The First Return
We came back, as we had always known we should.
The Snark’s voyage ended untimely in 1909—because we paid too little heed to Dr. E. S. Goodhue’s warnings against “speeding up” in the tropics. Jack’s articles, collected under the title of “The Cruise of the Snark” and my journal book, “The Log of the Snark,” tell the story of the wonderful traverse as far as it attained. To this day, friend and stranger alike occasionally write from the South Seas that the little Snark, now schooner-rigged, has put in at this bay or that in the New Hebrides, under the flag of our French Allies—Snark Number One of a fleet of Snarks trading and recruiting in the cannibal isles.
We came back: and on the wharf at Honolulu that morning of the Matsonia’s arrival, March 2, 1915, in the crowd we thrilled to meet the eyes of many friends who had kept us a-tiptoe for days aboard ship with their welcoming wireless Alohas and invitations.
An amusing incident did much to mellow the pleasure-pang of our meeting. Nearest the stringer-piece of the pier stood a brown-tanned girl in an adorable bonnet of roses, her dark eyes searching the high steamer rail.
“Gee! what a pretty girl!” exclaimed a voyage acquaintance at our elbow. “Wouldn’t you take her for at least half-white?” Jack, following the directing gesture, enthusiastically agreed that she must be “all of hapa-haole,” and added:
“Furthermore, I’ll show you something; I’ll throw her a kiss, see? and I’ll bet you ‘even money’ that she’ll respond. Is it a go?—you just watch.”
And the conspicuous wafted caress arresting her eye, the young woman answered with blown kisses and outstretched brown arms.
“Gee!” was the awed whisper. “Are they all like that?”
It was Beth Wiley, my cousin from California—who is as much or as little Spanish as I, but shows it more. By several months she had preceded us, and had become well-tanned by unstinted sunning on the beach at Waikiki.
The malihini’s confusion was almost pathetic when Jack introduced “Mrs. London’s cousin—I taught her to swim when she was a gangly kid!” and he continued mischievously, “I’ll leave it to you, Beth, to convince him that part of that color of yours has been acquired since last I saw you!”
Tremulous with memory of those hack-drives in the silver and lilac dawns of eight years gone, we entered an automobile in the crush outside the wharf’s great sheds, and proceeded to the Alexander Young Hotel for one night. Kilauea being in eruption, we were to return aboard the Matsonia next day for the round trip to Hilo.
On this short voyage, for the first time from sea vantage, we saw the Big Island’s green cliffs, stepped in dashing surf and fringed with waterfalls, Mauna Kea’s fair knees and lap of sugar cane extending into the broad belt of clouds—and, glory of glories, Mauna Kea’s wondrous morning face white and still against the intense blue sky.
At Hilo, we were met by Mr. R. W. Filler, manager of Mr. Thurston’s concrete dream of a Hilo Railroad, over which, in an automobile on car wheels, we made the thirty-four miles to Paauilo in the Hamakua District, and knew it to be one of the most scenically beautiful rail journeys we had ever had the good fortune to travel. It was hard to realize the accomplishment of these trestles, one horseshoe of which, we understood, is the most acute broad gauge in existence. And thus, high in a motorcar, upon steel tracks, we looked fascinated into the depths of the same gulches, unbridged and perilous in Isabella Bird’s time, and laboriously journeyed by ourselves nearly a decade ago. Sections of the railroad, instead of imitating the bluff coast line, run through passes that have been sliced deep through the bluffs themselves, the narrow cuts already blossoming like greenhouses.
Beaching the terminal, Paauilo, a pretty spot on the seaward edge of a sugar plantation, we lunched in a rustic hotel, before starting on the return. Part-way back, we left the train, at a station where Mr. Filler had been especially urged by Kakina to have an automobile waiting to take us mauka to the Akaka Fall, seldom visited and rather difficult of access. A muddy tramp in a shower brought us to the fall—a streaming ribbon five hundred feet long, trailing into an exquisitely lovely cleft, earth and rocks completely hidden by maiden-hair and other small ferns. The origin of Akaka is told in a charming legend.
Strange it seemed to speed over the red road to Hilo in a “horseless carriage,” reminiscent as we were of the four-mule progress of yore. Good it was to meet up once more with the Baldings, Mrs. Balding dimpling at Jack’s reminder of her pessimism concerning the Snark; and with Jack’s First Lady of Hawaii, “Mother” Shipman, her Hawaiian curls perhaps more silvery, but her face beaming as ever. And there was Uncle Alec, smiling only more benignly.
Next morning, in an unyieldingly new hired machine, up mountain we fared, noting a lessening of the forestage along the route, due to the encroachment of sugar cane. In some of the cleared areas we recognized the familiar ’ava plant of the South Seas. Still remained untouched stretches, as of a dream within a dream for beauty, and again I could vision the evanescent minarets and airy spans of the Palace of Truth I had once liked to fancy growing before my eyes in the delicate tracery of parasite foliage. Nothing seen in all the Snark’s coming and going among the isles under the Line had surpassed this enchanted wood.
Saving the Volcano for evening, we spent the day horseback, visiting Kilauea’s environs of sister craters, some still breathing and others dead and cold, shrouded in verdure. Kalauea-iki, one of the nearest to the Volcano House and the new Crater Hotel, is an 800-foot deep sink, with a diameter of half a mile. The neighborhood is pitted with these void caldrons, and one could spend wonderful weeks in the jungle trails. The Thurstons have made a study of the region, and find it one of the most interesting in the Islands. Into a number of the more important craters we peered, and our native guide finally led the way up Puuhuluhulu around whose mellifluous name we had been rolling our tongues from Honolulu, where Kakina’s last adjuration was not to miss a sight of this particular blowhole.
Leaving the animals with the sandwich-munching guide, we carried our own lunch to the summit, where, prone, we lay with faces over the edge of the bewitching inverted cone. For an hour, like foolish children, we played with our fantasy, planning the most curious of all contemplated Hawaii dwellings, this time in the uttermost depths of Puuhuluhulu’s riotous natural fernery, with a possible glass roof over the entire crater!
Already, as we returned, low-pressing clouds above Kilauea were alight with the intense red-rose glow of Halemaumau. And no remembered volcano of Tana or Savaii made me any less excited at prospect of at last beholding Pélé’s boiling well.
(1) Kahilis at Funeral of Prince David Kawananakoa. (2) Kamehameha the Great. (3) and (4) Sport of Kings.
Not by the old trans-basin trail did we pilgrimage to the House of Everlasting Fire, but upon a new road graded through veriest stage-scenery of ohia and tree ferns, a fairyland in the brilliant headlights. One encircles nearly half of the great sink until, on the southeastern section, the road winds down westerly and across the floor to Halemaumau.
It was weird; and weirder still it became when, within a few minutes’ walking distance of the pit, the car, making for a walled parking circle, ran into a waft of steam like a tepid pink fog. Out of this, or into it, the eyes of an oncoming machine took form, burning larger and brighter through the downy smother, and safely passing our own.
A well-defined pathway is worn in the gritty lava to the southeast edge. Soon we were settled there waiting for the warm mists to incline the other way and disclose the disturbance of liquid earth that we could hear hissing softly, heavily, hundreds of feet beneath, like the sliding fall of avalanches muffled by distance and intervening masses of hills.
Then, suddenly, the mist drafted in a slanting flight toward the western crags, sucked clear of the inland sea of incredible molten solids. Open-mouthed we gazed into the earth and saw nothing akin to the colored representations of Halemaumau, but a tortured, crawling surface of grayish black, like a mantle thrown over slow-wrestling Titans in a fitful, dying struggle. Then a crack would show—not red, but an intensely luminous orange flame-color—a glimpse of earth’s hot blood. As our eyes became accustomed to the heaving skin of the monstrous tide, they could follow the rising, slow-flowing, lapsing waves that broke sluggishly against an iron-bound shore. And never a wave of the fiery liquid but left some of itself on the black strand, its ruthless, heavy-flung comb resistlessly imposing coat upon coat of rocky gore that cooled, at least in comparison to its source, in upbuilding process. Once in a while a bubble would rise out in the central mass, and burst info a fountain of intolerably brilliant orange fluid, its scorching drops fading on the dense black surge.
From the seduction of its merest smoke display to this deep-sunk eruption of 1915, the House of Fire is all one in its confounding marvel.
That night, when the first vivid crack broke the oily dark surface, Jack, with a gasp of delight, seized my hand, lighted a match above it, and peered closely at a big black opal, precious loot of Australia’s Lightning Ridge, that I had named “Kilauea” before ever we had seen Pélé’s colors. Tipping the stone from slanting plane to plane, its blue-gray dull face cracked into flaming lines for all the world like the phenomenon before us in the wounded side of Mauna Loa—a truer replica of Halemaumau than any painting.
Upon our return, Mr. Demosthenes had the old guest book lying open in the same long glass room, and again we read the page written years before.
“Be sure, now, Lakana,” had been another final behest of Kakina’s, “to call up Col. Sam Johnson in Pahoa, when you get to Hilo. I’m writing him to expect to take you from the Volcano down to Puna. Never saw such a man for punch.”
Next morning the Colonel arrived at the Volcano House, and drove us by way of Hilo to Pahoa, where he is in charge of the lumber mill.
Nine miles from Hilo, at the mill of the enormous Olaa Sugar Plantation, we branched off southwest on the picturesque Puna Road. Once clear of certain beautiful miles of jungle, it crosses an interesting if monotonous desert of aged lava, supporting a sparse growth of lehua and ohia, and pasturage for cattle of the Shipmans and others. Mauna Kea and her sister mountain were good to us that day, for both going and returning we had fair view of their snowy springtime summits.
The mill at Pahoa demonstrated to us how the forests of lehua, koa, the ohia, and all the valuable hard timber of the rich woods is converted into merchantable lumber. And we came away with a handsome souvenir, a precious calabash of kou wood (now almost extinct, owing to an insect that deprives the tree of its leaves, heavy and polished like mottled brown marble), a product of the mill.
After luncheon there were summoned three part-Hawaiian sisters, cultured and modest-mannered, to sing. And there, my initial time in the District of Puna—scene of Tully’s “Bird of Paradise,”—quite unexpectedly I learned something of what these isles of the Snark’s first landfall meant to me. While the contralto and treble of their limpidezzo voices sang the beloved old “Sweet Lei Lehua,” “Mauna Kea,” the “Dargie Hula,” and the heart-compelling “Aloha oe,” suddenly I fell a-weeping, quite overwhelmed with all the unrealized pent emotion of what I had seen and felt the preceding days, and the gracious memories that flooded back from the older past. And auwé, murmured the dusky sisters, hovering about me in solicitude.
Once more at Hilo Harbor, the Matsonia, out in the stream, her siren sounding the warning hour, was reached by launch from the pretty oriental waterside at the mouth of the Waiakea. Our eyes were more than a little wistful as in memory we sailed out with the Snark. But we did it! “With our own hands we did it,” thus Jack; and the glamorous voyage was now an accomplished verity, from which we had come back very much alive and unjaded.
Back in Honolulu at daybreak, Jack declined to be ousted by any officious steward until the final period was dotted to his morning’s ten pages. Eventually he issued upon deck almost into the arms of Alexander Hume Ford, whom we were no end glad to see, buoyant and incessant as ever, brimful of deeds for the advantage of Hawaii as ever he had been of their visioning.
The first responsibility, not to be neglected for a single hour, was the hunting of a habitation that we might call our own for the time being. Beth had reported the total failure of her exhaustive search. Honolulu was chock-a-block with tourists. “Beginning to realize what they’ve got,” Jack observed with satisfaction, though a trifle put out that his prophesied appreciation of the Islands by the mainlanders should interfere with his own getting of a roof-shelter.
We learned from one of the large Trust Companies that a cottage on Beach Walk, a newly opened residence street not far from the Seaside Hotel, was to be let a couple of months hence. We found it eminently suitable for our little household of four, for Beth was to be one of us, and Nakata, as usual, was our shadow. Next we devoted all our powers to persuade the somewhat flustered owners that they needed an earlier visit to the Pan-American Exposition than they had planned; and proceeded to move in before they could change their minds, while Jack wirelessed to the Coast for Sano, our cook.
Not a day passed, before, in swimming suits, we walked down Kalia Road to the old Seaside Hotel, and once more felt underfoot the sands of Waikiki. But such changes had been wrought by sea and mankind that we could hardly believe our eyes, and needed a guide to set us right.
The sands, shifting as they do at irregular periods, had washed away from before the hotel, leaving an uninviting coral-hummock bottom not to be negotiated comfortably except at high tide, and generally shunned. A forbidding sea-wall buttressed up the lawn of the hotel while the only good beach was the restricted stretch between where the row of cottages once had begun, and the Moana Hotel.
And what had we here? In place of those little weather-beaten houses and the brown tent, the Outrigger Canoe Club had established its bathhouses, separate club lanais for women and men, and, nearest the water, a large, raised dancing-lanai, underneath which reposed a fleet of great canoes, their barbaric yellow prows ranged seaward. At the rear, in a goodly line of tall lockers, stood the surf-boards, fashioned longer and thicker than of yore, of the members of the Canoe Club.
A steel cable, whiskered with seaweed, anchored on the beach, extended several hundred yards into deeper water where a steel diving-stage had been erected. Upon it dozens of swimmers, from merest children with their swimming teachers, to old men, were making curving flights inside the breakers. Several patronesses of the Club give their time on certain days of the week, from the women’s lanai inconspicuously chaperoning the Beach.
The only landmark recognizable was the date-palm still flourishing where had once been a corner of our tent-house, now become a sheltering growth with yard-long clusters of fruit, and we were told it was known as the “Jack London Palm.” For it might be said that in its shadow Jack wove his first tales of Hawaii.
All this progress meant Ford! Ford! Ford! Everywhere evidence of his unrelaxing brain and energy met the eye. But he, in turn, credits Jack with having done incalculably much toward bringing the splendid Club into existence, by his article on surf-board riding, “A Royal Sport.” Largely on the strength of the interest it aroused, Mr. Ford had been enabled to keep his word to Jack that he would make surf-boarding one of the most popular pastimes in Hawaii. Upon his representations the Queen Emma estate, at a lease of a few dollars a year to be contributed to the Queen’s Hospital, which her Majesty had established, had set aside for the Club’s use this acre of ground, which, with the revival of surf-boarding, was now become almost priceless.
Queen Emma was the wife of Kamehameha IV, mother of the beautiful “Prince of Hawaii,” who died in childhood, herself granddaughter of John Young, and adopted daughter of an English physician, Dr. Rooke, who had married her aunt, Kamaikui. The Queen owned this part of the Beach, from which her own royal canoes were launched in the good old days, and where she also used the surf-board.
“Her estate holds this land,” Ford had said in 1907, “and I’m going to secure it for a Canoe Club. I don’t know how; but I’m just going to.”
Honolulu had of course altered, and grown. New streets, like this our Beach Walk, had been laid on filled marshlands at Waikiki, and bordered with bungalows set in unfenced lawns, while the lilied area of duck-ponds along Kalakaua Avenue had shrunken to the same populous end. Beyond the Moana, Heinie’s, an open-air café chantant—and dansant—beguiled the up-to-date residents and tourists, and a roof-garden, with like facilities, was bruited for the Alexander Young. The Country Club, out Nuuanu, boasted what we heard many a mainlander term “the finest golf-links anywhere.” Diamond Head’s rosy cradle had become unapproachable as a heavily fortified military position. Residential districts of beautiful homes had extended well into the valleys; some of the vernal ridges of Honolulu’s background had blossomed into alluring building-sites, such as Pacific Heights; and Tantalus was developing its possibilities. Kaimuki, on the rolling midlands beyond Kapiolani Park, formed quite a little city by itself. Kaimuki’s red lands, on the side of the gentle, seaward-tipped bowl that holds Honolulu, seemed always to be brushed by the raveled ends of rainbow-opal scarves. Never in the minds of living men, due to the continuous storms that year, were there such rainbows over Oahu. We lay, Jack and I, floating on the green hills of water beyond the inshore surges, and bathed our very souls in heavenly color. To mauka, out of deep blue skies pearled with magnificent clouds, out of the warm palpitant chaos of reflected sunset over against the eastern mountains, came the miracle, the rainbows, formless, generous, streaming banners of immaterial, loosely-banded colors, frayed with melting jewels that softly drenched the ruby and emerald vale and foothills. If I should have to live in a house for the rest of my days, I should call upon my memory of Oahu’s rainbow-tapestried skies, and dwell within that memory.
Automobile traffic had drawn the island closer together, and a drive around Oahu, by the route we had formerly traveled, was more often accomplished in one day. Once we spent a night on Kahuku Plantation, and visited the huge Marconi Wireless Station near by. Our return to Honolulu was made by way of the railroad around the extreme western end of the island. This trip should not be missed, for it shows a remarkable coast line, and splendid valleys of the mountain ranges, on the slopes of which one may still see the ruins of stone walls and habitations of long-dead generations. Automobile picnics from Diamond Head to Koko Head, and others over the Nuuanu Pali to points on the eastern shore, like Kailua and Waimanalo bays, together with a visit to Kaneohe Bay and its wondrous coral gardens, with swimming and sailing in pea-green water over jet-black volcanic sands, nearly completes the circuit one may make of this protean isle.
That summer of 1915, during a warm spell in town, bag and baggage we moved for a week to the little hotel at Kaneohe Bay. Each time we emerged over the Pali into the valley of the Mirrored Mountains, Jack would exclaim at the vast pineapple planting that had flowed over the carmine hillocks below. Instead of bemoaning this encroachment of man upon the natural beauty of the landscape, Jack hailed it with acclaim. To those who deprecated the invasion he would cry:
“I love to see the good rich earth being made to work, to produce more and better food for man. There is always plenty of untouched wild that will not produce food. Every time I open up a new field to the sun on the ranch, there is a hullabaloo about the spoiling of natural beauty. Meantime, I am raising beautiful crops to build up beautiful draft-animals and cattle—improving, improving, trying to help the failures among farmers to succeed. And, don’t you see? don’t you see?—there’s always plenty of wild up back. To me the change is from one beauty to another; and the other, in turn, goes to make further beauty of animal life, and more abundance for man.”
Indeed, from its small beginnings of but a few years before, the pineapple industry had risen to the second in importance in the Islands, giving place only to sugar. The exported product alone, for 1914, had been valued at $6,000,000.00.[[10]]
Mr. Thurston took us horseback on one of the most interesting and least known jaunts on Oahu. From Kaneohe we held east a quarter-mile to the sandy mouth of the Kaneohe River, across a spit of mountain-washed debris, through abandoned fishing villages and little tufts of groves; thence along an arm of the bay, outside the ancient barrier of a fish pond nearly half a mile in diameter, where the tide washed our horses’ flanks.
We attained to a plain partially covered with sand and sand hills drifted up out of the ocean, and rode upon a dead coral bed formerly undersea, which had been elevated several feet by volcanic action. Northwest to the point at the entrance to Kaneohe Bay, from a small fishing village we climbed a low cone to see the ruins of an old heiau, where some seventy years ago a church was erected by the pioneer Catholics. It is now in ruins, for the inhabitants, numbering several hundreds, have passed away. The pathetic remains of their little rocky homes can still be seen scattered about the slopes of the green hills and upon surrounding levels, where plover run, with skylarks soaring overhead. And for the first time in our lives, in this lonely deserted spot we listened to the celestial caroling of those lovely flying organisms, English skylarks, which our old friend, Governor Cleghorn, now dead, first imported from New Zealand. Ainahau, auwe and ever auwe, had been broken up into town lots, and was become the site of a boarding-house! Never, once, did Jack or I, in passing along Kalakaua Avenue, glance that way. Too sorrowful and indignant we were, that the home of Likelike and Kaiulani should not have been held inviolate. A distinguished architect, later passing through Honolulu, complained: “One thing regarding Honolulu I would say is damnable: that is the three-deck tenement on part of the old gardens of the Princess Kaiulani at Ainahau. This three-deck fills me with amazement, disgust and apprehension. This class of construction is not desirable under any consideration and should be stopped in this extraordinarily beautiful city.” He went on to say: “During my drive around the Island I came to the belief, after a matter of conclusion extending over thirty-five years of travel in Europe and Asia, that the Island of Oahu is the most beautiful place on earth. You have here the home of absolute beauty, and you should conserve it.”
On the seashore, inside a glorious surf, in view of Namoku manu, or Bird Islands, where we could see myriad seabirds nesting and flying about in clouds, we lunched under grotesque lava rocks, carved by the seas of ages; and Jack and I studied the green and turquoise rollers that thundered close, driven by the full power of the trans-Pacific swell, figuring how we should comport ourselves in such waters if ever we should be spilled therein. Again in the saddle, we let the horses run wild over a continuous, broad sand-beach, for a mile and a half; to our right a line of glaring sand hills, called Heleloa. Mounting these, Kakina led us to the battle field of a century before, where the Mauis, landing, had fought with the Oahus. The winds had uncovered a scattering of bleached bones, whiter than the white sand, and we found one perfect jawbone, larger than Jack’s, with several undecayed molars firm in their sockets, and, curiously enough, no provision for “wisdom teeth.”
Near the shore at one point we turned aside and dismounted to hunt for land-shells in the bank of a small gulch. For Lorrin A. Thurston was become a land-shell enthusiast, and by now had, by personal searching, amassed a fascinating collection of over 200 varieties, laid out like jewels in shallow, velvet-lined drawers.
Following the northerly shore of Mokapu Point, the trail mounted the outer shell of the little mountain, until, entering at the open south side, we were in a half-crater where cattle and horses grazed. Tying our animals, we lay heads-over the sea wall of the broken bowl, looking down and under, two hundred feet and more—“Kahekili’s Leap”—where the ocean surged against the forbidding cliff, from which our scrutiny frightened nesting seabirds.
So far, we have met no one who has taken this journey of a day; but it is easily accessible and more than worth while. Nothing can surpass the view one has of the blue Pacific, white-threshed by the glorious trade wind; and the prospect, landward to the Mirrored Mountains, is indescribably uplifting.
Returning to Honolulu by motor a few days later, after heavy rains, we thrilled to the sight of those same mountains curtained with rainbowed waterfalls. Once in the pass, the mighty draft of the trades revealed fresh cataracts behind torn cloud-masses, and looped and dissipated them before ever they could reach the bases of the dark-green palisades.
One of the most attractive means of recreation here is under the auspices of the Trail and Mountain Club of Hawaii, founded by Alexander Hume Ford. It is allied with the local activities of the Pan-Pacific Union, and associated with the American Mountaineer Club of North America, central information offices in New York City. It is proposed to establish a center of information in Honolulu, to act as a clearing house so that a member of one Pacific outing club may automatically become a visiting member of any other similar Pacific organization, should he travel in other lands than his own. Mr. Ford pursues a commendable if rather startling course in promoting this branch of his work for the Islands. When a new trail is required, it is projected, named for some citizen of means, who is then notified that it will be his duty to bear the expense of building. Once completed, the Club keeps the trail in order, the actual labor being done by the Boy Scouts, who are advised which particular patriotic member of society will pay them for their work. It is understood that the money goes toward the equipment expenses of the Scout troop which clears the path and puts it in order.
The outcome of all this agitation is that there are scores of different mountain trails on the island of Oahu alone. Officers of the project have spent thousands of dollars in erecting rest-houses, some of which, as on the rim of Haleakala, contain bunks and camp accommodations. Mr. Ford explains his method of drafting money and personal interest by the fact that the Club’s annual dues of $5.00 are not adequate for its upkeep and expansion, and so well has he presented his arguments that his fellow citizens are convinced of the worth to the territory of his unremitting drive to open up the lofty wonders of its interior to the world at large.
Auto buses are used to transport hikers to points from which they may radiate into the fastnesses, and steamers are sometimes chartered to convey them to other islands, as say to a strategic harbor for the reaching of Haleakala’s crater.
Occasionally a patron of the Club, alive to the opportunity for increased health, mentally and physically, in a latitude wherein the sea-level climate does not induce muscular effort except for water sports, places funds at the disposal of the officers. And it may be the Chinese, Filipino, or Japanese branch of the organization that is eager to cut the trail. The animating spirit among these inter-racial limbs of the body proper is one of mutual service.
The Associated Outing Clubs of Hawaii have selected Haleiwa—Waialua—as the location for the first of their rest houses. To the dabblers in sugar stocks, I have it from Mr. Ford, Haleiwa means little, and Waialua everything. For Waialua means “two waters,” and the length of the streams of Oahu that pour from the mountains to the sea at Waialua spells millions of dividends; for here there is never a drought. So, to the kamaaina Haleiwa is Waialua. He loves both. Waialua dividends make Haleiwa, “House Beautiful,” week ends possible for him. On the bank of the Anahula river, that flows into the sea near by, where the swimming is so fine, there is left a wing of the old Emerson homestead, built of coral in a grove of breadfruit. This has been secured by the Outing Clubs to fit up for a camping place; and none lovelier can be imagined. A fleet of canoes will be maintained upon the river. At the head of navigation are the rapids where the natives net the opae which they use for bait in the ocean a few hundred yards away.
From Waialua there are splendid motor trips. One in especial leads uphill at an unvarying five per cent grade through canefields to Opaeula, nearly 2000 feet above the sea on the edge of a great canyon, in the bottom of which there is a well-ordered rest-house in a tropical grove by a large natural swimming pool. From this point one may follow the well-cut ditch trails into the heart of the range. And this is but a sample of the opportunities offered the visitor to Oahu and its neighboring isles.
One evening we became acquainted with Colonel and Mrs. C. P. Iaukea, part-Hawaiian, and looking aristocrats to their finger tips. He had been Chamberlain to King Kalakaua, and accompanied Kalakaua’s queen Kapiolani (probably named after the illustrious defier of Pélé), to London at the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. At present Colonel Iaukea is one of the trustees of Liliuokalani’s estate. He stated that the Queen had expressed a wish to meet London, and Jack, pleased that the meeting should come about in this way, arranged to be present at a private audience the following Thursday, March 11.
The Royal Hawaiian Band, conducted by the venerable Henri Berger, now in his seventy-first year, after forty years’ conducting, was in full attendance in the Queen’s Gardens at Washington Place, which, in this city of notable gardens, is cited as the finest. Berger, owing to age and failing health, was later retired upon a pension, and has since died.
The dignified white mansion is as beautiful in its own way as the gardens, and tastefully tropical, surrounded as it is by broad lanais, with large pillars, supporting the roof in Southern colonial style. As one Kamaaina has it: “The whole has an air of retirement expressive of the attitude of the Queen herself.”
On the columned veranda, robed in black holoku, tender old hands folded in her silken lap, Her Majesty sat in a large armchair, at her back certain faithful ladies—Mrs. Dominis, wife of Aimoku Dominis, the Queen’s ward, with her cherubic little son; Mrs. Irene Kahalelaukoa Ii Holloway; and Mrs. Iaukea, all of them solicitous of their Queen’s every word and gesture. Their veneration is a touching link to the close and vivid past.
Liliuokalani’s fine face, as we saw it that day, was calm and lovable, as if a soothing hand had but lately passed over it.[[11]] She raised quiet, searching eyes, and upon Colonel Iaukea’s introduction, smiled and extended her hand, which it is the custom to kiss, and which we saluted right gladly. A few low-voiced questions and answers concerning work Jack had done on Hawaii; the listening to a number or two from the Band; and we were free to wander among the treasures of the house, than which are no better specimens of royal insignia outside the Museum. At length, Hawaii’s National Anthem, rising from under the palms, brought us all to the lanai again, where the men stood uncovered.
Queen Liliuokalani’s own book, “Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen,” published in 1906, by John Murray, London, should be read not only for her viewpoint, but also because it is piquantly entertaining in its lighter humors, and her naive descriptions of travel and characters in the United States and England are delicious.
Returning from a luncheon given by that vital institution, the Honolulu Ad Club, Jack burst into the house:
“Guess whom I met today! Two men, both of whom you have known, one here and one in Samoa—and now risen to different positions and titles. I give you three chances. Bet you ‘even money’ you couldn’t guess in a thousand years.”
That was “easy money” for him, and I threw up my hands. Our fearless old friend, Lucius E. Pinkham, once president of the Board of Health, was now become Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, appointed in 1913 by President Wilson, for a term of four years; and the other we had known in Tahiti and Pago-Pago, C. B. T. Moore, erstwhile Governor at the latter American port, and Captain of the Annapolis, now Rear Admiral, stationed at Pearl Harbor. Later we exchanged visits with Admiral and Mrs. Moore, and colorful were our reminiscences of days and nights under the Southern Cross.
It would require a book in itself to tell of the revolutionary alterations in Pearl Lochs, now possessed of all the circumstance of a thoroughgoing naval station. On September 28, 1917, the Pearl Harbor Radio Station was formally opened. In 1919, the drydock was completed, at a cost exceeding $5,000,000.00. The opening was attended by the Secretary of the Navy.
As for the old Elysian acre, we were informed it had changed hands and the bungalow had been replaced by a more ambitious one. It would be difficult to express why we never went back. Perhaps it had been a perfect thing in itself, that experience, finished and laid aside in heart’s lavender.
So much, briefly, for naval activity on Oahu. As for the Army, in addition to the older forts, and the new fortifications on Diamond Head, Schofield Barracks had sprung up, a city in itself, over against the Waianae Mountains on the table-land, and we could hardly believe our eyes, motoring from Haleiwa Hotel by way of Pearl Harbor, when they rested on the modern military post that spread over the grassy plain to the mountain slopes. Oahu, as if overnight, had become the largest military station of the United States.
One Sunday we spent outside Honolulu Harbor on the famous racing yacht, Hawaii; and in our hearts and on our lips was the wish that again we were “down, hull down on the old trail,” with a hail and farewell to every glamorous link of the Snark’s golden chain of ports, thence on and on through the years, from the Solomon Isles to the Orient, beyond to the seas and inland waterways of Europe. “You never did gather all that lapful of pearls I promised you,” Jack mused regretfully.
Four days after this yachting party, Honolulu and the rest of the Union shuddered to the loss of the Submarine F-4. They went out merrily in the morning—F-l, F-2, F-3, F-4—and all emerged but the last. For weeks and months, during the work of raising, under supervision of the U. S. S. Maryland, Captain Kittelle, there was a subtle gloom over the gayest life of the capital. Outside the Harbor channel, where the submarine had eventually slipped off coral bottom into deep ocean, from steamer and sailer, canoe and fishing boat and yacht that passed in or out, leis were dropped upon the mournful waters.
With the incursion of gasolene-driven craft and vehicle, the old-time yachting has nearly lapsed. No more does one see the racing fleets outside the reef. One can only hope that the matchless sport will be revived.
Upon the Beach at Waikiki it was seldom we missed the long afternoon. “I’m glad we’re here now,” Jack would ruminate; “for some day Waikiki Beach is going to be the scene of one long hotel. And wonderful as it will be, I can’t help clinging, for once, to an old idea.”
Under the high lanai of the Outrigger, we lay in the cool sand between canoes and read aloud, napped, talked, or visited with the delightful inhabitants of the charmed strand, until ready to swim in the later afternoon. One special diversion was to watch several Hawaiian youths, the unsurpassed Duke Kahanamoku among them, performing athletic stunts in water and out. And that sturdy little American girl, Ruth Stacker, with records of her own, could be seen instructing her pupils in the wahine surf. George Freeth, we heard, was teaching swimming and surf-boarding in Southern California. Our own swims became longer from day to day. Still inside the barrier reef, through the breakers we would work, emerging with back-flung hair on their climbing backs while they roared shoreward. Beyond the combing crests, in deeper water above the coral that we could see gleaming underfoot in the sunshafts, lazily we would tread the bubbling brine or lie floating restfully, almost ethereally, on the heaving warm surface, conversing sometimes most solemnly in the isolated space between sky and solid earth.
The newest brood of surf-boarders had learned and put into practice angles never dreamed of a decade earlier. Now, instead of always coasting at right-angles to the wave, young Lorrin P. Thurston and the half-dozen who shared with him the reputation of being the most skilled would often be seen erect on boards that their feet and balance guided at astonishing slants. Surf-boarding had indeed come into its own. And it never seems to pall. Its devotees, as long as boards and surf are accessible, show up every afternoon of their lives on the Beach at Waikiki. When a youth must depart for eastern college-life, his keenest regret is for the loss of Waikiki and all it means of godlike conquest of the “bull-mouthed breakers.” No athletic-field dream quite compensates. Surfing remains the king of sports. Young Lorrin, indeed, at Yale, has captained his swimming team, the fastest that college has ever put out in the east, to more than one world’s record and several intercollegiate ones.
One night in early May, Mayor John C. Lane of Honolulu gave a great luau in Kapiolani Park, where some fifteen hundred sat under a vast tent-roof and listened to the flowery eloquence of Senators and Congressmen from Washington. And it was to the venerable but sprightly “Uncle Joe” Cannon we awarded the triumphal palm for the most sensible, logical speechifying of the event. This magnificent luau, presided over by the handsome Mayor, surpassed any in our experience the South Seas over. “Mayor Lane ought to be re-elected indefinitely,” Jack would say, “to do the honors of his office!”
The following day we sailed from Honolulu for Hawaii, but on separate ships. The Mauna Kea was chartered to take the Congressional party junketing about the Islands, and Jack was bidden to be one of the Entertainment Committee. Owing to the fact that the Mauna Kea was full to overflowing, so that many of the Committee bunked on deck, we resident wives were blandly uninvited. But I, through a timely invitation from the Big Island, was enabled to come in contact with the august picnic party.
And so, with “Aloha nui oe” one to the other, Jack saw me off for Hilo on the Kilauea, sister of the smart Mauna Kea, while twelve hours later he was headed for Maui. My roommate on the crowded steamer was an Englishwoman, busily knitting socks for her brothers fighting in France. She told me how her husband, who had worked on the Snark’s machinery eight years before, when confronted with difficult or unsurmountable obstacles or problems, had ever since declared: “This is as hard as repairing Jack London’s engines!”
On Maui, Jack became much interested in the experiment that had been made in small homesteading on government land; but he did not foresee success in the venture. “You can’t turn the clock back,” he said. But his reasons for his opinion in the matter are set forth in “My Hawaiian Aloha,” his own articles which preface this book of mine.
And so I next saw Jack at Napoopoo, on Kealakekua Bay, with the Blue Flush for background, and we agreed warmly that never anywhere had we seen anything like it, and nothing to surpass. Here the Congressional party disembarked to see the Cook Monument, and from Napoopoo were whirled south and around through the Kau District, over a new, lava highway, to the Volcano House. It was during this day’s ride, at luncheon by the way, that the wires flashed to us the stunning news of the sinking of the Lusitania, and a stricken look was upon the faces of all for a time.
The machine carried a full and very jolly cargo back to Pahoa on the Puna coast, for in addition to its driver, the exuberant Colonel, and us two, there were Senator and Mrs. Warren, Mr. Roderick O. Matheson, long a figure as editor of Kakina’s paper, and “Bob” Breckons, Hawaii’s brilliant attorney and a unique personage in Islands affairs.
Again on the sulphurous brink of Halemaumau, Jack, who cared comparatively little for spectacles of this ilk, remarked to me after a long gazing silence at the increased flow and disturbance of the mountain’s internal forces:
“I’m coming personally to understand your fondness for volcanoes—I myself am getting the volcanic habit. I shall come here every time there is a chance; and in future, if this pot boils up and threatens to boil over, and we’re in California, we’ll take the first steamer down to see it!”
The fame of Mrs. Johnson’s house party the next twenty-four hours, given to her allotment of members of the junketing crowd and their Entertainment Committee, is still talked in Hawaii. Among others from Washington, besides Senator and Mrs. Warren, there were Senator and Mrs. Shafroth and Mrs. Hamilton Lewis. Our two steamers arrived back in Honolulu within an hour of each other. Mr. Thurston, who was aboard mine, carried me up Nuuanu for breakfast on the well-remembered and ideal lanai over the rocky stream; and I was led down into a magnificent fernery connected to the lanai, roofed over a grotto hewn in great bowlders on which the house rests—delightful and feasible arrangement which I can well recommend to new residents. While still at breakfast, we spied the Mauna Kea entering harbor from Kauai 90 miles away, and a taxicab delivered me on the dock exactly as my man, beaming at my precise calculation, descended the gangway.
Shall I ever see Kauai? I had planned to do so; for this 1915 visit to Hawaii I had expected to make alone, returning with my cousin. Meanwhile Jack, for an eastern weekly, was to sail on a battleship with President Wilson, attended by the Atlantic Fleet, through the Panama Canal to the Exposition at San Francisco. But Jack repeatedly complained: “If you knew how much I’d rather go to Hawaii—but I need the money, if I’m to carry out my schemes on the ranch!”
The official cruise being abandoned on account of war developments, he contentedly declared:
“Now I can go to Hawaii with you for a few weeks. And I’ll write a new dog book while I’m there. And we’ll see Kauai, too.”
The few weeks became five months, and “Jerry of the Islands” was begun and finished, to be followed by “Michael, Brother of Jerry.”
So it came to pass that Jack alone of our small family saw Kauai, the “Garden Isle,” with its exquisite Hanalei Valley and bay, one of the most beautiful in Hawaii; and Waimea Canyon, which he said beggared description in grandeur and coloring, only comparable with the Grand Canyon of Colorado. Jack came back promising that next trip to the Islands we should together visit Kauai.
The president of the Board of Health, Dr. John S. B. Pratt, being absent from the Territory, Governor Pinkham, always full of aloha toward us, sent to Mr. D. S. Bowman, Acting, his earnest kokua (recommendation) that we be granted a permit to revisit the Leper Settlement. We had long since heard from Jack McVeigh, who affectionately assured us of his personal welcome. He had lately asked Jack to give a lecture in Honolulu, the proceeds to be applied toward erecting a new motion-picture theater at Kalaupapa; but shortly the means came from some other source, and the lecture did not take place.
Jack always disliked repeating even the most desired experience in exactly the same manner; so this time, for the sake of variety, we were to descend the Molokai Pali. To this end, we landed from the Likelike one midnight, bag and saddle, at Kaunakakai, where waited Henry Ma, a wizzled, clever little old Hawaiian, sent all the way from Kalaupapa with horses. Miss Myers, a sister of Kalama of hearty memory, going home from Honolulu, accompanied us up-mountain.
(1) Jack and Charmion London, Waikiki. (2) A Race around Oahu. (3) Sailor Jack Aboard the Hawaii. (4) Pá-u-Rider.
Thus, under a full moon, we retraced the road descended eight years earlier in the heat of midday. The moonlight bewitched the remembered landscape, and silvered the receding ocean floor; and very tenuous and unreal it all seemed, as the eager horses forged lightly up, mile upon inclining mile, into chill air, for which I, for one, was unprepared. To Jack’s insistence that I wear his coat I refused to listen, until, riding alongside, he pressed his warm hands to my cheek. “See—how warm I am—you know me!” His circulation was always of the best, and never have I known his hands to be cold. Even on frosty days, tobogganing or sleighing, or long, damp hours at the Roamer’s winter wheel up the Sacramento or San Joaquin rivers, it was the same; “See—how warm my hands are!”
Ten very short miles to ourselves and the home-bound animals lay behind when we-reached the Myers’ house-gate. I shall always blame-sweet Hawaiian backwardness that set a silence upon Kalama’s red lips. No word she spoke except “Aloha,” as smiling she led the flagged way to the guest-cottage. And how were we to know that this imperial-bodied, full-blossomed Juno was molded on the frame of that tall, slim, strapping cow-girl we had met nearly ten years ago? There was something only vaguely familiar about her, and I dared to ask: “We knew you here before?” Oh, shades of night, protect and hide! “Why, yes,” quietly, “I am Kalama—don’t you remember?” Kalama! Kalama! Will you ever forgive? Why were you so gorgeously, amply different that we knew you not?
“Do you know where you are?” this, when, after three hours’ sleep, Henry Ma had tapped upon the begonia-screened window, and we had breakfasted and mounted and were galloping over green pastures to Molokai’s great falling-off place. Almost, as one hesitates to unlock a long-sealed box of letters and pictures, I drew back from the imminent verge. How I should like to have been the first who ever came suddenly upon this unexpected void of disaster and gazed upon the incredible lapse of the world below! We had yet to search for its equal.
A very different trail from the one we had never forgotten was that we now descended—wider, and so depressed in the middle that the earth was raised at the outer edge. Man nor beast could fall off the palisade except he went out of his way to do so. But the action of water had on the steepest declivities exposed large bowlders that were exceeding disconcerting to horse and rider. Still hanging with hind-hoofs, while feeling below with fore-, a grunt from the cheerfully alert buckskin pony would advertise that its unprotected belly had come in contact or impact with an equally rounded if less yielding object. Several times our saddles slipped so far over-neck that the beasts almost overbalanced to a somersault.
“It would be far simpler to walk and lead them,” Jack giggled. “But I rode up the trail without getting off, and I’m going down the damned thing the same way! What do you say?” And we did not dismount, save when necessary to set back our saddles.
Once at the doubly luxuriant kukui cluster at the feet of the pali, we saw a rider urging his flying steed in our direction—Jack McVeigh, could it be? It was; and the handclasp and voice were the same, if more than ever cordial. One of the first remarks was: “I wish you were going to be here for the Fourth. We’re going to whoop it up in grander style than ever. The Fourth you saw won’t be a patch on what’s going to happen this time.”
Dr. Will Goodhue, a little heavier, and if anything more benign if that could be, with his beautiful Madonna, in her arms their newest babe, waited at the arbored gate to welcome us of the wayward feet. Dr. Hollmann was now with the indefatigable Dr. George W. McCoy, at the Kalihi Receiving Station in Honolulu, where subsequently we renewed acquaintance.
The huge Belgian dairyman of old memory, good Van Lil, now a patient, had married another, and the pair lived happily in a vine-hidden cottage near Kalawao, making the most of their remaining time on earth. Beyond a fleeting embarrassment in his vague blue eye, he met us on the Damien Road with the undimmed buoyancy of other years, and our eyes could see no blemish on his face. Probably we were the more affected, for in the main the victim of leprosy is as optimistic as he of the White Plague.
Emil Van Lil was not the only one whom we saw who had perforce changed his status toward society in the intervening eight years. The little mail-carrier who had led us up out of the Settlement, we found in the Bay View Home, cheerful as of yore, though far gone with the malefic blight. And, auwe!—some of the men and women we had known here before as extreme cases still lingered, sightless perhaps, but trying to smile with what was left of their contorted visages, in recognition of our voices. Others, whose closing throats had smothered them, breathed through silver tubes in their windpipes. Strange is this will to persist—tenacity of life!
To light the almost desperate gloom of pity that could not but overwhelm me, Jack, with the shadow on his bright face too often there since the Great War commenced, said:
“Dear child—awful it is; but awful as it is, think of how thousands of healthy, beautiful human beings are making one another look in the shambles of civilized Europe right now while we stand here looking at these.”
Annie Kekoa, we were cheered to hear, had been discharged years before, all tests having failed to locate further evidence in her of the bacillus lepræ. Its depredations had ceased with her slightly twisted hand.
With pardonable pride the Superintendent showed us through the new “McVeigh Home,” for white lepers; and next forenoon, while Jack finished writing a chapter of “Jerry,” I visited the Nursery, also new. There behind glass, mothers may see their babes once a week until the tiny things are removed to the Detention Home in Honolulu. Born as they are “clean” of the disease, they are taken from their mothers immediately after birth, since further contact is a peril most strictly to be avoided.
Probably not one remained of the Bishop Home girls who had wrung our souls with their plaintive singing; but for Mother Marianne, wraith-like in her frail transparency, with blessings in her blue-veined hands and old eyes that seemed to look through and beyond us, we endured, as in the past, a concert. And it was no easier for them and for us than it had been for us and those who had gone before. Again were the tender things more sorrowful for my unconcealable grief than for their own.
But facts are facts, and joyous ones must overbalance the sorrowful. By stern and sterner segregation, as was done in Europe, leprosy is slowly being stamped out of the Hawaiian Islands. Eight years before, on Molokai, there were nearly a thousand lepers, and the Noeau made four yearly trips to carry the apprehended victims of the Territory; now there are a trifle over six hundred, and but one human cargo in the twelve months disembarks at Kalaupapa. This diminution of roughly thirty per cent of patients led Jack to prognosticate that fifty years hence the good rich acres of the Molokai Peninsula will be clean farmland for the clean, and moreover an accessible and unparalleled scenic wonder for the travelers of the world.
“I am happier about this place than I ever hoped to be,” he imparted to me. “Oh, don’t think for a moment that I minimize the dreadfulness of leprosy. But I am certain now of the passing of it, if the Islands persist in this rigid segregation.”
Jack ever stood reverent before the beyond-price work of Dr. Will Goodhue toward freeing the inhabitants of the Settlement from their thrall. Let me quote from his article, requested by the Advertiser upon our return to Honolulu:
“I insist that I must take my hat off in salute to two great, courageous, noble men: Jack McVeigh ... and Dr. Will Goodhue... My pride is to say that I have had the vast good fortune to know two such men. McVeigh, sitting tight on the purse-strings of the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year appropriated by the Territory, sitting up nights as well, begging money from his friends to do additional things for the Settlement over and beyond what the Territory finds itself able to-day to appropriate, is the one man in the Territory to-day who could not be replaced by any other man in his job. Dr. Goodhue, the pioneer of leprosy surgery, is a hero who should receive every medal that every individual and every country has ever awarded for courage and life-saving... I know of no other place, lazar house or settlement, in the world, where the surgical work is being performed that Dr. Goodhue performs daily... I have seen him take a patient, who, in any other settlement or lazar house in the world, would from the complications of the disease die horribly in a week, or two weeks or three ... and give it life, not for weeks, not for months, but for years and years, to the rounded ripeness of three score and ten, and give to it thereby the sun, the ever changing beauty of the Pali, the eternal wine of wind of the northeast trades, the body-comfort, the brain-quickness, the love of man and woman—in short, all the bribes and compensations of existence.”
But that is not all. Jack London’s hopeful prophecy did not take into account the discovery of a positive cure for leprosy. Alas, that he could not have read with me the glad, almost incredible tidings that meet my eyes in newspaper and periodical. The latest is a quotation from the lips of Dr. William J. Goodhue himself, speaking to members of the legislature visiting Kalaupapa in 1921. Said he:
“With two years’ chaulmoogra oil treatment, I believe sixty-five per cent of the chronic cases of leprosy on Molokai can be cured.” And within ten years, he added, all cases should be cured, and Kalaupapa be abandoned as a leper settlement. That same day, Dr. F. E. Trotter, president of the territorial board of health, announced to the lepers assembled in their amusement hall, that within a period of two years probably not twenty-five of their number would be compelled to stay on Molokai.
The feelings of those in the audience undoubtedly varied. To the majority, the hope held out for a return to the outside world must have been received with solemn thanksgiving; but there were some, I am sure, who, suffering little, have been happy in the harmoniousness of life on the peninsula, and who look with dismay upon being torn from its care and kindness.
The astounding revelation, after many centuries, is based upon results obtained at Kalihi, under Dr. J. T. McDonald, Director Leprosy Investigation Station, from the use of chaulmoogra oil. The history is brief. In 1918, the distinguished chemist, Dr. Arthur L. Dean, president of the University of Hawaii, and head of its chemistry department, was asked by the United States Public Health Service to add to the college research work some scientific problems in relation to chaulmoogra oil, which had enjoyed a good reputation with experimenters in different parts of the world. Chaulmoogra, according to my Standard Dictionary, is an East-Indian tree (Gynocardia odorata) of the Indian plum family, with a succulent fruit yielding a fixed oil.
It seems that the ethyl esters of the fatty acids of the oil had been reported by observers elsewhere to be ineffective on leprosy. Dr. Dean, however, succeeded in producing a form of that derivative of the oil, which in its curative effects on the patients of Kalihi Hospital has surpassed, so far as known, anything ever attained in the line of leprosy therapy.
It was in the beginning of the reign of Kamehameha V, Prince Lot, that compulsory segregation was established by law and the process of isolation commenced. And now, over half a century later, in no equal period of the history of segregation in the Hawaiian Islands have there been so many voluntary surrenders as since the “Dean Cure” has been known to make headway. Not only have adults asked to be taken for treatment, but children have been brought freely as soon as the nature of their disease was guessed by parents and guardians. This is in striking contrast to the necessity in past years of arresting suspected lepers through deputy sheriffs.
The Kalihi Station is flooded with letters from all over the world, requesting its remedies. The reply must perforce be that these are still of an experimental nature, and not yet commercially available; also that they are for hospital treatment, where the patient is under observation; that they do not lend themselves to the practice even of the family physician; and that they are impossible of self-administration.
Dr. Goodhue is using Dr. Dean’s derivatives of chaulmoogra oil at Kalaupapa; and out of the five hundred and twelve patients, one hundred and seventy-five have been taking regular treatment. Lack of oil is the sole reason that all were not sharing in the capsules or the hypodermic injections; but a full supply has been promised. At the meeting in Kalaupapa, above referred to, Senator L. M. Judd, commenting upon the willingness of the legislature to do everything possible for the patients, remarked that the board of health budget is larger in 1921 than the territorial budget was eight years ago. Dr. Dean, called to speak, was not to be found in the hall. Summoned from outside, he spoke briefly, saying that the laboratory of the University of Hawaii, its force supplemented by workers furnished by the board of health, is working to turn out the oil in sufficient quantities for all needs.
But it was our friend Charles F. Chillingworth, president of the senate, who brought up the problem of finding homes for the patients who would be paroled after they had made Kalaupapa their home for years. He suggested the homesteading by them of lands on Molokai, and voiced his intention of taking the question before the governor and the legislature. The Hawaiian Annual, issued by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, and the yearly Report of the Governor of Hawaii, trace the progress of the Cure.
For those who have been measurably happy on that verdant cape, and are loth to bid it farewell, how ideal it would be if their homesteads eventually could be chosen from its grasslands, and the yielding valleys of the pali, no longer a barrier to outside intercourse.
But to return:
In a machine, by way of a new boulevard on the coast, we sped to Kalawao, and saw the faithful Brother Dutton, alert as ever among his pupils; then passed on to the imposing Federal Leprosarium on the windswept shore in view of the lordly front of promontories with their feet in the deep indigo sea. This Leprosarium had been built at a cost of $300,000, and was now abandoned and falling into the swift decay of disuse in the tropics. Such a Leprosarium was never known. Jack McVeigh almost wept as he fingered the full equipment of blankets molding in their original wrappings: the beds, the washstands, the endless costly paraphernalia of a hospital, lying inutile and deteriorating, which he was unable to put into needful circulation in the Settlement. Even the fine dynamo, which a caretaker was paid to keep from rusting—“Think how this could furnish my people with electricity!” he mourned. O red, red tape—what a curious institution dost thou create!
Jack London very shortly got himself into trouble by airing his views in the Advertiser, which stirred up a tidy tempest of protest in Washington, D. C.; but he was, after much hot correspondence in the press, the means of Jack McVeigh finally getting his selflessly covetous hands on the outfit of the ambitious edifice.
Eight months after Jack’s death, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser contained a column stating that the Federal Leprosarium would probably be torn down and the material used for building cottages in the Settlement, which, J. D. McVeigh is quoted as saying, “it would be a God-send to secure.” In that column Jack London is mentioned as having been first to suggest such action.
For some reason the edifice has not been touched; and I notice that Dr. Goodhue in 1921, has offered to use it as a hospital for the treatment of patients taking chaulmoogra oil.
By a strange fatality, writes Dr. J. T. McDonald in the Journal of the American Medical Association, of the four principal scientists who have resided and worked in the Settlement, three are dead. But not of the disease which they were investigating. One succumbed to pneumonia, two from nephritis. The fourth, Dr. George W. McCoy, is now director of the Hygienic Laboratory at Washington.
Mr. Thurston had long planned a Japanese sampan trip from Honolulu to the non-leper valleys of windward Molokai, which lie between those stately promentories beyond Kalawao. And so, early on Sunday, “Decoration Day,” according to prearrangement by wireless and telephoned to the Settlement, a smart blue sampan hove in sight around the pali headland, and lying off-shore sent in a coffin-shaped tender with an alarming freeboard that made it appear topheavy. Kakina possessed no permit and therefore did not so much as step on the Kalaupapa breakwater-landing.
Aboard the outlandish power-boat, we found Mr. W. L. Emory, an architect of Honolulu, and his son Kenneth, and, to our hearty delight, Mr. Jack Atkinson, who had not yet decided whether or not he would be seasick. We decided for him, if unwittingly. A rainbow-and-silver sickle of an aku, bonita, was presently seen tripping the wave-tops at the end of the Japanese sailors’ trolling-line. This, promptly dispatched and prepared with Japanese soyu—to Jack and me more toothsome than any raw oysters—proved the last straw, not to mix metaphors, to Mr. Atkinson’s camel of control.
Oh, the rich life we lived on our via regia of happiness! Here were we again, in a small boat, sixty feet over all—“Only five feet longer than the Snark, Mate-Woman!” running before the big coastwise seas that heaved and broke in jeweled fountains almost over the fleeing stern. Again the “stinging spindrift” was in our faces, and I could have cried for joy at being on even so small a portion of “the trail that is always new.”
Skirting the black lava-bound peninsula, with its combing surf, we were soon in calmer water off the mouth of the riotous valley where we had ridden that long-ago day, its walls rising thousands of feet into the blue. It gave us an adventurous, alert feeling to skim the glassy swell under those overtowering somber cliffs, in the passes between shore and the three dark-green abrupt islets, fragments left from old convulsions of the riven island. The largest, Mokapu, over a hundred feet high, is crowned with mosses and shrubs, and a species of stunted palm tree found nowhere else in the world save, perhaps, on Necker, another islet of Hawaii.
The air rustled with wings, around and overhead, and Jack and I thrilled again to the call of the bosun bird, koae, and watched rapt its flight, high, high, and higher, above the pure white waterfalls that, spent in the wind, never reached the sunshot dark-sapphire brine.
Two miles or so beyond the last valley we had known, the sampan rounded into Pelekunu, unknown to the tourist, and visited by no one we had ever met. No vessel can approach the beach of its U-shaped bay, which shelves steeply out of deep water, bluer than the staring-blue sampan. “Why, the valley ran into the ocean,” Kenneth observed.
No possible landing place could we detect, and followed the slant eyes of the Nipponese skipper and his men while the oriental launch chugged steadily into mid-bay, presently making in closer to the beetling cliff on our right. A ledge of volcanic rock, jutting into the ocean-deep water, was indicated as the landing; but slow-surges swept rhythmically across it. “Can’t help being glad we know how to swim,” Jack remarked, every sailor-sense of him on the qui vive. Our problem lay in gauging the leap from the top-heavy marine coffin at the exact right moment. Only in quiet weather can any sort of connection be effected. If it be a trifle rougher than on this day, a basket on a derrick is lowered into the boat for passengers to climb into.
I decided to try both ways, and, once safely on the ledge, indicated to several native youngsters who had run the half mile from the village at the head of the U, to send down the rattan car. Swinging up in the air, the cable manipulated by two mere children, I had a decided if precarious advantage over my companions who clutched their way up a long vertical ladder.
Our slight luggage disappeared villageward in the arms of the natives, and we followed at leisure the tropic trail. It is a story in itself, that night and the next day in the isolate valley of Pelekunu. The sea, and this at rare intervals, is its sole egress, except by way of a precipitous trail that attains to a height of nearly 4500 feet, and it is accessible only to those who have clinging abilities second to none but wild goats. The few inhabitants, living in weather-grayed houses almost as picturesque as their hereditary lauhala huts, welcomed us with wide arms, and, like souls of grace we had known so sweetly in the South Seas, gave us their best. A Hawaiian pastor and a Belgian priest vie in kindness to their limited flocks, and all proffered us the freedom of the place.
Up wet and steaming paths we strove through hot-house plants that shook perfumed raindrops upon us, into the short, mounting vale; and I, while the men went landshell-hunting with and for the eager Kakina, idled in deep grass like that remembered of Iao and Tantalus. I tried hard to realize the earthly actuality of this amphitheater of greenest green swishing with water-courses and long falls, and the intense inshore peacock-green of the precipitously walled bay, turning to intenser peacock-blue outside, clear to the low white wool-packs on the intensest indigo horizon.
“We’ll return here some day, when we needn’t hurry; and then we’ll go into Wailau, too,” Jack, who had been especially happy on this little side-voyage, endeavored to compensate my regret in passing the next lovely rent in the shore Wailau, “four hundred water-falls”—lovely as Pelekunu, with an almost impregnable partition between the two. What we saw from the resumed sampan trip, young Kenneth Emory, in Ford’s Mid-Pacific Magazine, later on described too happily to omit:
“With each revolution of the propeller, scenes were laid open whose magnificence and beauty surpassed all that we thought impossible to surpass the day before. A plateau three thousand feet high and a mile long ended in one vast pali—cut down as if by a knife. Waterfalls, peaceful vales, lagoons hidden under dark caverns, tropical birds floating above, vines swaying in the wind, every form and color of beauty lay revealed upon the grand precipice above us.”
Some of the finest scenery in this island, Molokai nui a Hina, “The Lonely Isle,” is to be found in the valley of Halawa. “The traveler,” wrote “A Haole,” in 1854, “stumbled upon its brink unawares.” At a depth of nearly twenty-five hundred feet below, there spreads out a panorama of exquisite beauty. Several large cascades spring hundreds of feet into the valley. These, and scores of taro beds, with a scattering of native dwellings, can all be seen in a sweeping glance. “It seems,” the old writer said, “as if one leap would lodge the visitor at the foot of the enormous walls which bound this earthly Eden.”
He tells how the scenes in Pilgrim’s Progress had stayed in his consciousness since childhood, and how that “matchless allegory” welled up in memory as here on Molokai he came upon the Delectable Mountains, and the Land of Beulah, and explored their wonders.
Halawa is little changed in this day, they say, and is quite accessible. Hawaii is awakening to the possibilities of this island so little known by travelers; and hotels are planned at strategic points to enable the visitor to reach novel sights in the “Paradise of the Pacific” which have so far been unheard-of. I, for one, shall make my pilgrimage to that Molokai, I have not seen; and I shall tarry at leisure until I have known it all.
A correspondent writes me from Pukoo, on the southeast rim of Molokai: “I live here in my house by the sea, as isolated as if I were in Tonga.”
But the years are few ere “the horn of the hunter,” to say nothing of the honk of the gas-car and the strident explosion of aeroplane enginery will daily contest the supremacy of the birds in the utmost fastnesses. Regretfully enough, one must remember that the swarming of the white sojourners means the gradual disappearance of the last indigenes, until now practically undisturbed in their lovely retreats on the edge of the world, by the gruelling march of events outside in that world.
Next we voyaged to Maui. How strange to ascend Haleakala in an automobile!—oh, not to the summit, but even to the Von Tempsky’s and some miles above.
Kahului had fulfilled its promise and become a lively young town. Wailuku remained as if unchangeably serene; and fabulous Iao transcended all recollection of it. Then we heard the voices of the Vons over the telephone from Wreath of Surf, Kaleinalu by the sea, and next from their smart motor car—the same debonair Von, and the two elder girls grown to splendid womanhood. Lorna, thirteen, brought up as a girl in Hawaii may gloriously be, to the free life of saddle and range, could rope cattle with the best. At the races in Kahului, we saw Jubilee’s colt, Wallaby, carry off honors for Gwendolen.
During the weeks spent there, I noticed with surprise and faint misgiving that Jack stayed rather close to the house. “Oh, you girls run along... I thing I won’t ride to-day. There’s so much to read—I can never catch up. Perhaps I’m lazy; I’d rather lie around and read. We’ll do Haleakala next time we come.” But he never looked into Haleakala again. Even then the Shadow was upon him.
| [10] | Report for 1918 showed an export of 20,000,000 cans of pineapple. In March, 1920, the estimated pack for that year was 6,000,000 cases. All this in face of certain discouragements, such as “pineapple wilt,” “Kauai blight,” and the objection of large areas of plants to flourish in manganese soil. |
| [11] | During the World War, for the first time since her abdication, the American flag floated over Washington Place, indicating the Queen’s sympathy with our entry into the fight against Prussianism. On November 11, 1917, Liliuokalani, last sovereign of the Hawaiians, passed away. |