A good five-mile pull it is from the village to the “Doctorage,” through quaint Kailua, past Hackfeld’s old store, and the small, formal white palace where Prince Kalanianaole and his princess are staying; on, higher and higher, across a sloping desert of cactus blooming white and red and yellow, and laden with juicy-sweet “prickly pears,” called papipi, and sometimes panini, by the natives. In these, with care for the prickles, we eased a continuous thirst in the sapping noonday heat.
Shortly after quitting Kailua, we were pointed out a tumble-down frame dwelling, the home of the original Thurstons, which is now almost disintegrated by termites, borers, inaccurately termed “white ants,” whose undermining must ceaselessly be fought in the Islands. This house is a dreamfully pathetic reminder of those long-dead men and women who voyaged so courageously to a far land where, oh, savage association! a conch shell was the bell for the afternoon session of school. Their special interest in the Hawaiian people had been awakened in the New England missionaries by the acquaintance of several kanaka sailors brought to New Haven by Captain Brintnall in 1809, more especially one Opukahaia, whom they dubbed Obookiah. In 1817 the “Foreign Mission School” was instituted at Cornwall, Connecticut, for heathen youth, and five Sandwich Islanders were among the first pupils. Obookiah died in 1818, but three of his countrymen embarked for their native isles, with the missionaries, in 1819, in the Thaddeus, Captain Blanchard.
Presently we began to enjoy a cooler altitude, in which the vegetation changed to a sort of exotic orchard—a wilderness of avocado, kukui, guava, and breadfruit trees burdened with shining knobby globes of emerald, like those of Aladdin’s jeweled forest. And coffee—Kona coffee; spreading miles of glossy, green shrubbery sprinkled with its red, sweet berry inclosing the blessed bean.
At 1000 feet elevation the road emerged upon a variously level, winding highway which we pursued to the post office of Holualoa. From there we turned down an intricate lane between stone walls overhung with blossomy trees, that with sudden twist delivered us upon a verdant shelf of the long seaward lava incline. Here the Goodhues live and work and raise their young family of two in this matchless equable climate; and here with the unstudied graciousness of their adopted land welcomed us as we had been kinfolk.
“Now, this is what I call a white-man’s climate,” Jack enounces. “Few of us Anglo-Saxons are so made as to thrive in fervent spots like Kailua yonder,” indicating the far-distant and just-visible thumb-sketch of that storied hamlet, “no matter how beautiful they may be to the eye and mind.”
Dr. Goodhue agrees to this; but Jack will not follow him in the contention that, under the Hawaiian sun, even in this semi-temperate climate, said Anglo-Saxon should rest more than do we. “I wish you’d heed what I am advising,” almost wistfully the good Doctor urges. “You’ll last longer under the equator and have a better time on your voyage.—If I did not have such sweet responsibilities,” he smiled upon his wife and young ones, “I’d beg the chance to go along as ship’s physician!... And as for myself,” he added, “I have to work too hard—largely prescribing for people like you and myself, who have not heeded my own warnings.”
There is small need for residents of Kona to plan special entertainment for guests, provided those guests have eyes. First, one’s imagination is set in motion by this unheard-of gradient vastness of molten rock so ancient that it has become rich soil overspread in the higher reaches with bright sugar cane, coffee, bracken and forestage. Below this belt of vegetation, barren, seamy lava stretches to the coast line, lost in distance to right and left, all its miniature palm-feathered bays pricked out by a restless edge of pearly surf in dazzling contrast to the vivid turquoise water inshore. Off to the south, the last indentation visible is historic Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook paid with his life for stupid mishandling of a people proud beyond that Englishman’s comprehension of a brown-skinned people. We have never seen anything like this azure hemisphere of sea and sky. For we have observed no horizon from the Kona Coast. The water lies motionless as the sky—a frosted blue-crystal plane, no longer a “pathless, trackless ocean,” for over its limitless surface run serpentine paths, coiling and intermingling as in an inconceivable breadth of watered silk. Ocean and dome overhead are wedded by cloud masses that rear celestial castles in the blue, which in turn are reflected in the “windless, glassy floor”; and the atmospheric and vaporous suffusion I can only call a blue flush. The very air is blue.
We can just make out our house-upon-the-sea, tiny pearl upon lapis lazuli, beyond the slender, white spire of Kailua’s church. Fair little Dorothy, her eyes the all-prevalent azure, glides white-frocked and cool to our side and lisps her father’s child-verse:
“There’s Jack London coming, see?
In a little white-speck boat;