The passage through Oahu channel and Molokai channel was extremely rough, and the Mauna Kea “labored woundily.” The woman fell asleep, and dreamed that she saw Kahaleahu, once valet to Sam Parker; a cultured Hawaiian who had traveled about the world with the Colonel, and who, when the young folk of Parker Ranch had their vacations from school in Honolulu, would be dispatched to escort them home to Mana. The dreamer addressed Kahaleahu:
“Ino maoli ke kai!” (The sea is so rough!)
Kahaleahu replied:
“It will be calm in a little while, for the guide of the night is the mother of the Boy.”
Awakening, in Hawaiian she told her cabin-mate the dream. “But it was a vision, a sign,” she believes. “Do you not see?—Kilia, a chieftess of Hana, Maui, Sam Parker’s mother, was lost in the channel between Hawaii and Maui. She had come from Hana in a canoe, to marry Sam’s father, Eben Parker, at Kawaihae; and when she was old, in her was a great longing to see again her old home in Hana, and her people. And she must go in a canoe, as she had come forty years before. She set out in the canoe, and was never heard from.... She was guide of that night, and sent Kahaleahu to give me the sign that The Boy, ka keiki, her boy, should come safely ashore at Mahukona.”
Now Sam Parker to his retainers had never been Sam (Kamuela), in the usual native way, but was always referred to as ka keiki, The Boy—even at forty years and over; that being, in their etiquette, a mark of attention to superior birth.
To the prophecy of the vision: The Mauna Kea’s pitching and rolling began speedily to abate, and in due course she came to anchor off Lahaina in an unrippled calm, to send ashore and take aboard passengers and freight. This calm, under a cloudless sky, continued clear to Mahukona, where the landing from ship’s boats is habitually made difficult by a heavy swell, and passengers must watch their chance to avoid a ducking when leaping from boat to jetty. Never, in all the dreamer’s interisland voyaging, girl and woman, had she known the water of this open roadstead so like a millpond. It was a sign.
Up the long acclivity, at Kahua, Frank Woods had a great fire burning, and fine mats spread to receive the casket of his father-in-law; while in another room an abundant feast of “funeral baked meats” was spread—pig, and fowl, and fish, and all that goes therewith in this goodly land. After partaking of it, the mourners sat out the night, amongst the flowers, with their dead; and with the morning started upon the day-long journey over Kohala’s mountains to Waimea, on up Mauna Kea’s giant flank to Mana and the house of death.
“It was a vision, not a dream,” they believe. And why not? “Sam died,” they say, “on the anniversary of the birth of Panana, his youth’s bride. And was not that nineteenth day of March also the anniversary of the death of their first daughter?”
What would you?