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The Hawaiian Archipelago

by Isabella L. Bird · English · Gutenberg #6750 · 751,627 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Hawaiian Archipelago

Author: Isabella L. Bird


        
Release date: October 1, 2004 [eBook #6750]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAWAIIAN ARCHIPELAGO ***
THE HAWAIIAN ARCHIPELAGO.

SIX MONTHS AMONG THE PALM GROVES, CORAL REEFS, AND VOLCANOES OF THE
SANDWICH ISLANDS.

BY ISABELLA L. BIRD.



     "Summer isles of Eden lying
     In dark purple spheres of sea."




To my sister, to whom these letters were originally written, they
are now affectionately dedicated.



PREFACE.

Within the last century the Hawaiian islands have been the topic of
various works of merit, and some explanation of the reasons which
have led me to enter upon the same subject are necessary.

I was travelling for health, when circumstances induced me to land
on the group, and the benefit which I derived from the climate
tempted me to remain for nearly seven months.  During that time the
necessity of leading a life of open air and exercise as a means of
recovery, led me to travel on horseback to and fro through the
islands, exploring the interior, ascending the highest mountains,
visiting the active volcanoes, and remote regions which are known to
few even of the residents, living among the natives, and otherwise
seeing Hawaiian life in all its phases.

At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to
publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best
books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of
aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction
of Christianity and subsequent historical events.  They also
represented that I had seen the islands more thoroughly than any
foreign visitor, and the volcano of Mauna Loa under specially
favourable circumstances, and that I had so completely lived the
island life, and acquainted myself with the existing state of the
country, as to be rather a kamaina {0} than a stranger, and that
consequently I should be able to write on Hawaii with a degree of
intimacy as well as freshness.  My friends at home, who were
interested in my narratives, urged me to give them to a wider
circle, and my inclinations led me in the same direction, with a
sort of longing to make others share something of my own interest
and enjoyment.

The letters which follow were written to a near relation, and often
hastily and under great difficulties of circumstance, but even with
these and other disadvantages, they appear to me the best form of
conveying my impressions in their original vividness.  With the
exception of certain omissions and abridgments, they are printed as
they were written, and for such demerits as arise from this mode of
publication, I ask the kind indulgence of my readers.
                                  ISABELLA L. BIRD.
January, 1875.




TRAVELS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

Canon Kingsley, in his charming book on the West Indies, says, "The
undoubted fact is known I find to few educated English people, that
the Coco palm, which produces coir rope, cocoanuts, and a hundred
other useful things, is not the same plant as the cacao bush which
produces chocolate, or anything like it.  I am sorry to have to
insist upon this fact, but till Professor Huxley's dream and mine is
fulfilled, and our schools deign to teach, in the intervals of Greek
and Latin, some slight knowledge of this planet, and of those of its
productions which are most commonly in use, even this fact may need
to be re-stated more than once."

There is no room for the supposition that the intelligence of Mr.
Kingsley's "educated English" acquaintance is below the average, and
I should be sorry to form an unworthy estimate of that of my own
circle, though I have several times met with the foregoing
confusion, as well as the following and other equally ill-informed
questions, one or two of which I reluctantly admit that I might have
been guilty of myself before I visited the Pacific:  "Whereabouts
are the Sandwich Islands?  They are not the same as the Fijis, are
they?  Are they the same as Otaheite?  Are the natives all
cannibals?  What sort of idols do they worship?  Are they as pretty
as the other South Sea Islands?  Does the king wear clothes?  Who do
they belong to?  Does any one live on them but the savages?  Will
anything grow on them?  Are the people very savage?" etc.  Their
geographical position is a great difficulty.  I saw a gentleman of
very extensive information looking for them on the map in the
neighbourhood of Tristran d'Acunha; and the publishers of a high-
class periodical lately advertised, "Letters from the Sandwich
Islands" as "Letters from the South Sea Islands."  In consequence of
these and similar interrogatories, which are not altogether
unreasonable, considering the imperfect teaching of physical
geography, the extent of this planet, the multitude of its
productions, and the enormous number of islands composing Polynesia,
Micronesia, and Melanesia, it is necessary to preface the following
letters with as many preliminary statements as shall serve to make
them intelligible.

The Sandwich Islands do not form one of the South Sea groups, and
have no other connexion with them than certain affinities of race
and language.  They constitute the only important group in the vast
North Pacific Ocean, in which they are so advantageously placed as
to be pretty nearly equidistant from California, Mexico, China, and
Japan.  They are in the torrid zone, and extend from 18 degrees 50'
to 22 degrees 20' north latitude, and their longitude is from 154
degrees 53' to 160 degrees 15' west from Greenwich.  They were
discovered by Captain Cook in 1778.  They are twelve in number, but
only eight are inhabited, and these vary in size from Hawaii, which
is 4000 square miles in extent, and 88 miles long by 73 broad, to
Kahoolawe, which is only 11 miles long and 8 broad.  Their entire
superficial area is about 6,100 miles.  They are to some extent
bounded by barrier reefs of coral, and have few safe harbours.
Their formation is altogether volcanic, and they possess the largest
perpetually active volcano and the largest extinct crater in the
world.  They are very mountainous, and two mountain summits on
Hawaii are nearly 14,000 feet in height.  Their climate for
salubrity and general equability is reputed the finest on earth.  It
is almost absolutely equable, and a man may take his choice between
broiling all the year round on the sea level on the leeward side of
the islands at a temperature of 80 degrees, and enjoying the charms
of a fireside at an altitude where there is frost every night of the
year.  There is no sickly season, and there are no diseases of
locality.  The trade winds blow for nine months of the year, and on
the windward coasts there is an abundance of rain, and a perennial
luxuriance of vegetation.

The Sandwich Islands are not the same as Otaheite nor as the Fijis,
from which they are distant about 4,000 miles, nor are their people
of the same race.  The natives are not cannibals, and it is doubtful
if they ever were so.  Their idols only exist in missionary museums.
They cast them away voluntarily in 1819, at the very time when
missionaries from America sent out to Christianize the group were on
their way round Cape Horn.  The people are all clothed, and the
king, who is an educated gentleman, wears the European dress.  The
official designation of the group is "Hawaiian Islands," and they
form an independent kingdom.

The natives are not savages, most decidedly not.  They are on the
whole a quiet, courteous, orderly, harmless, Christian community.
The native population has declined from 400,000 as estimated by
Captain Cook in 1778 to 49,000, according to the census of 1872.
There are about 5,000 foreign residents, who live on very friendly
terms with the natives, and are mostly subjects of Kalakaua, the
king of the group.

The islands have a thoroughly civilized polity, and the Hawaiians
show a great aptitude for political organization.  They constitute a
limited monarchy, and have a constitutional and hereditary king, a
parliament with an upper and lower house, a cabinet, a standing
army, a police force, a Supreme Court of Judicature, a most
efficient postal system, a Governor and Sheriff on each of the
larger islands, court officials, and court etiquette, a common
school system, custom houses, a civil list, taxes, a national debt,
and most of the other amenities and appliances of civilization.

There is no State Church.  The majority of the foreigners, as well
as of the natives, are Congregationalists.  The missionaries
translated the Bible and other books into Hawaiian, taught the
natives to read and write, gave the princes and nobles a high class
education, induced the king and chiefs to renounce their oppressive
feudal rights, with legal advice framed a constitution which became
the law of the land, and obtained the recognition of the little
Polynesian kingdom as a member of the brotherhood of civilized
nations.

With these few remarks I leave the subject of the volume to develop
itself in my letters.  They have not had the advantage of revision
by any one familiar with the Sandwich Islands, and mistakes and
inaccuracies may consequently appear, on which, I hope that my
Hawaiian friends will not be very severe.  In correcting them, I
have availed myself of the very valuable "History of the Hawaiian
Islands," by Mr. Jackson Jarves, Ellis' "Tour Round Hawaii," Mr.
Brigham's valuable monograph on "The Hawaiian Volcanoes," and sundry
reports presented to the legislature during its present session.  I
have also to express my obligations to the Hon. E. Allen, Chief
Justice and Chancellor of the Hawaiian kingdom, Mr. Manley Hopkins,
author of "Hawaii," Dr. T. M. Coan, of New York, Professor W.
Alexander, Daniel Smith, Esq., and other friends at Honolulu, for
assistance most kindly rendered.
                                ISABELLA L. BIRD.



LETTER I.

STEAMER NEVADA, NORTH PACIFIC, January 19.

A white, unwinking, scintillating sun blazed down upon Auckland, New
Zealand.  Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees
and calla lilies drooped with the heat.  Dusty thickets sheltered
the cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the
palpitating atmosphere.  In dusty enclosures, supposed to be
gardens, shrivelled geraniums scattered sparsely alone defied the
heat.  Flags drooped in the stifling air.  Men on the verge of
sunstroke plied their tasks mechanically, like automatons.  Dogs,
with flabby and protruding tongues, hid themselves away under
archway shadows.  The stones of the sidewalks and the brick of the
houses radiated a furnace heat.  All nature was limp, dusty,
groaning, gasping.  The day was the climax of a burning fortnight,
of heat, draught, and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and
oily breezeless seas, of glaring days, passing through fierce fiery
sunsets into stifling nights.

I only remained long enough in the capital to observe that it had a
look of having seen better days, and that its business streets had
an American impress, and, taking a boat at a wharf, in whose seams
the pitch was melting, I went off to the steamer Nevada, which was
anchored out in the bay, preferring to spend the night in her than
in the unbearable heat on shore.  She belongs to the Webb line, an
independent mail adventure, now dying a natural death, undertaken by
the New Zealand Government, as much probably out of jealousy of
Victoria as anything else.  She nearly foundered on her last voyage;
her passengers unanimously signed a protest against her unseaworthy
condition.  She was condemned by the Government surveyor, and her
mails were sent to Melbourne.  She has, however, been patched up for
this trip, and eight passengers, including myself, have trusted
ourselves to her.  She is a huge paddle-steamer, of the old-
fashioned American type, deck above deck, balconies, a pilot-house
abaft the foremast, two monstrous walking beams, and two masts
which, possibly in case of need, might serve as jury masts.

Huge, airy, perfectly comfortable as she is, not a passenger stepped
on board without breathing a more earnest prayer than usual that the
voyage might end propitiously.  The very first evening statements
were whispered about to the effect that her state of disrepair is
such that she has not been to her own port for nine months, and has
been sailing for that time without a certificate; that her starboard
shaft is partially fractured, and that to reduce the strain upon it
the floats of her starboard wheel have been shortened five inches,
the strain being further reduced by giving her a decided list to
port; that her crank is "bandaged," that she is leaky; that her
mainmast is sprung, and that with only four hours' steaming many of
her boiler tubes, even some of those put in at Auckland, had already
given way.  I cannot testify concerning the mainmast, though it
certainly does comport itself like no other mainmast I ever saw; but
the other statements and many more which might be added, are, I
believe, substantially correct.  That the caulking of the deck was
in evil case we very soon had proof, for during heavy rain above, it
was a smart shower in the saloon and state rooms, keeping four
stewards employed with buckets and swabs, and compelling us to dine
in waterproofs and rubber shoes.

In this dilapidated condition, when two days out from Auckland, we
encountered a revolving South Sea hurricane, succinctly entered in
the log of the day as "Encountered a very severe hurricane with a
very heavy sea."  It began at eight in the morning, and never spent
its fury till nine at night, and the wind changed its direction
eleven times.  The Nevada left Auckland two feet deeper in the water
than she ought to have been, and laboured heavily.  Seas struck her
under the guards with a heavy, explosive thud, and she groaned and
strained as if she would part asunder.  It was a long weird day.  We
held no communication with each other, or with those who could form
any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no
officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward
department was suspended without notice; the sounds were tremendous,
and a hot lurid obscurity filled the atmosphere.  Soon after four
the clamour increased, and the shock of a sea blowing up a part of
the fore-guards made the groaning fabric reel and shiver throughout
her whole huge bulk.  At that time, by common consent, we assembled
in the deck-house, which had windows looking in all directions, and
sat there for five hours.  Very few words were spoken, and very
little fear was felt.  We understood by intuition that if our crazy
engines failed at any moment to keep the ship's head to the sea, her
destruction would not occupy half-an-hour.  It was all palpable.
There was nothing which the most experienced seaman could explain to
the merest novice.  We hoped for the best, and there was no use in
speaking about the worst.  Nor, indeed, was speech possible, unless
a human voice could have outshrieked the hurricane.

In this deck-house the strainings, sunderings, and groanings were
hardly audible, or rather were overpowered by a sound which, in
thirteen months' experience of the sea in all weathers, I have never
heard, and hope never to hear again, unless in a staunch ship, one
loud, awful, undying shriek, mingled with a prolonged relentless
hiss.  No gathering strength, no languid fainting into momentary
lulls, but one protracted gigantic scream.  And this was not the
whistle of wind through cordage, but the actual sound of air
travelling with tremendous velocity, carrying with it minute
particles of water.  Nor was the sea running mountains high, for the
hurricane kept it down.  Indeed during those fierce hours no sea was
visible, for the whole surface was caught up and carried furiously
into the air, like snow-drift on the prairies, sibilant, relentless.
There was profound quiet on deck, the little life which existed
being concentrated near the bow, where the captain was either lashed
to the foremast, or in shelter in the pilot-house.  Never a soul
appeared on deck, the force of the hurricane being such that for
four hours any man would have been carried off his feet.  Through
the swift strange evening our hopes rested on the engine, and amidst
the uproar and din, and drifting spray, and shocks of pitiless seas,
there was a sublime repose in the spectacle of the huge walking
beams, alternately rising and falling, slowly, calmly, regularly, as
if the Nevada were on a holiday trip within the Golden Gate.  At
eight in the evening we could hear each other speak, and a little
later, through the great masses of hissing drift we discerned black
water.  At nine Captain Blethen appeared, smoking a cigar with
nonchalance, and told us that the hurricane had nearly boxed the
compass, and had been the most severe he had known for seventeen
years.  This grand old man, nearly the oldest captain in the
Pacific, won our respect and confidence from the first, and his
quiet and masterly handling of this dilapidated old ship is beyond
all praise.

When the strain of apprehension was mitigated, we became aware that
we had not had anything to eat since breakfast, a clean sweep having
been made, not only of the lunch, but of all the glass in the racks
above it; but all requests to the stewards were insufficient to
procure even biscuits, and at eleven we retired supperless to bed,
amidst a confusion of awful sounds, and were deprived of lights as
well as food.  When we asked for food or light, and made weak
appeals on the ground of faintness, the one steward who seemed to
dawdle about for the sole purpose of making himself disagreeable,
always replied, "You can't get anything, the stewards are on duty."
We were not accustomed to recognize that stewards had any other duty
than that of feeding the passengers, but under the circumstances we
meekly acquiesced.  We were allowed to know that a part of the
foreguards had been carried way, and that iron stanchions four
inches thick had been gnarled and twisted like candy sticks, and the
constant falling of the saloon casing of the mainmast, showed
something wrong there.  A heavy clang, heard at intervals by day and
night, aroused some suspicions as to more serious damage, and these
were afterwards confirmed.  As the wind fell the sea rose, and for
some hours realized every description I have read of the majesty and
magnitude of the rollers of the South Pacific.

The day after the hurricane something went wrong with the engines,
and we were stationary for an hour.  We all felt thankful that this
derangement which would have jeopardised or sacrificed sixty lives,
was then only a slight detention on a summer sea.

Five days out from Auckland we entered the tropics with a
temperature of 80 degrees in the water, and 85 degrees in the air,
but as the light head airs blew the intense heat of our two smoke
stacks aft, we often endured a temperature of 110 degrees.  There
were quiet, heavy tropical showers, and a general misty dampness,
and the Navigator Islands, with their rainbow-tinted coral forests,
their fringe of coco palms, and groves of banyan and breadfruit
trees, these sunniest isles of the bright South Seas, resolved
themselves into dark lumps looming through a drizzling mist.  But
the showers and the dampness were confined to that region, and for
the last fortnight an unclouded tropical sun has blazed upon our
crawling ship.  The boiler tubes are giving way at the rate of from
ten to twenty daily, the fracture in the shaft is extending, and so,
partially maimed, the old ship drags her 320 feet of length slowly
along.  The captain is continually in the engine-room, and we know
when things are looking more unpropitious than usual by his coming
up puffing his cigar with unusual strength of determination.  It has
been so far a very pleasant voyage.  The moral, mental, and social
qualities of my fellow-passengers are of a high order, and since the
hurricane we have been rather like a family circle than a
miscellaneous accidental group.  For some time our days went by in
reading aloud, working, chess, draughts and conversation, with two
hours at quoits in the afternoon for exercise; but four days ago the
only son of Mrs. Dexter, who is the only lady on board besides
myself, ruptured a blood vessel on the lungs, and lies in a most
critical state in the deck-house from which he has not been moved,
requiring most careful nursing, incessant fanning, and the attention
of two persons by day and night.  Mrs. D. had previously won the
regard of everyone, and I had learned to look on her as a friend
from whom I should be grieved to part.  The only hope for the young
man's life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has
urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a
complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently
shall see the Sandwich Islands.  This severe illness has cast a
great gloom over our circle of six, and Mr. D. continues in a state
of so much exhaustion and peril that all our arrangements as to
occupation, recreation, and sleep, are made with reference to a
sick, and as we sometimes fear, a dying man, whose state is much
aggravated by the maltreatment and stupidity of a dilapidated Scotch
doctor, who must be at least eighty, and whose intellects are
obfuscated by years of whiskey drinking.  Two of the gentlemen not
only show the utmost tenderness as nurses, but possess a skill and
experience which are invaluable.  They never leave him by night, and
scarcely take needed rest even in the day, one or other of them
being always at hand to support him when faint, or raise him on his
pillows.

It is not only that the Nevada is barely seaworthy, and has kept us
broiling in the tropics when we ought to have been at San Francisco,
but her fittings are so old.  The mattresses bulge and burst, and
cockroaches creep in and out, the deck is so leaky that the water
squishes up under the saloon matting as we walk over it, the bread
swarms with minute ants, and we have to pick every piece over
because of weevils.  Existence at night is an unequal fight with
rats and cockroaches, and at meals with the stewards for time to
eat.  The stewards outnumber the passengers, and are the veriest
riff-raff I have seen on board ship.  At meals, when the captain is
not below, their sole object is to hurry us from the table in order
that they may sit down to a protracted meal; they are insulting and
disobliging, and since illness has been on board, have shown a want
of common humanity which places them below the rest of their
species.  The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a
marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or
servility which prevails on British steamers.  It has its comic side
too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other
oddities of this vaunted "Mail Line."

Our most serious grievance was the length of time that we were kept
in the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn.  Early
breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our
cabins, only just kept us alive.  We read, wrote, and talked like
automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away.  We decided
that heat was less felt in exercise, made up an afternoon quoit
party, and played unsheltered from the nearly vertical sun, on decks
so hot that we required thick boots for the protection of our feet,
but for three days were limp and faint, and hardly able to crawl
about or eat.  The nights were insupportable.  We used to lounge on
the bow, and retire late at night to our cabins, to fight the heat,
and scare rats and kill cockroaches with slippers, until driven by
the solar heat to rise again unrefreshed to wrestle through another
relentless day.  We read the "Idylls of the King" and talked of
misty meres and reedy fens, of the cool north, with its purple
hills, leaping streams, and life-giving breezes, of long northern
winters, and ice and snow, but the realities of sultriness and damp
scared away our coolest imaginations.  In this dismal region, when
about forty miles east of Tutuila, a beast popularly known as the
"Flying fox" {14} alighted on our rigging, and was eventually
captured as a prize for the zoological collection at San Francisco.
He is a most interesting animal, something like an exaggerated bat.
His wings are formed of a jet black membrane, and have a highly
polished claw at the extremity of each, and his feet consist of five
beautifully polished long black claws, with which he hangs on head
downwards.  His body is about twice the size of that of a very large
rat, black and furry underneath, and with red foxy fur on his head
and back.  His face is pointed, with a very black nose and prominent
black eyes, with a savage, remorseless expression.  His wings, when
extended, measure forty-eight inches across, and his flying powers
are prodigious.  He snapped like a dog at first, but is now quite
tame, and devours quantities of dried figs, the only diet he will
eat.

We crossed the Equator in Long. 159 degrees 44', but in consequence
of the misty weather it was not till we reached Lat. 10 degrees 6'
N. that the Pole star, cold and pure, glistened far above the
horizon, and two hours later we saw the coruscating Pleiades, and
the starry belt of Orion, the blessed familiar constellations of
"auld lang syne," and a "breath of the cool north," the first I have
felt for five months, fanned the tropic night and the calm silvery
Pacific.  From that time we have been indifferent to our crawling
pace, except for the sick man's sake.  The days dawn in rose colour
and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious
blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an
ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted region of perpetual calm,
and an endless summer.  Far off, for many an azure league, rims of
rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle still lagoons, and
are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks
all the year in broad drifts of foam.  Myriads of flying fish and a
few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the
scarcely undulating water.  But we look in vain for the "sails of
silk and ropes of sendal," which are alone appropriate to this
dream-world.  The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue
expanse, pure and lonely, an almost untraversed sea.  We revel in
these tropic days of transcendent glory, in the balmy breath which
just stirs the dreamy blue, in the brief, fierce crimson sunsets, in
the soft splendour of the nights, when the moon and stars hang like
lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and in the pearly
crystalline dawns, when the sun rising through a veil of rose and
gold "rejoices as a giant to run his course," and brightens by no
"pale gradations" into the "perfect day."


P.S.--To-morrow morning we expect to sight land.  In spite of minor
evils, our voyage has been a singularly pleasant one.  The condition
of the ship and her machinery warrants the strongest condemnation,
but her discipline is admirable, and so are many of her regulations,
and we might have had a much more disagreeable voyage in a better
ship.  Captain Blethen is beyond all praise, and so is the chief
engineer, whose duties are incessant and most harassing, owing to
the critical state of the engines.  The Nevada now presents a
grotesque appearance, for within the last few hours she has received
such an added list to port that her starboard wheel looks nearly out
of the water.
                                             I.L.B.



LETTER II.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU, Jan. 26th.

Yesterday morning at 6.30 I was aroused by the news that "The
Islands" were in sight.  Oahu in the distance, a group of grey,
barren peaks rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an
exception to the rule that the first sight of land is a
disappointment.  Owing to the clear atmosphere, we seemed only five
miles off, but in reality we were twenty, and the land improved as
we neared it.  It was the fiercest day we had had, the deck was
almost too hot to stand upon, the sea and sky were both
magnificently blue, and the unveiled sun turned every minute ripple
into a diamond flash.  As we approached, the island changed its
character.  There were lofty peaks, truly--grey and red, sun-
scorched and wind-bleached, glowing here and there with traces of
their fiery origin; but they were cleft by deep chasms and ravines
of cool shadow and entrancing green, and falling water streaked
their sides--a most welcome vision after eleven months of the desert
sea and the dusty browns of Australia and New Zealand.  Nearer yet,
and the coast line came into sight, fringed by the feathery cocoanut
tree of the tropics, and marked by a long line of surf.  The grand
promontory of Diamond Head, its fiery sides now softened by a haze
of green, terminated the wavy line of palms; then the Punchbowl, a
very perfect extinct crater, brilliant with every shade of red
volcanic ash, blazed against the green skirts of the mountains.  We
were close to the coral reef before the cry, "There's Honolulu!"
made us aware of the proximity of the capital of the island kingdom,
and then, indeed, its existence had almost to be taken upon trust,
for besides the lovely wooden and grass huts, with deep verandahs,
which nestled under palms and bananas on soft green sward, margined
by the bright sea sand, only two church spires and a few grey roofs
appeared above the trees.

We were just outside the reef, and near enough to hear that deep
sound of the surf which, through the ever serene summer years
girdles the Hawaiian Islands with perpetual thunder, before the
pilot glided alongside, bringing the news which Mark Twain had
prepared us to receive with interest, that "Prince Bill" had been
unanimously elected to the throne.  The surf ran white and pure over
the environing coral reef, and as we passed through the narrow
channel, we almost saw the coral forests deep down under the
Nevada's keel; the coral fishers plied their graceful trade; canoes
with outriggers rode the combers, and glided with inconceivable
rapidity round our ship; amphibious brown beings sported in the
transparent waves; and within the reef lay a calm surface of water
of a wonderful blue, entered by a narrow, intricate passage of the
deepest indigo.  And beyond the reef and beyond the blue, nestling
among cocoanut trees and bananas, umbrella trees and breadfruits,
oranges, mangoes, hibiscus, algaroba, and passion-flowers, almost
hidden in the deep, dense greenery, was Honolulu.  Bright blossom of
a summer sea!  Fair Paradise of the Pacific!

Inside the reef the magnificent iron-clad California (the flag-ship)
and another huge American war vessel, the Benicia, are moored in
line with the British corvette Scout, within 200 yards of the shore;
and their boats were constantly passing and re-passing, among
countless canoes filled with natives.  Two coasting schooners were
just leaving the harbour, and the inter-island steamer Kilauea, with
her deck crowded with natives, was just coming in.  By noon the
great decrepit Nevada, which has no wharf at which she can lie in
sleepy New Zealand, was moored alongside a very respectable one in
this enterprising little Hawaiian capital.

We looked down from the towering deck on a crowd of two or three
thousand people--whites, Kanakas, Chinamen--and hundreds of them at
once made their way on board, and streamed over the ship, talking,
laughing, and remarking upon us in a language which seemed without
backbone.  Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy,
shining black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect
teeth like ivory.  Everyone was smiling.  The forms of the women
seem to be inclined towards obesity, but their drapery, which
consists of a sleeved garment which falls in ample and unconfined
folds from their shoulders to their feet, partly conceals this
defect, which is here regarded as a beauty.  Some of these dresses
were black, but many of those worn by the younger women were of pure
white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light green.  The men
displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best advantage in
white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts.  A few of the women wore
coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both
men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one
side of their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by
bandana handkerchiefs of rich bright colours round their necks,
knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no
Anglo-Saxon dandy could attain.  Without an exception the men and
women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure
white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their
necks, flowers unknown to me, but redolent of the tropics in
fragrance and colour.  Many of the young beauties wore the gorgeous
blossom of the red hibiscus among their abundant, unconfined, black
hair, and many, besides the garlands, wore festoons of a sweet-
scented vine, or of an exquisitely beautiful fern, knotted behind
and hanging half-way down their dresses.  These adornments of
natural flowers are most attractive.  Chinamen, all alike, very
yellow, with almond-shaped eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long
pigtails, spotlessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled
cunning and simplicity, "foreigners," half-whites, a few negroes,
and a very few dark-skinned Polynesians from the far-off South Seas,
made up the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd.

The "foreign" ladies, who were there in great numbers, generally
wore simple light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many
of them so far conformed to native custom as to wear natural flowers
round their hats and throats.  But where were the hard, angular,
careworn, sallow, passionate faces of men and women, such as form
the majority of every crowd at home, as well as in America, and
Australia?  The conditions of life must surely be easier here, and
people must have found rest from some of its burdensome
conventionalities.  The foreign ladies, in their simple, tasteful,
fresh attire, innocent of the humpings and bunchings, the
monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste, beamed
with cheerfulness, friendliness, and kindliness.  Men and women
looked as easy, contented, and happy as if care never came near
them.  I never saw such healthy, bright complexions as among the
women, or such "sparkling smiles," or such a diffusion of feminine
grace and graciousness anywhere.

Outside this motley, genial, picturesque crowd about 200 saddled
horses were standing, each with the Mexican saddle, with its
lassoing horn in front, high peak behind, immense wooden stirrups,
with great leathern guards, silver or brass bosses, and coloured
saddle-cloths.  The saddles were the only element of the picturesque
that these Hawaiian steeds possessed.  They were sorry, lean,
undersized beasts, looking in general as if the emergencies of life
left them little time for eating or sleeping.  They stood calmly in
the broiling sun, heavy-headed and heavy-hearted, with flabby ears
and pendulous lower lips, limp and rawboned, a doleful type of the
"creation which groaneth and travaileth in misery."  All these
belonged to the natives, who are passionately fond of riding.  Every
now and then a flower-wreathed Hawaiian woman, in her full radiant
garment, sprang on one of these animals astride, and dashed along
the road at full gallop, sitting on her horse as square and easy as
a hussar.  In the crowd and outside of it, and everywhere, there
were piles of fruit for sale--oranges and guavas, strawberries,
papayas, bananas (green and golden), cocoanuts, and other rich,
fantastic productions of a prolific climate, where nature gives of
her wealth the whole year round.  Strange fishes, strange in shape
and colour, crimson, blue, orange, rose, gold, such fishes as flash
like living light through the coral groves of these enchanted seas,
were there for sale, and coral divers were there with their
treasures--branch coral, as white as snow, each perfect specimen
weighing from eight to twenty pounds.  But no one pushed his wares
for sale--we were at liberty to look and admire, and pass on
unmolested.  No vexatious restrictions obstructed our landing.  A
sum of two dollars for the support of the Queen's Hospital is levied
on each passenger, and the examination of ordinary luggage, if it
exists, is a mere form.  From the demeanour of the crowd it was at
once apparent that the conditions of conquerors and conquered do not
exist.  On the contrary, many of the foreigners there were subjects
of a Hawaiian king, a reversal of the ordinary relations between a
white and a coloured race which it is not easy yet to appreciate.

Two of my fellow-passengers, who were going on to San Francisco,
were anxious that I should accompany them to the Pali, the great
excursion from Honolulu; and leaving Mr. M--- to make all
arrangements for the Dexters and myself, we hired a buggy, destitute
of any peculiarity but a native driver, who spoke nothing but
Hawaiian, and left the ship.  This place is quite unique.  It is
said that 15,000 people are buried away in these low-browed, shadowy
houses, under the glossy, dark-leaved trees, but except in one or
two streets of miscellaneous, old-fashioned looking stores, arranged
with a distinct leaning towards native tastes, it looks like a large
village, or rather like an aggregate of villages.  As we drove
through the town we could only see our immediate surroundings, but
each had a new fascination.  We drove along roads with over-arching
trees, through whose dense leafage the noon sunshine only trickled
in dancing, broken lights; umbrella trees, caoutchouc, bamboo,
mango, orange, breadfruit, candlenut, monkey pod, date and coco
palms, alligator pears, "prides" of Barbary, India, and Peru, and
huge-leaved, wide-spreading trees, exotics from the South Seas, many
of them rich in parasitic ferns, and others blazing with bright,
fantastic blossoms.  The air was heavy with odours of gardenia,
tuberose, oleanders, roses, lilies, and the great white trumpet-
flower, and myriads of others whose names I do not know, and
verandahs were festooned with a gorgeous trailer with magenta
blossoms, passion-flowers, and a vine with masses of trumpet-shaped,
yellow, waxy flowers.  The delicate tamarind and the feathery
algaroba intermingled their fragile grace with the dark, shiny
foliage of the South Sea exotics, and the deep red, solitary flowers
of the hibiscus rioted among dear familiar fuschias and geraniums,
which here attain the height and size of large rhododendrons.

Few of the new trees surprised me more than the papaya.  It is a
perfect gem of tropical vegetation.  It has a soft, indented stem,
which runs up quite straight to a height of from 15 to 30 feet, and
is crowned by a profusion of large, deeply indented leaves, with
long foot-stalks, and among, as well as considerably below these,
are the flowers or the fruit, in all stages of development.  This,
when ripe, is bright yellow, and the size of a musk melon.  Clumps
of bananas, the first sight of which, like that of the palm,
constitutes a new experience, shaded the native houses with their
wonderful leaves, broad and deep green, from five to ten feet long.
The breadfruit is a superb tree, about 60 feet high, with deep
green, shining leaves, a foot broad, sharply and symmetrically cut,
worthy, from their exceeding beauty of form, to take the place of
the acanthus in architectural ornament, and throwing their pale
green fruit into delicate contrast.  All these, with the exquisite
rose apple, with a deep red tinge in its young leaves, the fan palm,
the chirimoya, and numberless others, and the slender shafts of the
coco palms rising high above them, with their waving plumes and
perpetual fruitage, were a perfect festival of beauty.

In the deep shade of this perennial greenery the people dwell.  The
foreign houses show a very various individuality.  The peculiarity
in which all seem to share is, that everything is decorated and
festooned with flowering trailers.  It is often difficult to tell
what the architecture is, or what is house and what is vegetation;
for all angles, and lattices, and balustrades, and verandahs are
hidden by jessamine or passion-flowers, or the gorgeous flame-like
Bougainvillea.  Many of the dwellings straggle over the ground
without an upper story, and have very deep verandahs, through which
I caught glimpses of cool, shady rooms, with matted floors.  Some
look as if they had been transported from the old-fashioned villages
of the Connecticut Valley, with their clap-board fronts painted
white and jalousies painted green; but then the deep verandah in
which families lead an open-air life has been added, and the
chimneys have been omitted, and the New England severity and
angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons
of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants.
Besides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a
cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or large
sun-baked bricks, plastered; houses of grass and bamboo; houses on
the ground and houses raised on posts; but nothing looks prosaic,
commonplace, or mean, for the glow and luxuriance of the tropics
rest on all.  Each house has a large garden or "yard," with lawns of
bright perennial greens and banks of blazing, many-tinted flowers,
and lines of Dracaena, and other foliage plants, with their great
purple or crimson leaves, and clumps of marvellous lilies,
gladiolas, ginger, and many plants unknown to me.  Fences and walls
are altogether buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus,
and the tropaeolum, mixed with geraniums, fuchsia, and jessamine,
which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable profusion.  A
soft air moves through the upper branches, and the drip of water
from miniature fountains falls musically on the perfumed air.  This
is midwinter!  The summer, they say, is thermometrically hotter, but
practically cooler, because of the regular trades which set in in
April, but now, with the shaded thermometer at 80 degrees and the
sky without clouds, the heat is not oppressive.

The mixture of the neat grass houses of the natives with the more
elaborate homes of the foreign residents has a very pleasant look.
The "aborigines" have not been crowded out of sight, or into a
special "quarter."  We saw many groups of them sitting under the
trees outside their houses, each group with a mat in the centre,
with calabashes upon it containing poi, the national Hawaiian dish,
a fermented paste made from the root of the kalo, or arum
esculentum.  As we emerged on the broad road which leads up the
Nuuanu Valley to the mountains, we saw many patches of this kalo, a
very handsome tropical plant, with large leaves of a bright tender
green.  Each plant was growing on a small hillock, with water round
it.  There were beautiful vegetable gardens also, in which Chinamen
raise for sale not only melons, pineapples, sweet potatoes, and
other edibles of hot climates, but the familiar fruits and
vegetables of the temperate zones.  In patches of surpassing
neatness, there were strawberries, which are ripe here all the year,
peas, carrots, turnips, asparagus, lettuce, and celery.  I saw no
other plants or trees which grow at home, but recognized as hardly
less familiar growths the Victorian Eucalyptus, which has not had
time to become gaunt and straggling, the Norfolk Island pine, which
grows superbly here, and the handsome Moreton Bay fig.  But the
chief feature of this road is the number of residences; I had almost
written of pretentious residences, but the term would be a base
slander, as I have jumped to the conclusion that the twin
vulgarities of ostentation and pretence have no place here.  But
certainly for a mile and a half or more there are many very
comfortable-looking dwellings, very attractive to the eye, with an
ease and imperturbable serenity of demeanour as if they had nothing
to fear from heat, cold, wind, or criticism.  Their architecture is
absolutely unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are
embowered among trailers, shadowed by superb exotics, and surrounded
by banks of flowers, while the stately cocoanut, the banana, and the
candlenut, the aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced.  One house
with extensive grounds, a perfect wilderness of vegetation, was
pointed out as the summer palace of Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani,
widow of Kamehameha IV., who visited England a few years ago, and
the finest garden of all was that of a much respected Chinese
merchant, named Afong.  Oahu, at least on this leeward side, is not
tropical looking, and all this tropical variety and luxuriance which
delight the eye result from foreign enthusiasm and love of beauty
and shade.

When we ascended above the scattered dwellings and had passed the
tasteful mausoleum, with two tall Kahilis, {28} or feather plumes,
at the door of the tomb in which the last of the Kamehamehas
received Christian burial, the glossy, redundant, arborescent
vegetation ceased.  At that height a shower of rain falls on nearly
every day in the year, and the result is a green sward which England
can hardly rival, a perfect sea of verdure, darkened in the valley
and more than half way up the hill sides by the foliage of the
yellow-blossomed and almost impenetrable hibiscus, brightened here
and there by the pea-green candlenut.  Streamlets leap from crags
and ripple along the roadside, every rock and stone is hidden by
moist-looking ferns, as aerial and delicate as marabout feathers,
and when the windings of the valley and the projecting spurs of
mountains shut out all indications of Honolulu, in the cool green
loneliness one could image oneself in the temperate zones.  The
peculiarity of the scenery is, that the hills, which rise to a
height of about 4,000 feet, are wall-like ridges of grey or coloured
rock, rising precipitously out of the trees and grass, and that
these walls are broken up into pinnacles and needles.  At the Pali
(wall-like precipice), the summit of the ascent of 1,000 feet, we
left our buggy, and passing through a gash in the rock the
celebrated view burst on us with overwhelming effect.  Immense
masses of black and ferruginous volcanic rock, hundreds of feet in
nearly perpendicular height, formed the pali on either side, and the
ridge extended northwards for many miles, presenting a lofty, abrupt
mass of grey rock broken into fantastic pinnacles, which seemed to
pierce the sky.  A broad, umbrageous mass of green clothed the lower
buttresses, and fringed itself away in clusters of coco palms on a
garden-like stretch below, green with grass and sugar-cane, and
dotted with white houses, each with its palm and banana grove, and
varied by eminences which looked like long extinct tufa cones.
Beyond this enchanted region stretched the coral reef, with its
white wavy line of endless surf, and the broad blue Pacific, ruffled
by a breeze whose icy freshness chilled us where we stood.  Narrow
streaks on the landscape, every now and then disappearing behind
intervening hills, indicated bridle tracks connected with a
frightfully steep and rough zigzag path cut out of the face of the
cliff on our right.  I could not go down this on foot without a
sense of insecurity, but mounted natives driving loaded horses
descended with perfect impunity into the dreamland below.

This pali is the scene of one of the historic tragedies of this
island.  Kamehameha the Conqueror, who after fierce fighting and
much ruthless destruction of human life united the island
sovereignties in his own person, routed the forces of the King of
Oahu in the Nuuanu Valley, and drove them in hundreds up the
precipice, from which they leaped in despair and madness, and their
bones lie bleaching 800 feet below.

The drive back here was delightful, from the wintry height, where I
must confess that we shivered, to the slumbrous calm of an endless
summer, the glorious tropical trees, the distant view of cool chasm-
like valleys, with Honolulu sleeping in perpetual shade, and the
still blue ocean, without a single sail to disturb its profound
solitude.  Saturday afternoon is a gala-day here, and the broad road
was so thronged with brilliant equestrians, that I thought we should
be ridden over by the reckless laughing rout.  There were hundreds
of native horsemen and horsewomen, many of them doubtless on the
dejected quadrupeds I saw at the wharf, but a judicious application
of long rowelled Mexican spurs, and a degree of emulation, caused
these animals to tear along at full gallop.  The women seemed
perfectly at home in their gay, brass-bossed, high peaked saddles,
flying along astride, barefooted, with their orange and scarlet
riding dresses streaming on each side beyond their horses' tails, a
bright kaleidoscopic flash of bright eyes, white teeth, shining
hair, garlands of flowers and many-coloured dresses; while the men
were hardly less gay, with fresh flowers round their jaunty hats,
and the vermilion-coloured blossoms of the Ohia round their brown
throats.  Sometimes a troop of twenty of these free-and-easy female
riders went by at a time, a graceful and exciting spectacle, with a
running accompaniment of vociferation and laughter.  Among these we
met several of the Nevada's officers, riding in the stiff, wooden
style which Anglo-Saxons love, and a horde of jolly British sailors
from H.M.S. Scout, rushing helter skelter, colliding with everybody,
bestriding their horses as they would a topsail-yard, hanging on to
manes and lassoing horns, and enjoying themselves thoroughly.  In
the shady tortuous streets we met hundreds more of native riders,
clashing at full gallop without fear of the police.  Many of the
women were in flowing riding-dresses of pure white, over which their
unbound hair, and wreaths of carmine-tinted flowers fell most
picturesquely.

All this time I had not seen our domicile, and when our drive ended
under the quivering shadow of large tamarind and algaroba trees, in
front of a long, stone, two-storied house with two deep verandahs
festooned with clematis and passion flowers, and a shady lawn in
front, I felt as if in this fairy land anything might be expected.

This is the perfection of an hotel.  Hospitality seems to take
possession of and appropriate one as soon as one enters its never-
closed door, which is on the lower verandah.  There is a basement,
in which there are a good many bedrooms, the bar, and billiard-room.
This is entered from the garden, under two semicircular flights of
stairs which lead to the front entrance, a wide corridor conducting
to the back entrance.  This is crossed by another running the whole
length, which opens into a very large many-windowed dining-room
which occupies the whole width of the hotel.  On the same level
there is a large parlour, with French windows opening on the
verandah.  Upstairs there are two similar corridors on which all the
bedrooms open, and each room has one or more French windows opening
on the verandah, with doors as well, made like German shutters, to
close instead of the windows, ensuring at once privacy and coolness.
The rooms are tastefully furnished with varnished pine with a strong
aromatic scent, and there are plenty of lounging-chairs on the
verandah, where people sit and receive their intimate friends.  The
result of the construction of the hotel is that a breeze whispers
through it by day and night.

Everywhere, only pleasant objects meet the eye.  One can sit all day
on the back verandah, watching the play of light and colour on the
mountains and the deep blue green of the Nuuanu Valley, where
showers, sunshine, and rainbows make perpetual variety.  The great
dining-room is delicious.  It has no curtains, and its decorations
are cool and pale.  Its windows look upon tropical trees in one
direction, and up to the cool mountains in the other.  Piles of
bananas, guavas, limes, and oranges, decorate the tables at each
meal, and strange vegetables, fish, and fruits vary the otherwise
stereotyped American hotel fare.  There are no female domestics.
The host is a German, the manager an American, the steward an
Hawaiian, and the servants are all Chinamen in spotless white linen,
with pigtails coiled round their heads, and an air of superabundant
good-nature.  They know very little English, and make most absurd
mistakes, but they are cordial, smiling, and obliging, and look cool
and clean.  The hotel seems the great public resort of Honolulu, the
centre of stir--club-house, exchange and drawing-room in one.  Its
wide corridors and verandahs are lively with English and American
naval uniforms, several planters' families are here for the season;
and with health seekers from California, resident boarders, whaling
captains, tourists from the British Pacific Colonies, and a stream
of townspeople always percolating through the corridors and
verandahs, it seems as lively and free-and-easy as a place can be,
pervaded by the kindliness and bonhomie which form an important item
in my first impressions of the islands.  The hotel was lately built
by government at a cost of $120,000, a sum which forms a
considerable part of that token of an advanced civilization, a
National Debt.  The minister whose scheme it was seems to be
severely censured on account of it, but undoubtedly it brings
strangers and their money into the kingdom, who would have avoided
it had they been obliged as formerly to cast themselves on the
hospitality of the residents.  The present proprietor has it rent-
free for a term of years, but I fear that it is not likely to prove
a successful speculation either for him or the government.  I
dislike health resorts, and abhor this kind of life, but for those
who like both, I cannot imagine a more fascinating residence.  The
charges are $15 a week, or $3 a day, but such a kindly, open-handed
system prevails that I am not conscious that I am paying anything!
This sum includes hot and cold plunge baths ad libitum, justly
regarded as a necessity in this climate.

Dr. McGrew has hope that our invalid will rally in this healing,
equable atmosphere.  Our kind fellow-passengers are here, and take
turns in watching and fanning him.  Through the half-closed
jalousies we see breadfruit trees, delicate tamarinds and algarobas,
fan-palms, date-palms and bananas, and the deep blue Pacific gleams
here and there through the plumage of the cocoanut trees.  A soft
breeze, scented with a slight aromatic odour, wanders in at every
opening, bringing with it, mellowed by distance, the hum and clatter
of the busy cicada.  The nights are glorious, and so absolutely
still, that even the feathery foliage of the algaroba is at rest.
The stars seem to hang among the trees like lamps, and the crescent
moon gives more light than the full moon at home.  The evening of
the day we landed, parties of officers and ladies mounted at the
door, and with much mirth disappeared on moonlight rides, and the
white robes of flower-crowned girls gleamed among the trees, as
groups of natives went by speaking a language which sounded more
like the rippling of water than human speech.  Soft music came from
the ironclads in the harbour, and from the royal band at the king's
palace, and a rich fragrance of dewy blossoms filled the delicious
air.  These are indeed the "isles of Eden," the "sun lands," musical
with beauty.  They seem to welcome us to their enchanted shores.
Everything is new but nothing strange; for as I enjoyed the purple
night, I remembered that I had seen such islands in dreams in the
cold gray North.  "How sweet," I thought it would be, thus to hear
far off, the low sweet murmur of the "sparkling brine," to rest, and

                   "Ever to seem
      Falling asleep in a half-dream."

A half-dream only, for one would not wish to be quite asleep and
lose the consciousness of this delicious outer world.  So I thought
one moment.  The next I heard a droning, humming sound, which
certainly was not the surf upon the reef.  It came nearer--there
could be no mistake.  I felt a stab, and found myself the centre of
a swarm of droning, stabbing, malignant mosquitoes.  No, even this
is not paradise!  I am ashamed to say that on my first night in
Honolulu I sought an early refuge from this intolerable infliction,
in profound and prosaic sleep behind mosquito curtains.
                               I.L.B.



LETTER III.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, Jan. 28th.

Sunday was a very pleasant day here.  Church bells rang, and the
shady streets were filled with people in holiday dress.  There are
two large native churches, the Kaumakapili, and the Kaiwaiaho,
usually called the stone church.  The latter is an immense
substantial building, for the erection of which each Christian
native brought a block of rock-coral.  There is a large Roman
Catholic church, the priests of which are said to have been somewhat
successful in proselytizing operations.  The Reformed Catholic, or
English temporary cathedral, is a tasteful but very simple wooden
building, standing in pretty grounds, on which a very useful
institution for boarding and training native and half-white girls,
and the reception of white girls as day scholars, also stands.  This
is in connection with Miss Sellon's Sisterhood at Devonport.
Another building, alongside the cathedral, is used for English
service in Hawaiian.  There are two Congregational churches:  the
old "Bethel," of which the Rev. S. C. Damon, known to all strangers,
and one of the oldest and most respected Honolulu residents, is the
minister; and the "Fort St. Church," which has a large and
influential congregation, and has been said to "run the government,"
because its members compose the majority of the Cabinet.  Lunalilo,
the present king, has cast in his lot with the Congregationalists,
but Queen Emma is an earnest member of the Anglican Church, and
attends the Liturgical Hawaiian Service in order to throw the weight
of her influence with the natives into the scale of that communion.
Her husband spent many of his later days in translating the Prayer-
Book.  As is natural, most of the natives belong to the denomination
from which they or their fathers received the Christian faith, and
the majority of the foreigners are of the same persuasion.  The New
England Puritan influence, with its rigid Sabbatarianism, though
considerably worn away, is still influential enough to produce a
general appearance of Sabbath observance.  The stores are closed,
the church-going is very demonstrative, and the pleasure-seeking is
very unobtrusive.  The wharves are profoundly quiet.

I went twice to the English Cathedral, and was interested to see
there a lady in a nun's habit, with a number of brown girls, who was
pointed out to me as Sister Bertha, who has been working here
usefully for many years.  The ritual is high.  I am told that it is
above the desires and the comprehension of most of the island
episcopalians, but the zeal and disinterestedness of Bishop Willis
will, in time, I doubt not, win upon those who prize such qualities.
He called in the afternoon, and took me to his pretty, unpretending
residence up the Nuuanu Valley.  He has a training and boarding
school there for native boys, some of whom were at church in the
morning as a surpliced choir.  The bishop, his sister, the
schoolmaster, and fourteen boys take their meals together in a
refectory, the boys acting as servitors by turns.  There is service
every morning at 6.30 in the private chapel attached to the house,
and also in the cathedral a little later.  Early risers, so near the
equator, must get up by candlelight all the year round.

This morning we joined our kind friends from the Nevada for the last
time at breakfast.  I have noticed that there is often a centrifugal
force which acts upon passengers who have been long at sea together,
dispersing them on reaching port.  Indeed, the temporary enforced
cohesion is often succeeded by violent repulsion.  But in this
instance we deeply regret the dissolution of our pleasant
fraternity; the less so, however, that this wonderful climate has
produced a favourable change in Mr. D., who no longer requires the
hourly attention they have hitherto shown him.  The mornings here,
dew-bathed and rose-flushed, are, if possible, more lovely than the
nights, and people are astir early to enjoy them.  The American
consul and Mr. Damon called while we were sitting at our eight-
o'clock breakfast, from which I gather that formalities are
dispensed with.  After spending the morning in hunting among the
stores for things which were essential for the invalid, I lunched in
the Nevada with Captain Blethen and our friends.

Next to the advent of "national ships" (a euphemism for men-of-war),
the arrivals and departures of the New Zealand mail-steamers
constitute the great excitement of Honolulu, and the failures,
mishaps, and wonderful unpunctuality of this Webb line are highly
stimulating in a region where "nothing happens."  The loungers were
saying that the Nevada's pumps were going for five days before we
arrived, and pointed out the clearness of the water which was
running from them at the wharf as an evidence that she was leaking
badly. {40}  The crowd of natives was enormous, and the foreigners
were there in hundreds.  She was loading with oranges and green
bananas up to the last moment,--those tasteless bananas which, out
of the tropics, misrepresent this most delicious and ambrosial
fruit.

There was a far greater excitement for the natives, for King
Lunalilo was about to pay a state visit to the American flag-ship
California, and every available place along the wharves and roads
was crowded with kanakas anxious to see him.  I should tell you that
the late king, being without heirs, ought to have nominated his
successor; but it is said that a sorceress, under whose influence he
was, persuaded him that his death would follow upon this act.  When
he died, two months ago, leaving the succession unprovided for, the
duty of electing a sovereign, according to the constitution,
devolved upon the people through their representatives, and they
exercised it with a combination of order and enthusiasm which
reflects great credit on their civilization.  They chose the highest
chief on the islands, Lunalilo (Above All), known among foreigners
as "Prince Bill," and at this time letters of congratulation are
pouring in upon him from his brethren, the sovereigns of Europe.

The spectacular effect of a pageant here is greatly heightened by
the cloudless blue sky, and the wealth of light and colour.  It was
very hot, almost too hot for sight-seeing, on the Nevada's bow.
Expectation among the lieges became tremendous and vociferous when
Admiral Pennock's sixteen-oared barge, with a handsome awning,
followed by two well-manned boats, swept across the strip of water
which lies between the ships and the shore.  Outrigger canoes, with
garlanded men and women, were poised upon the motionless water or
darted gracefully round the ironclads, as gracefully to come to
rest.  Then a stir and swaying of the crowd, and the American
Admiral was seen standing at the steps of an English barouche and
four, and an Hawaiian imitation of an English cheer rang out upon
the air.  More cheering, more excitement, and I saw nothing else
till the Admiral's barge, containing the Admiral, and the king
dressed in a plain morning suit with a single decoration, swept past
the Nevada.  The suite followed in the other boats,--brown men and
white, governors, ministers, and court dignitaries, in Windsor
uniforms, but with an added resplendency of plumes, epaulettes, and
gold lace.  As soon as Lunalilo reached the California, the yards of
the three ships were manned, and amidst cheering which rent the air,
and the deafening thunder of a royal salute from sixty-three guns of
heavy calibre, the popular descendant of seventy generations of
sceptred savages stepped on board the flag-ship's deck.  No higher
honours could have been paid to the Emperor "of all the Russias."  I
have seen few sights more curious than that of the representative of
the American Republic standing bare-headed before a coloured man,
and the two mightiest empires on earth paying royal honours to a
Polynesian sovereign, whose little kingdom in the North Pacific is
known to many of us at home only as "the group of islands where
Captain Cook was killed."  Ah! how lovely this Queen of Oceans is!
Blue, bright, balm-breathing, gentle in its supreme strength,
different both in motion and colour from the coarse "vexed
Atlantic!"

STEAMER KILAUEA, Jan. 29th.

I was turning homewards, enjoying the prospect of a quiet week in
Honolulu, when Mr. and Mrs. Damon seized upon me, and told me that a
lady friend of theirs, anxious for a companion, was going to the
volcano on Hawaii, that she was a most expert and intelligent
traveller, that the Kilauea would sail in two hours, that unless I
went now I should have no future opportunity during my limited stay
on the islands, that Mrs. Dexter was anxious for me to go, that they
would more than fill my place in my absence, that this was a golden
opportunity, that in short I MUST go, and they would drive me back
to the hotel to pack!  The volcano is still a myth to me, and I
wanted to "read up" before going, and above all was grieved to leave
my friend, but she had already made some needful preparations, her
son with his feeble voice urged my going, the doctor said that there
was now no danger to be apprehended, and the Damons' kind urgency
left me so little choice, that by five I was with them on the wharf,
being introduced to my travelling companion, and to many of my
fellow-passengers.  Such an unexpected move is very bewildering, and
it is too experimental, and too much of a leap in the dark to be
enjoyable at present.

The wharf was one dense, well-compacted mass of natives taking leave
of their friends with much effusiveness, and the steamer's
encumbered deck was crowded with them, till there was hardly room to
move; men, women, children, dogs, cats, mats, calabashes of poi,
cocoanuts, bananas, dried fish, and every dusky individual of the
throng was wreathed and garlanded with odorous and brilliant
flowers.  All were talking and laughing, and an immense amount of
gesticulation seems to emphasize and supplement speech.  We steamed
through the reef in the brief red twilight, over the golden tropic
sea, keeping on the leeward side of the islands.  Before it was
quite dark the sleeping arrangements were made, and the deck and
skylights were covered with mats and mattresses on which 170 natives
sat, slept, or smoked,--a motley, parti-coloured mass of humanity,
in the midst of which I recognized Bishop Willis in the usual
episcopal dress, lying on a mattress among the others, a prey to
discomfort and weariness!  What would his episcopal brethren at home
think of such a hardship?

There is a yellow-skinned, soft-voiced, fascinating Goa or Malay
steward on board, who with infinite goodwill attends to the comfort
of everybody.  I was surprised when he asked me if I would like a
mattress on the skylight, or a berth below, and in unhesitating
ignorance replied severely, "Oh, below, of course, please," thinking
of a ladies' cabin, but when I went down to supper, my eyes were
enlightened.

The Kilauea is a screw boat of 400 tons, most unprepossessing in
appearance, slow, but sure, and capable of bearing an infinite
amount of battering.  It is jokingly said that her keel has rasped
off the branch coral round all the islands.  Though there are many
inter-island schooners, she is the only sure mode of reaching the
windward islands in less than a week; and though at present I am
disposed to think rather slightingly of her, and to class her with
the New Zealand coasting craft, yet the residents are very proud of
her, and speak lovingly of her, and regard her as a blessed
deliverance from the horrors of beating to windward.  She has a
shabby, obsolete look about her, like a second-rate coasting
collier, or an old American tow-boat.  She looks ill-found, too; I
saw two essential pieces of tackle give way as they were hoisting
the main sail. {44}  She has a small saloon with a double tier of
berths, besides transoms, which give accommodation on the level of
the lower berth.  There is a stern cabin, which is a prolongation of
the saloon, and not in any way separated from it.  There is no
ladies' cabin; but sex, race, and colour are included in a
promiscuous arrangement.

Miss Karpe, my travelling companion, and two agreeable ladies, were
already in their berths very sick, but I did not get into mine
because a cockroach, looking as large as a mouse, occupied the
pillow, and a companion not much smaller was roaming over the quilt
without any definite purpose.  I can't vouch for the accuracy of my
observation, but it seemed to me that these tremendous creatures
were dark red, with eyes like lobsters', and antennae two inches
long.  They looked capable of carrying out the most dangerous and
inscrutable designs.  I called the Malay steward; he smiled
mournfully, but spoke reassuringly, and pledged his word for their
innocuousness, but I never can believe that they are not the enemies
of man; and I lay down on the transom, not to sleep, however, for it
seemed essential to keep watch on the proceedings of these
formidable vermin.

The grotesqueness of the arrangements of the berths and their
occupants grew on me during the night, and the climax was put upon
it when a gentleman coming down in the early morning asked me if I
knew that I was using the Governor of Maui's head for a footstool,
this portly native "Excellency" being in profound slumber on the
forward part of the transom.  This diagram represents one side of
the saloon and the "happy family" of English, Chinamen, Hawaiians,
and Americans:

     Governor Lyman.       Miss Karpe.       Miss ---.

     Afong.                Vacant.           Miss ---.

     Governor Nahaolelua.  Myself.           An Hawaiian.

I noticed, too, that there were very few trunks and portmanteaus,
but that the after end of the saloon was heaped with Mexican saddles
and saddlebags, which I learned too late were the essential gear of
every traveller on Hawaii.

At five this morning we were at anchor in the roads of Lahaina, the
chief village on the mountainous island of Maui.  This place is very
beautiful from the sea, for beyond the blue water and the foamy reef
the eye rests gratefully on a picturesque collection of low, one-
storied, thatched houses, many of frame, painted white; others of
grass, but all with deep, cool verandahs, half hidden among palms,
bananas, kukuis, breadfruit, and mangoes, dark groves against gentle
slopes behind, covered with sugar-cane of a bright pea-green.  It is
but a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the red, flaring,
almost inaccessible, Maui hills, which here rise abruptly to a
height of 6,000 feet, pinnacled, chasmed, buttressed, and almost
verdureless, except in a few deep clefts, green and cool with ferns
and candlenut trees, and moist with falling water.  Lahaina looked
intensely tropical in the roseflush of the early morning, a dream of
some bright southern isle, too surely to pass away.  The sun blazed
down on shore, ship, and sea, glorifying all things through the
winter day.  It was again ecstasy "to dream, and dream" under the
awning, fanned by the light sea-breeze, with the murmur of an
unknown musical tongue in one's ears, and the rich colouring and
graceful grouping of a tropical race around one.  We called at
Maaleia, a neck of sandy, scorched, verdureless soil, and at
Ulupalakua, or rather at the furnace seven times heated, which is
the landing of the plantation of that name, on whose breezy slopes
cane refreshes the eye at a height of 2,000 feet above the sea.  We
anchored at both places, and with what seemed to me a needless
amount of delay, discharged goods and natives, and natives, mats,
and calabashes were embarked.  In addition to the essential mat and
calabash of poi, every native carried some pet, either dog or cat,
which was caressed, sung to, and talked to with extreme tenderness;
but there were hardly any children, and I noticed that where there
were any, the men took charge of them.  There were very few fine,
manly dogs; the pets in greatest favour are obviously those odious
weak-eyed, pink-nosed Maltese terriers.

The aspect of the sea was so completely lazy, that it was a fresh
surprise as each indolent undulation touched the shore that it had
latent vigour left to throw itself upwards into clouds of spray.  We
looked through limpid water into cool depths where strange bright
fish darted through the submarine chapparal, but the coolness was
imaginary, for the water was at 80. degrees {47}  The air above the
great black lava flood, which in prehistoric times had flowed into
the sea, and had ever since declined the kindly draping offices of
nature, vibrated in waves of heat.  Even the imperishable cocoanut
trees, whose tall, bare, curved trunks rose from the lava or the
burnt red earth, were gaunt, tattered, and thirsty-looking, weary of
crying for moisture to the pitiless skies.  At last the ceaseless
ripple of talk ceased, crew and passengers slept on the hot deck,
and no sounds were heard but the drowsy flap of the awning, and the
drowsier creak of the rudder, as the Kilauea swayed sleepily on the
lazy undulations.  The flag drooped and fainted with heat.  The
white sun blazed like a magnesium light on blue water, black lava,
and fiery soil, roasting, blinding, scintillating, and flushed the
red rocks of Maui into glory.  It was a constant marvel that troops
of mounted natives, male and female, could gallop on the scorching
shore without being melted or shrivelled.  It is all glorious, this
fierce bright glow of the Tropic of Cancer, yet it was a relief to
look up the great rolling featureless slopes above Ulupalakua to a
forest belt of perennial green, watered, they say, by perpetual
showers, and a little later to see a mountain summit uplifted into a
region of endless winter, above a steady cloud-bank as white as
snow.  This mountain, Haleakala, the House of the Sun, is the
largest extinct volcano in the world, its terminal crater being
nineteen miles in circumference at a height of more than 10,000
feet.  It, and its spurs, slopes, and clusters of small craters form
East Maui.  West Maui is composed mainly of the lofty picturesque
group of the Eeka mountains.  A desert strip of land, not much above
high water mark, unites the twain, which form an island forty-eight
miles long and thirty broad, with an area of 620 square miles.

We left Maui in the afternoon, and spent the next six hours in
crossing the channel between it and Hawaii, but the short tropic day
did not allow us to see anything of the latter island but two snow-
capped domes uplifted above the clouds.  I have been reading Jarves'
excellent book on the islands as industriously as possible, as well
as trying to get information from my fellow-passengers regarding the
region into which I have been so suddenly and unintentionally
projected.  I really know nothing about Hawaii, or the size and
phenomena of the volcano to which we are bound, or the state of
society or of the native race, or of the relations existing between
it and the foreign population, or of the details of the
constitution.  This ignorance is most oppressive, and I see that it
will not be easily enlightened, for among several intelligent
gentlemen who have been conversing with me, no two seem agreed on
any matter of fact.

From the hour of my landing I have observed the existence of two
parties of pro and anti missionary leanings, with views on all
island subjects in grotesque antagonism.  So far, the former have
left the undoubted results of missionary effort here to speak for
themselves; and I am almost disposed, from the pertinacious
aggressiveness of the latter party, to think that it must be weak.
I have already been seized upon (a gentleman would write "button-
holed") by several persons, who, in their anxiety to be first in
imprinting their own views on the tabula rasa of a stranger's mind,
have exercised an unseemly overhaste in giving the conversation an
anti-missionary twist.  They apparently desire to convey the
impression that the New England teachers, finding a people rejoicing
in the innocence and simplicity of Eden, taught them the knowledge
of evil, turned them into a nation of hypocrites, and with a strange
mingling of fanaticism and selfishness, afflicted them with many
woes calculated to accelerate their extinction, CLOTHING among
others.  The animus appears strong and bitter.  There are two
intelligent and highly educated ladies on board, daughters of
missionaries, and the candid and cautious tone in which they speak
on the same subject impresses me favourably.  Mr. Damon introduced
me to a very handsome half white gentleman, a lawyer of ability, and
lately interpreter to the Legislature, Mr. Ragsdale, or, as he is
usually called, "Bill Ragsdale," a leading spirit among the natives.
His conversation was eloquent and poetic, though rather stilted, and
he has a good deal of French mannerism; but if he is a specimen of
native patriotic feeling, I think that the extinction of Hawaiian
nationality must be far off.  I was amused with the attention that
he paid to his dress under very adverse circumstances.  He has
appeared in three different suits, with light kid gloves to match,
all equally elegant, in two days.  A Chinese gentleman, who is at
the same time a wealthy merchant at Honolulu, and a successful
planter on Hawaii, interests me, from the quiet keen intelligence of
his face, and the courtesy and dignity of his manner.  I hear that
he possesses the respect of the whole community for his honour and
integrity.  It is quite unlike an ordinary miscellaneous herd of
passengers.  The tone is so cheerful, courteous, and friendly, and
people speak without introductions, and help to make the time pass
pleasantly to each other.



HILO, HAWAII.

The Kilauea is not a fast propeller, and as she lurched very much in
crossing the channel most of the passengers were sea-sick, a
casualty which did not impair their cheerfulness and good humour.
After dark we called at Kawaihae (pronounced To-wee-hye), on the
northwest of Hawaii, and then steamed through the channel to the
east or windward side.  I was only too glad on the second night to
accept the offer of "a mattrass on the skylight," but between the
heavy rolling caused by the windward swell, and the natural
excitement on nearing the land of volcanoes and earthquakes, I could
not sleep, and no other person slept, for it was considered "a very
rough passage," though there was hardly a yachtsman's breeze.  It
would do these Sybarites good to give them a short spell of the
howling horrors of the North or South Atlantic, an easterly
snowstorm off Sable Island, or a winter gale in the latitude of
Inaccessible Island!  The night was cloudy, and so the glare from
Kilauea which is often seen far out at sea was not visible.

When the sun rose amidst showers and rainbows (for this is the
showery season), I could hardly believe my eyes.  Scenery,
vegetation, colour were all changed.  The glowing red, the fiery
glare, the obtrusive lack of vegetation were all gone.  There was a
magnificent coast-line of grey cliffs many hundred feet in height,
usually draped with green, but often black, caverned, and fantastic
at their bases.  Into cracks and caverns the heavy waves surged with
a sound like artillery, sending their broad white sheets of foam
high up among the ferns and trailers, and drowning for a time the
endless baritone of the surf, which is never silent through the
summer years.  Cascades in numbers took one impulsive leap from the
cliffs into the sea, or came thundering down clefts or "gulches,"
which, widening at their extremities, opened on smooth green lawns,
each one of which has its grass house or houses, kalo patch,
bananas, and coco-palms, so close to the broad Pacific that its
spray often frittered itself away over their fan-like leaves.  Above
the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the
screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green,
bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which
for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast
volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there
above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet.  Creation
surely cannot exhibit a more brilliant green than that which clothes
windward Hawaii with perpetual spring.  I have never seen such
verdure.  In the final twenty-nine miles there are more than sixty
gulches, from 100 to 700 feet in depth, each with its cataracts, and
wild vagaries of tropical luxuriance.  Native churches, frame-built
and painted white, are almost like mile-stones along the coast, far
too large and too many for the notoriously dwindling population.
Ten miles from Hilo we came in sight of the first sugar plantation,
with its patches of yet brighter green, its white boiling house and
tall chimney stack; then more churches, more plantations, more
gulches, more houses, and before ten we steamed into Byron's, or as
it is now called Hilo Bay.

This is the paradise of Hawaii.  What Honolulu attempts to be, Hilo
is without effort.  Its crescent-shaped bay, said to be the most
beautiful in the Pacific, is a semi-circle of about two miles, with
its farther extremity formed by Cocoanut Island, a black lava islet
on which this palm attains great perfection, and beyond it again a
fringe of cocoanuts marks the deep indentations of the shore.  From
this island to the north point of the bay, there is a band of golden
sand on which the roar of the surf sounded thunderous and drowsy as
it mingled with the music of living waters, the Waiakea and the
Wailuku, which after lashing the sides of the mountains which give
them birth, glide deep and fern-fringed into the ocean.  Native
houses, half hidden by greenery, line the bay, and stud the heights
above the Wailuku, and near the landing some white frame houses and
three church spires above the wood denote the foreign element.  Hilo
is unique.  Its climate is humid, and the long repose which it has
enjoyed from rude volcanic upheavals has mingled a great depth of
vegetable mould with the decomposed lava.  Rich soil, rain, heat,
sunshine, stimulate nature to supreme efforts, and there is a
luxuriant prodigality of vegetation which leaves nothing uncovered
but the golden margin of the sea, and even that above high-water-
mark is green with the Convolvulus maritimus.  So dense is the wood
that Hilo is rather suggested than seen.  It is only on shore that
one becomes aware of its bewildering variety of native and exotic
trees and shrubs.  From the sea it looks one dense mass of greenery,
in which the bright foliage of the candle-nut relieves the glossy
dark green of the breadfruit--a maze of preposterous bananas, out of
which rise slender annulated trunks of palms giving their infinite
grace to the grove.  And palms along the bay, almost among the surf,
toss their waving plumes in the sweet soft breeze, not "palms in
exile," but children of a blessed isle where "never wind blows
loudly."  Above Hilo, broad lands sweeping up cloudwards, with their
sugar cane, kalo, melons, pine-apples, and banana groves suggest the
boundless liberality of Nature.  Woods and waters, hill and valley
are all there, and from the region of an endless summer the eye
takes in the domain of an endless winter, where almost perpetual
snow crowns the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.  Mauna Kea from
Hilo has a shapely aspect, for its top is broken into peaks, said to
be the craters of extinct volcanoes, but my eyes seek the dome-like
curve of Mauna Loa with far deeper interest, for it is as yet an
unfinished mountain.  It has a huge crater on its summit 800 feet in
depth, and a pit of unresting fire on its side; it throbs and
rumbles, and palpitates; it has sent forth floods of fire over all
this part of Hawaii, and at any moment it may be crowned with a
lonely light, showing that its tremendous forces are again in
activity.  My imagination is already inflamed by hearing of marvels,
and I am beginning to think tropically.

Canoes came off from the shore, dusky swimmers glided through the
water, youths, athletes, like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, rode
the waves on their surf-boards, brilliantly dressed riders galloped
along the sands and came trooping down the bridle-paths from all the
vicinity till a many-coloured tropical crowd had assembled at the
landing.  Then a whaleboat came off, rowed by eight young men in
white linen suits and white straw hats, with wreaths of carmine-
coloured flowers round both hats and throats.  They were singing a
glee in honour of Mr. Ragsdale, whom they sprang on deck to welcome.
Our crowd of native fellow-passengers, by some inscrutable process,
had re-arrayed themselves and blossomed into brilliancy.  Hordes of
Hilo natives swarmed on deck, and it became a Babel of alohas,
kisses, hand-shakings, and reiterated welcomes.  The glee singers
threw their beautiful garlands of roses and ohias over the foreign
passengers, and music, flowers, good-will and kindliness made us
welcome to these enchanted shores.  We landed in a whaleboat, and
were hoisted up a rude pier which was crowded, for what the arrival
of the Australian mail-steamer is to Honolulu, the coming of the
Kilauea is to Hilo.  I had not time to feel myself a stranger, there
were so many introductions, and so much friendliness.  Mr. Coan and
Mr. Lyman, two of the most venerable of the few surviving
missionaries, were on the landing, and I was introduced to them and
many others.  There is no hotel in Hilo.  The residents receive
strangers, and Miss Karpe and I were soon installed in a large buff
frame-house, with two deep verandahs, the residence of Mr.
Severance, Sheriff of Hawaii.

Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer
acquaintance, so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in
plain prose.  Two narrow roads lead up from the sea to one as
narrow, running parallel with it.  Further up the hill another runs
in the same direction.  There are no conveyances, and outside the
village these narrow roads dwindle into bridle-paths, with just room
for one horse to pass another.  The houses in which Mr. Coan, Mr.
Lyman, Dr. Wetmore (formerly of the Mission), and one or two others
live, have just enough suggestion of New England about them to
remind one of the dominant influence on these islands, but the
climate has idealized them, and clothed them with poetry and
antiquity.

Of the three churches, the most prominent is the Roman Catholic
Church, a white frame building with two great towers; Mr. Coan's
native church with a spire comes next; and then the neat little
foreign church, also with a spire.  The Romish Church is a rather
noisy neighbour, for its bells ring at unnatural hours, and doleful
strains of a band which cannot play either in time or tune proceed
from it.  The court-house, a large buff painted frame-building with
two deep verandahs, standing on a well-kept lawn planted with exotic
trees, is the most imposing building in Hilo.  All the foreigners
have carried out their individual tastes in their dwellings, and the
result is very agreeable, though in picturesqueness they must yield
the plain to the native houses, which whether of frame, or grass
plain or plaited, whether one or two storied, all have the deep
thatched roofs and verandahs plain or fantastically latticed, which
are so in harmony with the surroundings.  These lattices and single
and double verandahs are gorgeous with trailers, and the general
warm brown tint of the houses contrasts pleasantly with the deep
green of the bananas which over-shadow them.  There are living
waters everywhere.  Each house seems to possess its pure bright
stream, which is arrested in bathing houses to be liberated among
kalo patches of the brightest green.  Every verandah appears a
gathering place, and the bright holukus of the women, the gay shirts
and bandanas of the men, the brilliant wreaths of natural flowers
which adorn both, the hot-house temperature, the new trees and
flowers which demand attention, the strange rich odours, and the low
monotonous recitative which mourns through the groves make me feel
that I am in a new world.  Ah, this is all Polynesian!  This must be
the land to which the "timid-eyed" lotos-eaters came.  There is a
strange fascination in the languid air, and it is strangely sweet
"to dream of fatherland" . . .
                                        I.L.B.



LETTER IV.

HILO, HAWAII.

I find that I can send another short letter before leaving for the
volcano.  I cannot convey to you any idea of the greenness and
lavish luxuriance of this place, where everything flourishes, and
glorious trailers and parasitic ferns hide all unsightly objects out
of sight.  It presents a bewildering maze of lilies, roses,
fuschias, clematis, begonias, convolvuli, the huge appalling looking
granadilla, the purple and yellow water lemons, also varieties of
passiflora, both with delicious edible fruit, custard apples, rose
apples, mangoes, mangostein guavas, bamboos, alligator pears,
oranges, tamarinds, papayas, bananas, breadfruit, magnolias,
geraniums, candle-nut, gardenias, dracaenas, eucalyptus, pandanus,
ohias, {59a} kamani trees, kalo, {59b} noni, {59c} and quantities of
other trees and flowers, of which I shall eventually learn the
names, patches of pine-apple, melons, and sugar-cane for children to
suck, kalo and sweet potatoes.

In the vicinity of this and all other houses, Chili peppers, and a
ginger-plant with a drooping flower-stalk with a great number of
blossoms, which when not fully developed have a singular resemblance
to very pure porcelain tinted with pink at the extremities of the
buds, are to be seen growing in "yards," to use a most unfitting
Americanism.  I don't know how to introduce you to some of the
things which delight my eyes here; but I must ask you to believe
that the specimens of tropical growths which we see in
conservatories at home are in general either misrepresentations, or
very feeble representations of these growths in their natural homes.
I don't allude to flowers, and especially not to orchids, but in
this instance very specially to bananas, coco-palms, and the
pandanus.  For example, there is a specimen of the Pandanus
odoratissimus in the palm-house in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens,
which is certainly a malignant caricature, with its long straggling
branches, and widely scattered tufts of poverty stricken foliage.
The bananas and plantains in that same palm-house represent only the
feeblest and poorest of their tribe.  They require not only warmth
and moisture, but the generous sunshine of the tropics for their
development.  In the same house the date and sugar-palms are
tolerable specimens, but the cocoa-nut trees are most truly "palms
in exile."

I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree
of any species.  I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at
Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness
and witchery of their own.  As I write now I hear the moaning rustle
of the wind through their plume-like tops, and their long slender
stems, and crisp crown of leaves above the trees with shining
leafage which revel in damp, have a suggestion of Orientalism about
them.  How do they come too, on every atoll or rock that raises its
head throughout this lonely ocean?  They fringe the shores of these
islands.  Wherever it is dry and fiercely hot, and the lava is black
and hard, and nothing else grows, or can grow, there they are, close
to the sea, sending their root-fibres seawards as if in search of
salt water.  Their long, curved, wrinkled, perfectly cylindrical
stems, bulging near the ground like an apothecary's pestle, rise to
a height of from sixty to one hundred feet.  These stems are never
straight, and in a grove lean and curve every way, and are
apparently capable of enduring any force of wind or earthquake.
They look as if they had never been young, and they show no signs of
growth, rearing their plumy tufts so far aloft, and casting their
shadows so far away, always supremely lonely, as though they
belonged to the heavens rather than the earth.  Then, while all else
that grows is green they are yellowish.  Their clusters of nuts in
all stages of growth are yellow, their fan-like leaves, which are
from twelve to twenty feet long, are yellow, and an amber light
pervades and surrounds them.  They provide milk, oil, food, rope,
and matting, and each tree produces about one hundred nuts annually.

The pandanus, or lauhala, is one of the most striking features of
the islands.  Its funereal foliage droops in Hilo, and it was it
that I noticed all along the windward coast as having a most
striking peculiarity of aerial roots which the branches send down to
the ground, and which I now see have large cup-shaped spongioles.
These air-roots seem like props, and appear to vary in length from
three to twelve feet, according to the situation of the tree.  There
is one variety I saw to-day, the "screw pine," which is really
dangerous if one approached it unguardedly.  It is a whorled
pandanus, with long sword-shaped leaves, spirally arranged in three
rows, and hard, saw-toothed edges, very sharp.  When unbranched as I
saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times
magnified.  But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all
about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and
branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports
itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one
of the first plants to appear on the newly-formed Pacific islands.
{62}  Its foliage is singularly dense, although it is borne in tufts
of a quantity of long yucca-like leaves on the branches.  The shape
of the tree is usually circular.  The mournful look is caused by the
leaves taking a downward and very decided droop in the middle.  At
present each tuft of leaves has in its centre an object like a green
pine-apple.  This contains the seeds which are eatable, as is also
the fleshy part of the drupes.  I find that it is from the seeds of
this tree and their coverings that the brilliant orange leis, or
garlands of the natives, are made.  The soft white case of the
leaves and the terminal buds can also be eaten.  The leaves are used
for thatching, and their tough longitudinal fibres for mats and
ropes.  There is another kind, the Pandanus vacoa, the same as is
used for making sugar bags in Mauritius, but I have not seen it.

One does not forget the first sight of a palm.  I think the banana
comes next, and I see them in perfection here for the first time, as
those in Honolulu grow in "yards," and are tattered by the winds.
It transports me into the tropics in feeling, as I am already in
them in fact, and satisfies all my cravings for something which
shall represent and epitomize their luxuriance, as well as for
simplicity and grace in vegetable form.  And here it is everywhere
with its shining shade, its smooth fat green stem, its crown of huge
curving leaves from four to ten feet long, and its heavy cluster of
a whorl of green or golden fruit, with a pendant purple cone of
undeveloped blossom below.  It is of the tropics, tropical; a thing
of beauty, and gladness, and sunshine.  It is indigenous here, and
wild, but never bears seeds, and is propagated solely by suckers,
which spring up when the parent plant has fruited, or by cuttings.
It bears seed, strange to say, only (so far as is known) in the
Andaman Islands, where, stranger still, it springs up as a second
growth wherever the forests are cleared.  Go to the palm-house, find
the Musa sapientum, magnify it ten times, glorify it immeasurably,
and you will have a laggard idea of the banana groves of Hilo.

The ground is carpeted with a grass of preternaturally vivid green
and rankness of growth, mixed with a handsome fern, with a caudex a
foot high, the Sadleria cyathoides, and another of exquisite beauty,
the Micropia tenuifolia, which are said to be the commonest ferns on
Hawaii.  It looks Elysian.

Hilo is a lively place for such a mere village; so many natives are
stirring about, and dashing along the narrow roads on horseback.
This is a large airy house, simple and tasteful, with pretty
engravings and water-colour drawings on the walls.  There is a large
bath-house in the garden, into which a pure, cool stream has been
led, and the gurgle and music of many such streams fill the sweet,
soft air.  There is a saying among sailors, "Follow a Pacific
shower, and it leads you to Hilo."  Indeed I think they have a
rainfall of from thirteen to sixteen feet annually.  These deep
verandahs are very pleasant, for they render window-blinds
unnecessary; so there is nothing of that dark stuffiness which makes
indoor life a trial in the closed, shadeless Australian houses.

Miss Karpe, my travelling companion, is a lady of great energy, and
apparently an adept in the art of travelling.  Undismayed by three
days of sea-sickness, and the prospect of the tremendous journey to
the volcano to-morrow, she extemporised a ride to the Anuenue Falls
on the Wailuku this afternoon, and I weakly accompanied her, a burly
policeman being our guide.  The track is only a scramble among rocks
and holes, concealed by grass and ferns, and we had to cross a
stream, full of great holes, several times.  The Fall itself is very
pretty, 110 feet in one descent, with a cavernous shrine behind the
water, filled with ferns.  There were large ferns all round the
Fall, and a jungle of luxuriant tropical shrubs of many kinds.

Three miles above this Fall there are the Pei-pei Falls, very
interesting geologically.  The Wailuku River is the boundary between
the two great volcanoes, and its waters, it is supposed by learned
men, have often flowed over heated beds of basalt, with the result
of columnar formation radiating from the bottom of the stream.  This
structure is sometimes beautifully exhibited in the form of Gothic
archways, through which the torrent pours into a basin, surrounded
by curved, broken, and half-sunk prisms, black and prominent amidst
the white foam of the Falls.  In several places the river has just
pierced the beds of lava, and in one passes under a thick rock
bridge, several hundred feet wide.  Often, where the water flows
over beds of dark grey basalt, masses of trachyte, closely
resembling syenite, have formed "potholes," and by mutual action
have been worn to pebbles.  At Pei-pei there are three circular
pools, each about fifty feet in diameter, and separated by walls six
feet thick, in a bed of columnar basalt. {65}  During freshets the
river sometimes rises thirty feet, and hides these pools, but during
the dry season the upper bed is bare, and after a succession of
cascades of various heights the stream pours into the first basin,
filling it with foam.  From this there is no apparent outlet, but
leaves thrown in soon appear in the second basin, whose tranquillity
is only disturbed by a few bubbles.  Between this and the third
there are two subterranean passages, and the water there leaps over
a fall about forty feet high, nearly covering a perfect Gothic arch
which is the entrance to a shallow cave.  The scene is enclosed by
high and nearly perpendicular walls. {66}

Near the Anuenue Fall we stopped at a native house, outside which a
woman, in a rose-coloured chemise, was stringing roses for a
necklace, while her husband pounded the kalo root on a board.  His
only clothing was the malo, a narrow strip of cloth wound round the
loins, and passed between the legs.  This was the only covering worn
by men before the introduction of Christianity.  Females wore the
pau, a short petticoat made of tapa, which reached from the waist to
the knees.  To our eyes, the brown skin produces nearly the effect
of clothing.

Everything was new and interesting, but the ride was spoiled by my
insecure seat in my saddle, and the increased pain in my spine which
riding produced.  Once in crossing a stream the horses have to make
a sort of downward jump from a rock, and I slipped round my horse's
neck.  Indeed on the way back I felt that on the ground of health I
must give up the volcano, as I would never consent to be carried to
it, like Lady Franklin, in a litter.  When we returned, Mr.
Severance suggested that it would be much better for me to follow
the Hawaiian fashion, and ride astride, and put his saddle on the
horse.  It was only my strong desire to see the volcano which made
me consent to a mode of riding against which I have so strong a
prejudice, but the result of the experiment is that I shall visit
Kilauea thus or not at all.  The native women all ride astride, on
ordinary occasions in the full sacks, or holukus, and on gala days
in the pau, the gay, winged dress which I described in writing from
Honolulu.  A great many of the foreign ladies on Hawaii have adopted
the Mexican saddle also, for greater security to themselves and ease
to their horses, on the steep and perilous bridle-tracks, but they
wear full Turkish trowsers and jauntily-made dresses reaching to the
ankles.

It appears that Hilo is free from the universally admitted nuisance
of morning calls.  The hours are simple--eight o'clock breakfasts,
one o'clock dinners, six o'clock suppers.  If people want anything
with you, they come at any hour of the day, but if they only wish to
be sociable, the early evening is the recognized time for "calling."
After supper, when the day's work is done, people take their
lanterns and visit each other, either in the verandahs or in the
cheerful parlours which open upon them.  There are no door-bells, or
solemn announcements by servants of visitors' names, or "not-at-
homes."  If people are in their parlours, it is presumed that they
receive their friends.  Several pleasant people came in this
evening.  They seem to take great interest in two ladies going to
the volcano without an escort, but no news has been received from it
lately, and I fear that it is not very active as no glare is visible
to-night.  Mr. Thompson, the pastor of the small foreign
congregation here, called on me.  He is a very agreeable,
accomplished man, and is acquainted with Dr. Holland and several of
my New England friends.  He kindly brought his wife's riding-costume
for my trip to Kilauea.  The Rev. Titus Coan, one of the first and
most successful missionaries to Hawaii, also called.  He is a tall,
majestic-looking man, physically well fitted for the extraordinary
exertions he has undergone in mission work, and intellectually also,
I should think, for his face expresses great mental strength, and
nothing of the weakness of a sanguine enthusiast.  He has admitted
about 12,000 persons into the Christian Church.  He is the greatest
authority on volcanoes on the islands, and his enthusiastic manner
and illuminated countenance as he spoke of Kilauea, have raised my
expectations to the highest pitch.  We are prepared for to-morrow,
having engaged a native named Upa, who boasts a little English, as
our guide.  He provides three horses and himself for three days for
the sum of thirty dollars.
                                         I.L.B.



LETTER V.

VOLCANO OF KILAUEA, Jan. 31.

Bruised aching bones, strained muscles, and overwhelming fatigue,
render it hardly possible for me to undergo the physical labour of
writing, but in spirit I am so elated with the triumph of success,
and so thrilled by new sensations, that though I cannot communicate
the incommunicable, I want to write to you while the impression of
Kilauea is fresh, and by "the light that never was on sea or shore."

By eight yesterday morning our preparations were finished, and Miss
Karpe, whose conversance with the details of travelling I envy,
mounted her horse on her own side-saddle, dressed in a short grey
waterproof, and a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat tied so tightly over her
ears with a green veil as to give it the look of a double spout.
The only pack her horse carried was a bundle of cloaks and shawls,
slung together with an umbrella on the horn of her saddle.  Upa, who
was most picturesquely got up in the native style with garlands of
flowers round his hat and throat, carried our saddle-bags on the
peak of his saddle, a bag with bananas, bread, and a bottle of tea
on the horn, and a canteen of water round his waist.  I had on my
coarse Australian hat which serves the double purpose of sunshade
and umbrella, Mrs. Thompson's riding costume, my great rusty New
Zealand boots, and my blanket strapped behind a very gaily
ornamented brass-bossed demi-pique Mexican saddle, which one of the
missionary's daughters had lent me.  It has a horn in front, a low
peak behind, large wooden stirrups with leathern flaps the length of
the stirrup-leathers, to prevent the dress from coming in contact
with the horse, and strong guards of hide which hang over and below
the stirrup, and cover it and the foot up to the ancles, to prevent
the feet or boots from being torn in riding through the bush.  Each
horse had four fathoms of tethering rope wound several times round
his neck.  In such fashion must all travelling be done on Hawaii,
whether by ladies or gentlemen.

Upa supplied the picturesque element, we the grotesque.  The morning
was moist and unpropitious looking.  As the greater part of the
thirty miles has to be travelled at a foot's-pace the guide took
advantage of the soft grassy track which leads out of Hilo, to go
off at full gallop, a proceeding which made me at once conscious of
the demerits of my novel way of riding.  To guide the horse and to
clutch the horn of the saddle with both hands were clearly
incompatible, so I abandoned the first as being the least important.
Then my feet either slipped too far into the stirrups and were cut,
or they were jerked out; every corner was a new terror, for at each
I was nearly pitched off on one side, and when at last Upa stopped,
and my beast stopped without consulting my wishes, only a desperate
grasp of mane and tethering rope saved me from going over his head.
At this ridiculous moment we came upon a bevy of brown maidens
swimming in a lakelet by the roadside, who increased my confusion by
a chorus of laughter.  How fervently I hoped that the track would
never admit of galloping again!

Hilo fringes off with pretty native houses, kalo patches and mullet
ponds, and in about four miles the track, then formed of rough hard
lava, and not more than 24 inches wide, enters a forest of the
densest description, a burst of true tropical jungle.  I could not
have imagined anything so perfectly beautiful, nature seemed to riot
in the production of wonderful forms, as if the moist hot-house air
encouraged her in lavish excesses.  Such endless variety, such
depths of green, such an impassable and altogether inextricable maze
of forest trees, ferns, and lianas!  There were palms, breadfruit
trees, ohias, eugenias, candle-nuts of immense size, Koa (acacia),
bananas, noni, bamboos, papayas (Carica papaya), guavas, ti trees
(Cordyline terminalis), treeferns, climbing ferns, parasitic ferns,
and ferns themselves the prey of parasites of their own species.
The lianas were there in profusion climbing over the highest trees,
and entangling them, with stems varying in size from those as thick
as a man's arm to those as slender as whipcord, binding all in an
impassable network, and hanging over our heads in rich festoons or
tendrils swaying in the breeze.  There were trailers, i.e.,
(Freycinetia scandens) with heavy knotted stems, as thick as a
frigate's stoutest hawser, coiling up to the tops of tall ohias with
tufted leaves like yuccas, and crimson spikes of gaudy blossom.  The
shining festoons of the yam and the graceful trailers of the maile
(Alyxia Olivaeformis), a sweet scented vine, from which the natives
make garlands, and glossy leaved climbers hung from tree to tree,
and to brighten all, huge morning glories of a heavenly blue opened
a thousand blossoms to the sun as if to give a tenderer loveliness
to the forest.  Here trees grow and fall, and nature covers them
where they lie with a new vegetation which altogether obliterates
their hasty decay.  It is four miles of beautiful and inextricable
confusion, untrodden by human feet except on the narrow track.  "Of
every tree in this garden thou mayest freely eat," and no serpent or
noxious thing trails its hideous form through this Eden.

It was quite intoxicating, so new, wonderful, and solemn withal,
that I was sorry when we emerged from its shady depths upon a grove
of cocoanut trees and the glare of day.  Two very poor-looking grass
huts, with a ragged patch of sugar-cane beside them, gave us an
excuse for half an hour's rest.  An old woman in a red sack, much
tattooed, with thick short grey hair bristling on her head, sat on a
palm root, holding a nude brown child; a lean hideous old man,
dressed only in a malo, leaned against its stem, our horses with
their highly miscellaneous gear were tethered to a fern stump, and
Upa, the most picturesque of the party, served out tea.  He and the
natives talked incessantly, and from the frequency with which the
words "wahine haole" (foreign woman) occurred, the subject of their
conversation was obvious.  Upa has taken up the notion from
something Mr. S--- said, that I am a "high chief," and related to
Queen Victoria, and he was doubtlessly imposing this fable on the
people.  In spite of their poverty and squalor, if squalor is a term
which can be applied to aught beneath these sunny skies, there was a
kindliness about them which they made us feel, and the aloha with
which they parted from us had a sweet friendly sound.

From this grove we travelled as before in single file over an
immense expanse of lava of the kind called pahoehoe, or satin rock,
to distinguish it from the a-a, or jagged, rugged, impassable rock.
Savants all use these terms in the absence of any equally expressive
in English.  The pahoehoe extends in the Hilo direction from hence
about twenty-three miles.  It is the cooled and arrested torrent of
lava which in past ages has flowed towards Hilo from Kilauea.  It
lies in hummocks, in coils, in rippled waves, in rivers, in huge
convolutions, in pools smooth and still, and in caverns which are
really bubbles.  Hundreds of square miles of the island are made up
of this and nothing more.  A very frequent aspect of pahoehoe is the
likeness on a magnificent scale of a thick coat of cream drawn in
wrinkling folds to the side of a milk-pan.  This lava is all grey,
and the greater part of its surface is slightly roughened.  Wherever
this is not the case the horses slip upon it as upon ice.

Here I began to realize the universally igneous origin of Hawaii, as
I had not done among the finely disintegrated lava of Hilo.  From
the hard black rocks which border the sea, to the loftiest mountain
dome or peak, every stone, atom of dust, and foot of fruitful or
barren soil bears the Plutonic mark.  In fact, the island has been
raised heap on heap, ridge on ridge, mountain on mountain, to nearly
the height of Mont Blanc, by the same volcanic forces which are
still in operation here, and may still add at intervals to the
height of the blue dome of Mauna Loa, of which we caught occasional
glimpses above the clouds.  Hawaii is actually at the present time
being built up from the ocean, and this great sea of pahoehoe is not
to be regarded as a vindictive eruption, bringing desolation on a
fertile region, but as an architectural and formative process.

There is no water, except a few deposits of rain-water in holes, but
the moist air and incessant showers have aided nature to mantle this
frightful expanse with an abundant vegetation, principally ferns of
an exquisite green, the most conspicuous being the Sadleria, the
Gleichenia Hawaiiensis, a running wire-like fern, and the exquisite
Microlepia tenuifolia, dwarf guava, with its white flowers
resembling orange flowers in odour, and ohelos (Vaccinium
reticulatum), with their red and white berries, and a profusion of
small-leaved ohias (Metrosideros polymorpha), with their deep
crimson tasselled flowers, and their young shoots of bright crimson,
relieved the monotony of green.  These crimson tassels deftly strung
on thread or fibres, are much used by the natives for their leis, or
garlands.  The ti tree (Cordyline terminalis) which abounds also on
the lava, is most valuable.  They cook their food wrapped up in its
leaves, the porous root when baked, has the taste and texture of
molasses candy, and when distilled yields a spirit, and the leaves
form wrappings for fish, hard poi, and other edibles.  Occasionally
a clump of tufted coco-palms, or of the beautiful candle-nut rose
among the smaller growths.  To our left a fringe of palms marked the
place where the lava and the ocean met, while, on our right, we were
seldom out of sight of the dense timber belt, with its fringe of
tree-ferns and bananas, which girdles Mauna Loa.

The track, on the whole, is a perpetual upward scramble; for, though
the ascent is so gradual, that it is only by the increasing coolness
of the atmosphere that the increasing elevation is denoted, it is
really nearly 4,000 feet in thirty miles.  Only strong, sure-footed,
well-shod horses can undertake this journey, for it is a constant
scramble over rocks, going up or down natural steps, or cautiously
treading along ledges.  Most of the track is quite legible owing to
the vegetation having been worn off the lava, but the rock itself
hardly shows the slightest abrasion.

Upa had indicated that we were to stop for rest at the "Half Way
House;" and, as I was hardly able to sit on my horse owing to
fatigue, I consoled myself by visions of a comfortable sofa and a
cup of tea.  It was with real dismay that I found the reality to
consist of a grass hut, much out of repair, and which, bad as it
was, was locked.  Upa said we had ridden so slowly that it would be
dark before we reached the volcano, and only allowed us to rest on
the grass for half-an-hour.  He had frequently reiterated "Half Way
House, you wear spur;" and, on our remounting, he buckled on my foot
a heavy rusty Mexican spur, with jingling ornaments and rowels an
inch and a half long.  These horses are so accustomed to be jogged
with these instruments that they won't move without them.  The
prospect of five hours more riding looked rather black, for I was
much exhausted, and my shoulders and knee-joints were in severe
pain.  Miss K.'s horse showed no other appreciation of a stick with
which she belaboured him than flourishes of his tail, so, for a
time, he was put in the middle, that Upa might add his more forcible
persuasions, and I rode first and succeeded in getting my lazy
animal into the priestly amble known at home as "a butter and eggs
trot," the favourite travelling pace, but this not suiting the
guide's notion of progress, he frequently rushed up behind with a
torrent of Hawaiian, emphasized by heavy thumps on my horse's back,
which so sorely jeopardised my seat on the animal, owing to his
resenting the interference by kicking, that I "dropped astern" for
the rest of the way, leaving Upa to belabour Miss K.'s steed for his
diversion.

The country altered but little, only the variety of trees gave place
to the ohia alone, with its sombre foliage.  There were neither
birds nor insects, and the only travellers we encountered in the
solitude compelled us to give them a wide berth, for they were a
drove of half wild random cattle, led by a lean bull of hideous
aspect, with crumpled horns.  Two picturesque native vaccheros on
mules accompanied them, and my flagging spirits were raised by their
news that the volcano was quite active.  The owner of these cattle
knows that he has 10,000 head, and may have a great many more.  They
are shot for their hides by men who make shooting and skinning them
a profession, and, near settlements, the owners are thankful to get
two cents a pound for sirloin and rump-steaks.  These, and great
herds which are actually wild and ownerless upon the mountains, are
a degenerate breed, with some of the worst peculiarities of the
Texas cattle, and are the descendants of those which Vancouver
placed on the islands and which were under Tabu for ten years.  They
destroy the old trees by gnawing the bark, and render the growth of
young ones impossible.

As it was getting dark we passed through a forest strip, where tree-
ferns from twelve to eighteen feet in height, and with fronds from
five to seven feet long, were the most attractive novelties.  As we
emerged, "with one stride came the dark," a great darkness, a cloudy
night, with neither moon nor stars, and the track was further
obscured by a belt of ohias.  There were five miles of this, and I
was so dead from fatigue and want of food, that I would willingly
have lain down in the bush in the rain.  I most heartlessly wished
that Miss K. were tired too, for her voice, which seemed tireless as
she rode ahead in the dark, rasped upon my ears.  I could only keep
on my saddle by leaning on the horn, and my clothes were soaked with
the heavy rain.  "A dreadful ride," one and another had said, and I
then believed them.  It seemed an awful solitude full of mystery.
Often, I only knew that my companions were ahead by the sparks
struck from their horse's shoes.

It became a darkness which could be felt.

"Is that possibly a pool of blood?" I thought in horror, as a rain
puddle glowed crimson on the track.  Not that indeed!  A glare
brighter and redder than that from any furnace suddenly lightened
the whole sky, and from that moment brightened our path.  There sat
Miss K. under her dripping umbrella as provokingly erect as when she
left Hilo.  There Upa jogged along, huddled up in his poncho, and
his canteen shone red.  There the ohia trees were relieved blackly
against the sky.  The scene started out from the darkness with the
suddenness of a revelation.  We felt the pungency of sulphurous
fumes in the still night air.  A sound as of the sea broke on our
ears, rising and falling as if breaking on the shore, but the ocean
was thirty miles away.  The heavens became redder and brighter, and
when we reached the crater-house at eight, clouds of red vapour
mixed with flame were curling ceaselessly out of a huge invisible
pit of blackness, and Kilauea was in all its fiery glory.  We had
reached the largest active volcano in the world, the "place of
everlasting burnings."

Rarely was light more welcome than that which twinkled from under
the verandah of the lonely crater-house into the rainy night.  The
hospitable landlord of this unique dwelling lifted me from my horse,
and carried me into a pleasant room thoroughly warmed by a large
wood fire, and I hastily retired to bed to spend much of the
bitterly cold night in watching the fiery vapours rolling up out of
the infinite darkness, and in dreading the descent into the crater.
The heavy clouds were crimson with the reflection, and soon after
midnight jets of flame of a most peculiar colour leapt fitfully into
the air, accompanied by a dull throbbing sound.

This morning was wet and murky as many mornings are here, and the
view from the door was a blank up to ten o'clock, when the mist
rolled away and revealed the mystery of last night, the mighty
crater whose vast terminal wall is only a few yards from this house.
We think of a volcano as a cone.  This is a different thing.  The
abyss, which really is at a height of nearly 4,000 feet on the flank
of Mauna Loa, has the appearance of a great pit on a rolling plain.
But such a pit!  It is nine miles in circumference, and its lowest
area, which not long ago fell about 300 feet, just as ice on a pond
falls when the water below it is withdrawn, covers six square miles.
The depth of the crater varies from 800 to 1,100 feet in different
years, according as the molten sea below is at flood or ebb.  Signs
of volcanic activity are present more or less throughout its whole
depth, and for some distance round its margin, in the form of steam
cracks, jets of sulphurous vapour, blowing cones, accumulating
deposits of acicular crystals of sulphur, etc., and the pit itself
is constantly rent and shaken by earthquakes.  Grand eruptions occur
at intervals with circumstances of indescribable terror and dignity,
but Kilauea does not limit its activity to these outbursts, but has
exhibited its marvellous phenomena through all known time in a lake
or lakes in the southern part of the crater three miles from this
side.

This lake, the Hale-mau-mau, or House of Everlasting Fire of the
Hawaiian mythology, the abode of the dreaded goddess Pele, is
approachable with safety except during an eruption.  The spectacle,
however, varies almost daily, and at times the level of the lava in
the pit within a pit is so low, and the suffocating gases are
evolved in such enormous quantities, that travellers are unable to
see anything.  There had been no news from it for a week, and as
nothing was to be seen but a very faint bluish vapour hanging round
its margin, the prospect was not encouraging.

When I have learned more about the Hawaiian volcanoes, I shall tell
you more of their phenomena, but tonight I shall only write to you
my first impressions of what we actually saw on this January 31st.
My highest expectations have been infinitely exceeded, and I can
hardly write soberly after such a spectacle, especially while
through the open door I see the fiery clouds of vapour from the pit
rolling up into a sky, glowing as if itself on fire.

We were accompanied into the crater by a comical native guide, who
mimicked us constantly, our Hilo guide, who "makes up" a little
English, a native woman from Kona, who speaks imperfect English
poetically, and her brother who speaks none.  I was conscious that
we foreign women with our stout staffs and grotesque dress looked
like caricatures, and the natives, who have a keen sense of the
ludicrous, did not conceal that they thought us so.

The first descent down the terminal wall of the crater is very
precipitous, but it and the slope which extends to the second
descent are thickly covered with ohias, ohelos (a species of
whortleberry), sadlerias, polypodiums, silver grass, and a great
variety of bulbous plants many of which bore clusters of berries of
a brilliant turquoise blue.  The "beyond" looked terrible.  I could
not help clinging to these vestiges of the kindlier mood of nature
in which she sought to cover the horrors she had wrought.  The next
descent is over rough blocks and ridges of broken lava, and appears
to form part of a break which extends irregularly round the whole
crater, and which probably marks a tremendous subsidence of its
floor.  Here the last apparent vegetation was left behind, and the
familiar earth.  We were in a new Plutonic region of blackness and
awful desolation, the accustomed sights and sounds of nature all
gone.  Terraces, cliffs, lakes, ridges, rivers, mountain sides,
whirlpools, chasms of lava surrounded us, solid, black, and shining,
as if vitrified, or an ashen grey, stained yellow with sulphur here
and there, or white with alum.  The lava was fissured and upheaved
everywhere by earthquakes, hot underneath, and emitting a hot
breath.

After more than an hour of very difficult climbing we reached the
lowest level of the crater, pretty nearly a mile across, presenting
from above the appearance of a sea at rest, but on crossing it we
found it to be an expanse of waves and convolutions of ashy-coloured
lava, with huge cracks filled up with black iridescent rolls of
lava, only a few weeks old.  Parts of it are very rough and ridgy,
jammed together like field ice, or compacted by rolls of lava which
may have swelled up from beneath, but the largest part of the area
presents the appearance of huge coiled hawsers, the ropy formation
of the lava rendering the illusion almost perfect.  These are riven
by deep cracks which emit hot sulphurous vapours.  Strange to say,
in one of these, deep down in that black and awful region, three
slender metamorphosed ferns were growing, three exquisite forms, the
fragile heralds of the great forest of vegetation, which probably in
coming years will clothe this pit with beauty.  Truly they seemed to
speak of the love of God.  On our right there was a precipitous
ledge, and a recent flow of lava had poured over it, cooling as it
fell into columnar shapes as symmetrical as those of Staffa.  It
took us a full hour to cross this deep depression, and as long to
master a steep hot ascent of about 400 feet, formed by a recent
lava-flow from Hale-mau-mau into the basin.  This lava hill is an
extraordinary sight--a flood of molten stone, solidifying as it ran
down the declivity, forming arrested waves, streams, eddies,
gigantic convolutions, forms of snakes, stems of trees, gnarled
roots, crooked water-pipes, all involved and contorted on a gigantic
scale, a wilderness of force and dread.  Over one steeper place the
lava had run in a fiery cascade about 100 feet wide.  Some had
reached the ground, some had been arrested midway, but all had taken
the aspect of stems of trees.  In some of the crevices I picked up a
quantity of very curious filamentose lava, known as "Pele's hair."
It resembles coarse spun glass, and is of a greenish or yellowish-
brown colour.  In many places the whole surface of the lava is
covered with this substance seen through a glazed medium.  During
eruptions, when fire-fountains play to a great height, and drops of
lava are thrown in all directions, the wind spins them out in clear
green or yellow threads two or three feet long, which catch and
adhere to projecting points.

As we ascended, the flow became hotter under our feet, as well as
more porous and glistening.  It was so hot that a shower of rain
hissed as it fell upon it.  The crust became increasingly insecure,
and necessitated our walking in single file with the guide in front,
to test the security of the footing.  I fell through several times,
and always into holes full of sulphurous steam, so malignantly acid
that my strong dog-skin gloves were burned through as I raised
myself on my hands.

We had followed a lava-flow for thirty miles up to the crater's
brink, and now we had toiled over recent lava for three hours, and
by all calculation were close to the pit, yet there was no smoke or
sign of fire, and I felt sure that the volcano had died out for once
for our especial disappointment.  Indeed, I had been making up my
mind for disappointment since we left the crater-house, in
consequence of reading seven different accounts, in which language
was exhausted in describing Kilauea.

Suddenly, just above, and in front of us, gory drops were tossed in
air, and springing forwards we stood on the brink of Hale-mau-mau,
which was about 35 feet below us.  I think we all screamed, I know
we all wept, but we were speechless, for a new glory and terror had
been added to the earth.  It is the most unutterable of wonderful
things.  The words of common speech are quite useless.  It is
unimaginable, indescribable, a sight to remember for ever, a sight
which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul,
removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life.  Here was
the real "bottomless pit"--the "fire which is not quenched"--"the
place of hell"--"the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone"--
the "everlasting burnings"--the fiery sea whose waves are never
weary.  There were groanings, rumblings, and detonations, rushings,
hissings, and splashings, and the crashing sound of breakers on the
coast, but it was the surging of fiery waves upon a fiery shore.
But what can I write!  Such words as jets, fountains, waves, spray,
convey some idea of order and regularity, but here there was none.
The inner lake, while we stood there, formed a sort of crater within
itself, the whole lava sea rose about three feet, a blowing cone
about eight feet high was formed, it was never the same two minutes
together.  And what we saw had no existence a month ago, and
probably will be changed in every essential feature a month hence.

What we did see was one irregularly-shaped lake, possibly 500 feet
wide at its narrowest part and nearly half a mile at its broadest,
almost divided into two by a low bank of lava, which extended nearly
across it where it was narrowest, and which was raised visibly
before our eyes.  The sides of the nearest part of the lake were
absolutely perpendicular, but nowhere more than 40 feet high; but
opposite to us on the far side of the larger lake they were bold and
craggy, and probably not less than 150 feet high.  On one side there
was an expanse entirely occupied with blowing cones, and jets of
steam or vapour.  The lake has been known to sink 400 feet, and a
month ago it overflowed its banks.  The prominent object was fire in
motion, but the surface of the double lake was continually skinning
over for a second or two with a cooled crust of a lustrous grey-
white, like frosted silver, broken by jagged cracks of a bright
rose-colour.  The movement was nearly always from the sides to the
centre, but the movement of the centre itself appeared independent
and always took a southerly direction.  Before each outburst of
agitation there was much hissing and a throbbing internal roaring,
as of imprisoned gases.  Now it seemed furious, demoniacal, as if no
power on earth could bind it, then playful and sportive, then for a
second languid, but only because it was accumulating fresh force.
On our arrival eleven fire fountains were playing joyously round the
lakes, and sometimes the six of the nearer lake ran together in the
centre to go wallowing down in one vortex, from which they
reappeared bulging upwards, till they formed a huge cone 30 feet
high, which plunged downwards in a whirlpool only to reappear in
exactly the previous number of fountains in different parts of the
lake, high leaping, raging, flinging themselves upwards.  Sometimes
the whole lake, abandoning its usual centripetal motion, as if
impelled southwards, took the form of mighty waves, and surging
heavily against the partial barrier with a sound like the Pacific
surf, lashed, tore, covered it, and threw itself over it in clots of
living fire.  It was all confusion, commotion, force, terror, glory,
majesty, mystery, and even beauty.  And the colour!  "Eye hath not
seen" it!  Molten metal has not that crimson gleam, nor blood that
living light!  Had I not seen this I should never have known that
such a colour was possible.

The crust perpetually wrinkled, folded over, and cracked, and great
pieces were drawn downwards to be again thrown up on the crests of
waves.  The eleven fountains of gory fire played the greater part of
the time, dancing round the lake with a strength of joyousness which
was absolute beauty.  Indeed after the first half hour of terror had
gone by, the beauty of these jets made a profound impression upon
me, and the sight of them must always remain one of the most
fascinating recollections of my life.  During three hours, the bank
of lava which almost divided the lakes rose considerably, owing to
the cooling of the spray as it dashed over it, and a cavern of
considerable size was formed within it, the roof of which was hung
with fiery stalactites, more than a foot long.  Nearly the whole
time the surges of the further lake taking a southerly direction,
broke with a tremendous noise on the bold craggy cliffs which are
its southern boundary, throwing their gory spray to a height of
fully forty feet.  At times an overhanging crag fell in, creating a
vast splash of fire and increased commotion.

Almost close below us there was an intermittent jet of lava, which
kept cooling round what was possibly a blowhole forming a cone with
an open top, which when we first saw it was about six feet high on
its highest side, and about as many in diameter.  Up this cone or
chimney heavy jets of lava were thrown every second or two, and
cooling as they fell over its edge, raised it rapidly before our
eyes.  Its fiery interior, and the singular sound with which the
lava was vomited up, were very awful.  There was no smoke rising
from the lake, only a faint blue vapour which the wind carried in
the opposite direction.  The heat was excessive.  We were obliged to
stand the whole time, and the soles of our boots were burned, and my
ear and one side of my face were blistered.  Although there was no
smoke from the lake itself, there was an awful region to the
westward, of smoke and sound, and rolling clouds of steam and vapour
whose phenomena it was not safe to investigate, where the blowing
cones are, whose fires last night appeared stationary.  We were able
to stand quite near the margin, and look down into the lake, as you
look into the sea from the deck of a ship, the only risk being that
the fractured ledge might give way.

Before we came away, a new impulse seized the lava.  The fire was
thrown to a great height; the fountains and jets all wallowed
together; new ones appeared, and danced joyously round the margin,
then converging towards the centre they merged into one glowing
mass, which upheaved itself pyramidally and disappeared with a vast
plunge.  Then innumerable billows of fire dashed themselves into the
air, crashing and lashing, and the lake dividing itself recoiled on
either side, then hurling its fires together and rising as if by
upheaval from below, it surged over the temporary rim which it had
formed, passing downwards in a slow majestic flow, leaving the
central surface swaying and dashing in fruitless agony as if sent on
some errand it failed to accomplish.

Farewell, I fear for ever, to the glorious Hale-mau-mau, the
grandest type of force that the earth holds!  "Break, break, break,"
on through the coming years,

     "No more by thee my steps shall be,
      No more again for ever!"

It seemed a dull trudge over the black and awful crater, and
strange, like half-forgotten sights of a world with which I had
ceased to have aught to do, were the dwarf tree-ferns, the lilies
with their turquoise clusters, the crimson myrtle blossoms, and all
the fair things which decked the precipice up which we slowly
dragged our stiff and painful limbs.  Yet it was but the exchange of
a world of sublimity for a world of beauty, the "place of hell," for
the bright upper earth, with its endless summer, and its perennial
foliage, blossom, and fruitage.

Since writing the above I have been looking over the "Volcano Book,"
which contains the observations and impressions of people from all
parts of the world.  Some of these are painstaking and valuable as
showing the extent and rapidity of the changes which take place in
the crater, but there is an immense quantity of flippant rubbish,
and would-be wit, in which "Madam Pele," invariably occurs, this
goddess, who was undoubtedly one of the grandest of heathen mythical
creations, being caricatured in pencil and pen and ink, under every
ludicrous aspect that can be conceived.  Some of the entries are
brief and absurd, "Not much of a fizz," "a grand splutter," "Madam
Pele in the dumps," and so forth.  These generally have English
signatures.  The American wit is far racier, but depends mainly on
the profane use of certain passages of scripture, a species of wit
which is at once easy and disgusting.  People are all particular in
giving the precise time of the departure from Hilo and arrival here,
"making good time" being a thing much admired on Hawaii, but few can
boast of more than three miles an hour.  It is wonderful that people
can parade their snobbishness within sight of Hale-mau-mau.

This inn is a unique and interesting place.  Its existence is
strikingly precarious, for the whole region is in a state of
perpetual throb from earthquakes, and the sights and sounds are
gruesome and awful both by day and night.  The surrounding country
steams and smokes from cracks and pits, and a smell of sulphur fills
the air.  They cook their kalo in a steam apparatus of nature's own
work just behind the house, and every drop of water is from a
distillery similarly provided.  The inn is a grass and bamboo house,
very beautifully constructed without nails.  It is a longish
building with a steep roof divided inside by partitions which run up
to the height of the walls.  There is no ceiling.  The joists which
run across are concealed by wreaths of evergreens, from among which
peep out here and there stars on a blue ground.  The door opens from
the verandah into a centre room with a large open brick fire place,
in which a wood fire is constantly burning, for at this altitude the
temperature is cool.  Some chairs, two lounges, small tables, and
some books and pictures on the walls give a look of comfort, and
there is the reality of comfort in perfection.  Our sleeping-place,
a neat room with a matted floor opens from this, and on the other
side there is a similar room, and a small eating-room with a grass
cookhouse beyond, from which an obliging old Chinaman who
persistently calls us "sir," brings our food.  We have had for each
meal, tea, preserved milk, coffee, kalo, biscuits, butter, potatoes,
goats' flesh, and ohelos.  The charge is five dollars a day, but
everything except the potatoes and ohelos has to be brought twenty
or thirty miles on mules' backs.  It is a very pretty picturesque
house both within and without, and stands on a natural lawn of
brilliant but unpalatable grass, surrounded by a light fence covered
with a small trailing double rose.  It is altogether a most magical
building in the heart of a formidable volcanic wilderness.  Mr.
Gilman, our host, is a fine picturesque looking man, half Indian,
and speaks remarkably good English, but his wife, a very pretty
native woman, speaks none, and he attends to us entirely himself.

A party of native travellers rainbound are here, and the native
women are sitting on the floor stringing flowers and berries for
leis.  One very attractive-looking young woman, refined by
consumption, is lying on some blankets, and three native men are
smoking by the fire.  Upa attempts conversation with us in broken
English, and the others laugh and talk incessantly.  My inkstand,
pen, and small handwriting amuse them very much.  Miss K., the
typical American travelling lady, who is encountered everywhere from
the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with an indomitable energy,
Spartan endurance, and a genius for attaining everything, and
myself, a limp, ragged, shoeless wretch, complete the group, and our
heaps of saddles, blankets, spurs, and gear tell of real travelling,
past and future.  It is a most picturesque sight by the light of the
flickering fire, and the fire which is unquenchable burns without.

About 300 yards off there is a sulphur steam vapour-bath, highly
recommended by the host as a panacea for the woeful aches, pains,
and stiffness produced by the six-mile scramble through the crater,
and I groaned and limped down to it:  but it is a truly spasmodic
arrangement, singularly independent of human control, and I have not
the slightest doubt that the reason why Mr. Gilman obligingly
remained in the vicinity was, lest I should be scalded or blown to
atoms by a sudden freak of Kilauea, though I don't see that he was
capable of preventing either catastrophe!  A slight grass shed has
been built over a sulphur steam crack, and within this there is a
deep box with a sliding lid and a hole for the throat, and the
victim is supposed to sit in this and be steamed.  But on this
occasion the temperature was so high, that my hand, which I unwisely
experimented upon, was immediately peeled.  In order not to wound
Mr. Gilman's feelings, which are evidently sensitive on the subject
of this irresponsible contrivance, I remained the prescribed time
within the shed, and then managed to limp a little less, and go with
him to what are called the Sulphur Banks, on which sulphurous vapour
is perpetually depositing the most exquisite acicular sulphur
crystals; these, as they aggregate, take entrancing forms, like the
featherwork produced by the "frost-fall" in Colorado, but, like it,
they perish with a touch, and can only be seen in the wonderful
laboratory where they are formed.

In addition to the natives before mentioned, there is an old man
here who has been a bullock-hunter on Hawaii for forty years, and
knows the island thoroughly.  In common with all the residents I
have seen, he takes an intense interest in volcanic phenomena, and
has just been giving us a thrilling account of the great eruption in
1868, when beautiful Hilo was threatened with destruction.  Three
weeks ago, he says, a profound hush fell on Kilauea, and the summit
crater of Mauna Loa became active, and amidst throbbings, rumblings,
and earthquakes, broke into such magnificence that the light was
visible 100 miles at sea, a burning mountain 13,750 feet high!  The
fires after two days died out as suddenly, and from here we can see
the great dome-like top, snow-capped under the stars, serene in an
eternal winter.
                                           I.L.B.



LETTER VI.

HILO, HAWAII, Feb. 3.

My plans are quite overturned.  I was to have ridden with the native
mail-carrier to the north of the island to take the steamer for
Honolulu, but there are freshets in the gulches on the road, making
the ride unsafe.  There is no steamer from Hilo for three weeks, and
in the meantime Mr. and Mrs. S. have kindly consented to receive me
as a boarder; and I find the people, scenery, and life so charming,
that I only regret my detention on Mrs. Dexter's account.  I am
already rested from the great volcano trip.

We left Kilauea at seven in the morning of the 1st Feb. in a pouring
rain.  The natives decorated us with leis of turquoise and coral
berries, and of crimson and yellow ohia blossoms.  The saddles were
wet, the crater was blotted out by mist, water dripped from the
trees, we splashed through pools in the rocks, the horses plunged
into mud up to their knees, and the drip, drip, of vertical,
earnest, tepid, tropical rain accompanied us nearly to Hilo.  Upa
and Miss K. held umbrellas the whole way, but I required both hands
for holding on to the horse whenever he chose to gallop.  As soon as
we left the crater-house Upa started over the grass at full speed,
my horse of course followed, and my feet being jerked out of the
stirrups, I found myself ignominiously sitting on the animal's back
behind the saddle, and nearly slid over his tail, before, by skilful
efforts, I managed to scramble over the peak back again, when I held
on by horn and mane until the others stopped.  Happily I was last,
and I don't think they saw me.  Upa amused me very much on the way;
he insists that I am "a high chief."  He said a good deal about
Queen Victoria, whose virtues seem well known here:  "Good Queen
make good people," he said, "English very good!"  He asked me how
many chiefs we had, and supposing him to mean hereditary peers, I
replied, over 500.  "Too many, too many!" he answered emphatically--
"too much chief eat up people!"  He asked me if all people were good
in England, and I was sorry to tell him that this was very far from
being the case.  He was incredulous, or seemed so out of flattery,
and said, "You good Queen, you Bible long time, you good!"  I was
surprised to find how much he knew of European politics, of the
liberation of Italy, and the Franco-German war.  He expressed a most
orthodox horror of the Pope, who, he said, he knew from his Bible
was the "Beast!"  He said, "I bring band and serenade for good Queen
sake," but this has not come off yet.

We straggled into Hilo just at dusk, thoroughly wet, jaded, and
satisfied, but half-starved, for the rain had converted that which
should have been our lunch into a brownish pulp of bread and
newspaper, and we had subsisted only on some half-ripe guavas.
After the black desolation of Kilauea, I realized more fully the
beauty of Hilo, as it appeared in the gloaming.  The rain had
ceased, cool breezes rustled through the palm-groves and sighed
through the funereal foliage of the pandanus.  Under thick canopies
of the glossy breadfruit and banana, groups of natives were twining
garlands of roses and ohia blossoms.  The lights of happy foreign
homes flashed from under verandahs festooned with passion-flowers,
and the low chant, to me nearly intolerable, but which the natives
love, mingled with the ceaseless moaning of the surf and the sighing
of the breeze through the trees, and a heavy fragrance, unlike the
faint sweet odours of the north, filled the evening air.  It was
delicious.

I suffered intensely from pain and stiffness, and was induced to try
a true Hawaiian remedy, which is not only regarded as a cure for all
physical ills, but as the greatest of physical luxuries; i.e. lomi-
lomi.  This is a compound of pinching, pounding, and squeezing, and
Moi Moi, the fine old Hawaiian nurse in this family, is an adept in
the art.  She found out by instinct which were the most painful
muscles, and subjected them to a doubly severe pounding, laughing
heartily at my groans.  However, I must admit that my arms and
shoulders were almost altogether relieved before the lomi-lomi was
finished.  The first act of courtesy to a stranger in a native house
is this, and it is varied in many ways.  Now and then the patient
lies face downwards, and children execute a sort of dance upon his
spine. {95}  Formerly, the chiefs, when not engaged in active
pursuits, exacted lomi-lomi as a constant service from their
followers.

A number of Hilo folk came in during the evening to inquire how we
had sped, and for news of the volcano.  I think the proximity of
Kilauea gives sublimity to Hilo, and helps to lift conversation out
of common-place ruts.  It is no far-off spectacle, but an immediate
source of wonder and apprehension, for it rocks the village with
earthquakes, and renders the construction of stone houses and
plastered ceilings impossible.  It rolls vast tidal waves with
infinite destruction on the coast, and of late years its fiery
overflowings have twice threatened this paradise with annihilation.
Then there is the dead volcano of Mauna Loa, from whose resurrection
anything may be feared.  Even last night a false rumour that a light
was to be seen on its summit brought everyone out, but it was only
an increased glare from the pit of Hale-mau-mau.  It is most
interesting to be in a region of such splendid possibilities.
                                   I.L.B.



LETTER VII.

HILO, HAWAII.

The white population here, which constitutes "society," is very
small.  There are two venerable missionaries "Father Coan" and
"Father Lyman," the former pastor of a large native congregation,
which, though much shrunken, is not only self-sustaining, but
contributes $1200 a year to foreign missions, and the latter, though
very old and frail, the indefatigable head of an industrial school
for native young men.  Their houses combine the trimness of New
England, with the luxuriance of the tropics; they are cool retreats,
embowered among breadfruit, tamarind, and bamboo, through whose
graceful leafage the blue waters of the bay are visible.
Innumerable exotics are domesticated round these fair homesteads.
Two of "Father Lyman's" sons are influential residents, one being
the Lieutenant-Governor of the island.  Other sons of former
missionaries are settled here in business, and there are a few
strangers who have been attracted hither.  Dr. Wetmore, formerly of
the mission, is a typical New Englander of the old orthodox school.
It is pleasant to see him brighten into almost youthful enthusiasm
on the subject of Hawaiian ferns.  My host, a genial, social,
intelligent American, is sheriff of Hawaii, postmaster, etc., and
with his charming wife (a missionary's daughter), and some friends
who live with them, make their large house a centre of kindliness,
friendliness, and hospitality.  Mr. Thompson, pastor of the foreign
church, is a man of very liberal culture, as well as wide
sympathies.  The lady principal of the Government school is a
handsome, talented Vermont girl, and besides being an immense
favourite, well deserves her unusual and lucrative position.

There are hardly any young ladies, and very few young men, but
plenty of rosy, blooming children, who run about barefoot all the
year.  Besides the Hilo residents, there are some planters' families
within seven miles, who come in to sewing circles, church, etc.
There is a small class of reprobate white men who have ostracized
themselves by means of drink and bad morals, and are a curse to the
natives.  The half whites, among whom "Bill Ragsdale" is the leading
spirit, are not numerous.  Hilo has no carriage roads and no
carriages:  every one must ride or travel in a litter.  People are
very kind to each other.  Horses, dresses, patterns, books, and
articles of domestic use, are lent and borrowed continually.  The
smallness of the society and the close proximity are too much like a
ship.  People know everything about the details of each other's
daily life, income, and expenditure, and the day's doings of each
member of the little circle are matters for conversation.  Indeed,
were it not for the volcano and its doings, conversation might
degenerate into gossip.  There is an immense deal of personal talk;
the wonder is that there is so little ill-nature.  Not only is what
everybody does here common property, but the sayings, doings,
goings, comings, and purchases of every one in all the other islands
are common property also, made so by letters and oral communication.
It is all very amusing, and on the whole very kindly, and human
interests are always interesting; but it has its perilous side.
They are very kind to each other.  There is no distress which is not
alleviated.  There is no nurse, and in cases of sickness the ladies
take it by turns to wait on the sufferer by day and night for weeks,
and even months.  Such inevitable mutual dependence of course
promotes friendliness.

The foreigners live very simply.  The eating-rooms are used solely
for eating, the "parlours" are always cheerful and tasteful, and the
bedrooms very pretty, adorned with all manner of knick-knacks made
by the ladies, who are indescribably deft with their fingers.  Light
Manilla matting is used instead of carpets.  A Chinese man-cook, who
leaves at seven in the evening, is the only servant, except in one
or two cases, where, as here, a native woman condescends to come in
during the day as a nurse.  In the morning the ladies, in their
fresh pretty wrappers and ruffled white aprons, sweep and dust the
rooms, and I never saw women look more truly graceful and refined
than they do, when engaged in the plain prose of these domestic
duties.  They make all their own dresses, and when any lady is busy
and wants a dress in a hurry, two or three of them meet and make it
for her.  I never saw people live such easy pleasant lives.  They
have such good health, for one thing, partly no doubt because their
domestic duties give them wholesome exercise without pressing upon
them.  They have abounding leisure for reading, music, choir
practising, drawing, fern-printing, fancy work, picnics, riding
parties, and enjoy sociability thoroughly.  They usually ride in
dainty bloomer costumes, even when they don't ride astride.  All the
houses are pretty, and it takes little to make them so in this
climate.  One novel fashion is to decorate the walls with festoons
of the beautiful fern Microlepia tenuifolia, which are renewed as
soon as they fade, and every room is adorned with a profusion of
bouquets, which are easily obtained where flowers bloom all the
year.  Many of the residents possess valuable libraries, and these,
with cabinets of minerals, volcanic specimens, shells, and coral,
with weapons, calabashes, ornaments, and cloth of native
manufacture, almost furnish a room in themselves.  Some of the
volcanic specimens and the coral are of almost inestimable value, as
well as of exquisite beauty.

The gentlemen don't seem to have near so much occupation as the
ladies.  There are two stores on the beach, and at these and at the
Court-house they aggregate, for lack of club-house and exchange.
Business is not here a synonym for hurry, and official duties are
light; so light, that in these morning hours I see the governor, the
sheriff, and the judge, with three other gentlemen, playing an
interminable croquet game on the Court-house lawn.  They purvey
gossip for the ladies, and how much they invent, and how much they
only circulate can never be known!

There is a large native population in the village, along the beach,
and on the heights above the Wailuku River.  Frame houses with
lattices, and grass houses with deep verandahs, peep out everywhere
from among the mangoes and bananas.  The governess of Hawaii, the
Princess Keelikalani, has a house on the beach shaded by a large
umbrella-tree and a magnificent clump of bamboos, 70 feet in height.
The native life with which one comes constantly in contact, is very
interesting.

The men do whatever hard work is done in cultivating the kalo
patches and pounding the kalo.  Thus kalo, the Arum esculentum,
forms the national diet.  A Hawaiian could not exist without his
calabash of poi.  The root is an object of the tenderest solicitude,
from the day it is planted until the hour when it is lovingly eaten.
The eating of poi seems a ceremony of profound meaning; it is like
the eating salt with an Arab, or a Masonic sign.  The kalo root is
an ovate oblong, as bulky as a Californian beet, and it has large
leaves, shaped like a broad arrow, of a singularly bright green.
The best kinds grow entirely in water.  The patch is embanked and
frequently inundated, and each plant grows on a small hillock of
puddled earth.  The cutting from which it grows is simply the top of
the plant, with a little of the tuber.  The men stand up to their
knees in water while cultivating the root.  It is excellent when
boiled and sliced; but the preparation of poi is an elaborate
process.  The roots are baked in an underground oven, and are then
laid on a slightly hollowed board, and beaten with a stone pestle.
It is hard work, and the men don't wear any clothes while engaged in
it.  It is not a pleasant-looking operation.  They often dip their
hands in a calabash of water to aid them in removing the sticky
mass, and they always look hot and tired.  When it is removed from
the board into large calabashes, it is reduced to paste by the
addition of water, and set aside for two or three days to ferment.
When ready for use it is either lilac or pink, and tastes like sour
bookbinders' paste.  Before water is added, when it is in its dry
state, it is called paiai, or hard food, and is then packed in ti
leaves in 20 lb. bundles for inland carriage, and is exported to the
Guano Islands.  It is a prolific and nutritious plant.  It is
estimated that forty square feet will support an Hawaiian for a
year.

The melon and kalo patches represent a certain amount of spasmodic
industry, but in most other things the natives take no thought for
the morrow.  Why should they indeed?  For while they lie basking in
the sun, without care of theirs, the cocoanut, the breadfruit, the
yam, the guava, the banana, and the delicious papaya, which is a
compound of a ripe apricot with a Cantaloupe melon, grow and ripen
perpetually.  Men and women are always amusing themselves, the men
with surf-bathing, the women with making leis--both sexes with
riding, gossiping, and singing.  Every man and woman, almost every
child, has a horse.  There is a perfect plague of badly bred, badly
developed, weedy looking animals.  The beach and the pleasant lawn
above it are always covered with men and women riding at a gallop,
with bare feet, and stirrups tucked between the toes.  To walk even
200 yards seems considered a degradation.  The people meet outside
each others' houses all day long, and sit in picturesque groups on
their mats, singing, laughing, talking, and quizzing the haoles, as
if the primal curse had never fallen.  Pleasant sights of out-door
cooking gregariously carried on greet one everywhere.  This style of
cooking prevails all over Polynesia.  A hole in the ground is lined
with stones, wood is burned within it, and when the rude oven has
been sufficiently heated, the pig, chicken, breadfruit, or kalo,
wrapped in ti leaves is put in, a little water is thrown on, and the
whole is covered up.  It is a slow but sure process.

Bright dresses, bright eyes, bright sunshine, music, dancing, a life
without care, and a climate without asperities, make up the sunny
side of native life as pictured at Hilo.  But there are dark moral
shadows, the population is shrinking away, and rumours of leprosy
are afloat, so that some of these fair homes may be desolate ere
long.  However many causes for regret exist, one must not forget
that only forty years ago the people inhabiting this strip of land
between the volcanic wilderness and the sea were a vicious, sensual,
shameless herd, that no man among them, except their chiefs, had any
rights, that they were harried and oppressed almost to death, and
had no consciousness of any moral obligations.  Now, order and
external decorum at least, prevail.  There is not a locked door in
Hilo, and nobody makes anybody else afraid.

The people of Hawaii-nei are clothed and civilized in their habits;
they have equal rights; 6,500 of them have kuleanas or freeholds,
equable and enlightened laws are impartially administered; wrong and
oppression are unknown; they enjoy one of the best administered
governments in the world; education is universal, and the throne is
occupied by a liberal sovereign of their own race and election.

Few of them speak English.  Their language is so easy that most of
the foreigners acquire it readily.  You know how stupid I am about
languages, yet I have already picked up the names of most common
things.  There are only twelve letters, but some of these are made
to do double duty, as K is also T, and L is also R.  The most
northern island of the group, Kauai, is as often pronounced as if it
began with a T, and Kalo is usually Taro.  It is a very musical
language.  Each syllable and word ends with a vowel, and there are
none of our rasping and sibilant consonants.  In their soft
phraseology our hard rough surnames undergo a metamorphosis, as Fisk
into Filikina, Wilson into Wilikina.  Each vowel is distinctly
pronounced, and usually with the Italian sound.  The volcano is
pronounced as if spelt Keel-ah-wee-ah, and Kauai as if Kah-wye-ee.
The name Owhyhee for Hawaii had its origin in a mistake, for the
island was never anything but Hawaii, pronounced Hah-wye-ee, but
Captain Cook mistook the prefix O, which is the sign of the
nominative case, for a part of the word.  Many of the names of
places, specially of those compounded with wai, water, are very
musical; Wailuku, "water of destruction;" Waialeale, "rippling
water;" Waioli, "singing water;" Waipio, "vanquished water;"
Kaiwaihae, "torn water."  Mauna, "mountain," is a mere prefix, and
though always used in naming the two giants of the Pacific, Mauna
Kea, and Mauna Loa, is hardly ever applied to Hualalai, "the
offspring of the shining sun;" or to Haleakala on Maui, "the house
of the sun."

I notice that the foreigners never use the English or botanical
names of trees or plants, but speak of ohias, ohelos, kukui (candle-
nut), lauhala (pandanus), pulu (tree fern), mamane, koa, etc.  There
is one native word in such universal use that I already find I
cannot get on without it, pilikia.  It means anything, from a
downright trouble to a slight difficulty or entanglement.  "I'm in a
pilikia," or "very pilikia," or "pilikia!"  A revolution would be "a
pilikia."  The fact of the late king dying without naming a
successor was pre-eminently a pilikia, and it would be a serious
pilikia if a horse were to lose a shoe on the way to Kilauea.  Hou-
hou, meaning "in a huff," I hear on all sides; and two words, makai,
signifying "on the sea-side," and mauka, "on the mountain side."
These terms are perfectly intelligible out of doors, but it is
puzzling when one is asked to sit on "the mauka side of the table."
The word aloha, in foreign use, has taken the place of every English
equivalent.  It is a greeting, a farewell, thanks, love, goodwill.
Aloha looks at you from tidies and illuminations, it meets you on
the roads and at house-doors, it is conveyed to you in letters, the
air is full of it.  "My aloha to you," "he sends you his aloha,"
"they desire their aloha."  It already represents to me all of
kindness and goodwill that language can express, and the convenience
of it as compared with other phrases is, that it means exactly what
the receiver understands it to mean, and consequently, in all cases
can be conveyed by a third person.  There is no word for "thank
you."  Maikai "good," is often useful in its place, and smiles
supply the rest.  There are no words which express "gratitude" or
"chastity," or some others of the virtues; and they have no word for
"weather," that which we understand by "weather" being absolutely
unknown.

Natives have no surnames.  Our volcano guide is Upa, or Scissors,
but his wife and children are anything else.  The late king was
Kamehameha, or the "lonely one."  The father of the present king is
called Kanaina, but the king's name is Lunalilo, or "above all."
Nor does it appear that a man is always known by the same name, nor
that a name necessarily indicates the sex of its possessor.  Thus,
in signing a paper the signature would be Hoapili kanaka, or Hoapili
wahine, according as the signer was man or woman.  I remember that
in my first letter I fell into the vulgarism, initiated by the
whaling crews, of calling the natives Kanakas.  This is universally
but very absurdly done, as Kanaka simply means man.  If an Hawaiian
word is absolutely necessary, we might translate native and have
maole, pronounced maori, like that of the New Zealand aborigines.
Kanaka is to me decidedly objectionable, as conveying the idea of
canaille.

I had written thus far when Mr. Severance came in to say that a
grand display of the national sport of surf-bathing was going on,
and a large party of us went down to the beach for two hours to
enjoy it.  It is really a most exciting pastime, and in a rough sea
requires immense nerve.  The surf-board is a tough plank shaped like
a coffin lid, about two feet broad, and from six to nine feet long,
well oiled and cared for.  It is usually made of the erythrina, or
the breadfruit tree.  The surf was very heavy and favourable, and
legions of natives were swimming and splashing in the sea, though
not more than forty had their Papa-he-nalu, or "wave sliding
boards," with them.  The men, dressed only in malos, carrying their
boards under their arms, waded out from some rocks on which the sea
was breaking, and, pushing their boards before them, swam out to the
first line of breakers, and then diving down were seen no more till
they re-appeared as a number of black heads bobbing about like corks
in smooth water half a mile from shore.

What they seek is a very high roller, on the top of which they leap
from behind, lying face downwards on their boards.  As the wave
speeds on, and the bottom strikes the ground, the top breaks into a
huge comber.  The swimmers but appeared posing themselves on its
highest edge by dexterous movements of their hands and feet, keeping
just at the top of the curl, but always apparently coming down hill
with a slanting motion.  So they rode in majestically, always just
ahead of the breaker, carried shorewards by its mighty impulse at
the rate of forty miles an hour, yet seeming to have a volition of
their own, as the more daring riders knelt and even stood on their
surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries.  They
were always apparently on the verge of engulfment by the fierce
breaker whose towering white crest was ever above and just behind
them, but just as one expected to see them dashed to pieces, they
either waded quietly ashore, or sliding off their boards, dived
under the surf, taking advantage of the undertow, and were next seen
far out at sea, preparing for fresh exploits.

The great art seems to be to mount the roller precisely at the right
time, and to keep exactly on its curl just before it breaks.  Two or
three athletes, who stood erect on their boards as they swept
exultingly shorewards, were received with ringing cheers by the
crowd.  Many of the less expert failed to throw themselves on the
crest, and slid back into smooth water, or were caught in the
combers which were fully ten feet high, and after being rolled over
and over, ignominiously disappeared amidst roars of laughter, and
shouts from the shore.  At first I held my breath in terror,
thinking the creatures were smothered or dashed to pieces, and then
in a few seconds I saw the dark heads of the objects of my anxiety
bobbing about behind the rollers waiting for another chance.  The
shore was thronged with spectators, and the presence of the elite of
Hilo stimulated the swimmers to wonderful exploits.

These people are truly amphibious.  Both sexes seem to swim by
nature, and the children riot in the waves from their infancy.  They
dive apparently by a mere effort of the will.  In the deep basin of
the Wailuku River, a little below the Falls, the maidens swim,
float, and dive with garlands of flowers round their heads and
throats.  The more furious and agitated the water is, the greater
the excitement, and the love of these watery exploits is not
confined to the young.  I saw great fat men with their hair streaked
with grey, balancing themselves on their narrow surf-boards, and
riding the surges shorewards with as much enjoyment as if they were
in their first youth.  I enjoyed the afternoon thoroughly.

Is it "always afternoon" here, I wonder?  The sea was so blue, the
sunlight so soft, the air so sweet.  There was no toil, clang, or
hurry.  People were all holidaymaking (if that can be where there is
no work), and enjoying themselves, the surf-bathers in the sea, and
hundreds of gaily-dressed men and women galloping on the beach.  It
was so serene and tropical.  I sympathize with those who eat the
lotus, and remain for ever on such enchanted shores.

I am gaining health daily, and almost live in the open air.  I have
hired the native policeman's horse and saddle, and with a Macgregor
flannel riding costume, which my kind friends have made for me, and
a pair of jingling Mexican spurs am quite Hawaiianised.  I ride
alone once or twice a day exploring the neighbourhood, finding some
new fern or flower daily, and abandon myself wholly to the
fascination of this new existence.
                                   I.L.B.



LETTER VIII.

ONOMEA, HAWAII.  JUDGE AUSTIN'S.

Mrs. A. has been ill for some time, and Mrs. S. her sister and
another friend "plotted" in a very "clandestine" manner that I
should come here for a few days in order to give her "a little
change of society," but I am quite sure that under this they only
veil a kind wish that I should see something of plantation life.
There is a plan, too, that I should take a five days' trip to a
remarkable valley called Waipio, but this is only a "castle in the
air."

Mr. A. sent in for me a capital little lean rat of a horse which by
dint of spirit and activity managed to keep within sight of two
large horses, ridden by Mr. Thompson, and a very handsome young lady
riding "cavalier fashion," who convoyed me out.  Borrowed saddle-
bags, and a couple of shingles for carrying ferns formed my outfit,
and were carried behind my saddle.  It is a magnificent ride here.
The track crosses the deep, still, Wailuku River on a wooden bridge,
and then after winding up a steep hill, among native houses
fantastically situated, hangs on the verge of the lofty precipices
which descend perpendicularly to the sea, dips into tremendous
gulches, loses itself in the bright fern-fringed torrents which have
cleft their way down from the mountains, and at last emerges on the
delicious height on which this house is built.

This coast looked beautiful from the deck of the Kilauea, but I am
now convinced that I have never seen anything so perfectly lovely as
it is when one is actually among its details.  Onomea is 600 feet
high, and every yard of the ascent from Hilo brings one into a
fresher and purer air.  One looks up the wooded, broken slopes to a
wild volcanic wilderness and the snowy peaks of Mauna Kea on one
side, and on the other down upon the calm blue Pacific, wrinkled by
the sweet trade-wind, till it blends in far-off loveliness with the
still, blue, sky; and heavy surges break on the reefs, and fritter
themselves away on the rocks, tossing their pure foam over ti and
lauhala trees, and the exquisite ferns and trailers which mantle the
cliffs down to the water's edge.  Here a native house stands, with
passion-flowers clustering round its verandah, and the great
solitary red blossoms of the hibiscus flaming out from dark
surrounding leafage, and women in rose and green holukus, weaving
garlands, greet us with "Aloha" as we pass.  Then we come upon a
whole cluster of grass houses under lauhalas and bananas.  Then
there is the sugar plantation of Kaiwiki, with its patches of bright
green cane, its flumes crossing the track above our heads, bringing
the cane down from the upland cane-fields to the crushing-mill, and
the shifting, busy scenes of the sugar-boiling season.

Then the track goes down with a great dip, along which we slip and
slide in the mud to a deep broad stream.  This is a most picturesque
spot, the junction of two clear bright rivers, and a few native
houses and a Chinaman's store are grouped close by under some palms,
with the customary loungers on horseback, asking and receiving
nuhou, or news, at the doors.  Our accustomed horses leaped into a
ferry-scow provided by Government, worked by a bearded female of
hideous aspect, and leaped out on the other side to climb a track
cut on the side of a precipice, which would be steep to mount on
one's own feet.  There we met parties of natives, all flower-
wreathed, talking and singing, coming gaily down on their sure-
footed horses, saluting us with the invariable "Aloha."  Every now
and then we passed native churches, with spires painted white, or a
native schoolhouse, or a group of scholars all ferns and flowers.
The greenness of the vegetation merits the term "dazzling."  We
think England green, but its colour is poor and pale as compared
with that of tropical Hawaii.  Palms, candlenuts, ohias, hibiscus,
were it not for their exceeding beauty, would almost pall upon one
from their abundance, and each gulch has its glorious entanglement
of breadfruit, the large-leaved ohia, or native apple, a species of
Eugenia (Eugenia Malaccensis), and the pandanus, with its aerial
roots, all looped together by large sky-blue convolvuli and the
running fern, and is marvellous with parasitic growths.

The distracting beauty of this coast is what are called gulches--
narrow deep ravines or gorges, from 100 to 2,000 feet in depth, each
with a series of cascades from 10 to 1,800 feet in height.  I
dislike reducing their glories to the baldness of figures, but the
depth of these clefts (originally, probably, the seams caused by
fire torrents), cut and worn by the fierce streams fed by the snows
of Mauna Kea, and the rains of the forest belt, cannot otherwise be
expressed.  The cascades are most truly beautiful, gleaming white
among the dark depths of foliage far away, and falling into deep
limpid basins, festooned and overhung with the richest and greenest
vegetation of this prolific climate, from the huge-leaved banana and
shining breadfruit to the most feathery of ferns and lycopodiums.
Each gulch opens on a velvet lawn close to the sea, and most of them
have space for a few grass houses, with cocoanut trees, bananas, and
kalo patches.  There are sixty-nine of these extraordinary chasms
within a distance of thirty miles!

I think we came through eleven, fording the streams in all but two.
The descent into some of them is quite alarming.  You go down almost
standing in your stirrups, at a right angle with the horse's head,
and up, grasping his mane to prevent the saddle slipping.  He goes
down like a goat, with his bare feet, looking cautiously at each
step, sometimes putting out a foot and withdrawing it again in
favour of better footing, and sometimes gathering his four feet
under him and sliding or jumping.  The Mexican saddle has great
advantages on these tracks, which are nothing better than ledges cut
on the sides of precipices, for one goes up and down not only in
perfect security but without fatigue.  I am beginning to hope that I
am not too old, as I feared I was, to learn a new mode of riding,
for my companions rode at full speed over places where I should have
picked my way carefully at a foot's pace; and my horse followed
them, galloping and stopping short at their pleasure, and I
successfully kept my seat, though not without occasional fears of an
ignominious downfall.  I even wish that you could see me in my Rob
Roy riding dress, with leather belt and pouch, a lei of the orange
seeds of the pandanus round my throat, jingling Mexican spurs, blue
saddle blanket, and Rob Roy blanket strapped on behind the saddle!

This place is grandly situated 600 feet above a deep cove, into
which two beautiful gulches of great size run, with heavy cascades,
finer than Foyers at its best, and a native village is picturesquely
situated between the two.  The great white rollers, whiter by
contrast with the dark deep water, come into the gulch just where we
forded the river, and from the ford a passable road made for hauling
sugar ascends to the house.  The air is something absolutely
delicious; and the murmur of the rollers and the deep boom of the
cascades are very soothing.  There is little rise or fall in the
cadence of the surf anywhere on the windward coast, but one even
sound, loud or soft, like that made by a train in a tunnel.

We were kindly welcomed, and were at once "made at home."  Delicious
phrase! the full meaning of which I am learning on Hawaii, where,
though everything has the fascination of novelty, I have ceased to
feel myself a stranger.  This is a roomy, rambling frame-house, with
a verandah, and the door, as is usual here, opens directly into the
sitting-room.  The stair by which I go to my room suggests
possibilities, for it has been removed three inches from the wall by
an earthquake, which also brought down the tall chimney of the
boiling-house.  Close by there are small pretty frame-houses for the
overseer, bookkeeper, sugar boiler, and machinist; a store, the
factory, a pretty native church near the edge of the cliff, and
quite a large native village below.  It looks green and bright, and
the atmosphere is perfect, with the cool air coming down from the
mountains, and a soft breeze coming up from the blue dreamy ocean.
Behind the house the uplands slope away to the colossal Mauna Kea.
The actual, dense, impenetrable forest does not begin for a mile and
a half from the coast, and its broad dark belt, extending to a
height of 4,000 feet, and beautifully broken, throws out into
greater brightness the upward glades of grass and the fields of
sugar-cane.

This is a very busy season, and as this is a large plantation there
is an appearance of great animation.  There are five or six saddled
horses usually tethered below the house; and with overseers, white
and coloured, and natives riding at full gallop, and people coming
on all sorts of errands, the hum of the crushing-mill, the rush of
water in the flumes, and the grind of the waggons carrying cane,
there is no end of stir.

The plantations in the Hilo district enjoy special advantages, for
by turning some of the innumerable mountain streams into flumes the
owners can bring a great part of their cane and all their wood for
fuel down to the mills without other expense than the original cost
of the woodwork.  Mr. A. has 100 mules, but the greater part of
their work is ploughing and hauling the kegs of sugar down to the
cove, where in favourable weather they are put on board of a
schooner for Honolulu.  This plantation employs 185 hands, native
and Chinese, and turns out 600 tons of sugar a year.  The natives
are much liked as labourers, being docile and on the whole willing;
but native labour is hard to get, as the natives do not like to work
for a term unless obliged, and a pernicious system of "advances" is
practised.  The labourers hire themselves to the planters, in the
case of natives usually for a year, by a contract which has to be
signed before a notary public.  The wages are about eight dollars a
month with food, or eleven dollars without food, and the planters
supply houses and medical attendance.  The Chinese are imported as
coolies, and usually contract to work for five years.  As a matter
of policy no less than of humanity the "hands" are well treated; for
if a single instance of injustice were perpetrated on a plantation
the factory might stand still the next year, for hardly a native
would contract to serve again.

The Chinese are quiet and industrious, but smoke opium, and are much
addicted to gaming.  Many of them save money, and, when their turn
of service is over, set up stores, or grow vegetables for money.
Each man employed has his horse, and on Saturday the hands form
quite a cavalcade.  Great tact, firmness, and knowledge of human
nature are required in the manager of a plantation.  The natives are
at times disposed to shirk work without sufficient cause; the native
lunas, or overseers, are not always reasonable, the Chinamen and
natives do not always agree, and quarrels and entanglements arise,
and everything is referred to the decision of the manager, who,
besides all things else, must know the exact amount of work which
ought to be performed, both in the fields and factory, and see that
it is done.  Mr. A. is a keen, shrewd man of business, kind without
being weak, and with an eye on every detail of his plantations.  The
requirements are endless.  It reminds me very much of plantation
life in Georgia in the old days of slavery.  I never elsewhere heard
of so many headaches, sore hands, and other trifling ailments.  It
is very amusing to see the attempts which the would-be invalids make
to lengthen their brief smiling faces into lugubriousness, and the
sudden relaxation into naturalness when they are allowed a holiday.
Mr. A. comes into the house constantly to consult his wife regarding
the treatment of different ailments.

I have made a second tour through the factory, and am rather
disgusted with sugar making.  "All's well that ends well," however,
and the delicate crystalline result makes one forget the initial
stages of the manufacture.  The cane, stripped of its leaves, passes
from the flumes under the rollers of the crushing-mill, where it is
subjected to a pressure of five or six tons.  One hundred pounds of
cane under this process yield up from sixty-five to seventy-five
pounds of juice.  This juice passes, as a pale green cataract, into
a trough, which conducts it into a vat, where it is dosed with
quicklime to neutralize its acid, and is then run off into large
heated metal vessels.  At this stage the smell is abominable, and
the turbid fluid, with a thick scum upon it, is simply disgusting.
After a preliminary heating and skimming it is passed off into iron
pans, several in a row, and boiled and skimmed, and ladled from one
to the other till it reaches the last, which is nearest to the fire,
and there it boils with the greatest violence, seething and foaming,
bringing all the remaining scum to the surface.  After the
concentration has proceeded far enough, the action of the heat is
suspended, and the reddish-brown, oily-looking liquid is drawn into
the vacuum-pan till it is about a third full; the concentration is
completed by boiling the juice in vacuo at a temperature of 150
degrees, and even lower.  As the boiling proceeds, the sugar boiler
tests the contents of the pan by withdrawing a few drops, and
holding them up to the light on his finger; and, by certain minute
changes in their condition, he judges when it is time to add an
additional quantity.  When the pan is full, the contents have
thickened into the consistency of thick gruel by the formation of
minute crystals, and are then allowed to descend into an heater,
where they are kept warm till they can be run into "forms" or tanks,
where they are allowed to granulate.  The liquid, or molasses, which
remains after the first crystallization is returned to the vacuum
pan and reboiled, and this reboiling of the drainings is repeated
two or three times, with a gradually decreasing result in the
quality and quantity of the sugar.  The last process, which is used
for getting rid of the treacle, is a most beautiful one.  The mass
of sugar and treacle is put into what are called "centrifugal pans,"
which are drums about three feet in diameter and two feet high,
which make about 1,000 revolutions a minute.  These have false
interiors of wire gauze, and the mass is forced violently against
their sides by centrifugal action, and they let the treacle whirl
through, and retain the sugar crystals, which lie in a dry heap in
the centre.

The cane is being flumed in with great rapidity, and the factory is
working till late at night.  The cane from which the juice has been
expressed, called "trash," is dried and used as fuel for the furnace
which supplies the steam power.  The sugar is packed in kegs, and a
cooper and carpenter, as well as other mechanics, are employed.

Sugar is now the great interest of the islands.  Christian missions
and whaling have had their day, and now people talk sugar.  Hawaii
thrills to the news of a cent up or a cent down in the American
market.  All the interests of the kingdom are threatened by this
one, which, because it is grievously depressed and staggers under a
heavy import duty in the American market, is now clamorous in some
quarters for "annexation," and in others for a "reciprocity treaty,"
which last means the cession of the Pearl River lagoon on Oahu, with
its adjacent shores, to America, for a Pacific naval station.  There
are 200,000 acres of productive soil on the islands, of which only a
fifteenth is under cultivation, and of this large area 150,000 is
said to be specially adapted for sugar culture.  Herein is a
prospective Utopia, and people are always dreaming of the sugar-
growing capacities of the belt of rich disintegrated lava which
slopes upwards from the sea to the bases of the mountains.
Hitherto, sugar growing has been a very disastrous speculation, and
few of the planters at present do more than keep their heads above
water.

Were labour plentiful and the duties removed, fortunes might be
made; for the soil yields on an average about three times as much as
that of the State of Louisiana.  Two and a half tons to the acre is
a common yield, five tons, a frequent one, and instances are known
of the slowly matured cane of a high altitude yielding as much as
seven tons!  The magnificent climate makes it a very easy crop to
grow.  There is no brief harvest time with its rush, hurry, and
frantic demand for labour, nor frost to render necessary the hasty
cutting of an immature crop.  The same number of hands is kept on
all the year round.  The planters can plant pretty much when they
please, or not plant at all, for two or three years, the only
difference in the latter case being that the rattoons which spring
up after the cutting of the former crop are smaller in bulk.  They
can cut when they please, whether the cane be tasselled or not, and
they can plant, cut, and grind at one time!

It is a beautiful crop in any stage of growth, especially in the
tasselled stage.  Every part of it is useful--the cane pre-
eminently--the leaves as food for horses and mules, and the tassels
for making hats.  Here and elsewhere there is a plate of cut cane
always within reach, and the children chew it incessantly.  I fear
you will be tired of sugar, but I find it more interesting than the
wool and mutton of Victoria and New Zealand, and it is a most
important item of the wealth of this toy kingdom, which last year
exported 16,995,402 lbs. of sugar and 192,105 gallons of molasses.
{121}  With regard to molasses, the Government prohibits the
manufacture of rum, so the planters are deprived of a fruitful
source of profit.  It is really difficult to tear myself from the
subject of sugar, for I see the cane waving in the sun while I
write, and hear the busy hum of the crushing-mill.
                                       I.L.B.



LETTER IX.

ONOMEA, HAWAII.

This is such a pleasant house and household, Mrs. A. is as bright as
though she were not an invalid, and her room, except at meals, is
the gathering-place of the family.  The four boys are bright,
intelligent beings, out of doors, barefooted, all day, and with a
passion for horses, of which their father possesses about thirty.
The youngest, Ephy, is the brightest child for three years old that
I ever saw, but absolutely crazy about horses and mules.  He talks
of little else, and is constantly asking me to draw horses on his
slate.  He is a merry, audacious little creature, but came in this
evening quite subdued.  The sun was setting gloriously behind the
forest-covered slopes, flooding the violet distances with a haze of
gold, and, in a low voice, he said, "I've seen God."

There is the usual Chinese cook, who cooks and waits and looks good-
natured, and of course has his own horse, and his wife, a most
minute Chinese woman, comes in and attends to the rooms and to Mrs.
A., and sews and mends.  She wears her native dress--a large, stiff,
flat cane hat, like a tray, fastened firmly on or to her head; a
scanty loose frock of blue denim down to her knees, wide trousers of
the same down to her ancles, and slippers.  Her hair is knotted up;
she always wears silver armlets, and would not be seen without the
hat for anything.  There is not a bell in this or any house on the
islands, and the bother of servants is hardly known, for the
Chinamen do their work like automatons, and disappear at sunset.  In
a land where there are no carpets, no fires, no dust, no hot water
needed, no windows to open and shut--for they are always open--no
further service is really required.  It is a simple arcadian life,
and people live more happily than any that I have seen elsewhere.
It is very cheerful to live among people whose faces are not soured
by the east wind, or wrinkled by the worrying effort to "keep up
appearances," which deceive nobody; who have no formal visiting, but
real sociability; who regard the light manual labour of domestic
life as a pleasure, not a thing to be ashamed of; who are contented
with their circumstances, and have leisure to be kind, cultured, and
agreeable; and who live so tastefully, though simply, that they can
at any time ask a passing stranger to occupy the simple guest
chamber, or share the simple meal, without any of the soul-harassing
preparations which often make the exercise of hospitality a thing of
terror to people in the same circumstances at home.

People will ask you, "What is the food?"  We have everywhere bread
and biscuit made of California flour, griddle cakes with molasses,
and often cracked wheat, butter not very good, sweet potatoes,
boiled kalo, Irish potatoes, and poi.  I have not seen fish on any
table except at the Honolulu Hotel, or any meat but beef, which is
hard and dry as compared with ours.  We have China or Japan tea, and
island coffee.  Honolulu is the only place in which intoxicants are
allowed to be sold; and I have not seen beer, wine, or spirits in
any house.  Bananas are an important article of diet, and sliced
guavas, eaten with milk and sugar, are very good.  The cooking is
always done in detached cook houses, in and on American cooking
stoves.

As to clothing.  I wear my flannel riding dress for both riding and
walking, and a black silk at other times.  The resident ladies wear
prints and silks, and the gentlemen black cloth or dark tweed suits.
Flannel is not required, neither are puggarees or white hats or
sunshades at any season.  The changes of temperature are very
slight, and there is no chill when the sun goes down.  The air is
always like balm; the rain is tepid and does not give cold; in
summer it may be three or four degrees warmer.  Windows and doors
stand open the whole year.  A blanket is agreeable at night, but not
absolutely necessary.  It is a truly delightful climate and mode of
living, with such an abundance of air and sunshine.  My health
improves daily, and I do not consider myself an invalid.

Between working, reading aloud, talking, riding, and "loafing," I
have very little time for letter writing; but I must tell you of a
delightful fern-hunting expedition on the margin of the forest that
I took yesterday, accompanied by Mr. Thompson and the two elder
boys.  We rode in the mauka direction, outside cane ready for
cutting, with silvery tassels gleaming in the sun, till we reached
the verge of the forest, where an old trail was nearly obliterated
by a trailing matted grass four feet high, and thousands of woody
ferns, which conceal streams, holes, and pitfalls.  When further
riding was impossible, we tethered our horses and proceeded on foot.
We were then 1,500 feet above the sea by the aneroid barometer, and
the increased coolness was perceptible.  The mercury is about four
degrees lower for each 1,000 feet of ascent--rather more than this
indeed on the windward side of the islands.  The forest would be
quite impenetrable were it not for the remains of wood-hauling
trails, which, though grown up to the height of my shoulders, are
still passable.

Underneath the green maze, invisible streams, deep down, made sweet
music, sweeter even than the gentle murmur of the cool breeze among
the trees.  The forest on the volcano track, which I thought so
tropical and wonderful a short time ago, is nothing for beauty to
compare with this "garden of God."  I wish I could describe it, but
cannot; and as you know only our pale, small-leaved trees, with
their uniform green, I cannot say that it is like this or that.  The
first line of a hymn, "Oh, Paradise! oh, Paradise!" rings in my
brain, and the rustic exclamation we used to hear when we were
children, "Well, I never!" followed by innumerable notes of
admiration, seems to exhaust the whole vocabulary of wonderment.
The former cutting of some trees gives atmosphere, and the tumbled
nature of the ground shows everything to the best advantage.  There
were openings over which huge candle-nuts, with their pea-green and
silver foliage, spread their giant arms, and the light played
through their branches on an infinite variety of ferns.  There were
groves of bananas and plantains with shiny leaves 8 feet long, like
enormous hart's-tongue, the bright-leaved noni, the dark-leaved koa,
the mahogany of the Pacific; the great glossy-leaved Eugenia--a
forest tree as large as our largest elms; the small-leaved ohia, its
rose-crimson flowers making a glory in the forests, and its young
shoots of carmine red vying with the colouring of the New England
fall; and the strange lauhala hung its stiff drooping plumes, which
creak in the faintest breeze; and the superb breadfruit hung its
untempting fruit, and from spreading guavas we shook the ripe yellow
treasures, scooping out the inside, all juicy and crimson, to make
drinking cups of the rind; and there were trees that had surrendered
their own lives to a conquering army of vigorous parasites which had
clothed their skeletons with an unapproachable and indistinguishable
beauty, and over trees and parasites the tender tendrils of great
mauve morning glories trailed and wreathed themselves, and the
strong, strangling stems of the ie wound themselves round the tall
ohias, which supported their quaint yucca-like spikes of leaves
fifty feet from the ground.

There were some superb plants of the glossy tropical-looking bird's-
nest fern, or Asplenium Nidus, which makes its home on the stems and
branches of trees, and brightens the forest with its great shining
fronds.  I got a specimen from a koa tree.  The plant had nine
fronds, each one measuring from 4 feet 1 inch to 4 feet 7 inches in
length, and from 7 to 9 inches in breadth.  There were some very
fine tree-ferns (Cibotium Chamissoi?), two of which being
accessible, we measured, and found them seventeen and twenty feet
high, their fronds eight feet long, and their stems four feet ten
inches in circumference three feet from the ground.  They showed the
most various shades of green, from the dark tint of the mature
frond, to the pale pea green of those which were just uncurling
themselves.  I managed to get up into a tree for the first time in
my life to secure specimens of two beautiful parasitic ferns
(Polypodium tamariscinum and P. Hymenophylloides?).  I saw for the
first time, too, a lygodium and the large climbing potato-fern
(Polypodium spectrum), very like a yam in the distance, and the
Vittaria elongata, whose long grassy fronds adorn almost every tree.
The beautiful Microlepia tenuifolia abounded, and there were a few
plants of the loveliest fern I ever saw (Trichomanes meifolium), in
specimens of which I indulged sparingly, and almost grudgingly, for
it seemed unfitting that a form of such perfect beauty should be
mummied in a herbarium.  There was one fern in profusion, with from
90 to 130 pair of pinnae on each frond; and the fronds, though often
exceeding five feet in length, were only two inches broad
(Nephrolepis pectinata).  There were many prostrate trees, which
nature has entirely covered with choice ferns, specially the rough
stem of the tree-fern.  I counted seventeen varieties on one trunk,
and on the whole obtained thirty-five specimens for my collection.

The forest soon became completely impenetrable, the beautiful
Gleichenia Hawaiiensis forming an impassable network over all the
undergrowth.  And, indeed, without this it would have been risky to
make further explorations, for often masses of wonderful matted
vegetation sustained us temporarily over streams six or eight feet
below, whose musical tinkle alone warned us of our peril.  I shall
never again see anything so beautiful as this fringe of the
impassable timber belt.  I enjoyed it more than anything I have yet
seen; it was intoxicating, my eyes were "satisfied with seeing."  It
was a dream, a rapture, this maze of form and colour, this entangled
luxuriance, this bewildering beauty, through which we caught bright
glimpses of a heavenly sky above, while far away, below glade and
lawn, shimmered in surpassing loveliness the cool blue of the
Pacific.  To me, with my hatred of reptiles and insects, it is not
the least among the charms of Hawaii, that these glorious
entanglements and cool damp depths of a redundant vegetation give
shelter to nothing of unseemly shape and venomous proboscis or fang.
Here, in cool, dreamy, sunny Onomea, there are no horrid, drumming,
stabbing, mosquitoes as at Honolulu, to remind me of what I forget
sometimes, that I am not in Eden. {128}
                                   I.L.B.



LETTER X.

WAIPIO VALLEY, HAWAII.

There is something fearful in the isolation of this valley, open at
one end to the sea, and walled in on all others by palis or
precipices, from 1,000 to 2,000 feet in height, over the easiest of
which hangs the dizzy track, which after trailing over the country
for sixty difficult miles, connects Waipio with the little world of
Hilo.  The evening is very sombre, and darkness comes on early
between these high walls.  I am in a native house in which not a
word of English is spoken, and Deborah, among her own people, has
returned with zest to the exclusive use of her own tongue.  This is
more solitary than solitude, and tired as I am with riding and
roughing it, I must console myself with writing to you.  The
natives, after staring and giggling for some time, took this letter
out of my hand, with many exclamations, which, Deborah tells me, are
at the rapidity and minuteness of my writing.  I told them the
letter was to my sister, and they asked if I had your picture.  They
are delighted with it, and it is going round a large circle
assembled without.  They see very few foreign women here, and are
surprised that I have not brought a foreign man with me.

There was quite a bustle of small preparations before we left
Onomea.  Deborah was much excited, and I was not less so, for it is
such a complete novelty to take a five days' ride alone with
natives.  D. is a very nice native girl of seventeen, who speaks
English tolerably, having been brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Austin.
She was lately married to a white man employed on the plantation.
Mr. A. most kindly lent me a favourite mule, but declined to state
that she would not kick, or buck, or turn obstinate, or lie down in
the water, all which performances are characteristic of mules.  She
has, however, as he expected, behaved as the most righteous of her
species.  Our equipment was a matter for some consideration, as I
had no waterproof; but eventually I wore my flannel riding dress,
and carried my plaid in front of the saddle.  My saddle-bags, which
were behind, contained besides our changes of clothes, a jar of
Liebig's essence of beef, some potted beef, a tin of butter, a tin
of biscuits, a tin of sardines, a small loaf, and some roast yams.
Deborah looked very piquante in a bloomer dress of dark blue, with
masses of shining hair in natural ringlets falling over the collar,
mixing with her lei of red rose-buds.  She rode a powerful horse, of
which she has much need, as this is the most severe road on horses
on Hawaii, and it takes a really good animal to come to Waipio and
go back to Hilo.

We got away at seven in bright sunshine, and D.'s husband
accompanied us the first mile to see that our girths and gear were
all right.  It was very slippery, but my mule deftly gathered her
feet under her, and slid when she could not walk.  From Onomea to
the place where we expected to find the guide, we kept going up and
down the steep sides of ravines, and scrambling through torrents
till we reached a deep and most picturesque gulch, with a primitive
school-house at the bottom, and some grass-houses clustering under
palms and papayas, a valley

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