Gentlemen of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, I salute you! Here's to your summer seas, and your summer winds, and your summer skies, and the summer in your hearts. May you always have—I was going to say fair weather and other things to match, but I pause in time. Yours are the natures that make fair weather out of any storm that blows. So—here's to a sail above you, a plank beneath you, the blue-green Pacific about you, and the boisterous Trade wind blowing you on.
Honolulu hospitality is of so wide a fame that I will not lay myself open to the charge of trying to "gild refined gold or paint the rainbow" by telling here of the details of our sojourn in what is so happily called the "Pearl of the Pacific"; and yet—there was one incident that is so characteristic of the innate courtesy and gentility of the Hawaiian host that I may be pardoned for setting it down.
It was but a few days after our arrival in Honolulu that we were invited to attend a luau or native feast at the home of Col. Sam Parker, a prominent planter of the Islands and a relative of the late King Kaleakaua. The affair was to be informal, we were told, and the feast was to be spread on the lanai or open veranda. On the strength of these assurances, and because the night was a hot and sultry one, the Commodore and I thought that our duck yachting uniforms would fulfil all the requirements of the occasion, and proceeded to attend thus accoutred. Imagine our feelings, then, on finding the genial Colonel Parker waiting to receive us in full evening dress, and observing that every one of the hundred and fifty other guests were likewise impeccably garbed. Two white doves in a flock of ravens could not have been more conspicuous or out of place, and our discomfiture was no whit lessened on being led to the head of the long table and placed in the seats of honour beside Colonel Parker's step-daughters, the lovely Princess Kawanakoa and the no less beautiful Alice Campbell. Not till we were seated did I notice that our host's place was vacant.
For ten minutes the Commodore and I munched shamedly at our poi and boiled seaweed and avoided the I-told-you-so glances of the Mater and Claribel who, resplendent in "full racing rig," seemed palpably endeavouring to impress the assembled company with the fact that they had no connection whatever with the two ill-at-ease nautical-looking gentlemen in the duck jackets. The Princess and her sister were the souls of wit, tact and amiability, but we continued droopy and unresponsive even under the stimuli of their spirited sallies. There was only one thing that could happen to restore our shattered equanimity, and that—thanks to the inspiration which had doubtless seized upon our genial host the moment our mis-garbed figures had hove above his horizon—was the very thing that did happen. We were just passing from poi in calabashes to mullet boiled in ti leaves, when in breezed the Colonel, with only a quickened heaving of his ample chest indicating the lightning change he had been making, garbed in the undress uniform of a Commodore of the Royal Hawaiian Yacht Club, a position which he had held during the reign of the late King Kaleakaua. It was a most gracious act of kindly courtesy, and I was not in the least surprised to hear the Commodore spent most of the rest of the evening trying to persuade all the Parkers, root and branch, to get their things together and join us for our cruise in the South Pacific. In my own thankfulness, I distinctly remember offering several times to make a present of the yacht to both the Princess Kawanakoa and her sister before I pulled myself together sufficiently to realize that it was not mine to give.
The only unpleasant feature about letting go anchor in Honolulu Harbour is having to break it out again. After our week of scheduled stop had stretched out to two weeks, and finally to three, the realization that our reluctance to leave was but growing with every day that the inevitable moment was deferred brought us at length to the arbitrary setting of a sailing hour. Toward this we inflexibly directed the current of our resolutions, with the result that we really did get away in the end.
On the morning of sailing we were pleasantly surprised to receive word from the Spreckels Company—John D. Spreckels was the original owner of Lurline—that it was sending its big tug, Fearless, to tow us out of the passage and beyond the lee of the island to the breeze-swept channel. A little later a note came out from Governor Carter informing us that he was sending the Royal Hawaiian Band on the Fearless to pipe paeans of farewell.
We were not sailing until three o'clock on the afternoon of the 24th of March, but soon after daybreak boats commenced coming off laden with boxes and bags and parcels, remembrances from our kindly Island friends, and toward noon the tide of flowers set in—these mostly in the form of leis or garlands to be worn about the neck. By two o'clock the cabin was like the shipping room of a department store at the climax of the Christmas rush, and the deck a cross between a fruitstand and a conservatory. Nor was the forecastle unremembered. The sailors, too, appeared to have formed attachments. As the bluff bow of the Fearless came nosing out into the stream from under the stern of the big Siberia and all hands turned to on the anchor, we were treated to the spectacle of four brawny seamen, garlanded and festooned in trailing leis from head to heel, bending and swaying in unison and heaving up the chain to a chantey that was nothing more or less than an improvisation from a rollicking native hula.
The line from Fearless was passed aboard and made fast, and as the anchor was broken out the white-coated band, grouped picturesquely on the forward deck of the tug, struck up the opening bars of a familiar air, and Puilani Molina, the sweetest singer in all of the Hawaiias, advanced to the rail, tossed a bright-hued lei upon the water and began singing that most plaintive and tenderly sweet of all the world's songs of farewell, "Aloha-oe."