The Hawaiian Archipelago, Isabella Lucy Bird [list of ebook readers txt] 📗

land, and at daylight we anchored in Koloa Roads. The view is a pleasant one. The rains have been abundant, and the land, which here rises rather gradually from the sea, is dotted with houses, abounds in signs of cultivation, and then spreads up into a rolling country between precipitous ranges of mountains. The hills look something like those of Oahu, but their wonderful greenness denotes a cooler climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features, one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me impune lacessit most literally applies.

I had not time to tell you before that this trip to Kauai was hastily arranged for me by several of my Honolulu friends, some of whom gave me letters of introduction, while others wrote forewarning their friends of my arrival. I am often reminded of Hazael's question, "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" There is no inn or boarding house on the island, and I had hitherto believed that I could not be concussed into following the usual custom whereby a traveller throws himself on the hospitality of the residents. Yet, under the influence of Honolulu persuasions, I am doing this very thing, but with an amount of mauvaise honte and trepidation, which I will not voluntarily undergo again.

My first introduction was to Mrs. Smith, wife of a secular member of the Mission, and it requested her to find means of forwarding me a distance of twenty-three miles. Her son was at the landing with a buggy, a most unpleasant index of the existence of carriage roads, and brought me here; and Mrs. Smith most courteously met me at the door. When I presented my letter I felt like a thief detected in a first offence, but I was at once made welcome, and my kind hosts insist on my remaining with them for some days. Their house is a pretty old-fashioned looking tropical dwelling, much shaded by exotics, and the parlour is homelike with new books. There are two sons and two daughters at home, all, as well as their parents, interesting themselves assiduously in the welfare of the natives. Six bright-looking native girls are receiving an industrial training in the house. Yesterday being Sunday, the young people taught a Sunday school twice, besides attending the native church, an act of respect to Divine service in Hawaiian which always has an influence on the native attendance.

We have had some beautiful rides in the neighbourhood. It is a wild, lonely, picturesque coast, and the Pacific moans along it, casting itself on it in heavy surges, with a singularly dreary sound. There are some very fine specimens of the phenomena called "blow-holes" on the shore, not like the "spouting cave" at Iona, however. We spent a long time in watching the action of one, though not the finest. At half tide this "spouting horn" throws up a column of water over sixty feet in height from a very small orifice, and the effect of the compressed air rushing through a crevice near it, sometimes with groans and shrieks, and at others with a hollow roar like the warning fog-horn on a coast, is magnificent, when, as to-day, there is a heavy swell on the coast.

Kauai is much out of the island world, owing to the infrequent visits of the Kilauea, but really it is only twelve hours by steam from the capital. Strangers visit it seldom, as it has no active volcano like Hawaii, or colossal crater like Maui, or anything sensational of any kind. It is called the "Garden Island," and has no great wastes of black lava and red ash like its neighbours. It is queerly shaped, almost circular, with a diameter of from twenty- eight to thirty miles, and its area is about 500 square miles. Waialeale, its highest mountain, is 4,800 feet high, but little is known of it, for it is swampy and dangerous, and a part of it is a forest-covered and little explored tableland, terminating on the sea in a range of perpendicular precipices 2,000 feet in depth, so steep it is said, that a wild cat could not get round them. Owing to these, and the virtual inaccessibility of a large region behind them, no one can travel round the island by land, and small as it is, very little seems to be known of portions of its area.

Kauai has apparently two centres of formation, and its mountains are thickly dotted with craters. The age and density of the vegetation within and without those in this Koloa district, indicate a very long cessation from volcanic action. It is truly an oddly contrived island. An elevated rolling region, park-like, liberally ornamented with clumps of ohia, lauhala, hau, (hibiscus) and koa, and intersected with gullies full of large eugenias, lies outside the mountain spurs behind Koloa. It is only the tropical trees, specially the lauhala or "screw pine," the whimsical shapes of outlying ridges, which now and then lie like the leaves in a book, and the strange forms of extinct craters, which distinguish it from some of our most beautiful park scenery, such as Windsor Great Park or Belvoir. It is a soft tranquil beauty, and a tolerable road which owes little enough to art, increases the likeness to the sweet home scenery of England. In this part of the island the ground seems devoid of stones, and the grass is as fine and smooth as a race course.

The latest traces of volcanic action are found here. From the Koloa Ridge to, and into the sea, a barren uneven surface of pahoehoe extends, often bulged up in immense bubbles, some of which have partially burst, leaving caverns, one of which, near the shore, is paved with the ancient coral reef!

The valleys of Kauai are long, and widen to the sea, and their dark rich soil is often ten feet deep. On the windward side the rivers are very numerous and picturesque. Between the strong winds and the lightness of the soil, I should think that like some parts of the Highlands, "it would take a shower every day." The leeward side, quite close to the sea, is flushed and nearly barren, but there is very little of this desert region. Kauai is less legible in its formation than the other islands. Its mountains, from their impenetrable forests, dangerous breaks, and swampiness, are difficult of access, and its ridges are said to be more utterly irregular, its lavas more decomposed, and its natural sections more completely smothered under a profuse vegetation than those of any other island in the tropical Pacific. Geologists suppose, from the degradation of its ridges, and the absence of any recent volcanic products, that it is the oldest of the group, but so far as I have read, none of them venture to conjecture how many ages it has taken to convert its hard basalt into the rich soil which now sustains trees of enormous size. If this theory be correct, the volcanoes must have gone on dying out from west to east, from north to south, till only Kilauea remains, and its energies appear to be declining. The central mountain of this island is built of a heavy ferruginous basalt, but the shore ridges contain less iron, are more porous, and vary in their structure from a compact phonolite, to a ponderous basalt.

The population of Kauai is a widely scattered one of 4,900, and as it is an out of the world region the people are probably better, and less sophisticated. They are accounted rustics, or "pagans," in the classical sense, elsewhere. Horses are good and very cheap, and the natives of both sexes are most expert riders. Among their feats, are picking up small coins from the ground while going at full gallop, or while riding at the same speed wringing off the heads of unfortunate fowls, whose bodies are buried in the earth.

There are very few foreigners, and they appear on the whole a good set, and very friendly among each other. Many of them are actively interested in promoting the improvement of the natives, but it is uphill work, and ill-rewarded, at least on earth. The four sugar plantations employ a good deal of Chinese labour, and I fear that the Chinamen are stealthily tempting the Hawaiians to smoke opium.

All the world over, however far behind aborigines are in the useful arts, they exercise a singular ingenuity in devising means for intoxicating and stupifying themselves. On these islands distillation is illegal, and a foreigner is liable to conviction and punishment for giving spirits to a native Hawaiian, yet the natives contrive to distil very intoxicating drinks, specially from the root of the ti tree, and as the spirit is unrectified it is both fiery and unwholesome. Licences to sell spirits are confined to the capital. In spite of the notoriously bad effect of alcohol in the tropics, people drink hard, and the number of deaths which can be distinctly traced to spirit drinking is quite startling.

The prohibition on selling liquor to natives is the subject of incessant discussions and "interpellations" in the national legislature. Probably all the natives agree in regarding it as a badge of the "inferiority of colour;" but I have been told generally that the most intelligent and thoughtful among them are in favour of its continuance, on the ground that if additional facilities for drinking were afforded, the decrease in the population would be accelerated. In the printed "Parliamentary Proceedings," I see that petitions are constantly presented praying that the distillation of spirits may be declared free, while a few are in favour of "total prohibition." Another prayer is "that Hawaiians may have the same privileges as white people in buying and drinking spirituous liquors."

A bill to repeal the invidious distinction was brought into the legislature not long since; but the influence of the descendants of the missionaries and of an influential part of the white community is so strongly against spirit drinking, as well as against the sale of drink to the natives, that the law remains on the Statute-book.

The tone in which it was discussed is well indicated by the language of Kalakaua, the present king's rival: "The restrictions imposed by this law do the people no good, but rather harm; for instead of inculcating the principles of honour, they teach them to steal behind the bar, the stable, and the closet, where they may be sheltered from the eyes of the law. The heavy licence imposed on the liquor dealers, and the prohibition against selling to the natives are an infringement of our civil rights, binding not only the purchaser but the dealer against acquiring and possessing property. Then, Mr. President, I ask, where lies virtue, where lies justice? Not in those that bind the liberty of this people, by refusing them the privilege that they now crave, of drinking spirituous liquors without restriction. Will you by persisting that this law remain in force make us a nation of hypocrites? or will you repeal it, that honour and virtue may for once be yours, O Hawaii." A committee of the Assembly, in reporting on the question of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicants to anybody, through its chairman, Mr. Carter, stated, "Experience teaches that such prohibition could not be enforced without a strong public sentiment to indorse it, and such a sentiment does not prevail