I doubt if the earth’s surface affords elsewhere more rapid transitions of zones within a more limited territory than Hawaii. Her phenomena of all kinds, and even her productions, though limited in variety, are on no niggard scale. The active and extinct volcanoes are the largest known,—her mountains, not in chains, but isolated, are the more impressive to the eye, from their solitary grandeur, rising as they do directly from the ocean, which encircling them leads off the view into immensity. Thus the grandeur of this wonderful island becomes complete.
In the middle-ground between the hot country of the coast and the cold of the highest region, there is a neutral spot or belt, where the creative and destructive agencies of nature are in intimate contact. Here we find heavy forests with trees of immense size, growing upon a soil so thin, that earthquakes frequently tilted them to the ground, throwing roots and the clinging earth into the air, and leaving bare the rock beneath. Amid seas of cold lava arise islets of shrubbery; verdant spots, where the strawberry, raspberry, and other fruits grow, planted in ages past by the provident agency of birds, that have here rested in their flights from more prolific soils. Now they yield welcome harvests to the colonies of their first sowers and to man. Although fire so often lays them waste, they speedily recover their fertility, and, indeed, are gradually pushing vegetation into the increasing soil on all sides, thus adding slowly to the area of habitable earth.
The inhabitants of this region partook of its character. They were brave, hardy, fierce, and cruel; as uncertain as their volcanoes, and as savage as their soil. The sybaritic life of their more favored neighbors had no attractions for them, except as a temptation for foray. They loved to seize upon the luxuries they were too ignorant to create for themselves, and indeed which nature almost denied them. But the superior arms and discipline of Kiana’s people in general prevailed, and they were confined within their own borders, although sometimes a successful expedition supplied them with both slaves and victims for sacrifice to the gods of their terrible mythology. For they saw in the mighty agencies of nature around them, only malignant and sanguinary deities, whom they feared and sought to appease by rites as horrible as their own imagination.
The great crater of Mauna Loa was their Olympus. Amid its glowing fires, or high up in the perpetual snows of the mountain, resided their awful goddess Pele, with her sister train and attendants of the other sex, whose names best express their terrific attributes. It will be noticed that like the Grecian, their mythology had its origin in their elementary conceptions of the facts of natural philosophy, which in time, by their darker imaginations, were personified into a family of monsters, instead of the poetical fancies of the sensuous Greek. “Hiaka-wawahi-lani,” the heaven dwelling cloud-holder, and “Makole-inawahi-waa,” the fiery-eyed cave breaker, were the sisters of Pele, and with the brothers “Kamoho-alii,” the king of steam and vapor, “Kapoha-ikahi-ala,” the explosion in the palace of life, “Kenakepo,” the rain of night, “Kanekekili,” thundering god, and “Keoahi-kama-kana,” fire-thrusting child of war; the latter two were like Vulcan deformed,—made up her court. Their favorite sporting place was the volcano of Kilauea, where they were always to be seen, revelling in its flames, or bathing in its red surges, to the chorus of its terrific thunderings or frightful mutterings.
My readers will, I trust, forgive me the insertion of these sentence-long names for the poetry there is in them, and if they will pronounce them with the soft accent of Southern Europe, they will find them as melodious as their definitions are expressive.
But it was not alone to these deities these savages paid homage. They worshipped a mammoth shark, and fed him with human victims, casting them alive within the enclosed water in which they kept their ferocious pet. This was not quite so bad as feeding lampreys on slaves, for their sin was done under a mistaken idea of religion, while the other was to glut revenge, and fatten eels for their owner’s dinner. If we condemn the unintellectual Indian for his sacrifices and his tabus, how much more must we pass under condemnation the Roman for his inhumanity, and the Catholic for his Inquisition; the one sinning in the full light of knowledge, and the other of both knowledge and revelation.
As Kiana had partially succeeded in placing the rites of worship among his sensuous people upon a cheerful and in a material view, an elevated footing, so the priests of these tribes had in every conceivable way augmented the terrors and demoniacal attributes of theirs, and shaped them into the likeness of a devil, called “Kalaipahoa,” which combined all the ugliness their imaginations were capable of conceiving in a wooden idol, sufficiently hideous to have sent a thrill of horror even through Dante’s Inferno. It was the poison god, and was made of a wood, which the priests gave out to be deadly poisonous. Its huge, grinning mouth was filled with rows of sharks’ teeth, human hair in brutish curls covered its head, while its extended arms and spread fingers continually cried, “give, give,” to the poor victims of its fears.