At sunset Haleakala vouchsafed a glimpse of its head two miles in the flushing ether, and on Sunday we sighted the island of Hawaii above a cloud-bank. Crippled with neither engine nor wind-power, we could only wonder when the few remaining miles would be covered; for still in our ears rang tales of schooners long becalmed off the Kona coast, and of one that drifted offshore for a sweltering month.
Monday night, four days from Honolulu, the Snark wafted into Kailua. There Kamehameha died in 1819, at the age of eighty-two, his active brain to the last filled with curiosity about the world even to an interest in rumors of the Christian religion, which had found their way from the Society group. Three years after his death, Kaahumanu, favorite of his two wives (a remarkable woman whose career would make a great romance), together with her second husband, held a grand midsummer burning of idols collected from their hiding places.
Kailua is the first port into which our boat has made her own way under sail. It was an occasion of sober excitement, in a moonless night lighted softly by large stars that illumined the shifting cloud vapors. The enormous bulk of the island appeared twice its height against the starry night-blue sky, and a few unblinking lights strewn midway of the darkling mass hinted of mouths of caverns strewn in a savage wilderness.
When at last the searchlight was manned, fed by the five-horse-power engine that had been driving our blessed electric fans, we discovered the palm-clustered village on the shore, and, sweeping the water with the shaft of radiance, made out a ghostly schooner in our own predicament.
“Do you know where you are?—do you like it?” Jack breathed in the almost oppressive stillness, where we sat in damp swimming-suits, in which we had spent the afternoon, occasionally sluicing each other with canvas bucketfuls of water from overside. Ah, did I like it! I sensed with him all the wordless glamour of the tropic night; floating into a strange haven known of old to discoverer and Spanish pirate, the land a looming shadow of mystery; our masts swaying gently among bright stars so low one thought to hear them humming through space, and no sound but the tripping of wavelets along our imperceptibly moving sides, with a dull boom of breakers not too far off the port bow. As we drew closer in the redolent gloom, dimly could be seen melting columns and spires of white, shot up by the surf as it dashed against the rugged lava shore line.
Little speech was heard—the captain alert, anxious, the searchlight playing incessantly to the throbbing of the little engine, anchor ready to let go at an instant’s notice. Suddenly the voice of Nelson, who handled the lead-line, struck the tranquility, naming the first sounding, and continued indicating the lessening depth as we slid shoreward in a fan of gentle wind, until “Twelve!” brought “Let her go!” from the skipper. Followed the welcome grind of chain through the hawse pipe, the yacht swung to her cable as the fluke laid hold of bottom, the breakers now crashing fairly close astern; and we lay at anchor in a dozen fathoms in Kailua Bay, all tension relaxed, half-wondering how we had got there.
Hardly could we compose ourselves to sleep, for curiosity to see in broad daylight our first unaided landfall. And it was not disappointing, but quite our tropic picturing, simmering in dazzling sunlight. One could not but vision historical enactments in the placid open bay, say when the French discovery-ship Uranie put in, the year of Kamehameha’s death, yonder, past the wharf, where heavy stone walls mark his crumbling fortifications. The Uranie was received by a chief, Kuakine, popularly called Governor Adams, from a fancied resemblance to President Adams of the United States. The “palace” built by Kuakine still is to be seen, across from the stone church with its memorial arch to the first missionaries, who stepped ashore near the site of the wharf where we of the Snark landed, with their three Hawaiian associates, Thomas Hopu, William Kenui, John Honolii, all returning from Connecticut. Besides the Thurstons, the other first missionaries were: Mr. and Mrs. Bingham, Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain with their five children, Mr. and Mrs. Holman, Mr. and Mrs. Loomis, Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles, Mr. and Mrs. Whitney. George Kaumalii, son of the king of Kauai, was also with them, returning home. “Kuakine,” says the late Dr. Sereno E. Bishop in his Reminiscences of Hawaii, “was disposed to monopolize such trade as came from occasional whalers.... He possessed large quantities of foreign goods stored up in his warehouses, while his people went naked. I often heard my father tell of once seeing one of Kuakine’s large double canoes loaded deep with bales of broadcloths and Chinese silks and satins which had become damaged by long storage. They were carried out and dumped in the ocean. Probably they had been purchased by the stalwart Governor with the sandalwood which in the twenties was such a mine of wealth to the chiefs, but soon became extirpated.” And, later, the brig Thaddeus, long months from Boston Town with her pioneer missionaries, was greeted by the welcome tidings that the tabus were abolished, temples and fanes destroyed, and that peace reigned under Kamehameha the Second, Liholiho, who, among other radical acts, had broken the age-long tabu and sat at meat with his womenkind.
(1) Where the Queen Composed “Aloha Oe”. (2) A Hair-raising Bridge on the Ditch Trail. (3) A Characteristic Mountain Trail in Hawaii. (4) The Flume Across a Gulch.
Aboard the Thaddeus were Mr. and Mrs. Asa Thurston, grandparents of our Kakina. All must have suffered outlandish inconveniences, to say the least, in that primitive environment. I am minded of having read how, on one occasion, those early Thurstons made a passage from Kailua to Lahaina in a very small brig that scarcely furnished standing room for its four hundred and seventy-five passengers and numerous live stock; which was not considered an unusual overcrowding.