"Ha-a-heo ka-u-a-ina pa—li—."
Liquid silver, the full, clear notes floated out to us across the unrippling water, and from reef to shore the whole bay fell silent as she sang through the first verse. At the opening words of the chorus a score or more of friends clustered on the hurricane deck of the tug joined in. Instantly the air was taken up by the deep-voiced bandsmen; then by the deckhands and grimy stokers gathered at the door of the engine room, and then by the boatmen as they lay on their oars in the offing, until finally it reached the shore, to come back to us in broken snatches from the throats of the crowd that lined the quays and landings.
"Aloha-oe, Aloha-oe,
E-ke o-na-o-na no-ho i-ka li—po,
A fond embrace—A ho-i a-e-au,
Until we meet again."
Then the screw of the Fearless began revolving, her tautening hawser swung Lurline into line astern, and out through the narrow passage in the reef we were trailed in the bubbling wake of the tug. An hour later, with Coco Head abeam and Diamond Head bearing N.E. by N., five miles distant, sail was hoisted, the tow-line cast off, and Lurline, wing-and-wing to a light northwest breeze, curtesied gracefully to the rising swells of the channel and took her first mincing steps in the long dance to the Marquesas.
As we filled away, dipping our flag in a farewell salute, we saw the band, which since leaving the harbour had been doing its bravest to lift the sodden pall of parting with rollicking Kanaka airs and stirring patriotic selections, again stiffen to attention, and down the wind, despairingly, appealingly, soothingly by turns, as though wafted by the tug's broadside of fluttering handkerchiefs, came for the last time the strains of "Aloha-oe." There are many forms and fashions of the sweet sorrow of parting of which the poet sings, but for a long, long pull, with a yo-heave-ho, at the heart strings, nothing like that which steals over you as you listen to "Aloha-oe" with the tow-line in the water, the odor of Ilima leis heavy in the nostrils, and the skyline of fair Hawaii blurring dim through a mist of tears.
The course from Honolulu to the Marquesan island of Nukahiva is about S.E. by E., but in order to run as little chance as possible of being headed by the Southeast Trades after crossing the Line, it was deemed best to lay our course a couple of points to the east of this until the latitudes of this southern wind were reached and its prevailing direction at that season more accurately determined. This course we found we had managed to approximate at the end of two weeks' sailing, but only at the expense of being constantly on the wind; then to discover that the Trades in the South Pacific blow steadily between E.S.E. and east for nearly all of the year. This meant that we had put ourselves to a good deal of unnecessary trouble and made but a moderately good run where we might have made a very speedy one by heading directly for our destination. That from Hawaii to the Marquesas is one of the few long traverses in the Pacific where the most direct course is also the fastest.
The bleak rock of Lanaii loomed abeam to windward for several hours on the night of the 24th, and morning showed the dim blur of Maui's great crater, Haleakala, blotting out the eastern sky. At noon the snowy peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa detached themselves from the fleecy cloud-racks down to E.S.E., and steadily loomed higher as the sun declined. In the first watch the wind began falling lighter, by midnight it was only coming in fluky puffs, and at daybreak Lurline found herself in the most windlessly somnolent patch of salt water in all the length and breadth of the Pacific, the lee of the two great 13,000-foot volcanoes that form the backbone of the island of Hawaii.
Probably no other place in the world presents such striking contrasts of meteorological conditions between almost contiguous points as those furnished by the windward and leeward sides of Hawaii. The lofty summits of its volcanoes tower so far above the raincloud line that practically no moisture whatever is able to pass to a large belt of country on the southwest side of the island, and where the annual precipitation in the vicinity of Hilo is occasionally in excess of two, and even three hundred inches, that of the Kona or leeward coast ranges from absolutely nothing to five or six. The rank tropical verdure of the windward slopes is unknown in this windless and rainless belt, and save in places where streams from the perpetual snows form thread-like oases, this leeward region is largely desert.
The windless area behind the volcanic barrier of Hawaii may be roughly defined as a triangle, sixty miles wide at its base, tapering off to an apex a hundred miles or more to leeward. It was well down toward the base of this triangle that we were trying to cross in an ill-advised effort to avoid the alternative of sailing the longer course to the windward of the island.
Morning of the 26th found us in a clear, mirror-like, unrippling sea, the surface of which, in its absence of motion, might have passed for that of a great freshwater lake. Scarcely a suggestion of a swell underran the satiny sheen of the level sea, and for all the motion of her decks the yacht might have been chocked up in a dry dock for repairs. The booms, hauled in amidship, lay as though spiked to the deck; and even the drowsy slatting of the lazy-lines and the brisk tattoo of the reef points—twin lullabies of the so-called calms of livelier seas—were unheard. The log, as though in emulation of a sounding lead, hung perpendicularly from the taffrail, its brass blades showing no less clearly in the lucent, unwinking depths than the feathery weed that fringed the motionless rudder.