I walked that night beside the sea. The steamer with its lights and crowd of tourists was gone by; it had left me alone among these aliens, and I felt no touch of strangeness. The trim, lamp-lit houses shining quietly, like villas, each in its narrow garden; the gentle sound of speech from within; the room that awaited my return, with the lamp, and the books, and the spectacled householder studying his Bible:—there was nothing changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and played, a child, beside the borders of another sea. And some ten miles from where I walked, Cook was adored as a deity; his bones, when he was dead, were cleansed for worship; his entrails devoured in a mistake by rambling children.
A day of session in the Hookena Court-house equally surprised me. The judge, a very intelligent, serious Hawaiian, sat behind a table, taking careful notes; two policemen, with their bright metal badges, standing attention at his back or bustling forth on errands. The plaintiff was a Portuguese. For years, he had kept store and raised cattle in the district, without trouble or dispute. His store stood always open, it was standing so seven miles away at the moment of the case; and when his cattle strayed, they were duly impounded and restored to him on payment of one shilling. But recently a gentleman of great acuteness and a thousand imperfect talents had married into the family of a neighbouring proprietor; consecutively on which event the store-keeper’s cattle began to be detained and starved, the fine rose to half a dollar, and lastly a cow had disappeared. The Portuguese may have been right or wrong: he was convinced the new-comer was the main-spring of the change; called a suit in consequence against the father-in-law;—and it was the son-in-law who appeared for the defence. I saw him there, seated at his ease, with spectacles on brow; still young, much of a gentleman in looks, and dressed in faultless European clothes; and presently, for my good fortune, he rose to address the court. It appears he has already stood for the Hawaiian parliament; but the people (I was told) “did not think him honest,” and he was defeated. Honesty, to our ways of thought, appears a trifle in a candidate; and I think we have few constituencies to refuse so great a charmer. I understood but a few dozen words, yet I heard the man with delight, followed the junctures of his argument, knew when he was enumerating points in his own favour, when he was admitting those against him, when he was putting a question per absurdum, when (after the due pause) he smilingly replied to it. There was no haste, no heat, no prejudice; with a hinted gesture, with a semitone of intonation, the speaker lightly set forth and underlined the processes of reason; he could not shift a foot nor touch his spectacles, but what persuasion radiated in the court—it is impossible to conceive a style of oratory more rational or civilised. The point to which he spoke was pretty in itself. The people, as I had been told, did not think the orator honest; some judge, on a particular occasion, had inclined to the same view, and the man of talent was disbarred. By a clause in a statute, a layman or a disbarred lawyer might conduct a case for himself or for one of “his own family.” Is a father-in-law one of a man’s own family? “Yes,” argued the orator: “No,” with less grace and perspicuity, Nahinu, retained by the Portuguese. The laws of the tight little kingdom are conceived in duplicate for the Hawaiian hare and his many white friends. The native text appearing inconclusive, an appeal was made to the English, and I (as amicus curiæ) was led out, installed upon the court-house steps, and painfully examined as to its precise significance. The judge heard the orator; he heard Nahinu; he received by the mouth of the schoolmaster my report, for which he thanked me with a bow; and ruled the claimant out. This skirmish decided the fate of the engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted; judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and but for the plaintiff, the business was entirely native.
The Portuguese had come seven miles to Hookena, sure of substantial justice, and he left his store open, fearless of being robbed. Another white man, of strong sense and much frugality and choler, thus reckoned up what he had lost by theft in thirty-nine years among the different islands of Hawaii: a pair of shoes, an umbrella, some feet of hose-pipe, and one batch of chickens. It is his continual practice to send Hawaiians by a perilous, solitary path with sums in specie; at any moment the messenger might slip, the money-bag roll down a thousand feet of precipice, and lodge in fissures inaccessible to man: and consider how easy it were to invent such misadventures!—“I should have to know a white man well before I trusted him,” he said; “I trust Hawaiians without fear. It would be villainous of me to say less.” It should be remembered the Hawaiians of yore were not particular; they were eager to steal from Cook, whom they believed to be a god, and it was a theft that led to the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay; and it must not be forgotten that the Hawaiians of to-day are many of them poor. One residual trait of savage incompetence I have already referred to; they cannot administer a trust—I was told there had never yet been a case known. Even a judge, skilled in the knowledge of the law and upright in its administration, was found insusceptible of those duties and distinctions which appear so natural and come so easy to the European. But the disability stands alone, a single survival in the midst of change; and the faults of the modern Hawaiian incline to the other side. My orator of Hookena court-room may be a gentleman much maligned; I may have received his character from the lips of his political opponents; but the type described is common. The islands begin to fill with lawyers; many of whom, justly or unjustly, are disbarred; and to the age of Kamehameha, the age of Glossin has succeeded. Thus none would rob the store of the Portuguese, but the law was wrested to oppress him.
It was of old a warlike and industrious race. They were diggers and builders; the isles are still full of their deserted monuments; the modern word for law, Kanawai, “water rights,” still serves to remind us of their ancient irrigation. And the island story is compact of battles. Their courage and goodwill to labour seems now confined to the sea, where they are active sailors and fearless boatmen, pursue the shark in his own element, and make a pastime of their incomparable surf. On shore they flee equally from toil and peril, and are all turned to carpet occupations and to parlous frauds. Nahinu, an ex-judge, was paid but two dollars for a hard day in court, and he is paying a dollar a day to the labourers among his coffee. All Hawaiians envy and are ready to compete with him for this odd chance of an occasional fee for some hours’ talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. “What are you doing here?” she cried, for she was a strong partisan. “Do you not know they are murdering your king?” “I know,” said the skulker. “Why do you not go to help him?” she asked. “Aflaid,” said the poor craven, and crouched again among the grass. Here was a strange grandchild for the warriors that followed or faced Kamehameha. I give the singular instance as the more explicit; but the whole race must have been stricken at the moment with a similar weakness. No man dare say of this revolution that it was unprovoked; but its means were treachery and violence; the numbers and position of those engaged made the design one of the most insolent in history; and a mere modicum of native boldness and cohesion must have brought it to the dust. “My race had one virtue, they were brave,” said a typical Hawaiian: “and now they have taken that away.”
I have named a French example: but the thought that haunts the stranger in Hawaii is that of Italy. The ruggedness of feature which marks out the race among Polynesians is the Italian ruggedness. Countenances of the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality, are to be found in Hawaii and amongst Italian fisher-folk or whose people, in the midst of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave, beautiful in plainness: faces that take the heart captive. The tougher struggle of the race in these hard isles has written history there; energy enlivens the Hawaiian strength—or did so once, and the faces are still eloquent of the lost possession. The stock that has produced a Cæsar, a Kamehameha, a Káa-humanu, retains their signature.
CHAPTER II
A RIDE IN THE FOREST
By the Hawaiian tongue, the slope of these steep islands is parcelled out in zones. As we mount from the seaboard, we pass by the region of Ilima, named for a flowering shrub, and the region of Apaa, named for a wind, to Mau, the place of mist. This has a secondary name, the Au- or Wao-Kanaka, “the place of men” by exclusion, man not dwelling higher. The next, accordingly, is called the Waoakua, region of gods and goblins; other names, some apparently involving thoughts of solitude and danger, follow till the top is reached. The mountain itself might be a god or the seat of a god; it might be a volcano, the home of the dread Pele; and into desert places few would venture but such as were adroit to snare the whispering spirits of the dead. To-day, from the Waoakua or the Waomaukele, the gods have perhaps fled; the descendants of Vancouver’s cattle fill them with less questionable terrors.