheriff of Kona” and “Koolau the Leper,” have made one tourist stay his foot from the shores of the Hawaiian Islands.
And yet, these stories, works of art that had nothing to do with his visit to Molokai, in no way counteracting,to his judgment, the admitted benefit of his article on the Settlement, were the cause of bitter feelings and recriminations from what of provincialism there was in Hawaii—and was ever island territory that was not provincial? “Provincial they are,” reads a penciled note of Jack’s: “which is equally true, nay, more than true, of New York City.”
And untrue things were spoken and printed of Jack. Erect, on his “two hind legs,” as was his wont, he defended himself. In the pages of Lorrin A. Thurston’sPacific Commercial Advertiser, following certain remarks of the editor, Jack and Kakina had it out, hammer and tongs, without mincing of the English, as good friends may and remain good friends. Even now, it is with reminiscent smile of appreciation for the heated pair of them that I turn over the pages of Jack’s huge clipping scrapbook of 1910, forgotten the grave on the Little Hill, and once more live in memory of that brilliant discussion and Jack’s hurt and indignation that he should have been accused of abusing hospitality. There is no space here for the published letters; and besides, it is the long run of events that counts.
Kamaaina, desire of his heart, he became, until, in the end, the Hawaiians offered him that most honored name in their gift. In Hawaiian historical events, Kamehameha I was the only hero ever designated
“Ka Olali o Hawaii nui Kuaulii ka moa mahi i ku i ka moku,”
“Ka Olali o Hawaii nui Kuaulii ka moa mahi i ku i ka moku,”
which is to say,
“The excellent genius who excelled at the point of the spear all the warriors of the Hawaiian Islands, and became the consolidator of the group.”
“The excellent genius who excelled at the point of the spear all the warriors of the Hawaiian Islands, and became the consolidator of the group.”
And to Jack London, this is their gift:
“Ka Olali o kapeni maka kila.”“By the point of his pen his genius conquered all prejudice and gave out to the world at large true facts concerning the Hawaiian people and other nations of the South Seas.”
“Ka Olali o kapeni maka kila.”
“By the point of his pen his genius conquered all prejudice and gave out to the world at large true facts concerning the Hawaiian people and other nations of the South Seas.”
We came back, as we had always known we should.
TheSnark’svoyage ended untimely in 1909—because we paid too little heed to Dr. E. S. Goodhue’s warnings against “speeding up” in the tropics. Jack’s articles, collected under the title of “The Cruise of theSnark” and my journal book, “The Log of theSnark,” tell the story of the wonderful traverse as far as it attained. To this day, friend and stranger alike occasionally write from the South Seas that the littleSnark, now schooner-rigged, has put in at this bay or that in the New Hebrides, under the flag of our French Allies—SnarkNumber One of a fleet ofSnarkstrading and recruiting in the cannibal isles.
We came back: and on the wharf at Honolulu that morning of theMatsonia’sarrival, March 2, 1915, in the crowd we thrilled to meet the eyes of many friends who had kept us a-tiptoe for days aboard ship with their welcoming wireless Alohas and invitations.
An amusing incident did much to mellow the pleasure-pang of our meeting. Nearest the stringer-piece of the pier stood a brown-tanned girl in an adorable bonnet of roses, her dark eyes searching the high steamer rail.
“Gee! what a pretty girl!” exclaimed a voyage acquaintance at our elbow. “Wouldn’t you take her for at least half-white?” Jack, following the directing gesture, enthusiastically agreed that she must be “all of hapa-haole,” and added:
“Furthermore, I’ll show you something; I’ll throw her a kiss, see? and I’ll bet you ‘even money’ that she’ll respond. Is it a go?—you just watch.”
And the conspicuous wafted caress arresting her eye, the young woman answered with blown kisses and outstretched brown arms.
“Gee!” was the awed whisper. “Are they all like that?”
It was Beth Wiley, my cousin from California—who is as much or as little Spanish as I, but shows it more. By several months she had preceded us, and had become well-tanned by unstinted sunning on the beach at Waikiki.
The malihini’s confusion was almost pathetic when Jack introduced “Mrs. London’s cousin—I taught her to swim when she was a gangly kid!” and he continued mischievously, “I’ll leave it to you, Beth, to convince him thatpartof that color of yours has been acquired since last I saw you!”
Tremulous with memory of those hack-drives in the silver and lilac dawns of eight years gone, we entered an automobile in the crush outside the wharf’s great sheds, and proceeded to the Alexander Young Hotel for one night. Kilauea being in eruption, we were to return aboard theMatsonianext day for the round trip to Hilo.
On this short voyage, for the first time from sea vantage, we saw the Big Island’s green cliffs, stepped in dashing surf and fringed with waterfalls, Mauna Kea’s fair knees and lap of sugar cane extending into the broad belt of clouds—and, glory of glories, Mauna Kea’s wondrous morning face white and still against the intense blue sky.
At Hilo, we were met by Mr. R. W. Filler, manager of Mr. Thurston’s concrete dream of a Hilo Railroad, over which, in an automobile on car wheels, we made the thirty-four miles to Paauilo in the Hamakua District, and knew it to be one of the most scenically beautiful rail journeys we had ever had the good fortune to travel. It was hard to realize the accomplishment of these trestles, one horseshoe of which, weunderstood, is the most acute broad gauge in existence. And thus, high in a motorcar, upon steel tracks, we looked fascinated into the depths of the same gulches, unbridged and perilous in Isabella Bird’s time, and laboriously journeyed by ourselves nearly a decade ago. Sections of the railroad, instead of imitating the bluff coast line, run through passes that have been sliced deep through the bluffs themselves, the narrow cuts already blossoming like greenhouses.
Beaching the terminal, Paauilo, a pretty spot on the seaward edge of a sugar plantation, we lunched in a rustic hotel, before starting on the return. Part-way back, we left the train, at a station where Mr. Filler had been especially urged by Kakina to have an automobile waiting to take us mauka to the Akaka Fall, seldom visited and rather difficult of access. A muddy tramp in a shower brought us to the fall—a streaming ribbon five hundred feet long, trailing into an exquisitely lovely cleft, earth and rocks completely hidden by maiden-hair and other small ferns. The origin of Akaka is told in a charming legend.
Strange it seemed to speed over the red road to Hilo in a “horseless carriage,” reminiscent as we were of the four-mule progress of yore. Good it was to meet up once more with the Baldings, Mrs. Balding dimpling at Jack’s reminder of her pessimism concerning theSnark; and with Jack’s First Lady of Hawaii, “Mother” Shipman, her Hawaiian curls perhaps more silvery, but her face beaming as ever. And there was Uncle Alec, smiling only more benignly.
Next morning, in an unyieldingly new hired machine, up mountain we fared, noting a lessening of the forestage along the route, due to the encroachment of sugar cane. In some of the cleared areas we recognized the familiar ’ava plant of the South Seas. Still remained untouched stretches, as of a dream within a dream forbeauty, and again I could vision the evanescent minarets and airy spans of the Palace of Truth I had once liked to fancy growing before my eyes in the delicate tracery of parasite foliage. Nothing seen in all theSnark’scoming and going among the isles under the Line had surpassed this enchanted wood.
Saving the Volcano for evening, we spent the day horseback, visiting Kilauea’s environs of sister craters, some still breathing and others dead and cold, shrouded in verdure. Kalauea-iki, one of the nearest to the Volcano House and the new Crater Hotel, is an 800-foot deep sink, with a diameter of half a mile. The neighborhood is pitted with these void caldrons, and one could spend wonderful weeks in the jungle trails. The Thurstons have made a study of the region, and find it one of the most interesting in the Islands. Into a number of the more important craters we peered, and our native guide finally led the way up Puuhuluhulu around whose mellifluous name we had been rolling our tongues from Honolulu, where Kakina’s last adjuration was not to miss a sight of this particular blowhole.
Leaving the animals with the sandwich-munching guide, we carried our own lunch to the summit, where, prone, we lay with faces over the edge of the bewitching inverted cone. For an hour, like foolish children, we played with our fantasy, planning the most curious of all contemplated Hawaii dwellings, this time in the uttermost depths of Puuhuluhulu’s riotous natural fernery, with a possible glass roof over the entire crater!
Already, as we returned, low-pressing clouds above Kilauea were alight with the intense red-rose glow of Halemaumau. And no remembered volcano of Tana or Savaii made me any less excited at prospect of at last beholding Pélé’s boiling well.
(1) Kahilis at Funeral of Prince David Kawananakoa. (2) Kamehameha the Great. (3) and (4) Sport of Kings.
(1) Kahilis at Funeral of Prince David Kawananakoa. (2) Kamehameha the Great. (3) and (4) Sport of Kings.
Not by the old trans-basin trail did we pilgrimage to the House of Everlasting Fire, but upon a new road graded through veriest stage-scenery of ohia and tree ferns, a fairyland in the brilliant headlights. One encircles nearly half of the great sink until, on the southeastern section, the road winds down westerly and across the floor to Halemaumau.
It was weird; and weirder still it became when, within a few minutes’ walking distance of the pit, the car, making for a walled parking circle, ran into a waft of steam like a tepid pink fog. Out of this, or into it, the eyes of an oncoming machine took form, burning larger and brighter through the downy smother, and safely passing our own.
A well-defined pathway is worn in the gritty lava to the southeast edge. Soon we were settled there waiting for the warm mists to incline the other way and disclose the disturbance of liquid earth that we could hear hissing softly, heavily, hundreds of feet beneath, like the sliding fall of avalanches muffled by distance and intervening masses of hills.
Then, suddenly, the mist drafted in a slanting flight toward the western crags, sucked clear of the inland sea of incredible molten solids. Open-mouthed we gazed into the earth and saw nothing akin to the colored representations of Halemaumau, but a tortured, crawling surface of grayish black, like a mantle thrown over slow-wrestling Titans in a fitful, dying struggle. Then a crack would show—not red, but an intensely luminous orange flame-color—a glimpse of earth’s hot blood. As our eyes became accustomed to the heaving skin of the monstrous tide, they could follow the rising, slow-flowing, lapsing waves that broke sluggishly against an iron-bound shore. And never a wave of the fiery liquid but left some of itself on the black strand, its ruthless, heavy-flung comb resistlessly imposing coatupon coat of rocky gore that cooled, at least in comparison to its source, in upbuilding process. Once in a while a bubble would rise out in the central mass, and burst info a fountain of intolerably brilliant orange fluid, its scorching drops fading on the dense black surge.
From the seduction of its merest smoke display to this deep-sunk eruption of 1915, the House of Fire is all one in its confounding marvel.
That night, when the first vivid crack broke the oily dark surface, Jack, with a gasp of delight, seized my hand, lighted a match above it, and peered closely at a big black opal, precious loot of Australia’s Lightning Ridge, that I had named “Kilauea” before ever we had seen Pélé’s colors. Tipping the stone from slanting plane to plane, its blue-gray dull face cracked into flaming lines for all the world like the phenomenon before us in the wounded side of Mauna Loa—a truer replica of Halemaumau than any painting.
Upon our return, Mr. Demosthenes had the old guest book lying open in the same long glass room, and again we read the page written years before.
“Be sure, now, Lakana,” had been another final behest of Kakina’s, “to call up Col. Sam Johnson in Pahoa, when you get to Hilo. I’m writing him to expect to take you from the Volcano down to Puna. Never saw such a man forpunch.”
Next morning the Colonel arrived at the Volcano House, and drove us by way of Hilo to Pahoa, where he is in charge of the lumber mill.
Nine miles from Hilo, at the mill of the enormous Olaa Sugar Plantation, we branched off southwest on the picturesque Puna Road. Once clear of certain beautiful miles of jungle, it crosses an interesting if monotonous desert of aged lava, supporting a sparsegrowth of lehua and ohia, and pasturage for cattle of the Shipmans and others. Mauna Kea and her sister mountain were good to us that day, for both going and returning we had fair view of their snowy springtime summits.
The mill at Pahoa demonstrated to us how the forests of lehua, koa, the ohia, and all the valuable hard timber of the rich woods is converted into merchantable lumber. And we came away with a handsome souvenir, a precious calabash of kou wood (now almost extinct, owing to an insect that deprives the tree of its leaves, heavy and polished like mottled brown marble), a product of the mill.
After luncheon there were summoned three part-Hawaiian sisters, cultured and modest-mannered, to sing. And there, my initial time in the District of Puna—scene of Tully’s “Bird of Paradise,”—quite unexpectedly I learned something of what these isles of theSnark’sfirst landfall meant to me. While the contralto and treble of their limpidezzo voices sang the beloved old “Sweet Lei Lehua,” “Mauna Kea,” the “Dargie Hula,” and the heart-compelling “Aloha oe,” suddenly I fell a-weeping, quite overwhelmed with all the unrealized pent emotion of what I had seen and felt the preceding days, and the gracious memories that flooded back from the older past. Andauwé, murmured the dusky sisters, hovering about me in solicitude.
Once more at Hilo Harbor, theMatsonia, out in the stream, her siren sounding the warning hour, was reached by launch from the pretty oriental waterside at the mouth of the Waiakea. Our eyes were more than a little wistful as in memory we sailed out with theSnark. But we did it! “With our own hands we did it,” thus Jack; and the glamorous voyage was now anaccomplished verity, from which we had come back very much alive and unjaded.
Back in Honolulu at daybreak, Jack declined to be ousted by any officious steward until the final period was dotted to his morning’s ten pages. Eventually he issued upon deck almost into the arms of Alexander Hume Ford, whom we were no end glad to see, buoyant and incessant as ever, brimful of deeds for the advantage of Hawaii as ever he had been of their visioning.
The first responsibility, not to be neglected for a single hour, was the hunting of a habitation that we might call our own for the time being. Beth had reported the total failure of her exhaustive search. Honolulu was chock-a-block with tourists. “Beginning to realize what they’ve got,” Jack observed with satisfaction, though a trifle put out that his prophesied appreciation of the Islands by the mainlanders should interfere with his own getting of a roof-shelter.
We learned from one of the large Trust Companies that a cottage on Beach Walk, a newly opened residence street not far from the Seaside Hotel, was to be let a couple of months hence. We found it eminently suitable for our little household of four, for Beth was to be one of us, and Nakata, as usual, was our shadow. Next we devoted all our powers to persuade the somewhat flustered owners that they needed an earlier visit to the Pan-American Exposition than they had planned; and proceeded to move in before they could change their minds, while Jack wirelessed to the Coast for Sano, our cook.
Not a day passed, before, in swimming suits, we walked down Kalia Road to the old Seaside Hotel, and once more felt underfoot the sands of Waikiki. But such changes had been wrought by sea and mankindthat we could hardly believe our eyes, and needed a guide to set us right.
The sands, shifting as they do at irregular periods, had washed away from before the hotel, leaving an uninviting coral-hummock bottom not to be negotiated comfortably except at high tide, and generally shunned. A forbidding sea-wall buttressed up the lawn of the hotel while the only good beach was the restricted stretch between where the row of cottages once had begun, and the Moana Hotel.
And what had we here? In place of those little weather-beaten houses and the brown tent, the Outrigger Canoe Club had established its bathhouses, separate club lanais for women and men, and, nearest the water, a large, raised dancing-lanai, underneath which reposed a fleet of great canoes, their barbaric yellow prows ranged seaward. At the rear, in a goodly line of tall lockers, stood the surf-boards, fashioned longer and thicker than of yore, of the members of the Canoe Club.
A steel cable, whiskered with seaweed, anchored on the beach, extended several hundred yards into deeper water where a steel diving-stage had been erected. Upon it dozens of swimmers, from merest children with their swimming teachers, to old men, were making curving flights inside the breakers. Several patronesses of the Club give their time on certain days of the week, from the women’s lanai inconspicuously chaperoning the Beach.
The only landmark recognizable was the date-palm still flourishing where had once been a corner of our tent-house, now become a sheltering growth with yard-long clusters of fruit, and we were told it was known as the “Jack London Palm.” For it might be said that in its shadow Jack wove his first tales of Hawaii.
All this progress meant Ford! Ford! Ford! Everywhere evidence of his unrelaxing brain and energy met the eye. But he, in turn, credits Jack with having done incalculably much toward bringing the splendid Club into existence, by his article on surf-board riding, “A Royal Sport.” Largely on the strength of the interest it aroused, Mr. Ford had been enabled to keep his word to Jack that he would make surf-boarding one of the most popular pastimes in Hawaii. Upon his representations the Queen Emma estate, at a lease of a few dollars a year to be contributed to the Queen’s Hospital, which her Majesty had established, had set aside for the Club’s use this acre of ground, which, with the revival of surf-boarding, was now become almost priceless.
Queen Emma was the wife of Kamehameha IV, mother of the beautiful “Prince of Hawaii,” who died in childhood, herself granddaughter of John Young, and adopted daughter of an English physician, Dr. Rooke, who had married her aunt, Kamaikui. The Queen owned this part of the Beach, from which her own royal canoes were launched in the good old days, and where she also used the surf-board.
“Her estate holds this land,” Ford had said in 1907, “and I’m going to secure it for a Canoe Club. I don’t know how; but I’m just going to.”
Honolulu had of course altered, and grown. New streets, like this our Beach Walk, had been laid on filled marshlands at Waikiki, and bordered with bungalows set in unfenced lawns, while the lilied area of duck-ponds along Kalakaua Avenue had shrunken to the same populous end. Beyond the Moana, Heinie’s, an open-air café chantant—and dansant—beguiled the up-to-date residents and tourists, and a roof-garden, with like facilities, was bruited for the Alexander Young. The Country Club, out Nuuanu, boasted whatwe heard many a mainlander term “the finest golf-links anywhere.” Diamond Head’s rosy cradle had become unapproachable as a heavily fortified military position. Residential districts of beautiful homes had extended well into the valleys; some of the vernal ridges of Honolulu’s background had blossomed into alluring building-sites, such as Pacific Heights; and Tantalus was developing its possibilities. Kaimuki, on the rolling midlands beyond Kapiolani Park, formed quite a little city by itself. Kaimuki’s red lands, on the side of the gentle, seaward-tipped bowl that holds Honolulu, seemed always to be brushed by the raveled ends of rainbow-opal scarves. Never in the minds of living men, due to the continuous storms that year, were there such rainbows over Oahu. We lay, Jack and I, floating on the green hills of water beyond the inshore surges, and bathed our very souls in heavenly color. To mauka, out of deep blue skies pearled with magnificent clouds, out of the warm palpitant chaos of reflected sunset over against the eastern mountains, came the miracle, the rainbows, formless, generous, streaming banners of immaterial, loosely-banded colors, frayed with melting jewels that softly drenched the ruby and emerald vale and foothills. If I should have to live in a house for the rest of my days, I should call upon my memory of Oahu’s rainbow-tapestried skies, and dwell within that memory.
Automobile traffic had drawn the island closer together, and a drive around Oahu, by the route we had formerly traveled, was more often accomplished in one day. Once we spent a night on Kahuku Plantation, and visited the huge Marconi Wireless Station near by. Our return to Honolulu was made by way of the railroad around the extreme western end of the island. This trip should not be missed, for it shows aremarkable coast line, and splendid valleys of the mountain ranges, on the slopes of which one may still see the ruins of stone walls and habitations of long-dead generations. Automobile picnics from Diamond Head to Koko Head, and others over the Nuuanu Pali to points on the eastern shore, like Kailua and Waimanalo bays, together with a visit to Kaneohe Bay and its wondrous coral gardens, with swimming and sailing in pea-green water over jet-black volcanic sands, nearly completes the circuit one may make of this protean isle.
That summer of 1915, during a warm spell in town, bag and baggage we moved for a week to the little hotel at Kaneohe Bay. Each time we emerged over the Pali into the valley of the Mirrored Mountains, Jack would exclaim at the vast pineapple planting that had flowed over the carmine hillocks below. Instead of bemoaning this encroachment of man upon the natural beauty of the landscape, Jack hailed it with acclaim. To those who deprecated the invasion he would cry:
“I love to see the good rich earth being made to work, to produce more and better food for man. There is always plenty of untouched wild that will not produce food. Every time I open up a new field to the sun on the ranch, there is a hullabaloo about the spoiling of natural beauty. Meantime, I am raising beautiful crops to build up beautiful draft-animals and cattle—improving, improving, trying to help the failures among farmers to succeed.And, don’t you see? don’t you see?—there’s always plenty of wild up back. To me the change is from one beauty to another; and the other, in turn, goes to make further beauty of animal life, and more abundance for man.”
Indeed, from its small beginnings of but a few years before, the pineapple industry had risen to the second in importance in the Islands, giving place only to sugar.The exported product alone, for 1914, had been valued at $6,000,000.00.[10]
Mr. Thurston took us horseback on one of the most interesting and least known jaunts on Oahu. From Kaneohe we held east a quarter-mile to the sandy mouth of the Kaneohe River, across a spit of mountain-washed debris, through abandoned fishing villages and little tufts of groves; thence along an arm of the bay, outside the ancient barrier of a fish pond nearly half a mile in diameter, where the tide washed our horses’ flanks.
We attained to a plain partially covered with sand and sand hills drifted up out of the ocean, and rode upon a dead coral bed formerly undersea, which had been elevated several feet by volcanic action. Northwest to the point at the entrance to Kaneohe Bay, from a small fishing village we climbed a low cone to see the ruins of an old heiau, where some seventy years ago a church was erected by the pioneer Catholics. It is now in ruins, for the inhabitants, numbering several hundreds, have passed away. The pathetic remains of their little rocky homes can still be seen scattered about the slopes of the green hills and upon surrounding levels, where plover run, with skylarks soaring overhead. And for the first time in our lives, in this lonely deserted spot we listened to the celestial caroling of those lovely flying organisms, English skylarks, which our old friend, Governor Cleghorn, now dead, first imported from New Zealand. Ainahau, auwe and ever auwe, had been broken up into town lots, and was become the site of a boarding-house! Never, once, didJack or I, in passing along Kalakaua Avenue, glance that way. Too sorrowful and indignant we were, that the home of Likelike and Kaiulani should not have been held inviolate. A distinguished architect, later passing through Honolulu, complained: “One thing regarding Honolulu I would say is damnable: that is the three-deck tenement on part of the old gardens of the Princess Kaiulani at Ainahau. This three-deck fills me with amazement, disgust and apprehension. This class of construction is not desirable under any consideration and should be stopped in this extraordinarily beautiful city.” He went on to say: “During my drive around the Island I came to the belief, after a matter of conclusion extending over thirty-five years of travel in Europe and Asia, that the Island of Oahu is the most beautiful place on earth. You have here the home of absolute beauty, and you should conserve it.”
On the seashore, inside a glorious surf, in view of Namoku manu, or Bird Islands, where we could see myriad seabirds nesting and flying about in clouds, we lunched under grotesque lava rocks, carved by the seas of ages; and Jack and I studied the green and turquoise rollers that thundered close, driven by the full power of the trans-Pacific swell, figuring how we should comport ourselves in such waters if ever we should be spilled therein. Again in the saddle, we let the horses run wild over a continuous, broad sand-beach, for a mile and a half; to our right a line of glaring sand hills, called Heleloa. Mounting these, Kakina led us to the battle field of a century before, where the Mauis, landing, had fought with the Oahus. The winds had uncovered a scattering of bleached bones, whiter than the white sand, and we found one perfect jawbone, larger than Jack’s, with several undecayed molars firm in their sockets, and, curiously enough, no provision for “wisdom teeth.”
Near the shore at one point we turned aside and dismounted to hunt for land-shells in the bank of a small gulch. For Lorrin A. Thurston was become a land-shell enthusiast, and by now had, by personal searching, amassed a fascinating collection of over 200 varieties, laid out like jewels in shallow, velvet-lined drawers.
Following the northerly shore of Mokapu Point, the trail mounted the outer shell of the little mountain, until, entering at the open south side, we were in a half-crater where cattle and horses grazed. Tying our animals, we lay heads-over the sea wall of the broken bowl, looking down and under, two hundred feet and more—“Kahekili’s Leap”—where the ocean surged against the forbidding cliff, from which our scrutiny frightened nesting seabirds.
So far, we have met no one who has taken this journey of a day; but it is easily accessible and more than worth while. Nothing can surpass the view one has of the blue Pacific, white-threshed by the glorious trade wind; and the prospect, landward to the Mirrored Mountains, is indescribably uplifting.
Returning to Honolulu by motor a few days later, after heavy rains, we thrilled to the sight of those same mountains curtained with rainbowed waterfalls. Once in the pass, the mighty draft of the trades revealed fresh cataracts behind torn cloud-masses, and looped and dissipated them before ever they could reach the bases of the dark-green palisades.
One of the most attractive means of recreation here is under the auspices of the Trail and Mountain Club of Hawaii, founded by Alexander Hume Ford. It is allied with the local activities of the Pan-Pacific Union, and associated with the American Mountaineer Club of North America, central information offices in New York City. It is proposed to establish a center ofinformation in Honolulu, to act as a clearing house so that a member of one Pacific outing club may automatically become a visiting member of any other similar Pacific organization, should he travel in other lands than his own. Mr. Ford pursues a commendable if rather startling course in promoting this branch of his work for the Islands. When a new trail is required, it is projected, named for some citizen of means, who is then notified that it will be his duty to bear the expense of building. Once completed, the Club keeps the trail in order, the actual labor being done by the Boy Scouts, who are advised which particular patriotic member of society will pay them for their work. It is understood that the money goes toward the equipment expenses of the Scout troop which clears the path and puts it in order.
The outcome of all this agitation is that there are scores of different mountain trails on the island of Oahu alone. Officers of the project have spent thousands of dollars in erecting rest-houses, some of which, as on the rim of Haleakala, contain bunks and camp accommodations. Mr. Ford explains his method of drafting money and personal interest by the fact that the Club’s annual dues of $5.00 are not adequate for its upkeep and expansion, and so well has he presented his arguments that his fellow citizens are convinced of the worth to the territory of his unremitting drive to open up the lofty wonders of its interior to the world at large.
Auto buses are used to transport hikers to points from which they may radiate into the fastnesses, and steamers are sometimes chartered to convey them to other islands, as say to a strategic harbor for the reaching of Haleakala’s crater.
Occasionally a patron of the Club, alive to the opportunity for increased health, mentally and physically, in a latitude wherein the sea-level climate does not inducemuscular effort except for water sports, places funds at the disposal of the officers. And it may be the Chinese, Filipino, or Japanese branch of the organization that is eager to cut the trail. The animating spirit among these inter-racial limbs of the body proper is one of mutual service.
The Associated Outing Clubs of Hawaii have selected Haleiwa—Waialua—as the location for the first of their rest houses. To the dabblers in sugar stocks, I have it from Mr. Ford, Haleiwa means little, and Waialua everything. For Waialua means “two waters,” and the length of the streams of Oahu that pour from the mountains to the sea at Waialua spells millions of dividends; for here there is never a drought. So, to the kamaaina Haleiwa is Waialua. He loves both. Waialua dividends make Haleiwa, “House Beautiful,” week ends possible for him. On the bank of the Anahula river, that flows into the sea near by, where the swimming is so fine, there is left a wing of the old Emerson homestead, built of coral in a grove of breadfruit. This has been secured by the Outing Clubs to fit up for a camping place; and none lovelier can be imagined. A fleet of canoes will be maintained upon the river. At the head of navigation are the rapids where the natives net theopaewhich they use for bait in the ocean a few hundred yards away.
From Waialua there are splendid motor trips. One in especial leads uphill at an unvarying five per cent grade through canefields to Opaeula, nearly 2000 feet above the sea on the edge of a great canyon, in the bottom of which there is a well-ordered rest-house in a tropical grove by a large natural swimming pool. From this point one may follow the well-cut ditch trails into the heart of the range. And this is but a sample of the opportunities offered the visitor to Oahu and its neighboring isles.
One evening we became acquainted with Colonel and Mrs. C. P. Iaukea, part-Hawaiian, and looking aristocrats to their finger tips. He had been Chamberlain to King Kalakaua, and accompanied Kalakaua’s queen Kapiolani (probably named after the illustrious defier of Pélé), to London at the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. At present Colonel Iaukea is one of the trustees of Liliuokalani’s estate. He stated that the Queen had expressed a wish to meet London, and Jack, pleased that the meeting should come about in this way, arranged to be present at a private audience the following Thursday, March 11.
The Royal Hawaiian Band, conducted by the venerable Henri Berger, now in his seventy-first year, after forty years’ conducting, was in full attendance in the Queen’s Gardens at Washington Place, which, in this city of notable gardens, is cited as the finest. Berger, owing to age and failing health, was later retired upon a pension, and has since died.
The dignified white mansion is as beautiful in its own way as the gardens, and tastefully tropical, surrounded as it is by broad lanais, with large pillars, supporting the roof in Southern colonial style. As one Kamaaina has it: “The whole has an air of retirement expressive of the attitude of the Queen herself.”
On the columned veranda, robed in black holoku, tender old hands folded in her silken lap, Her Majesty sat in a large armchair, at her back certain faithful ladies—Mrs. Dominis, wife of Aimoku Dominis, the Queen’s ward, with her cherubic little son; Mrs. Irene Kahalelaukoa Ii Holloway; and Mrs. Iaukea, all of them solicitous of their Queen’s every word and gesture. Their veneration is a touching link to the close and vivid past.
Liliuokalani’s fine face, as we saw it that day, was calm and lovable, as if a soothing hand had but latelypassed over it.[11]She raised quiet, searching eyes, and upon Colonel Iaukea’s introduction, smiled and extended her hand, which it is the custom to kiss, and which we saluted right gladly. A few low-voiced questions and answers concerning work Jack had done on Hawaii; the listening to a number or two from the Band; and we were free to wander among the treasures of the house, than which are no better specimens of royal insignia outside the Museum. At length, Hawaii’s National Anthem, rising from under the palms, brought us all to the lanai again, where the men stood uncovered.
Queen Liliuokalani’s own book, “Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen,” published in 1906, by John Murray, London, should be read not only for her viewpoint, but also because it is piquantly entertaining in its lighter humors, and her naive descriptions of travel and characters in the United States and England are delicious.
Returning from a luncheon given by that vital institution, the Honolulu Ad Club, Jack burst into the house:
“Guess whom I met today! Two men, both of whom you have known, one here and one in Samoa—and now risen to different positions and titles. I give you three chances. Bet you ‘even money’ you couldn’t guess in a thousand years.”
That was “easy money” for him, and I threw up my hands. Our fearless old friend, Lucius E. Pinkham, once president of the Board of Health, was now become Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, appointed in 1913 by President Wilson, for a term of four years; and theother we had known in Tahiti and Pago-Pago, C. B. T. Moore, erstwhile Governor at the latter American port, and Captain of theAnnapolis, now Rear Admiral, stationed at Pearl Harbor. Later we exchanged visits with Admiral and Mrs. Moore, and colorful were our reminiscences of days and nights under the Southern Cross.
It would require a book in itself to tell of the revolutionary alterations in Pearl Lochs, now possessed of all the circumstance of a thoroughgoing naval station. On September 28, 1917, the Pearl Harbor Radio Station was formally opened. In 1919, the drydock was completed, at a cost exceeding $5,000,000.00. The opening was attended by the Secretary of the Navy.
As for the old Elysian acre, we were informed it had changed hands and the bungalow had been replaced by a more ambitious one. It would be difficult to express why we never went back. Perhaps it had been a perfect thing in itself, that experience, finished and laid aside in heart’s lavender.
So much, briefly, for naval activity on Oahu. As for the Army, in addition to the older forts, and the new fortifications on Diamond Head, Schofield Barracks had sprung up, a city in itself, over against the Waianae Mountains on the table-land, and we could hardly believe our eyes, motoring from Haleiwa Hotel by way of Pearl Harbor, when they rested on the modern military post that spread over the grassy plain to the mountain slopes. Oahu, as if overnight, had become the largest military station of the United States.
One Sunday we spent outside Honolulu Harbor on the famous racing yacht,Hawaii; and in our hearts and on our lips was the wish that again we were “down, hull down on the old trail,” with a hail and farewell to every glamorous link of theSnark’sgolden chainof ports, thence on and on through the years, from the Solomon Isles to the Orient, beyond to the seas and inland waterways of Europe. “You never did gather all that lapful of pearls I promised you,” Jack mused regretfully.
Four days after this yachting party, Honolulu and the rest of the Union shuddered to the loss of the Submarine F-4. They went out merrily in the morning—F-l, F-2, F-3, F-4—and all emerged but the last. For weeks and months, during the work of raising, under supervision of the U. S. S.Maryland, Captain Kittelle, there was a subtle gloom over the gayest life of the capital. Outside the Harbor channel, where the submarine had eventually slipped off coral bottom into deep ocean, from steamer and sailer, canoe and fishing boat and yacht that passed in or out, leis were dropped upon the mournful waters.
With the incursion of gasolene-driven craft and vehicle, the old-time yachting has nearly lapsed. No more does one see the racing fleets outside the reef. One can only hope that the matchless sport will be revived.
Upon the Beach at Waikiki it was seldom we missed the long afternoon. “I’m glad we’re herenow,” Jack would ruminate; “for some day Waikiki Beach is going to be the scene of one long hotel. And wonderful as it will be, I can’t help clinging, for once, to an old idea.”
Under the high lanai of the Outrigger, we lay in the cool sand between canoes and read aloud, napped, talked, or visited with the delightful inhabitants of the charmed strand, until ready to swim in the later afternoon. One special diversion was to watch several Hawaiian youths, the unsurpassed Duke Kahanamoku among them, performing athletic stunts in water and out. And that sturdy little American girl, Ruth Stacker, with records of her own, could be seeninstructing her pupils in the wahine surf. George Freeth, we heard, was teaching swimming and surf-boarding in Southern California. Our own swims became longer from day to day. Still inside the barrier reef, through the breakers we would work, emerging with back-flung hair on their climbing backs while they roared shoreward. Beyond the combing crests, in deeper water above the coral that we could see gleaming underfoot in the sunshafts, lazily we would tread the bubbling brine or lie floating restfully, almost ethereally, on the heaving warm surface, conversing sometimes most solemnly in the isolated space between sky and solid earth.
The newest brood of surf-boarders had learned and put into practice angles never dreamed of a decade earlier. Now, instead of always coasting at right-angles to the wave, young Lorrin P. Thurston and the half-dozen who shared with him the reputation of being the most skilled would often be seen erect on boards that their feet and balance guided at astonishing slants. Surf-boarding had indeed come into its own. And it never seems to pall. Its devotees, as long as boards and surf are accessible, show up every afternoon of their lives on the Beach at Waikiki. When a youth must depart for eastern college-life, his keenest regret is for the loss of Waikiki and all it means of godlike conquest of the “bull-mouthed breakers.” No athletic-field dream quite compensates. Surfing remains the king of sports. Young Lorrin, indeed, at Yale, has captained his swimming team, the fastest that college has ever put out in the east, to more than one world’s record and several intercollegiate ones.
One night in early May, Mayor John C. Lane of Honolulu gave a great luau in Kapiolani Park, where some fifteen hundred sat under a vast tent-roof andlistened to the flowery eloquence of Senators and Congressmen from Washington. And it was to the venerable but sprightly “Uncle Joe” Cannon we awarded the triumphal palm for the most sensible, logical speechifying of the event. This magnificent luau, presided over by the handsome Mayor, surpassed any in our experience the South Seas over. “Mayor Lane ought to be re-elected indefinitely,” Jack would say, “to do the honors of his office!”
The following day we sailed from Honolulu for Hawaii, but on separate ships. TheMauna Keawas chartered to take the Congressional party junketing about the Islands, and Jack was bidden to be one of the Entertainment Committee. Owing to the fact that theMauna Keawas full to overflowing, so that many of the Committee bunked on deck, we resident wives were blandly uninvited. But I, through a timely invitation from the Big Island, was enabled to come in contact with the august picnic party.
And so, with “Aloha nui oe” one to the other, Jack saw me off for Hilo on theKilauea, sister of the smartMauna Kea, while twelve hours later he was headed for Maui. My roommate on the crowded steamer was an Englishwoman, busily knitting socks for her brothers fighting in France. She told me how her husband, who had worked on theSnark’smachinery eight years before, when confronted with difficult or unsurmountable obstacles or problems, had ever since declared: “This is as hard as repairing Jack London’s engines!”
On Maui, Jack became much interested in the experiment that had been made in small homesteading on government land; but he did not foresee success in the venture. “You can’t turn the clock back,” he said. But his reasons for his opinion in the matter are set forth in “My Hawaiian Aloha,” his own articles which preface this book of mine.
And so I next saw Jack at Napoopoo, on Kealakekua Bay, with the Blue Flush for background, and we agreed warmly that never anywhere had we seen anything like it, and nothing to surpass. Here the Congressional party disembarked to see the Cook Monument, and from Napoopoo were whirled south and around through the Kau District, over a new, lava highway, to the Volcano House. It was during this day’s ride, at luncheon by the way, that the wires flashed to us the stunning news of the sinking of theLusitania, and a stricken look was upon the faces of all for a time.
The machine carried a full and very jolly cargo back to Pahoa on the Puna coast, for in addition to its driver, the exuberant Colonel, and us two, there were Senator and Mrs. Warren, Mr. Roderick O. Matheson, long a figure as editor of Kakina’s paper, and “Bob” Breckons, Hawaii’s brilliant attorney and a unique personage in Islands affairs.
Again on the sulphurous brink of Halemaumau, Jack, who cared comparatively little for spectacles of this ilk, remarked to me after a long gazing silence at the increased flow and disturbance of the mountain’s internal forces:
“I’m coming personally to understand your fondness for volcanoes—I myself am getting the volcanic habit. I shall come here every time there is a chance; and in future, if this pot boils up and threatens to boil over, and we’re in California, we’ll take the first steamer down to see it!”
The fame of Mrs. Johnson’s house party the next twenty-four hours, given to her allotment of members of the junketing crowd and their Entertainment Committee, is still talked in Hawaii. Among others from Washington, besides Senator and Mrs. Warren, there were Senator and Mrs. Shafroth and Mrs. HamiltonLewis. Our two steamers arrived back in Honolulu within an hour of each other. Mr. Thurston, who was aboard mine, carried me up Nuuanu for breakfast on the well-remembered and ideal lanai over the rocky stream; and I was led down into a magnificent fernery connected to the lanai, roofed over a grotto hewn in great bowlders on which the house rests—delightful and feasible arrangement which I can well recommend to new residents. While still at breakfast, we spied theMauna Keaentering harbor from Kauai 90 miles away, and a taxicab delivered me on the dock exactly as my man, beaming at my precise calculation, descended the gangway.
Shall I ever see Kauai? I had planned to do so; for this 1915 visit to Hawaii I had expected to make alone, returning with my cousin. Meanwhile Jack, for an eastern weekly, was to sail on a battleship with President Wilson, attended by the Atlantic Fleet, through the Panama Canal to the Exposition at San Francisco. But Jack repeatedly complained: “If you knew howmuchI’d rather go to Hawaii—but I need the money, if I’m to carry out my schemes on the ranch!”
The official cruise being abandoned on account of war developments, he contentedly declared:
“NowI can go to Hawaii with you for a few weeks. And I’ll write a new dog book while I’m there. And we’ll see Kauai, too.”
The few weeks became five months, and “Jerry of the Islands” was begun and finished, to be followed by “Michael, Brother of Jerry.”
So it came to pass that Jack alone of our small family saw Kauai, the “Garden Isle,” with its exquisite Hanalei Valley and bay, one of the most beautiful in Hawaii; and Waimea Canyon, which he said beggared description in grandeur and coloring, only comparable with the Grand Canyon of Colorado. Jack came backpromising that next trip to the Islands we should together visit Kauai.
The president of the Board of Health, Dr. John S. B. Pratt, being absent from the Territory, Governor Pinkham, always full of aloha toward us, sent to Mr. D. S. Bowman, Acting, his earnest kokua (recommendation) that we be granted a permit to revisit the Leper Settlement. We had long since heard from Jack McVeigh, who affectionately assured us of his personal welcome. He had lately asked Jack to give a lecture in Honolulu, the proceeds to be applied toward erecting a new motion-picture theater at Kalaupapa; but shortly the means came from some other source, and the lecture did not take place.
Jack always disliked repeating even the most desired experience in exactly the same manner; so this time, for the sake of variety, we were todescendthe Molokai Pali. To this end, we landed from theLikelikeone midnight, bag and saddle, at Kaunakakai, where waited Henry Ma, a wizzled, clever little old Hawaiian, sent all the way from Kalaupapa with horses. Miss Myers, a sister of Kalama of hearty memory, going home from Honolulu, accompanied us up-mountain.