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.