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HONOLULU, MARCH, 1866.
OUR ARRIVAL ELABORATED A LITTLE
MORE
We came in sight of two of this group of islands, Oahu
and Molokai (pronounced O-waw-hoo and Mollo-ki), on
the morning of the 18th, and soon exchanged the dark blue
waters of the deep sea for the brilliant light blue of
"sounding." The fat, ugly birds (said to be a species of
albatross) which had skimmed after us on tireless wings
clear across the ocean, left us, and an occasional flying
fish went skimming over the water in their stead. Oahu
loomed high, rugged, treeless, barren, black and dreary,
out of the sea, and in the distance Molokai lay like a
homely swaybacked whale on the water.
THE HAWAIIAN FLAG
As we rounded the promontory of Diamond Head (bringing
into view a grove of coconut trees, first ocular proof that
we were in the tropics), we ran up the Stars and Stripes at
the main spencer gaff, and the Hawaiian flag at the fore.
The latter is suggestive of the prominent political
elements of the Islands. It is part French, part English,
part American, and is Hawaiian in general. The union is the
English cross; the remainder of the flag (horizontal
stripes) looks American, but has a blue French stripe in
addition to our red and white ones. The flag was gotten up
by foreign legations in council with the Hawaiian
Government. The eight stripes refer to the eight islands
which are inhabited; the other four are barren rocks
incapable of supporting a population.
REFLECTIONS
As we came in sight we fired a gun, and a good part of
Honolulu turned out to welcome the steamer. It was Sunday
morning, and about church time, and we steamed through the
narrow channel to the music of six different church bells,
which sent their mellow tones far and wide, over hills and
valleys, which were peopled by naked, savage, thundering
barbarians only fifty years ago! Six Christian churches
within five miles of the ruins of a pagan temple, where
human sacrifices were daily offered up to hideous idols in
the last century! We were within pistol shot of one of a
group of islands whose ferocious inhabitants closed in upon
the doomed and helpless Captain Cook and murdered him,
eighty-seven years ago; and lo! their descendants were at
church! Behold what the missionaries have wrought!
THE CROWD ON THE PIER
By the time we had worked our slow way up to the wharf,
under the guidance of McIntyre, the pilot, a mixed crowd of
four or five hundred people had assembled: Chinamen, in the
costume of their country; foreigners and the better class
of natives, and "half whites" in carriages and dressed in
Sacramento summer fashion; other native men on foot, some
in the cast-off clothing of white folks, and a few wearing
a battered hat, an old ragged vest, and nothing else--at
least nothing but an unnecessarily slender rag passed
between the legs; native women clad in a single garment--a
bright colored robe or wrapper as voluminous as a balloon,
with full sleeves. This robe is "gathered" from shoulder to
shoulder, before and behind, and then descends in ample
folds to the feet--seldom a chemise or any other
undergarment--fits like a circus tent fits the tent pole,
and no hoops. These robes were bright yellow, or bright
crimson, or pure black occasionally, or gleaming white; but
"solid colors" and "stunning" ones were the rule. They wore
little hats such as the sex wear in your cities, and some
of the younger women had very pretty faces and splendid
black eyes and heavy masses of long black hair,
occasionally put up in a "net"; some of these dark,
gingerbread colored beauties were on foot--generally on
bare foot, I may add--and others were on
horseback--astraddle; they never ride any other way, and
they ought to know which way is best, for there are no more
accomplished horsewomen in the world, it is said. The
balance of the crowd consisted chiefly of little half-naked
native boys and girls. All were chattering in the catchy,
chopped-up Kanaka language; but what they were chattering
about will always remain a mystery to me.
THE KING
Captain Fitch said, "There's the King! that's him in the
buggy! I know him far as I can see him."
I had never seen a king in my life, and I naturally took
out my notebook and put him down: "Tall, slender, dark;
full-bearded; green frock coat, with lapels and collar
bordered with gold band an inch wide; plug hat--broad gold
band around it; royal costume looks too much like a livery;
this man isn't as fleshy as I thought he was."
I had just got these notes entered when Captain Fitch
discovered that he had got hold of the wrong King--or,
rather, that he had got hold of the King's driver or a
carriage--driver of one of the nobility. The King was not
present at all. It was a great disappointment to me. I
heard afterward that the comfortable, easy-going King
Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ah-may-ah) V had been seen
sitting on a barrel on the wharf, the day before, fishing;
but there was no consolation in that; that did not restore
to me my lost King.
HONOLULU
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The town of Honolulu (said to contain between twelve
thousand and fifteen thousand inhabitants) is spread over a
dead level; has streets from twenty to thirty feet wide,
solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line
and a few as crooked as a corkscrew; houses one and two
stories high, built of wood, straw, 'dobes, and dull
cream-colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral cut into
oblong square blocks and laid in cement, but no brick
houses; there are great yards, more like plazas, about a
large number of the dwelling houses, and these are carpeted
with bright green grass, into which your foot sinks out of
sight; and they are ornamented by a hundred species of
beautiful flowers and blossoming shrubs, and shaded by
noble tamarind trees and the "Pride of India," with its
fragrant flower, and by the "Umbrella Tree," and I do not
know how many more. I had rather smell Honolulu at sunset
than the old police courtroom in San Francisco.
ALMOST A KING
I had not shaved since I left San Francisco--ten days.
As soon as I got ashore, I hunted for a striped pole, and
shortly found one. I always had a yearning to be a king.
This may never be, I suppose. But at any rate it will
always be a satisfaction to me to know that if I am not a
king, I am the next thing to it--I have been shaved by the
King's barber.
LANDSMEN ON "SEA LEGS"
Walking about on shore was very uncomfortable at first;
there was no spring to the solid ground, and I missed the
heaving and rolling of the ship's deck; it was unpleasant
to lean unconsciously to an anticipated lurch of the world
and find that the world did not lurch, as it should have
done. And there was something else missed--something gone
something wanting, I could not tell what--a dismal vacuum
of some kind or other--a sense of emptiness. But I found
out what it was presently. It was the absence of the
ceaseless dull hum of beating waves and whipping sails and
fluttering of the propeller, and creaking of the
ship--sounds I had become so accustomed to that I had
ceased to notice them and had become unaware of their
existence until the deep Sunday stillness on shore made me
vaguely conscious that a familiar spirit of some kind or
other was gone from me. Walking on the solid earth with
legs used to the "giving" of the decks under his tread made
Brown sick, and he went off to bed and left me to wander
alone about this odd-looking city of the tropics.
NEW SCENES AND STRONG
CONTRASTS
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The further I traveled through the town the better I
liked it. Every step revealed a new contrast--disclosed
something I was unaccustomed to. In place of the grand
mud-colored brown stone fronts of San Francisco, I saw neat
white cottages, with green window shutters; in place of
front yards like billiard tables with iron fences around
them, I saw those cottages surrounded by ample yards, about
like Portsmouth Square (as to size), thickly clad with
green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense
foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the
customary infernal geranium languishing in dust and general
debility on tin-roofed rear additions or in bedroom
windows, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers,
fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the
richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of the
"Willows," and the painful sharp-pointed shrubbery of that
funny caricature of nature which they call "South Park," I
saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange
names and stranger appearance--trees that cast a shadow
like a thundercloud, and were able to stand alone without
being tied to green poles; in place of those vile,
tiresome, stupid, everlasting goldfish, wiggling around in
glass globes and assuming all shades and degrees of
distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities
of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats--Tom cats,
Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bobtail cats, blind cats,
one-eyed cats, walleyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats,
black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted
cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats,
groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats,
regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats,
millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy, and
sound asleep; in place of roughs and rowdies staring and
blackguarding on the corners, I saw long-haired,
saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the
ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at
whatever or whoever happened along; instead of that
wretched cobblestone pavement nuisance, I walked on a firm
foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by
the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a
light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral,
belched up out of fathomless hell long ago through the
seared and blackened crater that stands dead and cold and
harmless yonder in the distance now; instead of cramped and
crowded streetcars, I met dusky native women sweeping by,
free as the wind, on fleet horses and astraddle, with gaudy
riding sashes streaming like banners behind them; instead
of the combined stenches of Sacramento Street, Chinadom,
and Brannan Street slaughterhouses, I breathed the balmy
fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India;
in place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San
Francisco, I moved in the midst of a summer calm as
tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of our
familiar skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on
the one side a framework of tall, precipitous mountains
close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep,
cool, chasmlike valleys--and in front the grand sweep of
the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near the shore,
bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray
dashing against the reef, and further out the dead blue
water of the deep sea, flecked with "white caps," and in
the far horizon a single, lonely sail--
At this moment, this man Brown, who has no better
manners than to read over one's shoulder, observes:
"Yes, and hot. Oh, I reckon not (only 82 in the shade)!
Go on, now, and put it all down, now that you've begun;
just say, 'And more "santipedes," and cockroaches, and
fleas, and lizards, and red ants, and scorpions, and
spiders, and mosquitoes and missionaries'--oh, blame my
cats if I'd live here two months, not if I was
High-You-Muck-a-Muck and King of Wawhoo, and had a harem
full of hyenas!" (Wahine, most generally pronounced
Wyheeny, seems to answer for wife, woman, and female of
questionable character, indifferently. I never can get this
man Brown to understand that "hyena" is not the proper
pronunciation. He says "It ain't any odds; it describes
some of 'em, anyway.")
I remarked: "But, Mr. Brown, these are
trifles."
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"Trifles be--blowed! You get nipped by one of them
scorpions once, and see how you like it! There was Mrs.
Jones, swabbing her face with a sponge; she felt something
grab her cheek; she dropped the sponge and out popped a
scorpion an inch and a half long! Well, she just got up and
danced the Highland fling for two hours and a half--and
yell!--why, you could have heard her from Lu-wow to
Hoolahoola, with the wind fair! and for three days she
soaked her cheek in brandy and salt, and it swelled up as
big as your two fists. And you want to know what made me
light out of bed so sudden last night? Only a
'santipede'--nothing, only a ‘santipede,’ with
forty-two legs on a side, and every foot hot enough to burn
a hole through a rawhide. Don't you know one of them things
grabbed Miss Boone's foot when she was riding one day? He
was hid in the stirrup, and just clamped himself around her
foot and sunk his fangs plum through her shoe; and she just
throwed her whole soul into one war whoop and then fainted.
And she didn't get out of bed nor set that foot on the
floor again for three weeks. And how did Captain Godfrey
always get off so easy? Why, because he always carried a
bottle full of scorpions and santipedes soaked in alcohol,
and whenever he got bit he bathed the place with that
devilish mixture or took a drink out of it, I don't
recollect which. And how did he have to do once, when he
hadn't his bottle along? He had to cut out the bite with
his knife and fill up the hole with arnica, and then prop
his mouth open with the bootjack to keep from getting the
lockjaw. Oh, fill me up about this lovely country! You can
go on writing that slop about balmy breezes and fragrant
flowers, and all that sort of truck, but you're not going
to leave out them santipedes and things for want of being
reminded of it, you know."
I said mildly: "But, Mr. Brown, these are the
mere--"
"Mere--your grandmother! they ain't the mere anything!
What's the use of you telling me they're the
mere--mere--whatever it was you was going to call it? You
look at them raw splotches all over my face--all over my
arms--all over my body! Mosquito bites! Don't tell me about
mere--mere things! You can't get around them mosquito
bites. I took and brushed out my bar [mosquito net] good
night before last, and tucked it in all around, and before
morning I was eternally thawed up, anyhow. And the night
before I fastened her up all right, and got in bed and
smoked that old strong pipe until I got strangled and
smothered and couldn't get out, and then they swarmed in
there and jammed their bills through my shirt and sucked me
as dry as a life preserver before I got my breath again.
And how did that deadfall work? I was two days making it,
and sweated two buckets full of brine, and blame the
mosquito even went under it; and sloshing around in my
sleep I ketched my foot in it and got it flattened out so
that it wouldn't go into a green turtle shell forty-four
inches across the back. Jim Ayers grinding out seven double
verses of poetry about Waw-hoo! and crying about
leaving the blasted place in the two last verses; and you
slobbering here about--there you are! Now--now, what
do you say? That yellow spider could straddle over a saucer
just like nothing--and if I hadn't been here to set that
spittoon on him, he would have been between your sheets in
a minute--he was traveling straight for your bed--he had
his eye on it. Just pull at that web that he's been
stringing after him--pretty near as hard to break as sewing
silk; and look at his feet sticking out all round the
spittoon. Oh, confound Waw-hoo!"
I am glad Brown has got disgusted at that murdered
spider and gone; I don't like to be interrupted when I am
writing--especially by Brown, who is one of those men who
always looks at the unpleasant side of every thing, and I
seldom do.
MARK TWAIN
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