The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 18

by Robert Louis Stevenson

THE KONA COAST

Of the island of Hawaii, though I have passed days becalmed under its lee, and spent a week upon its shores, I have never yet beheld the profile. Dense clouds continued to enshroud it far below its midst; not only the zone of snow and fire, but a great part of the forest region, covered or at least veiled by a perpetual rain. And yet even on my first sight, beholding so little and that through a glass from the deck of the Casco, the rude plutonic structure of the isle was conspicuous. Here was none of the accustomed glitter of the beach, none of the close shoreside forests of the typical high island. All seemed black and barren, and to slope sheer into the sea. Unexpected movements of the land caught the attention, folds that glittered with a certain vitreosity; black mouths of caves; ranges of low cliffs, vigorously designed awhile in sun and shadow, and that sank again into the general declivity of the island glacis. Under its gigantic cowl of cloud, the coast frowned upon us with a face of desolation.

On my return I passed from a humming city, with shops and palaces and busy wharves, plying cabs and tramcars, telephones in operation and a railway in the building; mounted a strong and comfortable local steamer; sailed under desolate shores indeed, but guided in the night by sea and harbour lights; and was set down at last in a village uninhabited by any white, the creature of pure native taste—of which, what am I to say but that I know no such village in Europe? A well-to-do western hamlet in the States would be the closest parallel; and it is a moderate prophecy to call it so already.

Hookena is its name. It stands on the same coast which I had wondered at before from the tossing Casco; the same coast on which the far voyager Cook ended a noble career not very nobly. That district of Kona where he fell is one illustrious in the history of Hawaii. It was at first the centre of the dominion of the great Kamehameha. There, in an unknown sepulchre, his bones are still hidden; there, too, his reputed treasures, spoils of a buccaneer, lie, and are still vainly sought for, in one of the thousand caverns of the lava. There the tabus were first broken, there the missionaries first received; and but for the new use of ships and the new need of harbours, here might be still the chief city and the organs of the kingdom. Yet a nearer approach confirmed the impression of the distance. It presents to the seaward one immense decline. Streams of lava have followed and submerged each other down this slope, and overflowed into the sea. These cooled and shrank, and were buried under fresh inundations, or dislocated by fresh tremors of the mountain. A multiplicity of caves is the result. The mouths of caves are everywhere; the lava is tunnelled with corridors and halls; under houses high on the mountain, the sea can be heard throbbing in the bowels of the land; and there is one gallery of miles, which has been used by armies as a pass. Streams are thus unknown. The rain falls continually in the highlands: an isle that rises nearly fourteen thousand feet sheer from the sea could never fail of rain; but the treasure is squandered on a sieve; and by sunless conduits returns unseen into the ocean. Corrugated slopes of lava, bristling lava cliffs, spouts of metallic clinkers, miles of coast without a well or rivulet; scarce anywhere a beach, nowhere a harbour: here seems a singular land to be contended for in battle as a seat for courts and princes. Yet it possessed in the eyes of the natives one more than countervailing advantage. The windward shores of the isle are beaten by a monstrous surf; there are places where goods and passengers must be hauled up and lowered by a rope, there are coves which even the daring boatmen of Hamakua dread to enter; and men live isolated in their hamlets or communicate by giddy footpaths in the cliff. Upon the side of Kona, the table-like margin of the lava affords almost everywhere a passage by land; and the waves, reduced by the vast breakwater of the island, allow an almost continual communication by way of sea.

Yet even here the surf of the Pacific appears formidable to the stranger as he lands, and daily delights him with its beauty as he walks the shore.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that the steamer Hall conveyed me to Hookena. She was charged with tourists on their way to the volcano; and I found it hard to justify my choice of a week in an unheard-of hamlet, rather than a visit to one of the admitted marvels of the world. I do not know that I can justify it now and to a larger audience. I should prefer, indeed, to have seen both; but I was at the time embarrassed with arrears of work; it was imperative that I should choose; and I chose one week in a Kona village and another in the lazaretto, and renounced the craters of Maunaloa and Haleakala. For there are some so constituted as to find a man or a society more curious than the highest mountain; some, in whom the lava foreshores of Kona and Kaú will move as deep a wonder as the fiery vents that made them what they are.

The land and sea breezes alternate on the Kona coast with regularity; and the veil of rain draws up and down the talus of the mountain, now retiring to the zone of forests, now descending to the margin of the sea. It was in one of the latter and rarer moments that I was set on board a whale boat full of intermingled barrels, passengers, and oarsmen. The rain fell and blotted the crude and sombre colours of the scene. The coast rose but a little way; it was then intercepted by the cloud: and for all that appeared, we might have been landing on an isle of some two hundred feet of elevation. On the immediate foreshore, under a low cliff, there stood some score of houses, trellised and verandahed, set in narrow gardens, and painted gaudily in green and white; the whole surrounded and shaded by a grove of cocoa-palms and fruit trees, springing (as by miracle) from the bare lava. In front, the population of the neighbourhood were gathered for the weekly incident, the passage of the steamer; sixty to eighty strong, and attended by a disproportionate allowance of horses, mules, and donkeys; for this land of rock is, singular to say, a land of breeding. The green trees, the painted houses, the gay dresses of the women, were everywhere relieved on the uncompromising blackness of the lava; and the rain, which fell unheeded by the sightseers, blended and beautified the contrast.

The boat was run in upon a breaker, and we passengers ejected on a flat rock where the next wave submerged us to the knees. There we continued to stand, the rain drenching us from above, the sea from below, like people mesmerised; and as we were all (being travellers) tricked out with the green garlands of departure, we must have offered somewhat the same appearance as a shipwrecked picnic.

The purser spied and introduced me to my host, ex-judge Nahinu, who was then deep in business, despatching and receiving goods. He was dressed in pearl-grey tweed like any self-respecting Englishman; only the band of his wide-awake was made of peacock’s feather.—“House by and by,” said he, his English being limited, and carried me to the shelter of a rather lofty shed. On three sides it was open, on the fourth closed by a house; it was reached from without by five or six wooden steps; on the fourth side, a farther flight of ten conducted to the balcony of the house; a table spread with goods divided it across, so that I knew it for the village store and (according to the laws that rule in country life) the village lounging-place. People sat with dangling feet along the house verandah, they sat on benches on the level of the shed or among the goods upon the counter; they came and went, they talked and waited; they opened, skimmed, and pocketed half-read, their letters; they opened the journal, and found a moment, not for the news, but for the current number of the story: methought, I might have been in France, and the paper the Petit Journal instead of the Nupepa Eleele. On other islands I had been the centre of attention; here none observed my presence. One hundred and ten years before, the ancestors of these indifferents had looked in the faces of Cook and his seamen with admiration and alarm, called them gods, called them volcanoes; took their clothes for a loose skin, confounded their hats and their heads, and described their pockets as a “treasure door, through which they plunge their hands into their bodies and bring forth cutlery and necklaces and cloth and nails,” and to-day the coming of the most attractive stranger failed (it would appear) to divert them from Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs: for that was the novel of the day.

My host returned, and led me round the shore among the mules and donkeys to his house. Like all the houses of the hamlet, it was on the European or, to be more descriptive, on the American plan. The parlour was fitted with the usual furniture and ornamented with the portraits of Kamehameha the third, Lunalilo, Kalakaua, the queen consort of the isles, and Queen Victoria. There was a Bible on the table, other books stood on a shelf. A comfortable bedroom was placed at my service, the welcome afforded me was cordial and unembarrassed, the food good and plentiful. My host, my hostess; his grown daughters, strapping lassies; his young hopefuls, misbehaving at a meal or perfunctorily employed upon their school-books: all that I found in that house, beyond the speech and a few exotic dishes on the table, would have been familiar and exemplary in Europe.