The city had yet another function. There was in Hawaii a class apart, comparable to the doomed families of Tahiti, whose special mission was to supply the altar. It seems the victim fell usually on the holy day, of which there were four in the month; between these, the man was not only safe, but enjoyed, in virtue of his destiny, a singular licence of behaviour. His immunities exceeded those of the mediæval priest and jester rolled in one; he might have donned the King’s girdle (the height of sacrilege and treason), and gone abroad with it, unpunished and apparently unblamed; and with a little care and some acquaintance in priests’ families, he might prolong this life of licence to old age. But the laws of human nature are implacable; their destiny of privilege and peril turned the men’s heads; even at dangerous seasons, they went recklessly abroad upon their pleasures; were often sighted in the open, and must run for the City of Refuge with the priestly murderers at their heels. It is strange to think it was a priest also who stood in the door to welcome and protect them.
The enclosure of the sanctuary was all paved with the lava; scattered blocks encumbered it in places; everywhere tall cocoa-palms jutted from the fissures and drew shadows on the floor; a loud continuous sound of the near sea burthened the ear. These rude monumental ruins, and the thought of that life and faith of which they stood memorial, threw me in a muse. There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye. I have found it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it so again in the City of Refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the Heiau, the priestly murderers and the fleeing victim, rose before and mastered my imagination.
Some dozen natives of Honaunau followed me about to show the boundaries; and I was recalled from these scattering thoughts by one of my guides laying his hand on a big block of lava.
“This stone is called Kaahumanu,” said he. “It is here she lay hid with her dog from Kamehameha.”
And he told me an anecdote which would not interest the reader as it interested me, till he has learned what manner of woman Kaahumanu was.
CHAPTER IV
KAAHUMANU
Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. “You are old,” they argued; “soon you will die; what use will it be to you?” “Let the bird go,” said the King. “It will be for my children afterwards.” Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.