The Pacific Triangle

by Sydney Greenbie

My presence at the ceremony in honor of the royal demise gave me an opportunity to see at once some of the best specimens of Samoan manhood. It left me with the impression that no race capable of mustering so many men of such build was on the decline. There was nothing in their manner to indicate servility or despair. And some day Setu, with his knowledge of Western civilization gained at first hand, may be the means of arousing his fellow-Samoans to great things.

4

The process of assimilation and decline is taking place with far more rapidity in Hawaii. Hawaii crashed like a meteor into America and was comminuted and absorbed. The finer dust of its primitive civilization is giving more color to our atmosphere than any other American possession. But the real Hawaii is rapidly receding into the past. On the beach at Waikiki there is a thatch-roofed hut, but like most of the Hawaiians themselves, it bears too obviously the ear-marks of the West, the imprint of invasion.

What there is left of the Hawaiians still possesses a measure of strength and calmness. Big, burly, self-satisfied, they wend their way unashamed of having been conquered. Only a few thousand can now claim any racial purity. The mixture of Hawaiians with the various peoples now in occupation of their lands is growing greater every year; those of pure Hawaiian blood, fewer. And after all, is it any reflection upon any race that it has been assimilated by its conquerors?

And assimilated to the point of extinction Hawaii has been. It has become an integral part of a continental nation of whose existence it had hardly known a hundred years ago. When Captain Cook discovered Hawaii he estimated its population at 400,000. Fifty years later there were only 130,000. To-day there may not be more than 30,000. The white race has had its revenge on these natives for the death of this intrepid captain. And the last of the great Hawaiian rulers, Queen Liliuokalani, shorn of her power, passed away on November 11, 1917. She, the descendant of great warriors and remarkable political leaders, had turned to the only thing left her—expressing the sentiments of her people in music.

The submersion is nearly complete. Politically, there isn't a son among them who would feel any happier for a revival. So little fear is there of such a hope ever rising even for a moment in the Hawaiian breast that the key to the former throne-room hangs indifferently on a nail in the outer office of the present government. I believe that that is the only throne-room under the American flag. It is a small room, modern and finished in every detail. On its walls hang paintings of kings and queens and ministers of state. There is a musty odor about it, which could easily be removed. All one need do is open the windows and an inrush of sensuous air would sweeten every corner of it. This would be doing only what the race is doing with every intake of alien blood.

A broad-shouldered, broad-nosed, broad-faced—and seemingly broad-hearted—Hawaiian clerk took me into the room. As we wandered about he told who the worthies were, enframed in gilt and under glass. Interspersed with some facts was inherited fancy. His enthusiasm rose appreciably when he recited the deeds of Kamehameha I, their most renowned king.

"Once he saw an enemy spy approach," said my guide. "He threw his spear with such force that it penetrated the trunk of the cocoa-palm behind which the traitor was hiding, and pierced the man's heart." A merry twinkle lit up the cicerone's eyes. That twinkle was something almost foreign to the man: it must have been the white blood in him that was mocking the tales of his native ancestry.

Aside from these few portraits there was nothing in the throne-room which gave evidence of Hawaii's former prestige. Here that king's descendants planned to lead his race to glory among nations. And here they were outwitted. The guide had recounted among the king's exploits his ability to break the back of his strongest enemy with his naked hands. Yet the white man came along and broke the Hawaiian back. And to-day he who wishes to learn the habits, the arts, and the exploits of these people has to go to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

A primer got up for children, to be learned parrot-like, and distributed to tourists, tells us "the Hawaiians never were savages." We are also assured they "never were cannibals," and "speedily embraced religion." The first is an obvious misstatement; the second is an apology of uncertain value; as to the third, the son of one of Hawaii's best missionaries, who just died in his eighty-fifth year, said: "Not until the world shall learn how to limit the quantity and how to improve the quality of races will future ages see any renewal of such idyllic life and charm as that of the ancient Polynesians." Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose father converted some fifteen thousand Hawaiians to Christianity, deplored the effect on the native of the high-handed suppression of native taboos and attributes their extinction—which seems inevitable—to the imposition of clothes which they put on and off according to whim, and to customs unsuited to their natures. Dr. Coan said that though his father had a powerful voice he remembered that often he could not hear him preach because of the coughing and sneezing of the natives.