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Front matter

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Contents

Chapter Page

I — Voyaging Island wards i

II — Hawaii's Capital 8

Chapter I Voyaging Islandwards

It is a geographical blessing that one cannot reach Hawaii by rail. To arrive there with soot in the eyes and dust in the garments, tired and travel-stained, with the throb of the rails sounding in the ears, and desirous only of a bath and a bed, would be like appearing before royalty in old clothes. But to slip smoothly down through six days of delicious rest and languor is fit preparation for entering into the presence of this queen of the sundown sea.

The days at sea are full of dreams and laziness. It is a rest cure on a gigantic scale, with a hundred people taking it all at once. There is absolute lack of anything exciting from without; and woe to them who do not carry that store of memories within which makes gay the gravest day. Sometimes the voyager watches through the glass another steamer, plowing the parallel miles. Sometimes he may see a deep-laden sugar barkentine, beating up the wind in the distant horizon. There are magnificent sunrises and moonrises, like ships on fire; and the sun sets in a glory of clouds and sky to be seen nowhere on dry land.

For the first few days the sea air is so sharp that rugs are a comfort, and then it grows so soft and warm that the canopied deck is a necessity. About the same time the sea changes from green to blue — a blue like lapis lazuli, more blue than the sapphire. Somebody has called it ' ' cold suds and blueing, ' ' but it is far too beautiful to be compared with anything so prosaic. And with the wonderful sea-color, the flying-fish appear. They seem a piece of the sea; for they too are blue, and ocean, sky, and fish are shades of the same color. There was never a voyage when a flying-fish did not make for the lighted saloon windows and dash himself to death on the cabin floor. It is the marine version of the moth-andcandle story. There never was a chief steward who did not take the flying-fish tenderly in his hands and carry him around to show to the passengers, pretending that the coming of one on board was an unusual thing, and giving that pleasant sense of difference and distinction that even- traveler loves. It is so pleasant to say to your friends in Honolulu: "And we had a flying -fish. He dashed himself to death against the windows of the cabin." To which they invariably reply: "Yes; they always do that the fourth day out."

Ah, the wily steward, who made us believe it was an Occurrence!

The blue sea and the blue fish, with their gauzy butterfly wings and their scales like blue metal, are signs of the tropics. The ocean becomes an oily plain, and the waves are smoothed out into the long, lazy swell of low latitudes. By day there is not even a pillar of cloud to guide us, but by night it is a favorite diversion to watch the phosphorescent gleam of tiny lights around the ship's prow. Minute animal organisms they may really be, but we prefer to think them fireflies of the deep, or reflected stars.

And now the convalescent passengers creep on deck, saffron in tint as contrasted with the ruddy people who spend their nights in sweet sleep, their days in a brisk canter about deck, and who eat at every possible opportunity — sometimes six times a day.

Here is a young man said to be "in coffee," just up from a hospital operation, who crawls with transparent white hands fastened to a stick. His skin is pale and luminous, and his features are out of all proportion to his cheeks. He eats on every occasion. He has an early cup of coffee in bed, a more substantial tiffin at eight, a luncheon at noon, a cup of tea and a fresh cookie at four, a dinner at half-past six, and a cup of something hot at ten. And before the six days are passed his thin cheeks are filling out, his hands are browner and have lost their transparency, and sometimes he forgets his cane for hours. There are other passengers interesting to watch — elderly globe-trotters with short skirts, many shawls, and a courier.

During the early days of the trip there are many vacant seats at table — the places of those who have fallen by the wayside. Trays go to cabin doors and come back untouched. The purser goes to the ship's library, and Stoddard' s book on the islands, which talks of ' ' drifting to Paradise on an even keel," is cleverly abstracted; for the early days are a bit choppy, and the purser hates to be asked angrily a hundred times a day if this is drifting to Paradise on an even keel! But gradually the chairs fill up and are at a premium; for after all it is really the mildest sort of an ocean experience. The delightful drifting before a fair wind with all sails set, and an average of 354 miles a day, must come to an end some time. In fact, we have been going faster than the wind, and our idle, flapping sails merely steady the ship and look well in the log-book. A day or two before Honolulu the guide-books come out. Heads bend over them, and little pencils scratch on tiny tablets. The students of guidebook and encyclopedia find that the islands are not properly called ' ' South Sea Islands, ' ' but constitute, instead, the only important group in the North Pacific; that they have no connection with the South Sea groups beyond certain affinities of race and language; that they are so advantageously placed as to be about equidistant from California, Mexico, China, and Japan; and that they are in the torrid zone, extending from i8° 54' to 22 15', north latitude, with a longitude from 154 50' to 160 30' west from Greenwich. Old Spanish charts prove that the Spanish navigators knew of them, but, according to Spanish custom, kept their knowledge from the world, until the islands were rediscovered by Captain Cook, in 1778.

The distance of Hawaii from the Californian coast is a little more than two thousand miles. The islands lie at the cross-roads where the great ocean routes to Australia and China cross. They are called ' ' Hawaiian ' ' from the name of the largest island. Captain Cook gave them the name of the Sandwich islands, in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the British Admiralty; but the English name has almost passed from use, and is seldom heard. It is a vulgarism, like the name "Kanaka," as applied to the natives of the islands. "Kanaka" is a native name, meaning simply "man," and the natives like it as a cognomen about as well as a respectable Chinese likes to be called "John Chinaman."

The travelers, over their guide-books, raise their heads with exclamations of surprise. The islands are so much larger than they thought them — six thousand seven hundred square miles in all, about equal to the principality of Wales or the kingdom of Saxony, with Hawaii, the principal island, nearly as large as the State of Connecticut. There are eight inhabited islands, extending from northwest to southeast, over a distance of about 380 miles. The names, some of them unfamiliar, are Hawaii, Maui, Kahoolawe, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, Kauai, and Niihau. Nor did the tourists dream that Hawaii contains the highest mountains of any island in the world, only a few peaks of the Alps being as high as Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, while Haleakala, on Maui, is about equal to Mount Etna in extent and elevation, and is, moreover, the largest extinct crater in the world.

People look up from their books to inquire if the coco-palm, which produces coir rope, cocoanuts, and a hundred other useful things, is the same which produces chocolate, not knowing that the tall, ragged palm, on its slender stem, with its long and useful life of two hundred years or more, is not the same plant as the cacao-bush, or anything like it. There is also a persistent belief that the islanders were formerly cannibals, a sturdy theory that will not down, and is based on some legend as to the eating of Captain Cook. I was careful to run down that tale. One day, at dinner, I asked the great-granddaughter of a chiefess who was present at the killing of the distinguished navigator about this reputed feast. She said that the heart of Captain Cook became mixed with some dog-meat and was eaten by mistake. The testimony of the lineal descendant of an eye-witness ought to be good authority. As a matter of fact, the Hawaiians never were cannibals. Their sacrifice of human life merely marked a form of worship common to many pagan creeds. The idea of eating human flesh was abhorred. Why should they feast on one another when pig was plentiful and good ?

And having discussed the cannibal question with some warmth, the travelers go back to the exhuming of more statistics. They find that the island idols exist only in museums; that the islanders cast them away voluntarily in 1819, at the very time when the first missionaries were on their way around Cape Horn; that the natives, who were decreasing rapidly in the seventies, and were threatened with total extinction, have since then gained some ground, and are not now decreasing so rapidly; that the population of the islands in 1896 was 109,020, 31,019 being Hawaiians, 8,485 part Hawaiians, 3,086 Americans, 15,000 Portuguese, 4,000 other Europeans, 24,000 Japanese, and 21,000 Chinese; and that the soil, which is described in prospectuses as flowing with milk and honey and producing wild all sorts of luxuries, is in reality poor, with nature yielding little spontaneously. Later they find that the valleys are fertile and productive, but limited in extent, and that the dry plains may be made fertile by irrigation. Intending settlers are sorry to discover that most of the available land is already taken up, and they will be still further astonished to learn the price of land in the valleys. There is not much left in Hawaii for the poor man, and even the capitalist will have some difficulty making an entrance where everything is already owned and incorporated.

But there is other knowledge that is more pleasant. Everybody knows that Hawaii's is the most salubrious climate on earth, but everybody does not know that it is almost absolutely equable, and that a man may take his choice between broiling all the year round at the sealevel, on the leeward side of the islands, at a temperature of 8 5 , or may enjoy the charms of a fireside at an altitude where there is frost every night in the year. To get any desired climate, you need only to follow Mark Twain's advice, and mark the place on the thermometer that suits you best; then climb until the mercury drops to the mark. It is a simple recipe for getting the needed change of season.

The physical geographists will tell you that the volcanoes died out from north to south, which makes Kauai, the garden isle, to the north, the oldest of its brethren and the most fertile. You can see for yourself that Maui and Hawaii are the youngest and most restless of the group. Unfinished Hawaii is still smoking, and its trackless wastes of lava, unfit for cultivation, are destined to lie idle for hundreds of years.

And then one yawns and lounges to the cabin, where less serious- minded people play at cards, waiting to learn geography from personal observation, which is, after all, the best and the only unforgettable way.

Chapter II Hawaii's Capital

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

A Typical Half- White.

I looked in vain for the palms that fringe the coast of fiction — those "feather-dusters in a cyclone" that are the sign and symbol of the tropics. Not a coco-palm raised its plumed head on slender, willowy trunk. All was dry, sandy, and unprofitable. But presently a bend in the coast, and then the green shore of pictures and imagination — a broad belt of freshness and verdure — and against the yellows and browns of the ragged range, bending cocoanut-palms and fluttering bananas to lend the tropical touch. And from the land, into the face of the rising sun, crept that perfumed breeze that blows in dreams of Araby. It is, indeed, a land of ten thousand Junes.

And we, bending over the rail in the languorous airs of early morning — for here is no chill freshness of dawn — note that the sea is changing from the ultramarine of the mid- Pacific to the emerald of the shallows, beneath which lie the shining sands and the living coral of the reef.

The harbor of Honolulu is difficult and set with dangers, and the good ship feels her way cautiously along the channel. Buoys mark out the narrow road which leads to safety, the path of righteousness being one of twists and turns, and the ship is at last snugly harbored where hull rubs hull within narrow confines. The bay of Honolulu is an overcrowded inn, where every guestchamber is taken.

Around the ship darts a school of divers — brown boys who leap like dolphins at play. Nothing could be smoother or slimmer than their graceful, gleaming bodies. They skim and dive for silver, and come from the green depths with the coins in their mouths to show you their

IO HAWAII XEI

agility and skill. They shriek shrilly to attract your attention, and go wriggling to the very bottom of the bay after the coin. A penurious person from east of the Mississippi flips a copper, and the divers detect it instantly and laugh contemptuously.

The pier is covered with people — a blare of bright colors against a background of white. The black garments to which our eyes are accustomed are utterly lacking, and the sun beats down on the white, and is reflected back again with an increase of heat. Behind the low white town, umbrellaed in shade, radiate beautiful valleys like the spokes of a wheel. They are so filled with verdure, that they seem to be lined with green velvet, and, like horns of plenty, they have emptied all their treasure on the scant shore where Honolulu sits and threatens to slide into the sea. Behind the city is the commanding eminence of Punchbowl, another dead and buried crater, whose quenched fires must once have turned midnight to midday where Honolulu now stands. Peaks and towers and domes rise behind, making mountainous lacework against the sky, each telling his tale of those tremendous upheavals when this still unfinished land rose from the sea.

If you arrive in the summer it is a moist and sticky morning, and you press through the warm and clinging crowd into one of the waiting hacks, which are not hacks at all, but surreys, and the Honolulu hackman fastens his talons upon you. Strangers are his legitimate prey. To residents he is kindly and indulgent — to travelers merciless. He looks at you, estimates your resources, and demands them all. And you, a poor limp rag, bathed in perspiration, and with a moral fiber melted

HAWAII NEI II

with heat, fall into the inevitable Honolulu indolence and call a carnage to go three blocks. The result is an impaired liver, a digestion gone wrong, and perhaps, accumulated weight. The curse of Honolulu is not the climate, but the laziness it engenders. Meanwhile the hackmen with their rubber-tired vehicles and their soft cushions and their cool linen rugs fatten like spiders. Just before you come away you learn that the regular price for any fare within the city proper is twenty-five cents, and that for long trips the same rule applies as elsewhere in the world, and it is imperative to drive a bargain in advance.

But even the octopus of a hackman cannot make you forget the streets through which you spin. The ponciana regia is bursting over your head in a crimson crown, the Golden Shower is throwing pendent clusters of yellow at your feet, the scarlet hibiscus nods at you from hedgerows, like eglantine in an English spring, and the thirsty banyan, with hundreds of drinking feelers which have sapped the earth beneath and rendered it verdureless, invites you to stop and rest in its heavy shade. Tattered bananas offer sunnier shelter, where light and shadow tremble alternately. There are no trees to remind you of home. All leaves are light and feathery, like the tamarind, or heavy and polished and waxen, like the breadfruit. You look in vain for a familiar tree-face in all that green and thronging crowd. These are the trees of the Tropic of Cancer, and the temperate zone is only a memory.

The air is heavy with the perfume of myriads of tuberoses and waxen pomerias. The streets are narrow and crooked, amazingly intricate at first sight. They branch in every direction as if from a common center. They are muddy from the showers that fall every night and almost every day, and the trees meet overhead in a soft dense shade. After the wharves come little low-browed shops and some pretentious stores; but even in the best of them primal colors jostle others of opposite disposition, and the quarreling combination shows that these people, so rich in wondrous color effects, have never studied the sequence in their own rainbows. The screaming juxtaposition is said to be for the benefit of the native who still has the brilliant taste of barbarism.

The houses are so modest among the shade-trees that the first glimpse tells little of their architecture. They smack of New England with blinds and gables, but they are without chimneys, and the twenty-foot-wide verandas are a Southern innovation. The tropical trees that surround them, the giant ferns and the fruits are importations from across the island, for this side of Oahu is not naturally tropical. In the verandas, inclosed for the most part, and called lanais, the family life goes on. There are cushions and couches, cool braided mats, and writing-tables. Often the family dines here, and one could sleep on the veranda in comfort. Here callers are received, and the household life ebbs and flows in the open air.

At last there is the hotel — the Royal Hawaiian — built by the government in the days of kings, and now floating the American flag. The hotel is set in the deepest shade of all. The dry pods of tamarinds rattle far overhead, the sunlight trickles in thin streams between many leaves both broad and thick, and tremulous aspen shadows flicker on the natural sward. Myna-birds, each with its single white feather, dart about on the grass. These birds, were introduced to remove a pest, but now, multiplied in this warm, nourishing climate, are themselves become a plague, like so many other imported blessings. Beyond the trees may be seen the soaring tower of the Government Building, which was not long ago Iolani Palace. It was the home of a king, and saw its dynasty rise and fall. It has looked unmoved on little revolutions, and has been a royal prison. Over a stone wall, with a wealth of vine atop, is a lofty church — a monument to missionary forehandedness. As the church rose, the palace toppled and fell.

The hotel lanai is big and luxurious, with palms and growing green things, and gold-fish sporting in a big glass bowl. Everything is cool except the traveler, who mops an unaccustomed brow and orders a lemonade. It comes in a big, deep, wide - lipped glass, the ice tinkling against the thin sides. A huge mosquito, with chinchilla legs, striped in gray and black, settles down upon you and bids you welcome to Honolulu.

Chapter III The Tropic Republic

There is nothing in American public life to cause an association of ideas between politics and religion, but in the islands they go hand and hand. To be in politics under the late republic one needed also to be in religion; but after a study of the political conditions of the islands, I have come to the conclusion that in Hawaii, as in America, true religion and "practical politics" have not even a bowing acquaintance.

The men who went to Hawaii to teach the native the way in which he should go, began by being the power behind the throne, and ended with being the power in front of it. When the missionary could no longer rule in the shade of the cloak of yellow feathers, he boldly threw off the sheltering garment and took the scepter for his own. There ended the most picturesque of island monarchies. I was not bred a royalist, and monarchical forms are not my forms, but seeing the republic of Hawaii in its expiring days, I cannot but think what an ideal place this must have been when native chiefs and chiefesses ruled in the islands of Hawaii. At the mere mention of their names the missionaries hold up their hands in horror. They cannot speak of Hawaii's latest sovereigns without a pious imprecation. To their crosseyed mental vision all luaus were orgies and all pleasure unholy. Doubtless some of these strictures are just; but, as an offset, it should be remembered that many of these profligate personages were also the kind and generous patrons of the missionary clan. The advisers of royalty were mainly white, and it was not until there rose up a woman whom they could not control that the missionaries found the royal yoke intolerable. And as for Hawaiian royalty, its behavior was much the same as that of royalty in other lands — much as it will always be while wealth and power buy everything in the world except happiness.

And so any glimpse of the incongruous tropic republic that was transplanted to this land of royal traditions must begin with the missionaries who came in the brig Thaddeus, arriving off the coast in the spring of 1820. The first of these gospel families settled in Kailua, and that little peaceful town is pointed out as the place where civilization first came to the islands. Some people call it the spot where the serpent entered Eden, but that depends on the point of view. At any rate, the advent of the missionary was the turning-point in Hawaiian history. There had been centuries of civil war and pillage, with intervals of peace and prosperity under an occasional strong chief who knew how to protect his people. The great Kamehameha, whose commanding bronze figure still reigns over Honolulu — the strutting infant republic not having banished him — had subdued his rivals and brought the islands under a single sovereignty. This native chief was the first to conceive the imperial idea, and he carried it out through a long life. There is a decided tendency in missionary publications to belittle Kamehameha, and a concentrated effort to make it appear that all his victories were won because of the assistance of whites and firearms. Nothing is said of the fact that Kamehameha was the first chief to apply the use of firearms to island warfare. In one Hawaiian history it is emphasized that the corner-stone of Kamehameha' s empire was laid in blood. I do not recall any historical cornerstones which were laid otherwise.

The second Kamehameha was even braver than the island Napoleon who preceded him; for he dared to meet and fight with the ancient superstitions of his race, and to throw off the galling yoke of the ancient tabus. It was an act comparable to the freeing of the serfs in Russia — not forced in any way, and one by which the king gave up many privileges, that he might easily have continued to exact.

The strenuous laws of the tabu carried originally the most frightful penalties; but as nothing followed the breaking of all their cherished tables of stone, the islanders, quick to reason from effect to cause, turned from their idols and deserted their temples. The soil was ripe for a new religion, and about half the missionaries' work was done.

I have visited the old Thurston house at Kailua, on the island of Hawaii. It is a good type of the missionary house all through the islands, and in its decay it is eloquent of the motives and methods of these men who came to preach the gospel to the heathen, and to cry aloud in the tropical wilderness. To New England the natives were heathen. Bigotry still esteems them such. There was not the slightest attempt to conform to native architecture. Instead, a frame house came out from the old country, and soon a New England manse, all gables and eaves and doors with fan-lights, reared its head on the green sloping hill that backs Kailua. The house must have been very hot and uncomfortable, entirely unadapted as it was to the island climate. The attic rooms must have been close and stuffy, and the lack of wide verandas a real deprivation. The old garden with its high and frowning fence may still be seen. Within this inclosure, Mrs. Thurston kept the little Thurstons, with strict injunctions that under no circumstances were they to hold converse with the natives. It was her boast that her children were to be brought up like New England children — no settlement idea this. The very house shows its desire to be exclusive. It is set half-way up the hillside in a maze of green, at some distance from the grass houses that fringed the sea, where the gregarious natives huddled as close together as possible. That there was some doubt of the sincerity of the friendly natives in the minds of these early teachers, is shown by the little peep-holes in the doors, like loop-holes in an Indian blockhouse. Everywhere the most determined effort was made to graft the civilization of New England upon this land of the banana and the coco-palm. Mrs. Thurston wanted a milk-house like the one at home, and she took for that purpose a cave at the back of the house. It was a cool grotto, and there she set her milk-pans, and did everything in the good old way. What did she care that the cave went underground all the way to the sea, coming out at last in a delicious cove at the water's edge, which was tabu and sacred to the chief who used to bathe there? Surf-bathing was no part of the New England curriculum, and bathing au nature I was wicked. And 60 the tabu cave and subterranean passage was used as a dairy, until one day one of the earthquakes that happen along almost every day in this new island of Hawaii, tumbled huge bowlders about the milk-house, and threw stones into the Thurston pans, and after that the lady of the manse relished the place no more.

The trouble with the missionary plan here, as in most places, was that it purposed to establish out of hand a scheme of civilization for which the islanders were all unprepared. It ignored all the preparation and gradual growth of Anglo-Saxon ideals, and sought to transplant the full-grown tree to another and entirely dissimilar land, where no condition was the same. It was as if England had skipped from John to Victoria. The result was that the islanders were plunged into the swift, unaccustomed current, and speedily ingulfed. When the missionaries taught them religion, they should also have taught them how to maintain themselves in the throat-cutting civilization of the Anglo-Saxon.

The natives died in shoals, and the survivors to this day say, ' ' The white man is too smart for us. ' '

It is the missionary fallacy that the Gospel and civilization are the best things in the world for the "benighted savage," the aforesaid "benighted savage" being represented as eating fresh wild fruits in the day and sleeping under the stars, spending the interval up in a coco-palm scanning the horizon for a missionary sail, and waiting to be discovered by civilization and rescued from a state of perfect contentment, which he can never by any chance regain.

The islands were still in the feudal period. There was no such thing as a fee-simple in land. On the death of a high chief, the land was re-apportioned. The common people paid tribute to petty chiefs, the petty chiefs to more powerful ones, and so on. The immediate followers of the moi, or king of the island, were bound to furnish him with a certain stated number of armed retainers in time of war. It was, in little, a perfect feudal state, with all the civil war and trouble that attended feudalism in Europe. And upon this basis, constantly changing with the ambitions of petty chieftains, the missionaries expected to rear New England systems, and New England ideas. History does not like to jump five hundred years. Her protest meant the diminution and gradual extermination of the natives. The strongest ones made a desperate effort to keep pace with the whites; the weaker fell by the wayside. The happiest Kanaka is the dead Kanaka, and the land is honeycombed with their burial-places.