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!”