On the third night we got into smoother water and stopped while the Chief and his assistants repaired the damage. The next morning at breakfast the deserted saloon began to fill up.
So far I and a fellow-traveller from Chicago had had the corner table to ourselves. By lunch-time it was full of lady missionaries going to China and Japan. For three or four of them that was destined to be their last voyage. The nicest and most pleasantly spoken of them was travelling many thousands of miles to meet an unspeakable fate at the hands of the Boxers.
On the fourth morning great blue-grey masses of land began to rise up to port and ahead of us, and that day we spent steaming through summer seas under a lovely sky, between shores whose beauty may well have led Captain Cook’s sailors to believe that they had at last reached the long-dreamed-of Islands of the Blest.
For all that, I must confess that I was disappointed with the approach to Honolulu. Even the most patriotic Hawaiian would, I think, agree with me that the capital has not been placed either on the most beautiful of the islands or in the most picturesque position possible.
Still, you would travel far before you found a fairer sea-flanked city than Honolulu itself. It is a city of broad, tree-shaded streets, of buildings which are dignified without being pretentious, of palaces and Government offices built on a scale of splendour which argues eloquently for the financial conceptions of former monarchs and a belief in their destinies which the sceptical Fates and the American Republic have since declined to justify.
There are, of course, many churches and schools in Honolulu. Your Hawaiian takes his or her religion in a cheerfully earnest fashion, and sings hymns with keener delight than any one else on earth. Still, the schools and churches of Honolulu were not built wisely. Where everything else is beautiful, softly lined, and tree-embowered, they are hard, bare, and angular, even after the fashion of the Ebenezers of the Midlands and the North of England. The very gaol looks nice in comparison with them.
But the private houses—for instance, those stretching away along King Street, west, to Waikiki, perhaps the loveliest bathing-place in the world—are, after all, the pleasantest memories that one brings away from Honolulu. Mostly low and broad-verandahed, white-painted, and embowered in foliage of every shade of green, faced with smooth, emerald lawns spangled with flower-beds blazing bright with every colour that Nature loves to paint her tropical flowers, they seemed rather the dwellings of lotus-eaters in “the land where it is always afternoon” than the houses of hard-headed, keen-witted business men and politicians, mostly of American descent, who have not only piled up many millions by various methods, but have also created this leafy paradise out of the bare and swampy seashore that it was when Captain Cook landed upon it.
I happened to arrive in Honolulu at a very interesting time. The Monroe Doctrine had been stretched across the Pacific from San Francisco to the Philippines, and Honolulu was a sort of hitching-post which kept it from sagging into the water. Among the white population there was a good deal more American than English being spoken. The harbour was full of American transports. Blue-clad, very business-like-looking American troops were marching and drilling and patrolling all over the place. Many of the men wore, in addition to their regimentals, portrait-medallions of the President or their best girls—a sight to make a British War Office Person ill for the rest of his official days. For myself, it liked me well.
Saving the American occupation, but not by any means unconnected with it, the four salient facts of Honolulu seemed to me to be Missionaries, Mosquitos, Millionaires, and Morality spelt backwards.