The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 18

A little way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the horses munched it by the way with relish. Candle-nut trees with their white foliage stood in groves. Bread-fruits were here and there, but never well-to-do; Hawaii is no true mother for the bread-fruit or the cocoa-palm. Mangoes, on the other hand, attained a splendid bigness, many of them discoloured on one side with a purplish hue which struck the note of autumn. The same note was repeated by a certain aerial creeper, which drops (you might suppose) from heaven like the wreck of an old kite, and roosts on tree-tops with a pendent raffle of air-roots, the whole of a colour like a wintry beech’s. These are clannish plants; five or six may be quartered on a single tree, thirty or forty on a grove; the wood dies under them to skeletons; and they swing there, like things hung out from washing, over the death they have provoked.

We had now turned southward towards Kaa, following a shapeless bridle-track which is the high road of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand. Our way was across – the woods we threaded did but cling upon – the vast declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle, delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew’s cross against the sea and sky, certainly fifty yards from where I rode, and five feet at least from either tree: so wide was its death-gossamer spread, so huge the ugly vermin.

Presently the sea was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their fronds above a horseman’s head. High over these, the dead and the living rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our excursion. The schoolmaster and certain others of Hookena had recently bought a tract of land for some four thousand dollars; set out coffee; and hired a Chinaman to mind it. The thing was notable in itself; natives selling land is a thing of daily custom; of natives buying, I have heard no other instance; and it was civil to show interest. “But when,” I asked, “shall we come to your coffee plantation?” “This is it,” said he, and pointed down. Their bushes grew on the path-side; our horses breasted them as they went by; and the gray wood on every hand enclosed and over-arched that thread of cultivation.

A little farther, we strung in single file through the hot crypt, our horses munching grass, their riders chewing unpalatable gum collected from a tree. Next the wood opened, and we issued forth again into the day on the precipitous broadside of the isle. A village was before us: a Catholic church and perhaps a dozen scattered houses, some of grass in the old island fashion, others spick-and-span with outside stair and balcony and trellis, and white paint and green, in the more modern taste. One arrested my attention; it stood on the immediate verge of a deep precipice: two stories high, with double balconies, painted white, and showing by my count fifteen windows. “There is a fine house,” said I. “Outside,” returned the schoolmaster drily. “That is the way with natives; they spend money on the outside. Let us go there: you will find they live in the verandah and have no furniture.” We were made welcome, sure enough, on the verandah; and in the lower room, which I entered, there was not a chair or table; only mats on the floor, and photographs and lithographs upon the wall. The house was an eidolon, designed to gladden the eye and enlarge the heart of the proprietor returning from Hookena; and its fifteen windows were only to be numbered from without. Doubtless that owner had attained his end; for I observed, when we were home again at Hookena, and Nahinu was describing our itinerary to his wife, he mentioned we had baited at Ka-hale-nui – “the great house.”

The photographs were of the royal family; that goes without saying in Hawaii; of the two lithographs, made in San Francisco, one I knew at the first sight for General Garfield: the second tempted and tantalised me; it could not be, I thought – and yet it must; it was this dubiety which carried me across the threshold; and behold! It was indeed the Duke of Thunder, his name printed under his effigies in the Hawaiianised form of Nelesona. I thought it a fine instance of fame that his features and his empty sleeve should have been drawn on stone in San Fransisco, which was a lone Mexican mission while he lived; and lettered for a market in those islands, which were not yet united under Kamehameha when he died. And then I had a cold fit, and wondered after all if these good folk knew anything of the man’s world-shaking deeds and gunpowder weaknesses, or if he was to them a “bare appellation” and a face on stone; and turning to the schoolmaster, I asked of him the question. Yes, the Hawaiians knew of Nelesona; there had been a story in the papers where he figured, and the portrait had been given for a supplement. So he was known as a character of Romance! Brave men since Agamemnon, like the brave before, must patiently expect the “inspired author.” And nowhere has fiction deeper roots than in the world of Polynesia. They are all tellers and hearers of tales; and the first requisite of any native paper is a story from the English or the French. These are of all sorts, and range from the works of good Miss Porter to The Lightning Detective. Miss Porter, I was told, was “drawing” in Hawaii; and Dumas and the Arabian Nights were named as having pleased extremely.

Our homeward way was down the hill and by the sea in the black open. We traversed a waste of shattered lava; spires, ravines, well-holes showing the entrance to vast subterranean vaults in whose profundities our horse-hooves doubtless echoed. The whole was clothed with stone fiorituri fantastically fashioned, like débris from the workshop of some brutal sculptor: dog’s heads, devils, stone trees, and gargoyles broken in the making. From a distance, so intricate was the detail, the side of a hummock wore the appearance of some coarse and dingy sort of coral, or a scorched growth of heather. Amid this jumbled wreck, naked itself, and the evidence of old disaster, frequent plants found root: rose-apples bore their rosy flowers; and a bush between a cypress and a juniper attained at times a height of twenty feet.

The breakneck path had descended almost to the sea, and we were already within sound of its reverberations, when a cliff hove up suddenly on the landward hand, very rugged and broken, streaked with white lichen, laddered with green lianas, and pierced with the apertures of half a hundred caves. Two of these were piously sealed with doors, the wood scarce weathered. For the Hawaiian remembers the repository of the bones of old, and is still jealous of the safety of ancestral relics. Nor without cause. For the white man comes and goes upon the hunt for curiosities; and one (it is rumoured) consults soothsayers and explores the caves of Kona after the fabled treasures of Kamehameha.

CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF REFUGE

Our way was northward on the naked lava of the coast. The schoolmaster led the march on a trumpeting black stallion; not without anxious thought, I followed after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day, and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the margin.

The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature’s making, endlessly vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is, cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting. Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag, green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam. Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too, their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of aromatic plants.

We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac, red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed, he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. “Will you be at school to-morrow?” “Yes, sir.” “Do you like school?” “Yes, sir.” “Do you like bathing?” “No, ma’am,” with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden, of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a pound-master’s notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre, melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell, and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable’s length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts – the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the heiau, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at Honaunau. First to the keeper’s wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some unknown crevice of that caverned isle.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in a drawing, more effectively in words. “Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of ‘the mighty dead’ reposing in the house adjoining… Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness… The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited… However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks’ teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoanut fibre, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged.” Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded.

Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without. The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them their toil and danger.

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.

The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to identify. It was this missionary’s habit to go walking in the morning ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea. The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people, observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary’s path, and drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began to press the King with Christianity. “If you will throw yourself from that cliff,” said Kamehameha, “and come down uninjured, I will accept your religion: not unless.” But the missionary was a man of parts; he wrote a deep impression on his hearer’s mind, and after he had left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King’s servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other’s; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King’s men were dragged in a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance; the King’s misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his son’s estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the King. “A man to your god!” they urged – “a man to your god, that you may recover!” “The man is sacred to (my son) the King,” replied Kamehameha. So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead) that which he had spared to do while living.

No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: “If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it.” The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King’s death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. “(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together.” He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis.

The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820), all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.