Isabella Bird Bishop has painted a thrilling word-picture of the gulches of Windward Hawaii in the Hilo District—giant erosions of age-old cloud-bursts, their precipitous sides hidden in a savage wealth of vegetation, heavy with tropic perfume. And this day, swinging through and beyond the coffee and cane of the Hamakua District that adjoins the Kona, following the patient grades along the faces of stupendous ravines, descending to bridges over rapturous streams that began and ended in waterfalls, we remembered how she, long before any bridging, at the risk of her precious life, forded on horseback these same turbulent water courses, swollen by freshets. For she was possessed of that same joy in existence that I know so well, and which, unescorted in a period when few women braved traveling alone, led her to venture ocean and island and foreign continent, writing as vividly as she lived.
Only fleeting glimpses we had of the coast—sheer green capes overflung with bursting waterfalls that dropped rainbow fringes to meet the blue-and-white frills of surf. “Bearded with falls,” to quote Robert Louis Stevenson, is this bluffwise coast of the Big Island, and we envied the Snark’s crew who from seaward had viewed the complete glory, from surf to mountain head.
Laupahoehoe, “leaf of lava,” was the simple poesy of the ancient-Hawaiian who named a long, low outthrust at the mouth of a wide ravine. Weather-softened old houses as well as grass huts stray its dreamy length, under coco palms etched against the horizon; and the natives seem to have no business but to bask beneath the blue-and-gold sky. One lovely thumb-sketch we glimpsed, where a river frolicked past a thatched hut beneath a leaning coco palm, near which a living bronze stood motionless—a rare picture in modern Hawaii.
Laupahoehoe, Hakalau, Onomea, each representing a sugar plantation—we passed them all, and toward the end of day our absurd four-in-hand of gritty little mules trotted into a fine red boulevard. Just as we had settled our cramped limbs to enjoy the unwonted evenness of surface, the driver pulled up in Wainaku, a section of suburban Hilo, before a seaward-sloping greensward terrace fanned by a “Travelers’ palm,” under which grazed a golden-coated mare. Here, upon a word sent ahead by mutual friends in the adorable way of the land, we were again to know the welcome of perfect strangers—an unequalled hospitality combined of European and Polynesian ideals by the white peoples who have made this country their own.
On the steps of an inviting lanai room stood a blue-eyed lady-woman, sweet and cool and solicitous, with three lovely children grouped about her slender, blue-Princess-gowned form—Mrs. William T. Balding, whose husband is connected with the Hilo Sugar Company. Its mill purrs all hours at Wainaku by the sea.
Refreshed by a bath, and arrayed in preposterously wrinkled ducks and holoku out of our suit cases, we dined exquisitely with the young couple in an exquisite dining room hung with fern baskets, the table sparkling with its perfect appointment, in contrast with the natural wildness of tropical growth seen through the wide windows.
Shipmans’ Volcano Home, Hawaii, September 7.
Away back in 1790 or thereabout, an American fur-trader named Metcalf, commanding the snow Eleanor, visited the Sandwich Islands on his way to the Orient, his son, eighteen years of age, being master of a small schooner, Fair American, which had been detained by the Spaniards at Nootka Sound.
A plot was hatched by some of the chiefs to capture the Eleanor, which was frustrated by Kamehameha, who himself boarded her and ordered the treacherous chiefs ashore. Following this, a high alii of Kona was insulted and thrashed with a rope’s-end by Captain Metcalf for some trifling offense, and vowed vengeance upon the next vessel that should come within his reach.
The little snow crossed Hawaii Channel to Honuaula, Maui, where a chief of Olowalu with his men one night stole a boat and killed the sailor asleep in it, afterward breaking up the boat for the nails. Metcalf set sail for Olowalu, where, under mask of trading with the natives, he turned loose a broadside of cannon into the flock of peaceful canoes surrounding the Eleanor, strewing the water with dead and dying.