Robust appetites we brought to Mrs. White’s luau, spread on the little wharf. Although we did sit on the floor, in approved posture, it was disappointing to note the forks, spoons, and knives, together with many haole dishes. Jack considerately forestalled comment from me by whispering, “They do not know us well enough to realize that we would appreciate the strictly Hawaiian customs.”
Some of the Keauhou folk sat with us, but were extremely shy, for few strangers find their way to the little village by the sea; and at the shore end of the pier a group of singers stared at us out of their beautiful eyes while their voices blended “with true consent” in older melodies than any we had heard.
Jack and I rode home in the dim misty moonlight, beholding the land and sea in a wondrous new aspect, the Blue Flush transformed into iridescent pearl and the frosted silver sea streaked with dull gold by a low-dipping moon. In the stillness the hoofs rang sharply on the stony steep, or a clash of palm swords in a vagrant puff of wind startled the horses to the side. It was a wild ride, up into the chiller air strata and along the clattering highway, and I enjoyed imagining myself a half-winged creature in a dream.
August 25.
Farther than any day yet we have bowled along the blithesome highroad, and then dropped into the increasing heat of the shimmering tropic levels, into Napoopoo village under its fruitful palms on the beach of Kealakekua Bay where Captain Cook met his fate. Mr. Leslie had us into his pleasant home to rest from the hot drive, and then led to where two canoes lay ready at the landing to paddle us over the romantic waters to the Cook Monument. Weather-grayed little outriggers they were; one of them propelled by an astonishing person, a full-blooded Hawaiian albino—curious paradox of a white man who was not a white man.
Skimming the lustrous water beyond the inshore breakers, on our way to the point of land, Kaawaloa, where stands the white monument pure and silent in the green gloom of trees, our eyes roved the palm-feathered, surf-wreathed shore and beetling cliffs honeycombed with tombs where rotting canoes still hold tapa-swathed bones of bygone inhabitants. Some of these, undoubtedly, knew the features of the Captain James Cook whom they deified as an incarnation of their secondary god, Lono, previous to slaying him for his misbehavior with a people too decent to countenance methods he had found possible among certain South Sea groups.
Day-dreaming I reinvested the roadstead with its sturdy whalers and picturesque adventurers’ ships, and garlanded dusky mermaidens swimming out in laughing schools to the strange white men from an unimagined bourne beyond the blue flush that encircled theirs, while again the friendly natives made high luau beneath the palms of the waterside. Our handsome boatman somewhat disturbed the mermaid fantasy: “Aole—no; no swim this place ... I tell you—planty, planty shark.”
No shark could we discern; only, in coral caverns deep below the quaint outrigger, burnished fishes playing in and out like sunbeams. We skimmed a jeweled bowl, the blue contents shot through with broadsides of amber by the afternoon sun, and on the surface shadowy undulations—violet pools in the azure; liquid sapphire spilled upon molten turquoise; and all exquisite hues melting into an opalescent fusion of water and air.
An arm of lava draws in the harbor on the north and near its end the rocky ruin of a heiau, undoubtedly of Lonomakahiki, where Captain Cook was worshipped, lends a befitting sacrificial spell, which the loud and irreverent mynah does everything in his power to desecrate. We landed on the broad dark rocks opposite the white concrete monument, which stands half-way of the little cape. The original memorial was a piece of ship’s copper, nailed to a coco palm near the site of the present imposing shaft, which is inclosed in a military square of chain-cable supported from posts topped by cannon-balls.
When Captain Cook was slain here, in 1779, his body was borne to a smaller heiau above the pali, where the same night the high priests performed their funeral rites. The flesh was removed from the skeleton, and part of it burned; while the bones were cleansed, tied with red feathers and deified in the temple of Lono. All that the men of his ship, the Resolution, could recover of their commander’s valorous meat was a few pounds which had been allotted to Kau, chief priest of Lono, which he and another friendly priest secretly conveyed to them under cover of darkness. Most of the wan framework, apportioned among the chiefs according to custom, was eventually restored, and committed with military honors to the deep.