I have striven to tell in the brief foregoing details my impressions and experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson. I hope they may be interesting. In the books that deal with his life in the South Seas it is little short of marvellous how tamely his life there is painted, especially when one thinks that his island home was overrun by semi-civilised natives and a white population of the most mixed and adventurous people the world could well place together; and certainly Stevenson was not the kind of man to travel to the South Seas and seek no other excitement beyond an afternoon walk or a fashionable dance in an Apia ballroom.
It was somewhere about the period which I am dealing with that a discussion was going on concerning Father Damien, the celebrated Catholic priest who had sacrificed his life for the sake of the lepers at the dread lazaretto on the Isle of Molokai. In my first book of reminiscences in the South Seas I touched briefly on the few incidents which I heard from a native friend of mine, Raeltoa the Samoan. And before I proceed with my later reminiscences of Samoa and elsewhere I will tell you all I heard about Father Damien whilst I was in Honolulu.
CHAPTER IX
Honolulu—King Lunalilo—Chinese Leprosy—Kooma’s Reminiscences of Father Damien—Molokai—The Leper-Hunters—Father Damien at Molokai—Robert Stevenson’s Open Letter to Dr C. M. Hyde
AFTER Samoa I think the Sandwich Isles are the most attractive islands in the Pacific. They are mountainous and the summits of Hawaii—pronounced Ha-wy-ee—rise to fourteen or fifteen thousand feet. All the islands of the group are volcanic, and rich both in live and extinct craters. I should not be surprised if some day the bowels of the Sandwich Group suddenly exploded and blew the isles to smithereens!
When, from the sea, you sight the coast, its promontories covered with coco-palms and gorgeous tropical trees, waving over slopes that lead down to lazy, shore-curling waves, you think of the Biblical Garden of Paradise. Native hut homes, conical-shaped, with tiny verandahs, peep out of the bamboo and clumps of bananas beneath mighty bread-fruit trees.
I stayed several weeks in the Sandwich Group. The natives are mirthful and well dressed, far in advance of the Marquesan and Solomon islanders. They are all Christians, but decidedly immoral according to European codes. Honolulu is a well-shaded city, with the spires of advanced civilisation rising. Missionaries are there in plenty, and possibly they feel thankful that barbarian ideas of virtue have given them a profession on islands of tropical beauty, whereon they can live in extreme comfort while they work among, and are kind to, the natives.
While there I saw the palace of the Hawaiian queen, who I think was the widow of King Kale-Conalain. She was as polished as a Parisian prima donna. I also saw the new king, Lunalilo, a fine-looking Hawaiian, six feet high, full-lipped and very majestic-looking. He was dressed in a frock-coat and fashionable felt hat. As he appeared before the people and stood on the palace steps, the crowds waved and cheered as the British do to their King and Queen.