It was a distinct pleasure to learn that Frank Woods, of Kohala, had lately bought the old place for his wife, Eva, who is a daughter of the famous Colonel Sam Parker, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the reign of Liliuokalani, bon vivant and familiar of King Kalakaua. Mr. Woods later acquired the house at Waikiki, Honolulu, in which Robert Louis Stevenson once lived and wrote. The early home of the original Parker, Mana Hale, built with his own hands, stands in a corner of the inclosure. One aches with the romance of it all, and would like to write an entire volume upon the history of the Ranch that started on this spot.
At the historic old port, Kawaihae, where the Ranch does its shipping, we were shown Queen Emma’s home, eloquent with decay, still dignified in the age-wreck of its palm gardens. It was off Kawaihae, in a gale, that Captain Cook’s Resolution sprung her foremast, which caused him to put in at Kealakekua Bay for repairs, to his doom. Only the heat prevented us from making an effort to walk to the ruins of the important heiau of Puukohala, erected upon advice of the priests, to secure to Kamehameha the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Upon our final leave-taking of Puuwaawaa, the Hinds’ open-handed hospitality sent us in one of their cars to Hilo. On the way, Mrs. Tommy White ran out with an addition to our lunch—a marvelous cold red fish, the ulaula, baked in ti-leaves, and a huge cake, compounded of fresh-grated, newly plucked coconut and other delicious things we could not guess. Of course we visited the Maguires, as well as the Goodhues down their lovely winding lane. And we must slip in for a moment to the wide unglassed window-ledge, to gaze once more, from that vantage through the needled branches of imported ironwood trees, across the long void of lava, upon the divine Blue Flush.
South we passed beyond the Blue Flush of Kona, and sped over the road traveled by the Congressional party the year before, through the tranquil village of Pahala, and on up Mauna Loa for an all-too-short stopover, which included a sumptuous luau, with Mr. and Mrs. Julian Monsarrat, on Kapapala Ranch in the Kau District, before pushing on to the Volcano.
Different again from other volcanic deserts of the island is this of Kau, made up of flow upon succeeding flow from Mauna Loa, in color black and bluish-gray. Vast fields of cane alternate with arid stretches, and west of Pahala is a sisal plantation and mill, the most extensive on the Island. Mauka of the road one sees a fertile swath of cane growing on a mud-flow of Mauna Loa at an elevation of 1200 feet. This mud-flow was originally a section of clay marshland which, in 1868, was jarred loose by an earthquake from the bluff at the head of a valley. In but a few moments it had swept down three miles in a wet landslide half a mile wide and thirty feet deep. Immediately afterward a tidal wave inundated the entire coast of Kau, while Kilauea, joining the general celebration, disgorged lava through underground fissures toward the southwest.
Full majestic lies Kau under the deep-blue sky, and as majestic moves the deep-blue, white-crested ocean that washes its lava-bound feet. From the Monsarrats’ roof we made a side-trip to the coast, where in the black sands of Ninole beach we gathered the “breeding-stones,” believed by old inhabitants to be reproductive, and which were sought after as small idols. Being full of holes, these large pebbles secrete smaller pebbles, which roll out at odd times, thus furnishing grist for the fancy of simple folk. Jack, immensely taken with the conceit, in no time had several brown urchins earning nickels collecting a supply which, he declared, he was going to turn loose on the Ranch at home to raise stone walls. Another curiosity in the neighborhood is a fresh-water pool just inside the high beach where the Pacific swell breaks. But to the hunter, Kau’s prime attraction is its wide opportunity for plover shooting.
A pretty legend is told of a small fishing place, Manilo, near Honuapo on the coast. A trick of the current eternally brought flotsam of various sorts from the direction of Puna into the little indentation at Manilo. Over and above the driftage of bodies of warriors who had been slain and thrown over the cliffs along the coast, the inlet became famous as a sort of post office for the lovers of Puna, whose messages, in the form of hala or mailé leis, inclosed in calabashes, could dependably be sent to their sweethearts in Kau.
Near Punaluu, the landing place for East Kau, are the remains of a couple of heiaus—Punaluunui and Kaneeleele, said to have been connected in their workings with the great Wahaula heiau, of Puna. Scientists are continually on the hunt for old temples and sites, and in 1921 the total for all of the Islands reached five hundred and seventeen. Dr. T. A. Jaggar, Jr., recently stumbled upon a most interesting discovery—an old heiau in the Pahala section of the Kau district, of which the neighborhood professed to have no knowledge. The ruins differ from all others known, in that the stones bear many rude carvings, or petroglyphs, in crescents and circles, with and without dots. These may be similar to the petroglyphs that may be seen on the rocks of the Kona shore.
And thus we merely glanced through a District rife with treasures for the explorer into the past, making mental notes for a return. That day we were to see evidence of the high attainment of the Hawaiians in the science of massage. An old woman, still handsome, with an antic humor in her black eyes from which the fire was yet to be quenched, noticed that I had a severe headache. Enticing me, with benevolent gestures and moans, to an ancient sofa, she laid rude but shrewd hands upon the tendons of the inner side of the legs below the knees. Nothing availed my shrieks of agony. Those powerful fingers, relentless as the bronze they looked, kneaded and twanged those cords until, lo! in a mere ten minutes or so the headache, accumulated in hours of motoring under the brassy sky, was charmed away—charmed not by any means being the best word for such drastic method. In this manner we thenceforth did away with headaches in our family of two.
The Monsarrats’, on Kapapala Ranch, is another of the homes that quaintly combine the lines and traditions of prim New England architecture with a lavish charm of subtropic treatment of interior and garden compound. In the latter, high-edged aloofly with cypress and eucalyptus from the winds of the surrounding amplitude of far-flung, treeless mountain areas, one feels bewilderingly lifted apart and set aside, amidst an abandon of flowers, from the rest of the kingly island.