HAWAII, 1920.
I went back, alone, and in that aloneness there was something very solemn. Of course I went back. One who knows Hawaii always goes back. The old lure abides; nor does it abate when the vessel’s forefoot, spurning the silver flying-fish, is heard thripping into the azure silken sea-level which betokens nearness to remembered isles. Again “The old lost stars wheel back”; again the yard-arm of the Southern Cross leans upon the night-purple horizon; again, the old, lovely approach to Oahu, with Molokai sleeping to the southeast.
It was the Maui’s first sailing for Honolulu since her war service in the Atlantic. Long will sound in the ears of her passengers the mighty conching of her deep-sea siren, as the battle-grey hull warped in to the quay. Every brazen throat, every clangorous bell of Honolulu joined in swelling the deafening, triumphal paean. Never had the many wharves been so obliterated by waving, flower-bedecked throngs. It must have been a proud and happy day for Captain Francis Milner Edwards. The approximate number of men under arms in Hawaii during the war, as given by the American Legion, was 8,500. This included practically every nationality represented in the Islands, and included army and navy. A large proportion of this total were in the federalized national guard, which took over the local garrison and released the regular troops for service on the mainland or over-seas.
How strange, to be arriving alone in Honolulu! Not a soul in the city knew that I was aboard. Sheltered by a life-boat, I waited, watching the concourse as it welcomed, and bound with embraces and cables of blossoms, its disembarking friends. There is no welcome so rare as Honolulu’s. Do I not know? But on that day, not a familiar face could I pick out in the vast bouquet of upturned faces, though in it were a score of old friends.
I have since wondered at my lack of emotion. Nature, as if to bear me across a void, seemed to have congealed all thrills and tears. What I remember is a sense of almost creeping, half-diffidently, half-curiously, between two walls of humanity that formed a lane through the sheds to the street.
“But aren’t you Mrs. Jack?”
Startled, I looked up into a fresh, young face.
“Joe!” It was Alexander Hume Ford’s ward. Never before had I beheld in him any striking resemblance to an angel. Assuring me he was not meeting any one, into his car he tucked me. I hardly had to explain that I wanted to drive about the city, and to Waikiki, before letting any one know I had come. I would have it all over with first; I would acquaint myself thoroughly with the event—that I had returned to Jack’s Loveland. Before I had gone to the hotel, I had dared to look into my long garden on Kalia Road; at the Beach Walk cottage of earlier memory; once more at the Outrigger Club, had again shaken hands with David and Duke Kahanamoku, and met two other champion sea-gods, Norman Ross and Rudy Langer. Then I had been whirled up Honolulu’s incomparable background, upon a new and perfect serpentine of road, in and out of the canyons that opened enchanting vistas in every direction. The last dash was out to Nuuanu Pali, to marvel afresh at the undisappointing grandeur of Oahu’s windward sea-prospect, Oahu’s dimming miles of green pineapples upon rolling, rosy prairie, Oahu’s eroded mountains, my Mirrored Mountains, their bastions like green waves, frothing and curling with kukui foliage that flooded cliff and gorge.
For that one day and night I went in the same lightly frozen state, observing the world in a detached way. I telephoned surprised acquaintances, and gradually oriented myself. One never knows what factor will thaw the ice. Next morning, upon the breakfast tray it was the golden sickle of the papaia that cut my controls and loosed the gate of tears. Why the papaia? Why not the coco palms, the fragrance of the plumeria, the clinging caress of the ilima lei, the sight of the long garden beneath its palms, or, above all, the wet eyes of Jack’s friends and mine? Why the mild breakfast melon from the carven papaia tree? I do not know. But thence on I was myself again, myself in my own Hawaii, aware of the compensations of life.
After the tears, the joy of knowing more than ever surely how kind are the hearts of Hawaii. Haole, hapa-haole, and all-Hawaiian, they flocked to me, dear friends all, and gave me to know that I “belonged,” that I was kamaaina, not less but more—in double measure for myself and our lost one.
I had made Honolulu my first port because of the uncertainty of post-war sailings from San Francisco for Hilo. I was tired, body and soul, from a year spent in writing my Book of Jack London. The gaieties of Honolulu were not for me. Hilo, and the arms of my Mother Shipman, and a quiet winter upon the Big Island, should precede my stay on Oahu. So I planned to continue the next day on the Maui to Hilo. But Mother Shipman happened to be in town, and I delayed for a week. For old sake’s sake, after a night in the Alexander Young, I put up at the Seaside Hotel, in one of its white cottages beneath the lofty coco palms. My rooms were soon full of flowers; and there were no paper leis among these. Conspicuous upon the lanai was a basket of sweet peas and maidenhair from Yoshimatsu Nakata, nine years our domestic familiar, on land and sea; now prosperous dentist, a man of family.
I lunched purposely by myself in the well-remembered lanai circle at the Seaside, looking out across the rainbow reef where the mad, white-maned sea-horses tore beachward as of yore. Memories of twelve years marched across my vision—a lovely pageantry in which the white sails of the doughty small Snark appeared most often and vividly. Many brown peoples were in the procession. Then the salt savor of the warm spray upon my lips invited me to breast at least the wahine surf, the little inshore breakers. But when I had passed the shallows, to where the Bearded Ones reared, green and menacing, I did not find myself as courageous as once with my Strong Traveler at hand.
Thursday was my birthday, and on Thanksgiving for the first time in many years. There was a lovable rush of my Hawaiian family to gather native kaokao for me. Mary Low had been the first to hear my voice over the wire. Her sister, Hannah Hind, and Aunt Carrie Robinson, saw to it that I lacked not for the peculiar delicacies than which in long wanderings, I had found nothing more to my taste. Aunt Carrie’s home on the Peninsula, near my one-time acre of Paradise, was the scene of a feast the like of which is seldom known in these degenerate days. Senator “Robbie” Hind and I vied in attention to the greatest number of viands. I won. Nor can I be ashamed of the fact. Which leads me to believe that the most complicated luau in these friendly isles is a “balanced ration” for my otherwise sensitive organism! Midway of the repast, I noticed across the flower-mounded table that one sylph-like maiden gazed out of window with the far-away look of repletion. “Weakening?” I queried scornfully. “Oh, no; I should say not!” amiably she disclaimed. “Only resting!”
But here I am, again writing about Hawaiian food. In conclusion, I must repeat that he or she who fails to approach with open mind and appetite a Sandwich Islands (no pun intended) banquet, misses the ultimate of normal gustatory blessings. For the casual sojourner there are special tourists’ luaus, tickets for which can be purchased at the news-stands of the large hotels. These native feasts include a hula dance.
Very softly I went down the red road, to pass through the little wicket into our old Elysian acre, for the first time since 1907, when our white ketch had swung at anchor in the jade tide off the jetty. Oh, the pity of it! A storm of a ferocity seldom before known in this part of the ocean, had snapped short the giant algarobas; while a new owner had elevated by a whole story the once low bungalow. The world, for a few moments, seemed as out of joint as the proportions of tree and house. I grieved that I had come. Miss Frances Johnson, across the way, was very full of years; and I thought, as I responded to her emotion, that it might be our last meeting. She has since died.
In these days there is much talk, by way of book and periodical, about the South Seas; South Seas meaning, for the most part, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, and other Polynesian isles, with little reference to the still raw and adventurous Melanesian region farther west, familiar to us of the Snark. But many who long to step upon the coralline sands of the east South Pacific, and cannot go that far, forget our own sub-tropics, whose spell works so wonderfully within five or six days’ sail from California. For one who would see Oahu in short order, the great Kamehameha Highway is well under way. “Hammer on federal aid for roads,” is the slogan of those interested in publicity for the Territory. Hawaii, they saw, has contributed vast sums to the federal government since annexation, but has never been included in federal appropriations for roads. Yet millions are being spent by the government in Alaska for this purpose. President Harding is hopefully regarded in this particular. A glance at the week-end automobile sections of Honolulu’s leading papers leaves no doubt of the charms of motoring about the group.
I was overjoyed to note that work was projected upon the red leagues to Waimanalo on windward Oahu. There, besides other indestructible glories of God, is that great beach, once before mentioned, the finest in all Hawaii.
One day, returning from Waimanalo, we angled aside to the old Irwin place, Maunawili, in an enchanting pocket on a mountainside. Here, long years ago, Queen Liliuokalani composed her sweet and simple song, now so widely known and associated with Hawaii, “Aloha Oe.” James Boyd, hapa-haole, and a close friend of the royal family, had then been the owner. With one who knew of the old days, I wandered about the original house, now occupied by a caretaker, where the alii had journeyed merrily over the Pali from Honolulu to rest and play; when there was no thought of time; when the heady air trembled with fragrance, and melody from happy, care-free throats. It was a quaint experience, stepping up or down from one built-on room to another; peering into musty wardrobes; contemplating the vast hikiés that had lulled long rows of Hawaiian noblemen to child-like slumber; musing above the remnants of furniture brought by clippers around Cape Horn. All the time in my ears the rich lore of a generation now silent in death.
Another day I was again at Refuge of Birds, Ahuimanu, hard against the Mirrored Mountains. Old as it had seemed before, now it looked far more than thirteen years older. Then it had been an inhabited and tended decline. Now the mossy roofs lay unrepaired beneath sun and star, cloud and rain, silent, deserted. But the few hours in which we awakened the echoes in that long dining-room and remembered chambers, and in garden and swimming pool, brought out the hospitable spirit of other days. Beside my own California mountain-side, there is one place above all others that I should love to have and cherish. It is Ahuimanu, Refuge of Birds.
I have descanted upon the outdoor sports of Hawaii. And if you would have the fever of city life in a rigorless climate, no city so gay as Honolulu. The hotel life is a dream of leisure, dining, teas, bridge, bathing, canoeing, and dancing in the immense lanais to the swooning Hawaiian strains or the latest mainland jazz, from stringed instruments and native voices.
One new activity I noticed was by way of well-coached companies in Little Theatres. The Lanai Players and the Footlight Players are notable among these. Talent is recruited from both amateur and professional material, even some of the older and most exclusive kamaainas taking enthusiastic part now and again in the excellent plays that are produced. Musical instruction and entertainments are kept at high standard in Honolulu. It is hardly necessary to mention that there are the best of moving picture houses throughout the islands.
In these latter days of the South Seas proper, one’s heart is wrung by the decadence of the natives through the ills of white civilization; and the influenza reaped its ghastly harvest everywhere. But Hawaii fared not so ill from the dread scourge. The all-Hawaiians, though not holding their own in fecundity, are far from presenting a puny appearance—the splendid creatures! Thus, the traveler who would gaze upon the pure Polynesian in his native haunt, may still have curiosity gratified. If he be in San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles, he may step out and secure steamship reservations at branch offices of the Hawaii Tours Company. And here let me say it is in sheer good will that I pass along this information, unbeknown to said Tours Company. My pleasure it is to share My Hawaii with the whole world. Many is the letter that weights my morning mail, telling me Our Hawaii has sent the writer out upon the blue Pacific. Never was I more gratified in this connection than upon a day when we went to meet Princess David Kawananakoa and her children, arriving from New York. Stepping from the gangplank to the wharf, a bright-faced woman made straight for myself, stretching out her hand: “You are Mrs. Jack London? Charmian London? Well, I want to tell you I am here to-day because I read your book, Our Hawaii. Oh, yes, and your Log of the Snark, too. I fully expect to get to the South Seas because of that! And there are others aboard who can tell you the same story.”
It saddens me to read the cold, hard figures of the official census of 1920. The only race registering a decrease is the native. The total pure-Hawaiians are given as 23,723—a decrease of 2,318 in ten years. The Asiatic-Hawaiian has doubled, However; and the Caucasian-Hawaiian risen from 8,772 to 11,072. Total population of the Territory, 255,912, of which 109,274 were Japanese.
Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalananaole has announced that at the end of his present term he will end his service as Hawaii’s representative in Congress, which began twenty years ago.
“I can best serve the ends of my own people by acting as a member of the Hawaiian Rehabilitation Act Commission,” he says. “I feel that I have done my duty to my country and my people in the past twenty years in Washington. I want to use what knowledge and influence I have in making the Hawaiian home laws a success. I succeeded in getting the Rehabilitation Act through Congress, and will continue to work on the successful carrying out of the law. The rest depends on the Hawaiian people.”
The Rehabilitation Act provides homesteads on the islands for people of Hawaiian blood as an aid to the rebuilding and perpetuation of the race. The act was passed on the ground that foreigners were taking up all available land and crowding out the natives.
When Princess David returned that winter of 1919-1920, she said it was to stay. For years she had lived in the eastern capitals, or sometimes in California, more especially San Diego, where once I visited her. She has made good her intention, busying herself with affairs in Honolulu.
Vividly there arises the memory of the great reception staged at her own house on that day of her landing. Owing to another engagement, I arrived in the latter part of the festivities. The sumptuous beauty, in a princess-like holoku of black charmeuse and lace, crowned and garlanded with golden ilima, sat in state near one end of her enormous lanai, still receiving the homage of her people. All official Honolulu dropped in during the afternoon. The orchestra played incessantly but unobtrusively, its haunting airs threading into the universal loveliness of low laughter, fragrance of jasmine and plumeria, exquisite tints of hibiscus, and the gentle pomp and happiness of the occasion.
Between the welcoming formalities, wahines, from young maidenhood to wrinkled age, approached wreathed in smiles and flowers, and made brief vowelly speeches before their princess. Not so brief, however, were those of one or two aged dames, who intoned the mele of their royal mistress. Some knelt to her, invoking blessings; some kissed her hands; others danced little hulas, archly chanting words that brought merry laughter to the lips of the princess.
“They love all this so,” she said, holding my hand with her own beautiful one. “And I love it, too. It makes them so happy. I am never going away again to live. Other times I have come home, this has lasted far into the night; and perhaps two hundred Hawaiians brought their mats or coverings and slept right here on this lanai. They will do the same to-night—sleep under my roof, you see.” I caught the unstudied regalness of her slight inclination to an old courtier, as she answered a question I had put:
“Am I tired? I am not. I rested all the way from San Francisco to Honolulu, in preparation for this day and night!—Ah, I want my children to know you—Kalakaua!” she raised her voice a little toward a tall youth, “bring your sisters!”
They are representative Hawaiians in appearance, the brother and two girls. Kalakaua, about sixteen, had the seeming of other dusky princes I had met in the world of Polynesia, with a lofty sweetness of expression and manner, and erect ease of carriage that made one’s eyes follow him as he moved about. The sisters, Kapiolani and Liliuokalani, were equally attractive. Despite their Caucasian blood and training in fashionable schools, and their latest word in summer modes, there was preserved an elusive wildness in their unfathomable eyes. I had seen the same untamable thing in the old Queen’s look of a dozen years before—though they were not related. The very pose of their young heads, from which rebellious curls seemed continually springing out of bonds, bore out this wholly charming island effect.
It had been my privilege at different times to have with me on the Jack London Ranch certain girl friends from Hawaii. And now I was again to meet some of these in Hilo in their own house—the Shipmans. Here I made home for the winter. A right royal welcome was mine, as always. Tranquil Hilo was what I most needed, and the days and nights were not long enough in which to rest, write letters, and drive about the country.
“Come—you’ve been quiet long enough for one day!” a bright voice would call, and Margaret, or Caroline, in summer lawns, stood beaming from the lanai through the French window. “Come on down to the Yacht Club for tea and a swim.” Or, “We’re off for Keaau—come with us; and we’ll swim and have supper there!” Keaau, as before mentioned, being their seaside retreat, and headquarters for the lower reaches of their cattle lands. It is pronounced Kay-ah-ah’-oo—quickly Kay-ah-ow’.
Such tropic jungle on the winding way! But first, last, and always, the cane, a jungle in itself, high above the big car: and often one had to be wary of the slicing thrusts of living green blades where the stalks had bent down the wire barriers which protect the road. Once at shady Keaau, Mother Shipman, knowing what I like, has a nimble Hawaiian scaling one of her fine palms for nuts. A clever swash of the heavy knife, and the chalice of fragrant cool water is ready to quaff. One lolls in hammocks on the high lanai, until an irruption of young things carrying bathing suits stirs one’s delicious languor.
Swimming at Keaau is inside a surf-pounded lava-rock barrier. The high breakers spill over and through crevices into this sheltered play-ground. We descended steps in a stone wall, to frolic on the sand, across which a fresh stream, never by the same route, finds its way to the sea. One has to hunt for places to swim among lava hummocks, and at high tide it is lively work battling with miniature currents that wash in and out the crevices. For a thorough swim, we would afterward wind up in a large fresh pond on the higher ground.
It was from here we made that ride on Kamehameha’s arrow-straight highway to the cowboys’ camp, Papae. Our supper was steak roasted on coals by lantern light. The native boys at first would not credit that I wanted raw fish, which I repeat is estimable above oysters. But after a little parleying among themselves, they prepared for me a morsel fresh-caught off the iron-bound coast. The night was far from tropic. Resting after supper, it was from under blankets where we lay in the moonlight on a cool swirl of age-old pahoehoe, that we watched the Pacific spouting high in gleaming spires against the lava cliffs. It was so beautiful, following the racing cloud-ships across an illumined sky where hung the few enormous stars the full moon let shine. Under the blanket, in the crook of my arm, a blooded young fox terrier moaned with the joy of white caresses—a white man’s dog, tolerated kindly enough by the cowboys.
We slept on a broad platform in the Japanese goat-herd’s hut. It did not look tempting. But noting that the Shipman girls were nothing loth, I made myself at home in the small, earth-floored room hung with quaint rags. Coming to examine these and the rest of the windowless apartment, I found it all immaculate, everything “sweet as a nut,” as if fresh laundered. The crisp night-wind flowed through the open doorways, and at intervals a pink glow suffused us from far Kilauea. We slept like children to the organ music of the surf; and there was a poignancy in the pleasure of awakening to the sunrise, an enormous orb, clear-cut as a harvest moon, red as wine, lifting out of a slate-blue, heaving plane. Then the snows of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa blushed from rose to fervid crimson above the fathomless mist-blues of their towering bulks.
Naturally, I had been eager to see the great eruption of Mauna Loa’s crater, Mokuoweoweo, down the Kau side of Hawaii; but it had ceased before my arrival. Kilauea, too, had joined in the general outburst, Halemaumau overflowing into the main crater, clear to the foot of the bluff below the Volcano House. The day before I landed, the lava had suddenly lapsed several hundreds of feet, carrying with it large sections of the pit walls. Before I had left Hilo, however, mine was the good fortune to see it risen to within twenty feet of the rim.
It was away and beyond all imagining from former views. Night after night I stood upon the crusted margin of the boiling shaft, prickly with Pélé’s strands of spun-glass hair, and ever the wonder accumulated. The circle of lava wall that had fallen in was raised by the powerful tide into the wreath-form of a south sea atoll, supporting tiny hills as does the surrounding reef of Bora-Bora in the Societies. Upon one arc the island bore a rugged miniature mountain with the silhouette of a castle on the Rhine. Inside this black lava circlet there moved and fountained a lake of fiery liquid, while between the ring and the crater walls there flowed and exploded a molten torrent. This would gradually sink a few feet, disclosing awful caverns at white heat along the lower edges of the island. The fountains, first bubbling up in domes of exquisite rose and lambent yellow, would swell to bursting point, and fling high into the burning night tons of molten fire-gold, which fell in great drops heavily back into the restless, roaring, hissing flood.
When one first leaves his car in the parking place, there is heard the peculiar soft-grinding, avalanching sound of the milling chaos. The sky is painted red above the pit, and clouds of pink steam rise and bend back and forth in the wind, or float away. But this illumination is no preparation, even to the very brink, for what impinges upon the eye when it looks over into the House of Fire. The brilliance is of an intensity so terrific that all the white-hot furnaces of the world could give little intimation of this glare that seems, like the eye of God, to pierce and light the innermost convolutions of one’s brain, rob the very spirit of its vain secrets.
By day the brilliance is more one of color, as if the solar spectrum dyed the earth-substance and vapor with fervid rose, red, and orange, and sulphurous greens and yellows.
Pélé has played fast and loose the past several years; and no man can count upon his pilgrimage being rewarded by her most spectacular performances. Although I continue to maintain that her serenest vaporings are worth the voyage.
In March of 1921, the big steamer Hawkeye State made her first Baltimore to Hawaii trip, bringing a large list of eastern passengers to visit the volcanic marvel. The campaign of publicity which landed them at Hilo had been based more than all else upon the prayer that the fire goddess might be in wrathful mood. As the Hawkeye State neared port, there was a disheartening lack of glow upon the side of Mauna Loa. The hopes of the promoters were faint when the hotels at Kilauea were reached, and grumbling arose at the insufficient accommodation and lethargic aspect of Halemaumau in the distance. This continued until the procession of motors was well on its way through the forest, bound for the pit.
And then it happened.
Abruptly, as if ordered for their benefit, Pélé broke loose upon the starry night; and by the time the excited scores had reached the verge of her dwelling, the ponderous surge, urged from beneath, was lashing tremendously against the battlements. These capitulated to the onslaught, and crashed into the molten mass, driving the tourists hastily to their cars and the safety and sight-seeing vantage of the bluffs around the main crater. I quote from an eye-witness:
“The lake broke through crevices and rushed with express speed out over the old lava surface, where flowing lava had not been known for forty years. A river formed on the side toward the Volcano House, plunged down the incline, covered the old horse corral where Professor Jaggar’s instruments were stored, sealing them forever. On and on the river spread until it stopped at the foot of the cliffs just below the Volcano House. All night and on St. Patrick’s day, which was also the birthday of Kamehameha III, the lava found new openings. It poured like a Niagara over the south side. A new fountain formed near the bluff southwest of Halemaumau and sent incandescent rockets into the air. Another fountain formed over toward the Kau road.”
Never in the history of personally conducted excursions had the volcano presented such a spectacle on schedule time. All discontented murmurings ceased. The goddess was surely working for the promotion committee; and a new hotel and enlargement of all present facilities, both there and in Hilo, were promptly on the way. To say nothing of improvements on the volcano highway.
Late tidings from this section of the territory augur that it will not in future be regarded as a mere amusement park. Its Titan energies are to be put to work. Professor Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr., volcanologist in charge (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau), has submitted that borings in search of heat for transformation into electric energy be made in the valley that lies between Kilauea—which he has found to be an independent mountain—and Mauna Loa. The idea, it seems, was suggested by John Brooks Henderson, zoologist from Washington, D. C., who backed up the proposal with a contribution of $1,500.00. These holes should be sunk at the base of the west bluff of Kilauea crater, in the bottoms of Kilauea and Kilauea Iki, and in the outer slopes of Kilauea and Mauna Loa. The Hawaii Volcano Research Association has approached the territorial legislature with this project, and funds have been appropriated. The borings are to be deep, to determine temperature, mineral and gas conditions, earthquake phenomena, and water underground at the volcanoes.
It is a fascinating thing to contemplate. Far more so than the invention of fast-obsolete war enginery and the squandering of dizzying billions on the same, while the victims of the infernal machines beg for bread and bed, or turn to crime. And think of the child-brains dulling in the factories of the land of the free and the home of the brave, because a time-dishonored law has been found constitutional in this day. Who knows that any one of these young brains might not be such an one as those of Henderson and the volcanologist on the slopes of Kilauea, who open up this vista of scientific romance for young and old. Not for nothing did Jack London, dying before the United States stepped into the “fight for democracy,” picture his native land “on her fat, helpless, lonely, unhonorable, profit-seeking way.” We got into the fight, wastefully, to be sure, but quickly and magnificently, and helped the rest of the world, temporarily, out of it. But look at us now, without conscience toward our educators, our children, our “heroes,” our “democracy.” One is tempted to indorse Shaw’s remark: “The longer I live, the more firmly I am convinced that the other planets use our earth as their lunatic asylum.”
But this is a book on Hawaii, and I have digressed—yet have I? This work of Tom Jaggar’s, on his heights geographically, creatively, head thrust forward into a golden age of scientific research for the good of man, stings one into swift realization of the cruel, wanton loss of strength and money that makes for destruction of body and mind, when it might be turned to account for the beautiful emancipations of life.
In July, 1921, Kilauea National Park, comprising a large area of Hawaii’s mountain land, including the fire-pit, was dedicated. The picturesque exercises included the recitation by a lineal descendant of a priest of Pélé, of a prayer to the fire goddess. This invocation, delivered in the full-toned chant of the old Hawaiians, was succeeded by an impressive recitation of the first Christian prayer delivered at the same brink by the spirited Kapiolani in olden days.
In connection with this National Park a road is to be built to the crater Mokuaweoweo at the summit of Mauna Loa. Owners of the land required for this highway are willing to donate the property. The possibilities of this road are set astir in one’s imagination by the popular watchword, “From Surfing to Ski-ing.”
The greatest volcanic event in Hawaii for the year 1919 was the activity of Mauna Loa itself. It was no surprise to the unsleeping keeper of Kilauea and the Long Mountain. That autumn, with its unruly flock of seismic disturbances, was a busy one for Professor Jaggar, who made more than one lofty ascent to the flaming pastures of his charge.
Back at Kilauea observatory, it was at 1:45 on the morning of Monday, September 29, that he noticed the fume and glow from Mauna Loa’s 13,675-foot crater, Mokuaweoweo, spreading to the southward along a route he knew well. By telephone he warned Kapapala and the other districts in the course the flow would take. Many is the account I have listened to from residents of those sections who saw destruction looming far above, and who hurried to pack their belongings in preparation for flight. Some thought they would go grey in a night, through the freaks played by the fluid avalanche, which would seem to skirmish in avoidance of an obviously doomed home. And I noticed a hesitance among these, as well as other island visitors who rushed to the ten-days’ wonder, about telling what they had seen.
“It’s like this,” they faltered. “We saw things that nobody would believe. How do we know? We tried it out when we got home. The thing was too big, too terrible, to impress those who had not seen it—in spite of the great smoke and glare that hid Hawaii from the other islands for days and days. Why, I stood on the hot bank of that burning cascade, and saw bowlders as big as houses, I tell you, perfectly incandescent, go rolling down to the sea; and—but there I go. I don’t think you’d believe the things I could tell you.”
Yet I find this in Professor Jaggar’s official report: “The lava ‘rafts’ or blocks of bench magma which rolled down the live channel, were seen to bob up [in the sea], make surface steam, and float out some distance from the shore without sinking at first, as though buoyed by the hot gas inflating them. Lightnings were seen in the steam columns. There was much muddying of the water, and fish were killed in considerable numbers.”
For the week previous the professor had kept a pack train in readiness, and by sun-up on September 29 he and Mr. Finch of the observatory, with two native packers, were on their difficult and perilous adventure over the lava deserts of other periods. The redoubtable scientist risked life and limb in the following days to secure his remarkable photographs and take samples of gas in vacuum tubes. The absorbing details of the journey and its observations are in his Bulletin of October, 1919—the high fountains of lava, the great detonations of explosions, the lake of fire on the mountain, and the final plunge of the melt over old lava bluffs into the sea in a river speeding five to ten miles an hour. This red torrent coursed for ten days. The heat of the stilled lava was not yet gone when, four months afterward, I motored upon it where it had crossed, a hundred yards wide, the highway in Alika district—a waste of aa as upstanding as the wavelet of a tide-rip, kupíkipíkio. It had swept everything in its path, causing suffering, fear and death among the herds. A temporary restoration of the highway was begun as soon as the heat had sufficiently cooled; but it made one nervous, in an inflammable vehicle, to see how a light shower caused the lava to steam, and to feel warmth still rising from crevices. Through the courtesy of Professor Jaggar, I am able to present his photograph of the flowing lava-stream.
During the eruption there was a succession of short-period, shallow tidal waves ranging from three to fourteen feet in height. These kept in trepidation the passengers on vessels of all classes that swarmed off shore. An authentic tale is told of the wife of an islander being swept some distance off-shore by a subsiding tidal wave. Fortunately she was a swimmer. I have forgotten whether she was returned by the next landward billow or was rescued by a canoe.
As I write, at this late date, of Hawaii’s volcanoes quick and dead, it comes to me that they have new rivals in extent—Katmai in Alaska, and Svea crater in Iceland just discovered by the Swedish savants Yberg and Waddell. But the character and accessibility of Kilauea and Haleakala make them immune from neglect.
One morning at half past two we left Hilo for the Shipmans’ highest altitude on Mauna Kea. But not by way of their volcano house, which necessitates traversing the lava valley between Mauna Loa and its twin mountain. We motored up the coast, in and out the misty, moonlit gulches, breathing the odors of Eden, and trying to catch glimpses of the sleeping beaches at their mouths. The sky went every opal tint that dawn can paint; and when the sun rose it was a dull, blood-red globe that burned its way through the mist at our backs. By five we were breakfasting in substantial New England manner with friends in Waimea on Parker Ranch.
More than one gorgeous sunrise was ours while we wound southerly up Mauna Kea’s western side on tracks more fit for cow-ponies, and only lately attempted by automobiles. As the “clover-leaf” climbed, one felt less and less inclined to talk. The beauty, the enormousness of every prospect was almost stupefying. The first great valley we encountered lies several thousand feet high between the largest mountain’s broken knees and Hualalai lifting its head more than eight thousand feet to the right, with Mauna Loa visible ahead. It must be kept in mind that this highest island in the world is composed of three mountains, two of which are nearly twice the elevation of Hualalai. This valley had the effect of a desert basin, hemmed in by the three looped mountains. The rolling plain, broken by hills and lesser valleys, was tufted with tree-growths and half-dried, golden-green pili grass, blowing in the high wind. For the island was suffering from what was as near drouth as it ever experiences. But one knew that with abundant moisture the wavy plateau would be an incalculably rich one.
At Kalaieha, on the Humuulu tract, still on Parker Ranch, we watched the throwing and shearing of rams, while waiting for the Japanese cowboys to bring horses on which we rode to the Shipmans’ ranch, PuuOO. The ponies’ feet thudded softly in the meadow turf. The air was light and sweet, and full of bird voices—questioning whistle of plover, bickering and calling of mynah, and skylarks near the ground, with more of earth-earthy mellowness than that small feathered angel’s celestial strains from the thin blue ether. From time to time, on our curving path among hillocks high and low, we would have a glimpse, still six thousand feet overhead, of Mauna Kea’s pure snowy pinnacles, with their azure shadows.
“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed in the buildings,” Caroline ventured. Disappointed? Never had I seen anything to equal this little ranch house, perched a mile and a quarter above sea level. It is built of hand-hewn koa—walls, roof, floors, lanais. Koa, red as Etruscan gold, is as common here as precious metal in heaven. The furniture, too, is of the same “Hawaiian mahogany,” fashioned long ago in quaintest of shapes. Outside, the house was grayed beautifully with age and weathers of many years. We slept in high koa beds, on fat wool mattresses carded by Jack’s “First lady of Hawaii,” Mother Shipman herself. And what sleep! What appetite! What life! It was snapping-cold at morn and eve, with a moon diamond-bright—never did I see moon so bright. I would wake to hear, as if in a Maine winter, the telephone wire humming and crackling, and the mynahs complaining of the cold; and another bird, with a benevolent warble low in the throat.
Before the moon had risen, we could make out afar, where the sea laved the foot of the valley, the twinkling lights of Hilo town, a little to south of east. Already the glow from Kilauea’s raging furnace was coloring the dark clouds beyond Mauna Loa’s long incline. Any time of the night one could reckon upon that intense, lurid wine-glow to the southeast.
Breakfasts were mainly of plumpest plover, proudly served to the queen’s taste by Ondera, the Japanese cook, a broken-down cowboy. For some reason it had been hard for me to think of the Japanese as cowboys; but men who are fortunate enough to get and keep them say there are none more able nor more faithful. The time came when none of the splendid Hawaiian horsemen were to be found who would stay on the upper reaches. A picturesque Japanese graveyard on a neighboring knoll attests the devotion of the transplanted labor.
I came to call it The Book of the Mountain, what I read into and out of it from saddle and from lanai at PuuOO. From dawn to dusk the pages were always turning. Sometimes twilight came short hours after high noon, with an infloat of cloud between earth and sun that seemed to rob one of weight and all relation to every-day sensations, giving great area to the imagination. Then would show the sudden etching, against thinning vapor, of the writhen, ghostly skeleton of a dead koa tree, or the large grace of a living lehua. But for the most part the satin-gray doorway framed a happy foreground of green touched with sun-gold.
What held me most in thrall was the breathtaking lap of earth between the two great mountains. For the first time I realized, only possible from such vantage, what a whale of a mountain is Mauna Loa, and why the ancients named it Loa, Long. It is that long, gradual slope to the sea. Upon its side, from the summit, miles upon miles of lava that had flowed from Mokuaweoweo in the early ’fifties and as late as 1880, glisten under the brassy sun like streaming fields of mica, hardly distinguishable from snow or ice.
Sometimes, at PuuOO, I seemed to be in a balcony looking upon a gigantic stage. The cloud-drop of tarnished silver rose and lowered upon the bright scene of flowing leagues of seaward-declining valley, with showers of sun-javelins falling inside the curtain. I wondered why the very vastness of it did not speak monotony. Perhaps the vastness was the answer. Movement depended upon sunshine and cloud-shadow, except when one picked out upon the colossal map a gliding herd of cattle, or a pack-train of mules crawling con moto over the gray and fawn of lichened lava. What I do know is that never was the unearthly sweep of valley twice alike; always the vision was renewed with a difference; and never did it seem a tangible reality.
One day we spent following the pig-hunters. There was lacking the famed excitement of boar-sticking, for the boars were stunted and spiritless from the prolonged drouth. This sport is all in the day’s work for Otji and Muranka, immovable as sacks of meal in their saddles—efficient Japanese vaqueros, but far from graceful. They and their ponies are of a sort in appearance, stocky, short-legged, homely, with sagacious eyes. Good little philosophers, both, and kindly.
Exhilarating was the dash down the hummocky, slanting champaign, hoofs displacing dust only lightly laid by cloud-mist. Fear of monotony is dispelled in the first mile of closer acquaintance with the range. Quite suddenly the soft pasture-soil gives place to harder ground of half-decomposed lava forested in koa, standing and fallen. Then we come quite unexpectedly upon a large river between steep banks; but it is of long-arrested lava. Halting on the brink, we watch the hunters scrambling below after a boar, the collies stringing out eagerly in pursuit, bearing their plumed tails like kahilis, proudly.
I rein down into the channel, and negotiate the stream of stone and the farther bank, marveling upon the puissance of my square and honest pony. On over a descent of rough lava country, with clinking shoes the horses leap like goats, landing bunched from mound to mound with perfect precision, or scampering like rabbits in the wider spaces. We stop where a stout plain-wire boundary is reached, by which the government protects the young koa forestage, rooted in large bracken and tree ferns. From among this undergrowth the collies’ smiling faces, bright-eyed, point up at us, where they have come upon the quarry accounted for by the first shot. A cowboy swings from his horned saddle, and dexterously, without a waste movement, skins the bristly beast, whose lips in death snarl away from yellowed tusks. The butchering is unpleasant and malodorous, but interesting. The knife releases the entrails, and a small rough boot is planted conveniently midmost of the smoking ruins that seem to shrink from contact with an inimical outer world. All of the once vicious wild-pig is left on the ground save the four quarters, except in case of especially fine ribs. When the boys are out for longer periods, they roast the meat, wrapped in koa leaves, in a bed of hot stones lined with koa branches. The meat remains all day in this primitive tireless cooker.
Sometimes we trailed after the hunters into deep gulches, crowded with ferns, where the victims were brought to bay and dispatched in places from which it was difficult to retrieve their bodies.
Caroline and I turned homeward by way of an obscure trail she knew upon the long acclivity. Part of the distance was over pahoehoe lavas of antiquity, patterned in grey-green lichen and a rich, tawny-tiger moss deep and yielding as Wilton carpet. The sky was wonderful as the earth—a satsuma sky of blue and white, the fleck of clouds giving the effect of delicate cracked surfaces.
A roaring fireplace greeted our return. The smiling Ondera bustled about like an old nurse making us comfortable, and set upon the koa table, already holding his vase of dewy blue violets, a steaming roast of ranch beef, and steaming vegetables from his garden. Later, while we read cozily in the warmth, out of the windy night we heard the hunters and pack animals coming in with the slain porkers; and presently their laconic expressions of satisfaction as they sat to meat in Ondera’s domain.
Under a tortoise sky this time, a dome of large close patches of lead and white, we swung down-mountain to move into certain paddocks a drove of cattle which had come all the way from Keaau by the sea. To an American, the word paddock sounds so futile to designate the seemingly immeasurable acres between fences or gates. Moment by moment I marveled at the variety of that sage-green obliquity. Large areas are so rich and friable that it must have puzzled the owner where, in some practically desirable spot, as PuuOO, to find a place firm enough to bear a house.
It is saddening to come upon so much fallen timber. A pest of moss has overspread and destroyed great numbers of the large growth. Among living trees, I saw a few of the naia, false sandalwood, pricked out bright-green by stray sunbeams.
Over the tussocks of grass we raced, senses aching with very pleasure of motion in so boundless a survey. The declining earth stretches in an unbroken expanse; then suddenly, under a clearing sky, an unguessed deep serration yawns at our feet. The little horses drop easily from the prairie into tropic ferns and flowering lehua, where the ground is lush, the air hot as a greenhouse. Just as one notices that the fern-edges are frost-bitten to brown, a cloud rolls majestically overhead, and coats are drawn on without delay. Shortly afterward the torrid sunshine floods down, and one pants in the rarefied air, while the toughest pony breaks out in sweat.
We would ride through a living greenwood of large koa, and the next paddock would shock as the veriest boneyard of blanched trunks and limbs, erect or prone. In one such, we moistened our throats with thimble-berries, less insipid than our California ones, and quite juicy and refreshing.
Resting loosely in saddle, we followed with our eyes the red cattle deploying with soft impact of tired hoofs. Next we would be over-edge driving into some wet ruddy gulch, where the ponies, machine-like but more reliable than any machine, slid steeply upon braced fours, into fainting depths and dauntlessly up the opposite walls, keeping the beeves in line.
Homeward bound, to show me more of the endless novelty we rode leisurely by a round-about way that led through a stretch of Kentucky bluegrass which would make a golfer’s paradise. This close lawn spread into the most beautiful wood I have ever seen. It was of thriving koa and ohia lehua, and would serve for the scene of legend or fairy tale. The lehua are of as great girth and height as the koa; the fair green gloom, trickled through with showers of sunrays, making the white-grey trunks gleam as in a dream forest, or like the spirits of trees. That a red-fibered plant may be so white outside, is of a piece with the wonder of white-skinned humanity. One looked for pure, exquisite wood-sprites to step into the emerald clearings and challenge the invader. Then, like a shot, the lovely tranquillity was shattered by the spurring of a pony after a frightened wild-pig, and I found myself very much occupied staying with the bounding, darting pursuit of my own steed. The black boar, at bay, almost underneath a mounted hunter, stood motionless except for the savage glint of eye, bristling crest along neck and back, and gnashing of tusks—the strangest, wildest note I have ever heard outside a nightmare. In this posture, with all outdoors around him offering a fighting chance, the animal menaced death and received it at full gaze.
Puaakala—akala blossom—is the eastern ranch house of PuuOO, and thither we rode for our last sleep on Mauna Kea. Raincoats and our few traveling effects were strapped behind on the saddles, and thus we set out, over an entirely different route, upon the return journey to the east coast.
Puaakala, roofed in red corrugated iron, was otherwise even more picturesque, more hand-made in appearance than the PuuOO eyrie, even the washing-bowl and the bath-tub being dubbed out of koa. That tub, long and narrow and sloped at one end, was unavoidably reminiscent of a stout coffin. The living room had an aged and mellow look, walled with beautifully seasoned wood. There were well filled bookcases and cupboards of koa, stands of rifles and shotguns, small koa tables bearing pots of flowers; and a large couch covered with a scarlet shawl that I fancied was an heirloom. The fireplace shed its warmth and glow upon the splendid woods, which gave back the cheer. Cooking and serving was done by another Nipponese cowboy, with a face like weathered mahogany, and whose usefulness in the saddle had passed. He, like Ondera, busied himself with our welfare like an old family nurse. Unlike Ondera, various small replicas of himself played charmingly upon the greensward outside.
The low front lanai, wreathed with honeysuckle, faced mauka. Makai of the house we wandered on foot at sunset through a grove of koa rooted in uneven velvet turf pastured by Holstein Frisian and Hereford cattle that made pictures at every turn.
That night, when I shut the koa panel that was my bedroom door, I became aware that Gauguin had not been the only young painter who left his mark upon wood. I found on the inner side an oil, manifestly not new, of a spray of akala berries and leaves. It had been done as long ago as 1882, on a visit by Howard Hitchcock, who has since attracted much attention by his fine canvases of Hawaii.
In a crisp dawn that tingled cheeks and gloved fingers, we took to the homeward trail, fifty miles down-mountain to the railroad. There we were to board train for Hilo, leaving the cowboys to lead our mounts back to PuuOO. It is the sort of traveling that only a seasoned rider should undertake. Not that it demands special horsemanship, for the ponies are surefooted and docile. But the approved gait is that steady jog-trot which one must, with at least simulated composure, maintain to the bitter end. This for five times ten miles, downhill at that, unrelieved by even a stop for lunch, and paced, mile in and mile out, by chunky little Japanese whose one duty was to see that we did not miss our train... I, fortunately, was a seasoned rider.
But every foot of the way was of a beauty and interest never to be forgotten. The start, for instance: did I say dawn? It was barely more than the beginning of the end of morning twilight. The sky was deep blue in contrast to a crescent moon bright as any star. The day grew, and beetling cloud-masses, slate-blue, stood up, solid, the lightning streaking athwart, like fantastic mountains against the heavenly hyacinth dome. I almost listened for grand music to usher in this creation of a new day. Music there was not wanting, however, of birds on earth and in the scintillating air. Then a Gargantuan cloud-zeppelin sailed on its tremendous way above the horizon, raining reflected fire over a burning cloud-city of sunrise upon a cobalt sea.
How different the vision upon our left—shadowy Mauna Kea’s snows flushing rosier, shade by shade, to the sun’s ardency; but in some towering fields it was that the color of the snow is occasioned by the red volcanic soil.
Dipping in and out of gulches, the clawing, sliding hoofs uncovered earth as yellow as rusty iron. In a light rain, the warm breath of the dust rose fog-like in the frosty air. While the sun dispersed the mists and sent them drifting, drifting, in opal veils, we noted the semblance of a Japanese print in the dead and dying koa trees, stark and gray against a pearl-white curtain.
When the sharp, hot sunlight became obscured by clouds through which we plodded, our coats had to be unrolled. The changes of temperature were startling. But as the morning wore, the heat settled down, and jerseys were added to the saddle bundles. In and out of forest and descending plain jogged we; and many were the views of the mountain—red, upturned profiles of burned-out craters against the enamel-blue sky, and the sharp-edged summit blotched with snow. The drouth was very apparent where we had come again into the Parker Ranch, which reaches over the shoulders and about both sides of Mauna Kea, into and around other tracts. Reforesting has been done by setting out eucalyptus. I saw some well-grown groves, of a kind bearing blossoms which drenched the breeze with fragrance.
The last few miles, by highway along the ocean bluffs, were painful, I will admit; but I was not the only “seasoned rider” who dismounted stiffly. A short walk, and the restful trip to Hilo in an open railway coach, put us into condition for a dance. But I was bothered much by the sudden wrenching from transcendent heights of which I had been a thankful and very humble part for the past days. It was hard again to tread city pavement, to gaze upon buildings of wood and stone instead of fronded tree and the extravagant bulks of God’s mountains. Even when contemplating the Shipmans’ string of automobiles, I harked back regretfully to my friends up yonder on Mauna Kea’s shoulder—the funny, fuzzy, excellent philosophers, the square, true little horses of PuuOO.
Yet for all the stupendousness of my late surroundings, and the wholesome excitements of the chase, the memory of it remained a quiet thing, something serenely happy.
At one o’clock of another morning, I arrived at Lahaina, on Maui, to spend Christmas holidays upon Haleakala Ranch. Not long after leaving Hilo, the Mauna Kea had run into a succession of violent squalls, through which she threshed steadily for hours. But when the ship’s boat landed, it was under a sky of low-hanging stars, and I could see the loom of West Maui’s valleyed heights.
Louis von Tempsky, debonair as of old, and the sonsy Armine, stood peering down in the uncertain light. Without trace of yawn from interrupted sleep, they reached to me the hands of perfect welcome one fails not to clasp in these sweet isles. Never, should I embark and depart a thousand times, can Hawaii’s landings become commonplace. Day or night, they remain the most unspoiled of travel blessings.
If there is one thing lovelier than sea-level on Maui, it is her temperate zone. I slept and woke for a month in the wing of a new house on the ranch, set in thick, wild lawns where before breakfast one romps barefoot with an adorable sprawl of puppies. By day, it was the old story of bird-song, of sunshine and shadow, of illimitable mountain rim above blue-shadowed clouds. And rainbows. Such rainbows! Conflagrations of rainbows; the air afire with drifting rainbows; rainbows against cloudrack of West Maui; through a veil of rainbowed mist, all the centuried lapse of green-clothed lava below. Each morning, my own pet rainbow frayed itself out in a dewy meadow just beyond my window. And once, on a day’s ride of fifty miles, I saw at sunset, across a vast bowl of pale-green cane, an old burial ground turned into a glittering city of the dead, with a huge slanting shaft of rainbow piercing a low, leaden pall of cloud.
During that same ride on the mountain, above the cactus plains, we could make out the island of Kahoolawe. And Armine told me how once she had found, in a rocky interstice, an old tambourine—so old it fell to dust in her fingers. Lanai was visible to the northwest, and I planned some day to go there from Lehaina. One reads that the ages have exposed on Lanai a strata of soil of every conceivable shape and color, as remarkable as the Garden of the Gods.
Christmas and New Year came and went, with all the gay observance of tree and feast and dancing. On both days, a swarm of men and women who had for years worked under Von, came like retainers to share in the holiday spirit—Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. And all played their part in music and merriment. The New Year’s Eve ball opened the new hall at Kahului’s race-track. Then there were the New Year’s races. In an unguarded moment I let fall that I had always been ambitious to ride in a race. Promptly Von took me up, and it was arranged that I should be one in the cow-girls’ contest on polo ponies. I demanded further practice in the required “cowboy” saddle, being used to the English tree. But almost incessant storms prevented much preparation, and none whatever on the race-course.
On the great day, after dancing all night, I entered the event on a horse and saddle I had never tried nor even seen before that day, upon a new track so deep in mud that several jockeys had already been hurt from falling horses. But the worst of it was that two “dark horses” proved to be rangy thoroughbreds. Armine and I, indignant but determined, managed despite to pass second and third under the wire, very close to the winner. The other thoroughbred was at our rear, along with the beaten ponies.
The weather did not permit the Haleakala camping I had so longed to repeat. I was especially disappointed, because the von Tempskys had some time previously made the startling discovery of heiaus in many of the interior cones of the main crater. They had so far guarded their fascinating secret; but in September, 1920, conducted to the treasure-trove the scientists of the new Polynesian Research Society. In all but two of the entire number of cones were found structures. These were of three descriptions—the first a sort of prayer heiau; the second, a type of burial heiau, “the passing place of priests,” in some of which skeletons were still preserved. The Kaupo natives say that the gray cinder-cone was for women, the black for men. A third variety, of which there were dozens in more or less demolished condition, were of the kind once used by Maui troops when they tried to hold Red Hill against an invading army from the Big Island. The floor of one cone held several small heiaus in a perfect state, while another crater bore nearly a dozen temples terraced upon its inner slopes. A sling-stone of antique pattern was the only relic they came across. I cannot imagine any exploration in Hawaii more alluring than this in Haleakala, and shall continue to burn for the chance, on horseback, to make at the side of cone after cone in the great House of the Sun.
I was to enjoy a new revelation of Hawaii, the Kona coast in winter. Gone was the Blue Flush, except the opalescent ghost of it at dawn or sunset. Instead, the horizon was keen as a steel-blue knife, though at times hardly darker than the deep blue sky. Seldom was the ocean like the streaked mirror I remembered. Winds blew fresh and stirred the surface into a semblance of more turbulent waters of the group.
Over the highway from the Volcano House, on through the Kau district, we drove close-protected as in a tent, in warm deluging rain-flurries that lightened to misty showers; out of rain-curtain into blazing sunshine that tore splendid vistas in the clouds mauka and to the crawling indigo sea far below. Lava from underneath Kilauea had broken out, in a fine spectacle, upon a bygone flow. The yacht Ajax, one hundred and ninety miles off-shore, had reported as plainly visible the glow from this Kau desert stream as well as from Halemaumau. But seeing the lower outburst entailed arduous tramping over sharp aa, and I, for one, having been a spectator of Samoa’s similar eruption on Savaii, decided not to spare the time and effort.
The Paris ranch was our goal. There we visited our friend Ethel who, with her brother, was administering the ranch. On the velvet lap of the mountain, the house rests in a close of natural lawn and rioting flowers. Oh, these gardens of Hawaii! It would seem that here the main effort might be not to stimulate growth, but to curb it from getting out of hand. This garden is inclosed by a low stone wall, above which rises a hedge bearing a profusion of rusty-orange flowers that make an arbor of the gate-arch. I loved to stroll down the pave of broad, flat volcanic flags, moss-grown, edged with amaryllis and iris, and then wander in the tree shade over the springy grass, breathing perfume of plumeria, magnolia, orange, my eyes full of the creamy color of their blooms and the scarlet and coral of tall hibiscus. The deep, rich loam in beds close to the house foundations was planted in luxuriant, tall begonias, red, pink, and blush, and many another flower that flourishes in this ardent clime; while the brilliant magenta Bougainvillea clambered up the pillars, screened the lanai, and banked upon its roof. In a leafy, damp ell of the building, I came upon an old well-top of mossy cement, that looked more like a beautiful miniature mausoleum.
Outside the garden, on the natural terraces, were untended coffee plants, with their green and red beans; the air-plant cassia (kolu), with bell-shaped flowers, tinged with pink. This is a native of Africa, and is a well known curiosity. Its leaf, allowed to lie on a table, will continue to grow from the crenate notches along its edges, deriving life from the air—hence, air-plant.
It was to this very spot where now stands the Paris home that from earliest times the missionaries came as a health resort when the tropical coast proved too warm for their New England blood.
Coffee raising in Kona, as in other sections of the Big Island, goes on apace. The tobacco industry can hardly be said to be firmly established, but its prospects are excellent. The leaf has the tropical flavor and quality, classing with “Havana” rather than with any of our “domestic” varieties. The 1920 crop was disposed of to a New York firm, who express faith that at no distant day the Hawaiian “weed” will occupy a permanent place in the American market.
One novel trip to me was on horseback to Kaawaloa, where is the Cook monument. The trail lies down a rocky ridge, on which one sees the site of that small heiau where Captain Cook’s body was dismembered, and where one may turn aside to look upon Lord Byron’s 1825 oaken cross with tablet to the memory of his slain countryman.
How certain faces and scenes stand out clear, definite, as if challenging to be forgotten! One head I saw on the cape persists in my impressions of that dreamy day. Its owner was vouched for as pure Hawaiian—yet why, when he flashed his eyes sidewise, did I fancy they were grey? He was the alii type, nobly tall, with straight-backed skull and waving iron-grey hair. The Hawaiian lofty sweetness was not wanting, softening the sternness of a large mouth and aquiline nose—reminiscent of the carven lineaments of the fast-disappearing Marquesan.
The scene that is stamped upon my recollection is of the peacock-blue, deep water at foot of that dull-gold burial cliff. Here some grand specimens of Polynesians, nude save for bright loin-cloths, were fishing as of old from a small fleet of the savage black and yellow outrigger canoes. The noonday sun beat hot upon them, and their skins glistened like wet copper and bronze. Now and again a fixed, silent statue became alive and went overboard with a perfect grace that left hardly a ripple upon the intensely blue current. Then two or more would pull in a tawny net, and spill into the canoes their catch of sentient silver. Or, if some were colored fish of unedible sorts, these were flung like autumn leaves back into their element.
Unwatched so far as they knew, untrammeled, utterly at one with their native environment, they gave me unwittingly a look into the past of their race. Often I feel again beneath my head the cast-up spar, sun-whitened, of a forgotten wreck, and see from beneath drowsy lashes that vision of the golden age of Polynesia, and hear the desultory chatter and young, care-free laughter of those children of the sun who little knew the priceless worth of their gift to one white visitor on their shore.
Doubtless I heard and listened to the same natives, but in their unlovely modern clothes, at a church convention song-festival in Napoopoo, part of the centennial commemoration of Opukahaia. The best voices on the island were there, sweet, pure, true, melodious. I sat on a bench with my back to the singers, but more particularly, to the glaring lanterns; swinging my feet over a small surf and dreaming into the starry night. “What dreams may come,” when one revisits lands where one’s own romance has been enacted. I thought I saw the Snark’s headsails come questing through the gloom around the point—my little ship of dreams-realized.
Upon the outskirts of Napoopoo village lie the well-preserved remains of Hikiau heiau where the monument to the famous young Hawaii Christian of a century ago was unveiled with day-long song and prayer and genuine Hawaiian oratory. This temple, which has been cleared of debris, shows half a dozen shallow terraces rising to the final shrine. Here one can see the very holes where once stood the idol-posts. In the middle of this level is a divided wall inclosure. A short distance southeast of the savage edifice, one comes upon a small stone platform where was the house of Opukahaia’s uncle, with its family chapel—I should say heiau; and two tall coconut palms which the boy is supposed to have planted.
The new monument stands hard against the outer southwest corner of the impressive Hikiau temple, that point being nearest to where Opukahaia had lived, and from where he sailed quite literally for the bourne whence there was no return for him. The Anglicized inscription follows:
IN MEMORY OF
HENRY OPUKAHAIA
Born in Kau 1792.
Resided at Napoopoo 1797-1808
Lived in New England Until His Death at Cornwall,
Conn., in 1818.
His Zeal for Christ and Love for His People Inspired
the First American Board Mission to Hawaii in 1820.
Standing or sitting in the grass, without boredom for hours on end I listened to the exercises. The oratory of the Hawaiian leaders, several of them government officials, is like music. There is nothing they would rather do than launch into speechmaking upon public occasions; and with good reason, for there is nothing they do better. Their rounded periods, their intonations, are impressive in the extreme. They know the value of emphasis, of pause, of repose. I was transported to Bora-Bora, the Jolly Isle, and heard again the ringing improvisations of the Talking Men. Not the least among the speakers at Napoopoo that day was our good friend Mr. Kawewehi. Some of the old men of the district, perspiring patiently in resurrected frock-coats that were moss-green with age and damp, delivered themselves of word and gesture with volume and fervor that betokened they had been long-pent.
Between speeches, the choirs from various churches and Sunday schools about the island, including every adopted race, were heard in songs and hymns and recitations. School songs were also given, and I can only wish I had reels of motion-picture, in colors, to preserve the types, beautiful, comical, dark, fair, large and small, from royally-fleshed Hawaiian, on through the score of other nationalities, to the tiniest, bashfullest Chinese or Japanese maiden, or babe from sunny Portugal. Such a gathering may never be again upon the strand of storied Kealakekua.
One distinguished figure that mingled with the gathering was Miss Bertha Ben Taylor. Her official title is Supervising Principal of the West Hawaii government schools. For years this strong and capable woman has devoted her abilities to maintaining the high standard she has set for the schools under her charge.
“Do you approve of whipping children?” I once asked Miss Taylor.
“Not now,” she replied, breaking into a smile. Then, to my questioning look, she went on:
“The last time I ever spanked a child, it suddenly occurred to me to ask the little fellow if he knew why I had punished him. ‘Yes,’ he blubbered. ‘Why, then?’ said I. ‘Because you’re bigger’n me!’ Why else? it struck me. I have never laid hand on a child since that day.”
The collection plate was passed by the sheriff—could that have been unpremeditated by the committee in charge? The last hymn died away upon the seabreeze, and the amen of the final invocation to Deity floated up to blue heaven. The summery throng, so solemnly happy throughout the warm hours of attention, left chairs, stones, grass, and the walls of the heiau, and descended upon a huge feast in a half-open building at water’s edge. Preparations had been afoot for days. More than once, bound through for other points, we had noted the busy wahines and their men, and passed the time o’ day with them. That very morning our nostrils had dilated to delicious odors of roast pig.
We remained at the luau only long enough for a first course, because we had been invited by the head of the Captain Cook Coffee Company to dine at his cottage on the beach beyond the heiau. One could envy our host his location, tucked away back in the cool shadow of the hoary temple, half-surrounded by ponds, and with splendid swimming outside off the shelving sands. There seems to be no fear of sharks here; why, I could not unearth, for the ocean pours over no barrier reef. I never had finer swimming than out beyond in those large, billowing rollers that did not burst until close to the beach, and then mildly. But it is a wicked place, they promise, in stormy weather.
There is no part of the world I have seen that is so fascinating to me as Kona. Aside from its material beauty from surf-frilled coast to timberline, it is pervaded by a mysterious charm that links it with my oldest dreams. Back in childhood, in the beginnings of personal memory, my dreaming at intervals took me upon a mountain where dwelt a sophisticated people who lived for beauty and pleasure. There were dark rooms somewhere in the steeps, but I never fathomed their significance. Although the men and women were my kind—I saw no children—I seemed to wander among them in a sort of seclusion, with little attention paid me. For years I had not thought of this land of unconsciousness until that week on the Paris ranch. As soon as the clover-leaf had emerged upon the Kona slopes, its high ridge began to stir a remembrance that led to the all but forgotten dream mountain. That skyline was a constant lure. The tender wedges of young papaia groves and other crops, fingering into the primeval forest, did not lessen the impression of familiarity with older visits than my former ones here. By daylight and by dark the whole prospect retained its unreality. Twilight and dawn lent the mountain-side a perpendicularity, the depressions and shadows caverns of mystery. In the eerie gloom one was almost afraid to find the ghostly wall impalpable.
By far the most savage thing in the Kona district is a small Catholic church that clings to the precipitous land. Some holy brother of long ago had decorated every inch of this chapel with his conception of the Hereafter. I will say that his sense of fitness kept the scene in key with native surroundings, for the wooden pillars simulated coco palms, their fronds spreading upon the blue ceiling. The painted trunks were scrolled in the native with hopeful prophecies such as “You are going to hell.” The tormented souls depicted on the right-hand wall were indubitably Hawaiians, with a sprinkling of imported tillers of the soil. Most of them wore expressions of pained surprise at shrewd punishments for sins they wotted not of. It was an unfortunate skurrying paké, Chinaman, however, with a long and inconvenient queue, who seemed to be having a peculiarly unpleasant time of it, between fire and snakes and an extremely unstable equilibrium. The distinguished attention lavished upon his execution, artistically and spiritually, by a harrying, tailed demon with a red pitchfork, led one to hazard that the painter had “had it in” for his earthly prototype. An artist of old Salem could not have used more lurid and thrilling realism!
On the opposite wall, with a certain rude sublimity, was limned the Temptation in the Wilderness, besides scenes of heavenly reward for righteousness.
The story runs, if I remember aright, that when the earnest proselyter was called to another parish, his mural illuminations failing to meet with aught but contumely, he revenged himself by painting brown the angels’ faces!
I was more than curious to learn if that three miles of new automobile road across the lava from Napoopoo had altered the native atmosphere of Honaunau. I record with thanksgiving that such is not to any grave extent the case. The pilgrim, approaching the beach village with open spirit and sympathy, may still find a bit of real Hawaii. Myself, I spent a perfect day, the abominable fumes and noise of gas-cars excepted. The church convention, taking the opportunity to revisit the heiau, motored over en masse. From what I observed, not a Hawaiian was guilty of the slightest levity within the pagan precincts.
It is a sweet spot, Honaunau, removed as far from the restless work-a-day world as may be in a machine age, considering its nearness to the continent. As all over the island, the old women, reminded of my identity, caressed me half-reverently for my widowhood. They recalled Jack London of the sea-gray eyes, and sunny curls as recalcitrant as their own, and that he wrote understandingly of their people. “A good man,” they murmured in the native; and Auwe! and again Auwe! they repeated in the kindest voices I had heard since far days in Samoa.
Ethel Paris, unknown to me, also hinted to the villagers that Lakana Wahine favored, above haole oysters, raw tidbits of Hawaiian fish. I had found, in the stone-walled palm grove, a coconut frond twenty feet long that suited me well for a sylvan couch. With head on log, I was complete. I sharpened my pencil on a convenient lava bowlder, and went at making word-sketches of my environs, unwilling to lose one moment in entire forgetfulness. I wrote a few sentences, set down some of the colors. But I found my mood better fed by idly wondering why the drowsy interval between the impact of an ax wielded by a distant woodchopper, and the sound of it, seemed longer than in any other atmosphere. An old break in the stone wall opened up a deep bight, striped in peacock and green-turquoise, where rolled at anchor a dove-gray sampan that dully mirrored the gaudy tide. To either side, arms of lava embraced miniature bays. On a moss-green islet stood a native boy, in perspective a mere Tanagre figurine, tarnished with vert reflections. In his hand was a snow-white crust of coconut, and motionless he watched a green-crested, red-webbed duck nozzling in the shallows.
Not far off, in a wind-ruffled, reef-sheltered place, swam a dozen men and women. They wore loincloths and white or red muumuus, and threshed the water, brilliant blue even close inshore, with overhand breast-strokes from brown arms smooth-shining against the lava background of rougher bronze surface. The unrestrained laughter and exclamations were too much for me, and I went out upon the piled lava shore for a nearer view of their gambols. While I sat, feet trailing in the brine-washed sand, a sumptuous wahine strolled by with the correct, straight-front poise of the heaviest Hawaiians. With the slightest recognition of my presence, a diffident reticence often mistaken for hauteur, she rested at a distance, filled and smoked a small pipe at her ease, the while carelessly studying a salt pool near by. Pipe empty, it and her sack of Bull Durham were tucked jauntily into the band of a tattered straw of native weave that tilted at a killing angle over her pretty eyes and saucy nose. The up-ended back of the brim gave view of a generous toss of curls that made me envious of her very probable ignorance of its beauty. With a hand-net and bag she commenced hunting for seafood in the sandy places, planting her feet on lava hummocks as squarely and ponderously, with her mighty ankles, as might a quickened idol of stone. When she ventured in above the knees, her floating red holoku revealed limbs like trunks, laughably fat, yet pleasantly proportioned.
A bevy of young women came wading in from their swim, shaking out yards of splendid hair to dry in the sun along with their dripping muumuus—hair abundant, not coarse, breaking into wonderful red-bronze waves, ringleting at the long ends and about face and neck as if in sheer celebration of vital life. Some of these wahines and their men converged where a swift current poured through a wee channel from one rocky pool to another, and began netting colored fish. Joining them with my friends, half in and half out in the drifting sand and milk-warm water, I watched the pretty sport.
“Do you know that they’re after the right fish for your lunch?” Margaret whispered to me. Repeating to the fishers in their tongue what she had said to me in mine, they all laughed, lowered their eyelids with the movement that caresses the cheek with the lashes, and bobbed their heads in delighted confusion.
I swam and frolicked in the racing brine, and once, floating face-down, spied a long shadow that sent me half-laughing, half-panicky, to win to safety ahead of an imaginary shark. But the natives knew that no sea-tiger comes into these lava-rimmed baylets, and I joined in the rippling explosion of mirth that went up at my discomfiture.
When I had returned to my shady coconut grove and palm-frond, ready to have lunch, a handsome elderly Hawaiian, with leonine gray mane above beautiful wide eyes of brown, approached with the grand air of a queen’s minister. In his shapely hand was a large leaf. Upon this natural platter lay freshly-snared game of the right varieties, white-fleshed and size of my palm, cleansed and sliced raw. Not a smile marred the high respectfulness of his manner; only the most formal ceremoniousness, without affectation, of service from one race to another. Without a word, he went as he had come, in unhurried and graceful stateliness. After I had eaten, curiously yet courteously observed by the passing dignified pilgrims to the ancient shrine, I joined my fish-host at the water’s edge, where he sat with the large wahine, who proved to be his wife. We waxed as chummy as our lingual disadvantage would permit. I was glad to learn that in these unprolific times the fine couple had at least one child; but he did not appear strong.
And thus, in all leisureliness, I linked with a chain of hours that seemed like days, in which there was enough of unspoiled human nature and habit to link one in turn with Hawaii’s yesterday. These child-people of the beach were pleased, too, in their way, that an outsider should love to be at one, as a matter of course, with their customs.
Ten days of reuniting with friends in Honolulu, and there came my sailing date. The four months’ vacation I had allotted myself was done. I must get home to the finishing of Jack London’s biography.
On the big wharf was scarcely standing room for those come to God-speed the ship. The faces of the passengers were regretful, no matter what their pleasure of home-going. Bedecked with wreaths, they struggled through the flowery crush to reinforce the crowded steamer rails that appeared like tiered garden walls.
The embracing was over, the eyes-to-eyes of farewells that tried to remain composed. Jack Atkinson, who at the last took charge of breasting a way for me to the gangplank, handed me through the gate. I was banked to the eyes with the rarest leis of roses, violets, plumeria, proud ilima and all. It being a warm March day, and the weight of flowers very palpable, one felt much as if in a perfumed Turkish bath!
Leaning over the topmost rail, trying to locate faces in the dense gathering, I realized again all the sweetness of my welcome and parting. Diffidently, desolately, I had approached Our Hawaii. As I had been welcomed for two, so I departed for two; and my speeding was two-fold. And now in my heart was gratitude and happiness for the renewed love and trust that made it My Hawaii.
The hawsers were cast off, the band melted into Aloha Oe, the streams of serpentine began to part and blossoms to fly, as the Matsonia got under way. Something made me glance down at the stringer-piece of the pier. A handsome Hawaiian youth stood looking aloft at me in mute distress, holding up fathoms of pink cables made from stripped carnations. He had failed to get aboard with them in time. It was Kalakaua Kawananakoa. Princess David had sent him in her stead, for I had made her promise that she would not brave the exhaustion of the merry mob.
Then I lost track of the young prince. A few moments later, one of the music boys came to me bearing the royal ropes of flowers, five inches in diameter, which Kalakaua had somehow contrived to land on the lower deck across the widening gap. Still unable to detect his among the myriad faces, I swung the wondrous lariat, letting out its yards about my flower-crowned head, that he might know the gift was safely mine.
With a sob in the throat, I recalled Jack’s words, that last time I had stood in the same place at the Matsonia’s hurricane rail:
“Of all lands of joy and beauty under the sun...”
But always the sob must turn to song, in contemplation of that beauty and joy.
Not alone because it was Jack London’s Loveland do I adore Hawaii and her people. To me, native and kamaaina alike, have they given their heart of sorrow, and their Welcome Home, in ways numerous and touching. To them, therefore, this book, Our Hawaii. To them, friends all, greeting and farewell.
“Love without end.”
“Aloha pau ole.”
Jack London Ranch,
In the Valley of the Moon,
1921.