The Hawaiian Archipelago by Isabella Lucy Bird (librera reader txt) 📖

with a sound like artillery, sending their broad white sheets of foam high up among the ferns and trailers, and drowning for a time the endless baritone of the surf, which is never silent through the summer years. Cascades in numbers took one impulsive leap from the cliffs into the sea, or came thundering down clefts or "gulches," which, widening at their extremities, opened on smooth green lawns, each one of which has its grass house or houses, kalo patch, bananas, and coco-palms, so close to the broad Pacific that its spray often frittered itself away over their fan-like leaves. Above the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green, bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. Creation surely cannot exhibit a more brilliant green than that which clothes windward Hawaii with perpetual spring. I have never seen such verdure. In the final twenty-nine miles there are more than sixty gulches, from 100 to 700 feet in depth, each with its cataracts, and wild vagaries of tropical luxuriance. Native churches, frame-built and painted white, are almost like mile-stones along the coast, far too large and too many for the notoriously dwindling population. Ten miles from Hilo we came in sight of the first sugar plantation, with its patches of yet brighter green, its white boiling house and tall chimney stack; then more churches, more plantations, more gulches, more houses, and before ten we steamed into Byron's, or as it is now called Hilo Bay.

This is the paradise of Hawaii. What Honolulu attempts to be, Hilo is without effort. Its crescent-shaped bay, said to be the most beautiful in the Pacific, is a semi-circle of about two miles, with its farther extremity formed by Cocoanut Island, a black lava islet on which this palm attains great perfection, and beyond it again a fringe of cocoanuts marks the deep indentations of the shore. From this island to the north point of the bay, there is a band of golden sand on which the roar of the surf sounded thunderous and drowsy as it mingled with the music of living waters, the Waiakea and the Wailuku, which after lashing the sides of the mountains which give them birth, glide deep and fern-fringed into the ocean. Native houses, half hidden by greenery, line the bay, and stud the heights above the Wailuku, and near the landing some white frame houses and three church spires above the wood denote the foreign element. Hilo is unique. Its climate is humid, and the long repose which it has enjoyed from rude volcanic upheavals has mingled a great depth of vegetable mould with the decomposed lava. Rich soil, rain, heat, sunshine, stimulate nature to supreme efforts, and there is a luxuriant prodigality of vegetation which leaves nothing uncovered but the golden margin of the sea, and even that above high-water- mark is green with the Convolvulus maritimus. So dense is the wood that Hilo is rather suggested than seen. It is only on shore that one becomes aware of its bewildering variety of native and exotic trees and shrubs. From the sea it looks one dense mass of greenery, in which the bright foliage of the candle-nut relieves the glossy dark green of the breadfruit--a maze of preposterous bananas, out of which rise slender annulated trunks of palms giving their infinite grace to the grove. And palms along the bay, almost among the surf, toss their waving plumes in the sweet soft breeze, not "palms in exile," but children of a blessed isle where "never wind blows loudly." Above Hilo, broad lands sweeping up cloudwards, with their sugar cane, kalo, melons, pine-apples, and banana groves suggest the boundless liberality of Nature. Woods and waters, hill and valley are all there, and from the region of an endless summer the eye takes in the domain of an endless winter, where almost perpetual snow crowns the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Mauna Kea from Hilo has a shapely aspect, for its top is broken into peaks, said to be the craters of extinct volcanoes, but my eyes seek the dome-like curve of Mauna Loa with far deeper interest, for it is as yet an unfinished mountain. It has a huge crater on its summit 800 feet in depth, and a pit of unresting fire on its side; it throbs and rumbles, and palpitates; it has sent forth floods of fire over all this part of Hawaii, and at any moment it may be crowned with a lonely light, showing that its tremendous forces are again in activity. My imagination is already inflamed by hearing of marvels, and I am beginning to think tropically.

Canoes came off from the shore, dusky swimmers glided through the water, youths, athletes, like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, rode the waves on their surf-boards, brilliantly dressed riders galloped along the sands and came trooping down the bridle-paths from all the vicinity till a many-coloured tropical crowd had assembled at the landing. Then a whaleboat came off, rowed by eight young men in white linen suits and white straw hats, with wreaths of carmine- coloured flowers round both hats and throats. They were singing a glee in honour of Mr. Ragsdale, whom they sprang on deck to welcome. Our crowd of native fellow-passengers, by some inscrutable process, had re-arrayed themselves and blossomed into brilliancy. Hordes of Hilo natives swarmed on deck, and it became a Babel of alohas, kisses, hand-shakings, and reiterated welcomes. The glee singers threw their beautiful garlands of roses and ohias over the foreign passengers, and music, flowers, good-will and kindliness made us welcome to these enchanted shores. We landed in a whaleboat, and were hoisted up a rude pier which was crowded, for what the arrival of the Australian mail-steamer is to Honolulu, the coming of the Kilauea is to Hilo. I had not time to feel myself a stranger, there were so many introductions, and so much friendliness. Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyman, two of the most venerable of the few surviving missionaries, were on the landing, and I was introduced to them and many others. There is no hotel in Hilo. The residents receive strangers, and Miss Karpe and I were soon installed in a large buff frame-house, with two deep verandahs, the residence of Mr. Severance, Sheriff of Hawaii.

Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer acquaintance, so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose. Two narrow roads lead up from the sea to one as narrow, running parallel with it. Further up the hill another runs in the same direction. There are no conveyances, and outside the village these narrow roads dwindle into bridle-paths, with just room for one horse to pass another. The houses in which Mr. Coan, Mr. Lyman, Dr. Wetmore (formerly of the Mission), and one or two others live, have just enough suggestion of New England about them to remind one of the dominant influence on these islands, but the climate has idealized them, and clothed them with poetry and antiquity.

Of the three churches, the most prominent is the Roman Catholic Church, a white frame building with two great towers; Mr. Coan's native church with a spire comes next; and then the neat little foreign church, also with a spire. The Romish Church is a rather noisy neighbour, for its bells ring at unnatural hours, and doleful strains of a band which cannot play either in time or tune proceed from it. The court-house, a large buff painted frame-building with two deep verandahs, standing on a well-kept lawn planted with exotic trees, is the most imposing building in Hilo. All the foreigners have carried out their individual tastes in their dwellings, and the result is very agreeable, though in picturesqueness they must yield the plain to the native houses, which whether of frame, or grass plain or plaited, whether one or two storied, all have the deep thatched roofs and verandahs plain or fantastically latticed, which are so in harmony with the surroundings. These lattices and single and double verandahs are gorgeous with trailers, and the general warm brown tint of the houses contrasts pleasantly with the deep green of the bananas which over-shadow them. There are living waters everywhere. Each house seems to possess its pure bright stream, which is arrested in bathing houses to be liberated among kalo patches of the brightest green. Every verandah appears a gathering place, and the bright holukus of the women, the gay shirts and bandanas of the men, the brilliant wreaths of natural flowers which adorn both, the hot-house temperature, the new trees and flowers which demand attention, the strange rich odours, and the low monotonous recitative which mourns through the groves make me feel that I am in a new world. Ah, this is all Polynesian! This must be the land to which the "timid-eyed" lotos-eaters came. There is a strange fascination in the languid air, and it is strangely sweet "to dream of fatherland" . . . I.L.B.



LETTER IV.

HILO, HAWAII.

I find that I can send another short letter before leaving for the volcano. I cannot convey to you any idea of the greenness and lavish luxuriance of this place, where everything flourishes, and glorious trailers and parasitic ferns hide all unsightly objects out of sight. It presents a bewildering maze of lilies, roses, fuschias, clematis, begonias, convolvuli, the huge appalling looking granadilla, the purple and yellow water lemons, also varieties of passiflora, both with delicious edible fruit, custard apples, rose apples, mangoes, mangostein guavas, bamboos, alligator pears, oranges, tamarinds, papayas, bananas, breadfruit, magnolias, geraniums, candle-nut, gardenias, dracaenas, eucalyptus, pandanus, ohias, {59a} kamani trees, kalo, {59b} noni, {59c} and quantities of other trees and flowers, of which I shall eventually learn the names, patches of pine-apple, melons, and sugar-cane for children to suck, kalo and sweet potatoes.

In the vicinity of this and all other houses, Chili peppers, and a ginger-plant with a drooping flower-stalk with a great number of blossoms, which when not fully developed have a singular resemblance to very pure porcelain tinted with pink at the extremities of the buds, are to be seen growing in "yards," to use a most unfitting Americanism. I don't know how to introduce you to some of the things which delight my eyes here; but I must ask you to believe that the specimens of tropical growths which we see in conservatories at home are in general either misrepresentations, or very feeble representations of these growths in their natural homes. I don't allude to flowers, and especially not to orchids, but in this instance very specially to bananas, coco-palms, and the pandanus. For example, there is a specimen of the Pandanus odoratissimus in the palm-house in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, which is certainly a malignant caricature, with its long straggling branches, and widely scattered tufts of poverty stricken foliage. The bananas and plantains in that same palm-house represent only the feeblest and poorest of their tribe. They require not only warmth and moisture, but the generous sunshine of the tropics for