“Since it is the will of the gods, it is also mine.”
“So shall it be made known by the heralds,” said Kanaloa, bowing to hide his grief, and leaving Lono and the queen together.
Thus it was that Lono, of whom tradition relates so many romantic stories, became the moi of Hawaii and the husband of the most attractive woman of her time, Queen Kaikilani.
II.
Peace and prosperity followed the elevation of Lono to the throne of Hawaii. His fame as an able and sagacious ruler soon spread to the other islands of the group, and his court as well as his person commanded the highest respect of his subjects. Weary of inaction, and having no desire to embroil the kingdom in a foreign war, he at length concluded to visit some of the neighboring islands with his queen, and particularly Kauai, which he had once seen when a boy.
Leaving the government in charge of his brother Kanaloa, Lono embarked on his journey of pleasure with a number of large double canoes and a brilliant retinue. He took with him poloulous, kahilis and other emblems of state, and the hokeo, or large calabash, containing the bones of the six rebellious chiefs slain by his royal father at the beginning of his reign.
The double canoe provided for Kaikilani and her personal attendants was fitted out in a manner becoming the rank of its royal occupant. It was eighty feet in length, and the two together were seven feet in width. Midway between stem and stern a continuous flooring covered both canoes, which was enclosed to a height of six feet, thus providing the queen with a room seven feet broad and twenty feet in length. The apartment was abundantly supplied with cloths and mats of brilliant colors, and the walls were decorated with festoons of shells and leis of flowers and feathers. In front of the entrance stood two kahilis, and behind a kapa screen was a carved image of Ku, surrounded by a number of charms and sacred relics. The canoes were brightly painted in alternate lines of black and yellow, while above their ornamented prows towered the carved and feathered forms of two gigantic birds with human heads. Forty oarsmen comprised the crew, and sails of mats were ready to lift into every favoring breeze.
The double canoe of the king was smaller and less elaborately ornamented; and as it moved out of the harbor of Hilo, bearing the royal ensign and followed by the sumptuous barge of the queen and the humbler crafts of servants and retainers, the shores were lined with people, and hundred in canoes paddled after them to give them their parting alohas beyond the reef. The auguries had not been favorable. So said the high-priest, and so had the people whispered to each other. But, after preparing for the journey, Lono could not be persuaded to relinquish it. It was therefore with misgivings that he was seen to depart; and for many days thereafter sacrifices were offered for him in the temples, and a strict tabu was ordered for a period of three days, during which time no labor was performed and a solemn silence prevailed over all the land embraced in the dread edict. Swine were confined, fires were extinguished, dogs were muzzled, fowls were hidden under calabashes, and the priests alone were seen and heard, and they but sparingly. Such was the strict tabu for the propitiation of the gods in case of emergency or peril, and death was the certain penalty of its violation.
The weather was fair, and the royal party first stopped at Lahaina. It had been Lono’s purpose to spend a week or more at the court of Kamalalawalu, but the moi was absent at the time, and the squadron left Maui the next day for Oahu. A fair wind wafted the party through Pailolo channel to the western point of Molokai. The sky was clear, and Lono began to discern the tops of the mountains of eastern Oahu, when one of his nephews threw his spear into and wounded a large shark which for some time had been slowly moving around the bows of the canoe. In an instant the weapon was thrown back with a violence which drove the point through the rim of the boat. Blood tinged the waves, but the shark disappeared.