HAWAII

We are lying off a little place, Keauhou, while people are landing in boats from the small steamer that carries us. The shore is broken with black lava rock, in beds that do not seem high, so flat are they on top. It is about eight o’clock, and the impression is of full sunlight on the green of everything. Behind the fringe of shore rises the big slope of the mountain seen in profile, so gigantic that one only sees a slice of it at a time; there are, of course, ravines up the hills, and trees and grass, but from my focus of the square, between the pillars of the roof of the upper deck, and seated by the guards I see rather shade broken with sunlight. The sea, of course, at the shore is glittering blue, but everything else that can cast a shade throws its edges upon the next; so that I see a black seaside broken up by lava rocks, and near them cocoa and palm, and some small wharves, or jetties, built out to protect the smaller beaches, that run back between the rocks. Each break of projection or recess has its trees, that make the fringe of shade with patches of sun, which the eye takes in along the water.

There are a few houses strung along, half in light, half in shadow; three of them are tall grass huts, hay-coloured in the half-shade of the cocoanuts beside them. Above them are patches of sun on the green slope where the upper bank or slope behind first flattens into the strong light. In the shadow, faint whites and pinks and blacks on the dresses of people waiting for their friends, or watching the steamer. Their horses and mules and donkeys stand in rows along the houses—or walls—occasionally they pass into the sunshine. One girl in red runs (why, heaven only knows—time seems of no possible use), and as she rises over a rock in the sand, the sun catches her brown feet and legs and the folds of her floating gown.

These people, I am told, have many of them ridden some miles from our last landing, at dawn, to meet us again. But there are special deliveries of people and freight at each place—so many and so much on board that one can hardly realize where they are stowed. Three full boatloads at the last place, and one here, of people jammed—dark Spanish faces, peacock feathers, and red veils on hats; coloured neckerchiefs, and head and shoulders covered with flowers or leaves that hang to the waist. There is loud objurgation and chattering, and keeping the children together, and holding up odds and ends of things not sent ashore by the other boats that carry goods and household furniture.

Last night we were pretty full. Children and women lay in files on our deck by the guards, the children ill with the rolling, for we pass several channels between islands, each one a pretext for the wind to give us a dance. And in the steerage people lay like herrings. It was picturesque; a few Chinese, the rest Hawaiian, with much colour and abundance of flowers and leaves that they like, and all eating on the spot, apparently without moving—guitars playing—we had two guitars aboard, and part of the night and morning somebody strummed; sometimes a man appearing from a cabin, posing guitarero-way, touching a few chords and going away again. Once, some fellow playing, squatted on the deck, apparently for the baby, and the other babies, who inspected the guitar inquiringly and approvingly—sometimes some of the women. In the late afternoon, as the sun struck this mass of colour against a blue sea of unnamable blue, at least two dozen of the people all in colours were eating watermelon all red down to the rind. The appearance of a palette well littered was only a symbol to it. And there was one beauty with long nose and the rounded end suggesting the aquiline, the black eyebrows under the frontal bone, the pouting lip, and heavy chin and long slope of jaw, and what they all have, even the ugly (like the Jap girls), a pretty setting of ears and neck and black-hair’s growth. But the children were prettier. We had a neighbour who had many and who looked so plaintive, and another, though sick, was jolly and smiling. And another was like a chieftain (or “chiefess”) with three great furrows down her forehead above her nose. But they all smiled with great sweetness, and I wish our women could do as much. All sullenness or sternness or disdain disappeared from the face. They talked in English, partly for convenience, but a little, I thought, for the gallery, the children mixing their languages, and their mothers gliding back occasionally to it. But the talk was just what it is everywhere—schools, and how dear, and what ideas are put into the children’s heads and whether there is a distinction between those who pay more or less, or have scholarships and something about prices in general. One is reading “Sabina Zembra” and we talk a little while the ship rolls, rendered sympathetic by suffering, and I am sure that two of my good ladies do not consider themselves kanaka, at least if I am to judge by their reference to kanaka and such like; but they are brown like berries, one light, the other sallow.

Later in the afternoon I go forward in the dance of our passage to the next island of Maui; the island lies before us across the sea, so sky-like that it is difficult to realize that the vast slopes are of earth; that the greenish hue, now and then, under the violet of the bank of heavy clouds, all brilliant and shining like satin, is not thicker air—just such tones make the island as with us make winter skies. Far off to the southeast stretches under clouds another line, that of the further Maui which ends above in Haleakala, the extinct volcano. As we draw near, the sun is setting, the jib and mainsail curving before us in shadow and light, as we drop a little to the south, repeat near to us the colours of the island and of the clouds. These hang far forward toward us, while the slope of green and peachy grey runs up behind it; and we glide soon into more quiet waters, and stop off the town of Lahaina. Then long hours are spent in unloading and loading, so that when we sail again, we only faintly see the mass of Haleakala. But in the morning, with the dawn which has no colour, but in which, to the east, stand up, in some sort of richer violet shade, the outlines of Hawaii, we see further the great slopes of Mauna Loa, so gentle that it is difficult to tell where the flat top is reached, and where the slopes begin again on the other side; and then we stop in the early sunlight. A fisherman comes up with fish; other boats (outriggers all) with fruit, and we see what I was telling you when I began to write. And later we have come to a great bank of black rock running out to sea, and precipices of black spotted with a green all of one colour, which is where Cook was killed, and where they have put up a little monument to him. This is Kaawaloa. We try the land, for the roll of the ship is disagreeable, as it waits, and we run in over the transparent water. It is too deep just by the landing for anchorage. The sea jumps from light aquamarine to the colour of a peacock’s breast in the shadow. We go up the black lava that looks as if it had been run out on the road, not under it, and sit in the shade a moment, and exchange a few words with our fellow passengers now on land—a little flock of tired children and mother, and our “chiefess.” And it is hot—the heights have shut off the wind, and all is baking. Horses and donkeys, saddled, stand about near the shadow of fences, left to themselves, while the cargo is landed. Higher up on the heights some planters tell us it is cool. They wear enormous hats, and have a planter-like appearance that suggests our being different.

As I look around on this green and black, and the few cocoanuts, and the dark blue-green olive water, I think that it is not an unlikely place for a man to have been killed in. The place has for Hawaiians another interest: it was once a great place, and the high cliffs have many holes where chiefs are buried, inaccessible and hidden. And a little way beyond was a city of refuge—that is to say, a sacred city—where none who took refuge could be injured. Even though the enemy came rushing up to the last outlying landmark, the moment that it had been passed, the pursued was safe, and after having sojourned according to due rite, could depart in peace and safety.

After this, and the same story of like places below the edge of the green table that slopes up to the sky and further on to the clouds, we stop, and the white boat takes our last passengers in the blue water; its white keel looking as if washed with blue. The people wait on the shore under less and less shadow, and on the other side we have now the enormous ocean opposed to this big slope, not as last evening, when always we had an island, now before, now behind, now to our side, as if we were in some inland sea. That is to say that now the sea occupies more than half of the whole circle that we can sweep, though we are only a few rods from shore. Do you realize the difference?

At last we are on the outlying edge of the group, and will soon this afternoon round the island, and stop at the place where we take the road to the volcano of Kilauea.

Sunday night.

At the volcano of Kilauea.

As I wrote I had no notion of the importance and eventfulness of a landing at night. As we came around the hard black cape marked with lava flow it was already dark, so we could not distinctly see the shore, though above were great slopes and some buttresses and heavy hills standing out from the mass. We could see lights at the place called Punaluu, where we were to land. The steamer shrieked and stopped as we prepared to leave it and come down the companion ladder to the heavy boat dancing below it. Women were first dropped in, and one by one gradually we men jumped into the hollow, half packed with trunks and boxes and men balancing themselves in the rolling. Perhaps had I been more accustomed to these forms of landing I might have seen less of a picture; but when I had got down, and watched the next passengers from below, and danced high up to them, and heard them told “Now!” or “Not yet!” as we came too high or too low or struck the bottom of the ladder, (so as to make one wonder whether we should not capsize in a rougher sea), when I could look at their foreshortening, and saw the heavy lower forms of the kanaka ladies, under their flowing drapery, and then saw them tuck their one long outer garment between those legs in a great bunch, to be untied at the next step and heard their discussions, I enjoyed the play, even if I was part of it.

The talk was in kanaka, but its meaning was plain: the two ladies objected to jumping just then or before or after, and it was now too high, now too low, and in general they expressed all possible doubts regarding the process. One of them especially, whom I had seen much of during the day, a massive archaic person, with the manners and features that might have belonged to an Eve of some other, more cannibalistic tradition than ours, poured all this out with a voice heavier than the roar of the water or the grinding of the boat’s gunwale against the companionway and her declamation was answered by a chorus from the boatmen, with the accompaniment of shifting lights, so that my simile of a play was but natural.

At length we were all stowed in and departed, one sailor still standing as he had from the beginning, balanced with a child in his arms. At the little wharf the scene was repeated on a small scale, while above us the one lantern lit the legs of an expectant multitude; and at length we were singled out by the host who was to take care of us, and who had the one single hotel or house, to which we were sent up with a lantern.

Then we rested. Adams had suffered very much from the tossing, so much so as to make me anxious, and I too was much the worse for the wear of the last two hours of resting in harbour while waiting for boats to go out and return. We had some food and rooms given us by the Chinaman factotum, major-domo, cook, servant, etc.; and later our host appeared in his shirt-sleeves, and asked our intentions and whether we were to go right off in the morning to the volcano. Having ascertained these facts, he selected one of the party—we were four, we three and some one else—and to this some one he poured out some information, mainly about the bad sides of the other way to the volcano—the Hilo way; its raininess, and in general all the wrongfulness of Hilo people. With that he also poured forth his bottom thoughts about the whole business that he had charge of, the idiotic way in which people travelled to see the volcano without sufficient practice on other volcanoes beforehand, so that invalids (he called them inwalids) found it difficult to ride on horseback, and some were sometimes thrown from mules, and in general he showed the folly of trusting to the advertisements of his own enterprise. For he is, I understand, a great man, who has this road and runs it. All this I absorbed before going to bed, so as to prepare for the next day, which began early with the Chinaman, and making for the train.

The train is a little engine with two platforms on wheels, that runs to a plantation some few miles off. One platform had a roof for the gentry; the other was loaded with the common people, consisting of some Swedish women and children, some Hawaiians, and one or two young people who belonged to our side, but preferred riding thus, thereby escaping the smoke that we got. We had a watchman and a Chinaman on the engine. At the start we were requested to trim our weights. The Hawaiian lady who had been a tragedy the evening before, was on our side, and whatever side she had taken, that would have been the heavy one. But still we risked it, and ran along the little road which occasionally passed over trestling and did have something of a reason for trimming.

The ride was lovely except for the smoke. We had left the shore at which we had landed the night before, for the car ran to the little jetty, where the sand was as black as ink—volcano dust, with a fringe of white like teeth. Then we slowly gained some heights, and saw behind us the great blue sea and white headlands; black lava looking grey in the sunshine, and to our left the great hills and slopes. And we ran by the sugar-cane and through a country with few or no trees, a great surface of up and down of moors, until we came to the plantation, where we stopped. Everybody had reached home except ourselves, and our accidental companion. We found a covered wagon with two mules and two horses, into which we were packed with difficulty, as our luggage was bulkier than is customary, owing to my not having been able to persuade our host to allow me to reship some that we did not want. He could not “fuss with such matters.” In fact he was right. The whole affair is merely for the convenience of travellers; on the part of the people who undertake it, there is no need of it and one feels indebted to them for the courtesy they show in allowing one to pass through their place, even though they charge for the same.

So we rolled slowly over the great downs, upon some sort of a trail, occasionally perturbed by some stones, or perhaps banked up with no incident. The great mountain was being covered with clouds, but the sea spread far below us, the capes at the corner, and the east of the shore glistening as if silvered, and white upon their local blackness. It was as Newport beaches might look upon a gigantic scale. Here and there a few trees (the ohia), stood up, orange-brown butterflies, Parnassians, flew continually across our path, spotting the entire landscape all busy with their loves. A few birds, plovers, I believe, rose at a distance, or flew across, or with a cry, peewits waved to and fro on the slopes below us.

By and by, at noon, we came to more trees; the landscape became more shut in, the sea disappeared behind the slopes we were leaving, and we took lunch at a convenient shanty where we were well treated, and tasted the native ohia berries. Then we entered a rockier soil, much broken up, with much black dust, and with many trees, all small and as if lost, something like little back country lanes—anywhere.

And this went on and on, and we walked sometimes, in despair of our mules and horses, driven by a driver who urged them with word and whip, and occasionally with stones, without being able to get them much out of a walk, broken by an occasional trot. Then things were colder, and on a landscape of no shape, with blocks of lava thrown over the soil as if by the spade of journeyman or maker of worlds; with ever so many queerly conventional trees,—the ohia before mentioned, which has yellow trumpet flowers—and many others; and at last many ferns, and more ferns, and the tree ferns. We saw on our right some cloudy forms of smoke rising toward the clouds of only a little warmer tint than they, and that was the smoke and steam of Kilauea—which was really below us, hidden under the edge of the desolate plateau we were driving on.

Then we came to more vegetation and many ferns, and we suddenly saw the glance of a sulphur bank, yellow, green, and white, like the surface of certain beans; and we drove up toward the house that stands by the volcano. It was not yet dark, but dark enough to see confusedly the crater just below us, only a few yards away, a mass of black, and high walls around it, and three cones apparently in the distance, with steam about them, and steam issuing near them in many places, so that the further wall was dim. And steam near us came out of crevices at our feet, and on our road, and a little everywhere, where ferns grew richer—and we had arrived.

We went in to make our host’s acquaintance, and got our simple rooms in a sort of rough farmhouse, with doors opening on the verandah, and in front of the crater of the volcano. And we sat later at dinner, and after dinner by the fire (for a fire was pleasant in the damp, cold air), and heard him talk, and spoke to him about Mr. Dana’s book, and the changes in the crater, and all the volcano talk that can come out of the absorption of much reading and much hearing. Maby (our host) talks of danger to his children from the steam fissures just mentioned.

Kilauea—The Volcano.

Maby, the keeper of the hotel, is not the old gentleman of Dana’s book, but a person whom I should describe if I had the time. He is a New Yorker, and has been away since the early war, and has sailed about much in this part of the world. The type is a well known one to us, and amusing enough. He is married to a Hawaiian woman, also shrewd-looking, good-looking, reminding one of many people with us, with a high forehead and thick lips; and has many children who play about, and make the place seem less showlike.

As we gather around the fireplace, Maby tells us stories of himself, and sailor yarns that interest us as regarding places we are looking to. One about Nukahiva has a flavour of Melville about it. It shows Maby landed there, and being told that he must (unless he wishes to behave suspiciously), report to the governor. This official receives the visit graciously, but requires a poll-tax of two dollars, not asking directly, but by the proper channel. Maby states that two dollars he has not, but offers to work it out; whereat he is taken at his word, and helps toward the completion, carpentering and painting, of the governor’s house; and after some long stay, at fair wages, offers to deduct his two dollars. But no, says the governor, he is now in government employ, and not liable to taxation.

In connection with this story, in my sleepy memory, is one of some expedition, with the governor and his army of one gendarme (“jenny dee arms,” Maby calls it), into the interior, or, rather, along the shore, for the purpose of levying the tax. Money there is none at the first place they come to, so that the gendarme is ordered to take a pig or so in payment. But the country has been aroused. Men come flocking down with old flint-guns, a retreat along the beach to the boat is ordered, and the pigs are abandoned on the way. All this was capital, as was Maby’s delight at the absurdity of some savage who knew not of gold, and to whom an Englishman gave a piece of gold instead of silver. As he complained, Maby relieved him of his anxiety by taking it and giving him the desired shilling.

With many stories we sat up and went late to bed, looking out on a darkish night, wherein two slight illuminations at a distance meant the light of the volcano. But nothing looked propitious. Dana Lake was quiet; there was only a little fire on the edges of the lake. Maby spoke as if something must happen elsewhere from the quiet of the volcano here.

In the morning Adams woke me out of sound sleep; the air was cold, damp, and the room decidedly so during the night. As I came out the sun was rising. Before us was the volcano, still in shadow, but the walls of the crater lit up pink in the sun, and farther out the long line of Mauna Loa appearing to come right down to these cliffs, all clear and lit up except for the shadow of one enormous cloud that stretched half across the sky. The floor of the crater, of black lava, was almost all in shadow, so that as it stretched to its sunlit walls it seemed as if all below was shadow. In the centre of the space smoked the cones that rise from the bed of the crater. Through this vapour we saw the further walls, and on the other side of the flow, as it sloped away from us, more steam marked the lava openings at Dana Lake, invisible to us.

We sketched that day and lounged in the afternoon, the rain coming down and shutting out things; but in the noon I

was able to make a sketch in the faint sunlight; and that was of no value, but as I looked and tried to match tints, I realized more and more the unearthly look that the black masses take under the light. A slight radiance from these surfaces of molten black glass gives a curious sheen, that far off in tones of mirage does anything that light reflected can do, and fills the eye with imaginary suggestions. Hence the delightful silver; hence the rosy coldness, that had made fairylands for us of the desert aridity. But nearer, the glitter is like that of the moon on a hard cold night, and the volcano crater I shall always think of as a piece of dead world, and far away in the prismatic tones of the mountain sides, I shall see a revelation of the landscapes of the moon.

Late in the afternoon the young Australian, or whatever he was, who had been with us, went down with a guide into the crater, and returned toward ten o’clock with a story that Dana Lake had broken. He had seen the grey surfaces move and tumble over like ice pack into the fire, and we were proportionately curious to see and unwilling to go. For I must own that it has been rather out of duty than otherwise that we have been here. Neither of us cares for climbing, and certainly the pleasure of seeing fire near by must be very exciting to amount to pleasure. Yet we went next day and toiled down to the surface of the crater, which is accessible from our side by a zigzag path. By and by one gets to the surface of the crater, which rises to the centre and (when one is on it) shows nothing but a desolate labyrinth of rocks. We walk over this tiresome surface that destroys the sole of the boot, following more or less in single file, because of crevasses that are deep, and at the end of a walk of some three miles, we approach the cones that rise high above us, perhaps seventy feet. Maby says that they are higher than they were, for this whole surface of lava is movable, and parts of it like the cones float over a molten surface underneath. Think of it as glass and you will just get the simile that it makes mentally. To the eyes it is rock; around the cones there are loose disorderly rocks piled up like loose stones in a fence—absolutely like it, which loose formation is called a-a in Hawaiian, as the flowing, smooth lava, on which we have mainly walked, is called pa-hoe-hoe. Some of it is in crusts that are hollow to the tread, and that give way suddenly, to one’s annoyance, for it is hard to realize that it is still solid underneath. Especially as here our guide points out a small cone about a mile off, sticking out of a confusion or heap of broken rocks, or above the broken rocks that are before us and below us, for we are now walking on a colossal loose stone fence—far off, I say, in this confusion is a single cone, with a red glow in it. And now we cross a little more fence; the smooth and crusty surface is hot to the feet; we look down and see grey and red lines in the cracks below us that are fire; and then a few feet off, we look into and between some rocks, and see the lava flowing along, exactly like glass when it is cooling and growing red from former whiteness, a slow, viscous, sticky dropping into some hole below. Then we go back quickly and paddle along toward the other slope of the floor, where steam is rising; and by and by, as the light is waning after our two hours’ walk, we get within a short distance of the wall edge, and see a space apparently near higher rocks, some seventy feet high, I am told, which is Dana Lake. There is now only vapour; sulphurous fumes that float up and obscure the distance, and go up into the skies. But as the twilight begins, fires come out and the space is edged with fire that sometimes colours the clouds of vapour. At one side a small cone stands up, that burns with an eye of red fire. From time to time this opening spits out to one side a little vicious blotch of fire. The clouds of vapour rise so as to blur the distance, but near by the rocks are clear enough, and either black, or further off where they are cliffs, are greenish yellow with sulphur. Sizes become uncertain. I could swear that this lake was a thousand feet long and the cliffs were five hundred feet; but Awoki and the guide, walking along, reduce the lake to real proportions. Then it is only a small lake of some hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, perhaps. But the impression still remains—all is so thrown out of reference. The hole is so uncanny; the sky above, purple with the yellow of the afterglow, and partly covered by the yellowish tone of the hellish vapour, looks high up above us. I sit (and sketch) on the absurd rocks, and then we wait for something to happen. It has become night; we determine to give up hope of the breaking up of the lake, and we start. We have lanterns, but gradually these go out, and we have only one that has to be cherished, and we scramble along. By and by we halt, and looking back see greater lights, and our guide says that the lake has broken out. Still we are disinclined to return on the chance, for the vapours exaggerate everything; and after much scrambling we get back to the edge of the crater, after a seven hours’ tramp. As we go up the ascent the fires seem larger, and our host and the guides say that there is some breaking out. Still we are in doubt; we are disappointed and tired. And still I should not go back unless the most extraordinary conflagration occurred. Besides the undefined terror and spookiness of the thing, there is great boredom. There is nothing to take hold of, as it were—no centre of fire and terror—only inconvenience and a faint fear of one thing—but what?

But even without fire, the remainder of those dread hollows is something to affect the mind. Judge Dole was telling us

that he could not get out of his memory his having looked down the hollow of the pit of Halemaumau, then just extinct, and having seen an inverted hollow cone all in motion, with rock and débris rolling down to some indefinite centre far below.

I still have (as I write at Hilo) the scent of sulphur in my memory. From time to time, in our ride to Hilo next morning, this smell would come up, perhaps in reality. That was a bad ride, all over a sort of lava bed like a mountain torrent. Then it ended in the beginning of a road of red earth, soft and spongy, and up to the bellies of the horses. There we met, after fifteen miles of it, a carriage and horses that took us to Hilo, over a pretty road through a pretty tropical forest, to this little old place, the abode of quiet and cocoanut trees, where are very pleasant people; among them M. Furneaux, the artist, who shows us sketches, and talks to me of what I sympathize with—the being driven to means unusual to us, when we try to give an impression of the tone of colour here.

Ride from Hilo around the east of Island of Hawaii, September 19th to 22d.

It will be difficult to give you an account of our ride. As to the places, the names are indifferent, I think, and if I occasionally mention them, it is more for my own help than for yours.

Our ride was to be certainly for three days and more, over what is known as a very bad road; up and down through the gulches that edge the shore, breaking the line of our travel, and making little harbours where the surf ran in to meet the little torrents or runs that hurried to them in cascades or waterfalls. It was, for the first day or so, beautiful; not so very grand, except that the simplicity of the scene, consisting of the sea, high rocks, and some little river running down, had always that importance that belongs to the typical. Time and time again we had the high rocky banks of the little bays covered with trees; then in the centre of the shore, a little half island, with tall cocoanuts, and on one or both sides of it, the torrent and cascade rushing down, and the surf running in in a great lacelike spread over the black sand.

Once when I stopped to sketch for an hour or so, I enjoyed the essence of a type of scene that is with difficulty described, though every one knows it, and with difficulty painted, though any one might attempt it. From the hillside hidden in trees came over some very low rocks a cascade of two rills, and at its feet lay a little sheet of water, of perhaps some fifty yards in length and very narrow. On either side high rocks crowned with great ferns and much moss, and behind the few lauhala (pandanus) trees upon them, and great banana leaves in some hollow. The rocks were black, spotted with green and white, and at their feet ran a little rim of sand. This for the land end of the basin. At the open sea end high rocks running far out into headlands, with many trees and bushes, so as to make walls, along which the sea rushed heavily to some little bar, at one end of which, on a small bluff with huts, grew a few cocoanut trees tossing in the wind: one would wish there were more. And the sea running far up over this sand melted with a cross current into the run of the little stream, so gently that each looked like a separate tide. Here the road crossed the ford, coming on either side from high-up banks. Near the rocks were the marked edges of the road, and up the stream, canoes, with white ends like the cusp of the moon, and white outriggers protected with thatch, lay on the grass.

As I sat on some wet rocks near the sea, to sketch, I could see what happened during the day. Some wayfarer came down the slope, pushed across the stream his horse that put down its head to taste the brackish water; children and older natives crossed barefooted the less deep water; high up, some practised native in best dress, crossed at some well-known ford by adding a few stones. Later, loud cries, and the noise of a sail coming down. I could see them without looking, for I had to paint hard with my face turned the other way, and hurried by occasional showers. For our sky was all cloudy and wet, though faint drops of sunshine fell also here and there. But the horizon, as I sat so low, was all clear of that unearthly blue of the islands, against which danced the grey sea, and the triple line of grey surf, white perhaps otherwise, but dull against such a clearness of green aquamarine air.

Then the fishermen landed on the rocks and showed their fish, and all rushed that way, all but the girl who had come to sit behind me, and followed my work, perhaps to see what I was trying to make out. But she too succumbed when a half naked man held up a silvery fish of some mackerel shape right before me and her, and she ran off to the house near the cocoanut trees. Then the fishermen took off their ragged clothes, and washed them in the stream, within a foot or so of the tide-water; great strapping fellows when out of their clothes, with heavy muscles, splendid and brown like nuts, and sometimes with red breech-clouts, that brought out the olive of the wet skin. Then they bathed, plunging in the deeper channel, where the waves of their movement married the tide of the sea with the current of the stream. And later an old man with peaked grey beard sat down and washed his clothes, then walked in and lay down, he too as handsome in his nakedness, as he had looked broken down in his shabby clothes. Then he rose and slowly put on the wet clothes, to reappear later in a cleaner dress.

And a Chinaman charged across the stream on his mule, splashing the water about him. Then as the fishermen were gone, and all the boys and the women, probably to their meal just caught, all noise ceased, except the rush of the surf and the ripple of the tide, and in some interval the trickling of the little cascade. Above, the wind rustled at times the palms. Noonday and rest had come. And I left my work, and again on horseback trudged along the impossible road.

Sunday 21st.

As I went up the bank, a small furtive animal like a weasel ran up the perpendicular face of the big rock by the waterfall. It was a mongoose, an animal of a race imported to destroy the pest of rats, and now a plague in itself, and an example of the eternal story.

The lower part of the sky was clear, with small pearly clouds, the upper yet covered with heavy mist, so that the ocean was framed as above, and occasionally the view confined on the sides by the projecting rocks of the gulches, into which ran the sea and surf. Once, at Onomea, the cliff was hollowed into a great arch, beyond which the rock, all green with foliage, rose further out. Whether framed in by such cliffs, or stretched out beyond a single gaze, the ocean accompanied us most of the time—the ocean, distinctly, not recalling the seas of our shores, but the great sea, hiding the secret of its blue dyes in depths of full three thousand fathoms. And over its blue ran a perpetual story. Rarely during our few days was the whole surface under one influence. We saw faint mists and rain-clouds brushed over the water, often separated by intervals of sunny sapphire; the sky above still lit up and peaceful. Sometimes a part of the ocean was wiped out and became sky; sometimes great bars of grey broke across it; and again, as these rolled over the stilled edge of the waves, rainbows shone either where they joined the sea, or through their entire height, up into the upper air. For this great deceptive space seemed at our distance so peaceful, even when we could see the surf dashing in folds on the rocks and black beaches. Sometimes a solitary whitecap dotted it, or when the wind blew more, many spots of broken light threw a rosy bloom over the enchanted surface. Islands of reflected light, islands of purple shadow repeated the clouds above, and often the parent cloud, along with its reflected lights and its shadows, touched and melted into the waves, making enclosures, within which the eye could see vaguely, a trembling repetition of light and dark; and sometimes, perhaps most when

seen as a background to some trees or rocks, or grey native hut, with a figure in waving red or white framed in the blue opening through it, the distance and the sky melted into mere spaces of slightly different colour.

The eye never tired of this surface of blue below a greener sky, that repeated in the air that colour of greenness (blue-tint shade) that rests the sight. On land, meanwhile, our roads were good or bad, mostly bad, but not the terrors that we had heard of. Our poor nags struggled through deep mud at times, or slipped up and down in the rocks and loose stones of the gulches, or floundered in the river-beds, dropping up and down as they found footing on hidden boulders, or cantered in a tired way over some little piece of road near plantations. But their attention was mostly engaged in stepping along over the half-dried road, looking and feeling like our old “corduroy” roads, the logs being represented by bars of higher and drier mud. Over these we rose and sank, and I had plenty of time to meditate upon the idiocy of that sentimental animal, the horse, and his relative want of judgment. Never did our beasts step in any reasoned way upon these alternations of ground, though the little mule of our guide, as he trotted ahead, never going very fast, never very slow, showed his romantic relatives what pure intellect, devoid of emotions, can do in the practical line. With such nonsense I perforce diverted my mind, when confined within the limits of the road. But our horses had plenty of rest; we took four whole days for those ninety miles, stopping to sketch, and going to ask for lunch or dinner, and bed, at the plantations on our road. The only difficulty seemed to be our own hesitation at the impudence of our requests. But this is the custom. Our visit had been telephoned ahead by acquaintances; for the telephone, that most citylike of our contrivances, goes around the island, joining together places that are difficult to reach and out of the way.

And so we met pleasant people by chance, and heard about things accidentally by way of conversation, and were most kindly treated. Indeed, when on one occasion our amiable hostess asked us to remain over night, and we had listened to German music, and had talked with the doctor in charge of the plantations, and our host himself arrived from the fields, it seemed hard to go and break our feeling of content. Perhaps I ought to tell you something about the plantations, but that is too much like information—and what do you need it for? All that we saw was sugar, which occupies the east coast; on the other side of the island, as different as the other side of the continent, there are cattle ranches, and we were told that most of the sugar land that is available has been taken already. Most of the low land, I suppose; for the upper land further from the sea is often reclaimed and used, but it is less favourable. The yield by the acre below, at the highest, has been about eight tons, while the upper is not more than five; all this upon land which a few years ago was forest—wide downs now—covered either with sugar-cane or grass, and dotted with trees, were all covered to the sea edge, which, where I write now is a cliff fully eight hundred feet high.

The sugar plantations employ many Chinese and Japanese labourers, of whom there are a good many thousand, and we saw on two occasions “camps” of Japanese, as they are called. In the shops or stores attached to one plantation (as in others), I saw the Japanese costume again, for men and women—the kimono and the obi and the geta or wooden clogs; of course they are mostly peasants or of low class, as I could easily surmise without inquiring, by Awoki’s manner. “They are great children,” says our good lady to me, and the doctor at one residence has much to say about the anomalous position he stands in with regard to them and others. He is employed by the government to inspect them, as well as other hands, to see that they are not made to work in illness, and he also examines the flock, in the interest of the employers, to see that they do not shirk. The result is that he is a physician who cannot trust the word of his patient about his ailings, after his patient has made up his mind to be ill, who if one ailing is dismissed, will call up as many as may seem available—and inscrutable. I am told that the Japanese illness, kakke, or as they call it here, biri biri, persists among them. It is a form of slow paralysis, having its premonitory symptoms; sometimes to be cured, but not often. The patients, not white, have the better chance if they be under competent care, for the government gives free medical attention, and I understood that many avail themselves of it who could as well pay.

I need not say that the great tariff question is that of the moment; free sugar with us will shake the Hawaiian tree, and weaker planters will go to the wall. I always feel regret when I see all put into one chance, so liable to fluctuation, and it is to be hoped that coffee, which here is excellent, may succeed and grow more available. I take it that the difficulty is always in the picking, and that there may be chance for some improvement in the facility.

September 22d.

Our last sugar plantation took us to the edge of the great valley of Waipio, from one to two thousand feet deep, at the further and higher inland end of which drops a great waterfall; from its outside sea-cliffs trickle down others from the lesser height of eight hundred. But all was wrapped in mist, for at this point of our ride we had almost the only bad weather of the trip. Here we turned toward the other side of the island, across great downs and spreads of land like those we had seen on first landing on the island. We were out of the rainy influence. The whole spread of the landscape was that of dryness; of the “Sierras”; we rode at first through vast fields or spreads of green, where the path was marked by the rooting of the pigs, who here run loose and grow wild. A great mountain slope rose to our left—Mauna Kea—and as we dipped to the sea we had Mount Hualalai to continue it. But that was after we had stopped on our last day’s ride in a dry country, where distances swam in the pale colours that belong to the volcanoes and the desert, while near us green marked the foreground.

We rested and dreamed in midday, at some hospitable residence, from whose verandah, in the great heat, we saw Hawaiians coursing recklessly about in the way you would like to ride; and cattle on many hills; while the young ladies in the shade made garlands (leis) for us to wear around our necks and hats on our last ride to the shore. Adams and I rode slowly down, a mile behind the others, in the blazing afternoon, a most delicious air breaking the heat; with that same sense of space that had accompanied our first day ashore. And as the sun set like a clear ball of fire over the blue sea, and sent rosy flickerings to the shore, we came down to the edges of the bay.

Above us to the left rose a hill crowned with the remains of some one building that trailed down its side, still red in the sunlight. To our right were palms and black sand and enclosures, apparently deserted, and with an afterglow like that of Egypt, a look of desolate Africa. In the dark we passed over the black sand, and behind the trees through which the moon moved restlessly in the water, and came up to an absurd little hotel kept by a Chinaman, where we dismounted among black pigs charging about, and bade good-bye to amiable Mr. Much, our guide, who had preceded us.

Then we met, at tea, the manager of the last place (Waimea) we had dined at. He told me of what I had missed by not getting in in the morning—the shipping of the steers, which are parked out on the shore, then singled out and lassoed by the “boys,” whom they rush after into the sea, where it is the horse and rider’s business to get them to the boats. To these their heads are secured, and they are rowed off swimming, willy-nilly, to the steamers, into which some contrivance hoists them.

These cattle came, I understand, from the great ranch of Mr. Sam Parker up in the mountains, a wealthy Hawaiian of partly white blood, whose name is well known besides as giving hospitality in a lordly way in his lonely domain.

And in the evening we waited for the steamer, not in the house of refuge and food, where water was scarce, and where poor Mr. Much could get nothing to eat, as being too late; but near by, under a verandah or wide canopy of palm branches lit up by the moonlight. There we listened to Hawaiian music—while our older hosts sat on the mats—melancholy chants adapted to European airs, and among them one apparently original, a sad, romantic sort of cakewalk, to which one could fancy dusky savage warriors keeping time, with many foliage-adorned feet, and hands tossed up and pointing out. It was called the March of Kamehameha (the old conqueror of these islands), and I let myself understand that it was a reproduction of the veritable sounds that once celebrated his triumphs and mastery over these islands; from which dates the royalty now existing, though his royal race itself is extinct.

And we, too, stretched on the mats brought out, and listened to lazy talk in the language, until the steamer came, when all walked down in time to the wharf, after the sheep and the freight had been put on board, and we rowed out on the water smooth as that of a lake, to the little steamer, and later went to bed and waited until morning, when we steamed for the next port and thence to Honolulu, and our own house in the valley.

We met on board many pleasant people, and among others a former neighbour, though unknown, who is now one of the few American missionaries in the Islands. These, I think he told me, are all that remain who are salaried from America. He spoke to us about Mr. Hyde, whom Mr. Stevenson had been attacking, as if he belonged to him by his name; and explained how exaggerated was the notion of this gentleman’s affluence. All, I understand, that he gets, besides what his wealthy family allow him (and for that he could not be held responsible), is some two thousand five hundred a year and his residence—surely not a large amount. I have not myself read all that Mr. Stevenson has written, so that I have but a vague idea of the question, but my informant tells me that Father Damien, as is well understood, was no saint, and that two pastors had told him of things that looked wrong. These are themselves rather vague to the outsider, but much weight seemed to attach to them with our informant—a gentlemanly person, who looked little like the usual clergyman, and had a brave air of the church militant about him. But it was more pleasant to talk to him about St. Gaudens, whom he knew, and about what he had done of late years; for everywhere we find that there are others who know friends; and the desert of Gobi alone would be without home associations.

At Sea, Oct. 2, 1890.

Yesterday we crossed the equator; it was cool and pleasant, as lovely as one could wish. In the evening I found an overcoat comfortable. To-day it is more salty and cloudy, wind behind us more from the north; indefinable blue sea that looks grey against the delicate blue and silver of the sky, but near by, under the guards, it is like a greener lapis lazuli.

Yesterday, as I wrote, we crossed the equator, and left it with disrespect behind us, almost unnoticed—the Line, as they used to call it. And soon we shall have dropped the sun also, which would, were there no clouds, no abundant awnings, leave us with diminished shadows, insufficient to cover our feet. And at the thought of dropping him, the old Taoist wish of getting outside the points of the compass comes over me, the feeling that leads me to travel. Can we never get to see things as they are, and is there always a geographical perspective? Should I reach Typee shall I find it invaded by others? Shall I find everywhere the company of our steamers?

On Sunday morning we shall be dropped into a boat off Tutuila, some sixty miles away from the Samoa to which we go. How long we stay as I told you, I do not know, but we think of Tahiti later, and even other places, that I dare not think of, for I must return some day. But before that day, I wish to have seen a Fayaway sail her boat in some other Typee.

PASSAGES FROM A DIARY IN THE PACIFIC

SAMOA