To get to Hilo from the Snark, the best way was to walk along the sandy beach clear into Hilo, for the damp sand was always cool and refreshing, and the sea breeze blowing made one want to take off his shoes and roll up his trousers, and splash along in the water, a thing I did many a time. Truth is, people, after a few weeks in the Sandwich Islands, start doing things they would never think of doing in the staid old United States. The climate seems to make one younger, for it is always spring in Hawaii.
On a quiet morning some strangely wonderful sights may be seen. In the clear water one can easily make out many-hued fish, and coral, sponges, coral-crabs; and, under the sponges, small octupuses or devil-fish from the size of one's hand down to the size of a silver dollar.
Hilo has about five thousand, mixed population. Here, as among all the islands of the group, the Japanese predominate, with Chinese a close second. The white people on this side of the island live mostly outside of Hilo on plantations; and as the brown population sleeps through the heat of the day, the business streets are deserted until late in the afternoon. Then the streets spring suddenly into life, and for several hours are thronged with people of all nationalities. The clubs and saloons are crowded, the band plays p110 nearly every evening, and everyone settles down to enjoy himself.
Off the business streets, the residence district seems like a park. The roads are well paved, electric lights are strung at every crossing, hedges and fences are of trees that usually bear flowers throughout the year. Homes are mostly of the bungalow style, with large porches running clear around the house. These porches are used as dining and sleeping rooms the year round. In fact, the people often give more thought to the lanai, as they call the porch, than to any other part of the house.
The lawns around the bungalows are studded with fruit trees that are usually laden with ripe fruit at all times. The small boys never care to steal fruit here, as there is so much of it that anyone may help himself to fruit wherever he finds it.
The fine public libraries, churches, and a good opera house at Hilo are as truly modern buildings as any I have seen in the United States. A large pineapple factory is located here, and one steamer makes regular trips from San Francisco to get the bananas that grow wild along this coast.
Hilo supplies the United States with more cane-sugar than any city in the world. Large sugar-mills are located along the water-front, in order that ships may load by gravity right from the mill. The sugar-cane is raised back of Hilo, and as far back as twenty miles into the mountains. The sugar-cane is sent to p111 the mill in long flumes that are filled with water, and the cane laid in the flumes goes down to the mill at the rate of twenty miles an hour.
The manager of the Waipalia sugar-mill invited Jack, Mrs. London, Captain Y——, and me to go for a flume-ride one Sunday, when there was no cane in the flume. Cabs were secured, and we were driven away back in the mountains to a good place to start from. Before leaving Hilo we had donned our bathing suits. Making a good seat of cane for ourselves, to guard against possible nails, we all got in the flume and started off. There is no more exciting sport in the world than flume-riding. Often, we could look down inclines, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet below. We rushed so fast that had a nail ever gotten in the way, it would certainly have ripped off a lot of skin, but we could not stop, for to have done so would have thrown us from the flume.
The rice fields looked like ordinary wheat fields. The rice is threshed by the primitive method of cutting the heads off the stalk, laying them on a large piece of volcanic rock, and letting in Chinese with bare feet to stamp upon it until the grain is hulled. Rice is an important factor in the Hawaiian farming, as the Japs and Chinese live upon it almost wholly. No rice is exported; the orientals consume the entire output.
As the rice must be planted in the water, the rice fields tend to breed mosquitoes, which become so annoying that it is often necessary to burn a powder p112 called buhack all night long, in addition to having the regular mosquito netting over the bed.