67. CHAPTER LXVII.
I STILL quote from my journal:
I found the national Legislature to consist of half a dozen
white men and some thirty or forty natives. It was a dark
assemblage. The nobles and Ministers (about a dozen of them
altogether) occupied the extreme left of the hall, with David
Kalakaua (the King's Chamberlain) and Prince William at the
head. The President of the Assembly, His Royal Highness M.
Kekuanaoa,* and
the Vice President (the latter a white man,) sat in the pulpit, if
I may so term it.
The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly
built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of
eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well
dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons,
without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a
calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a
young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter,
Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his
career suggested some such thought as this: "This man, naked as
the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged
at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages
more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and
carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has
seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as
sacrifices
to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever
pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God;
has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen
the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death
for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow
fall upon the King—and now look at him; an educated Christian;
neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman;
a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored
guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of
an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his
country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting
there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among
whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage,
and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been
born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. How the
experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap
inventions of romance!"
Kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal. He derives his princely
rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great.
Under other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the
female in tracing genealogies, but here the opposite is the case—the
female line takes precedence. Their reason for this is exceedingly
sensible, and I recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe: They
say it is easy to know who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.
The christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened
some of their barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them. I
have just referred to one of these. It is still a popular belief that if
your enemy can get hold of any article belonging to you he can get
down on his knees over it and pray you to
death. Therefore many a native gives
up and dies merely because he imagines that
some enemy is putting him through a course of damaging
prayer. This praying an individual to death seems absurb enough
at a first glance, but then when we call to mind
some of the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing
looks plausible.
In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of
wives was customary, but a plurality of
husbands likewise. Some native
women of noble rank had as many as six
husbands. A woman thus supplied did not reside with all her
husbands at once, but lived several months with each in turn. An
understood sign hung at her door during these months. When the
sign was taken down, it meant "NEXT."
In those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place."
Her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the
food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had
finished his dinner. She was not only forbidden, by ancient law,
and under penalty of death, to eat with her husband or enter a
canoe, but was debarred, under the same penalty, from eating
bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other choice fruits at any time
or in any place. She had to confine herself pretty strictly to "poi"
and hard work. These poor ignorant heathen seem to have had a
sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the
garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.
But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of
things. They liberated woman and made her the equal of
man.
The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their
children alive when the family became larger than necessary. The
missionaries interfered in this matter too, and stopped it.
To this day the natives are able to lie down
and die whenever they want to, whether there
is anything the matter with
them or not. If a Kanaka takes a notion to die, that is the end of
him; nobody can persuade him to hold on; all the doctors in the
world could not save him.
A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large
funeral. If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is
only necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour
and he will be on hand to the minute—at least his remains will.
All the natives are Christians, now, but many of them still
desert to the Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of
trouble. An irruption of the great volcano of Kilauea, or an
earthquake, always brings a deal of latent loyalty to the Great
Shark God to the surface. It is common report that the King,
educated, cultivated and refined Christian gentleman as he
undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers for help when
disaster threatens. A planter caught a shark, and one of his
christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of
ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion
forbidden by his abandoned creed. But remorse shortly began to
torture him. He grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his
sin, refused food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for
he had sinned against the Great Shark God and could never know
peace any more. He was proof against persuasion and ridicule,
and in the course of a day or two took to his bed and died,
although he showed no symptom of disease. His young daughter
followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the week.
Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone and it is only
natural that it should crop out in time of distress. Wherever one
goes in the Islands, he will find small piles of stones by the
wayside, covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives
to appease evil spirits or honor local deities belonging to the
mythology of former days.
In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly
comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in
the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very
intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. When the
missionaries first took up their residence in Honolulu, the native
women would pay their families frequent friendly visits, day by
day, not even clothed with a blush. It was found a hard matter to
convince them that this was rather indelicate. Finally the
missionaries provided them with long, loose calico robes, and that
ended the difficulty—for the women would troop through the town,
stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms, march to the
missionary houses and then
proceed to dress!—The natives soon manifested a strong proclivity
for clothing, but it was shortly apparent that they only wanted it for
grandeur. The missionaries imported a quantity of hats, bonnets,
and other male and female wearing apparel, instituted a general
distribution, and begged the people not to come to church naked,
next Sunday, as usual. And they did not; but the national spirit of
unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who were not
at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers could
hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations. In the
midst of the reading of
a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with a
world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a "stovepipe" hat
and a pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow, tricked out
in a man's shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a
flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied
around her waist and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a
peacock's tail off duty; a stately "buck" Kanaka would stalk in with
a woman's bonnet on, wrong side before—only this, and nothing
more; after him would stride his fellow, with the legs of a pair of
pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of his person
untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply
gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest.
The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and
wholly unconscious of any absurdity in their appearance. They
gazed at each other with happy admiration, and it was plain to see
that the young girls were taking note of what each other had on, as
naturally as if they had always lived in a land of Bibles and knew
what churches were made
for; here was the evidence of a dawning civilization. The
spectacle which the congregation presented was so extraordinary
and withal so moving, that the missionaries found it difficult to
keep to the text and go on with the services; and by and by when
the simple children of the sun began a general swapping of
garments in open meeting and produced some irresistibly
grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was nothing
for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and dismiss
the fantastic assemblage.
In our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same
high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the
poor little material of slender territory and meagre population, play
"empire." There is his royal Majesty the King, with a New York
detective's income of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year
from the "royal civil list" and the "royal domain." He lives in a
two-story frame "palace."
And there is the "royal family"—the customary hive of royal
brothers, sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual
to monarchy,—all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all
bearing such titles as his or her Royal Highness the Prince or
Princess So-and-so. Few of them can carry their royal splendors
far enough to ride in carriages, however; they sport the economical
Kanaka horse or "hoof it"* with
the plebeians.
Then there is his Excellency the "royal Chamberlain"—a
sinecure, for his majesty dresses himself with his own hands,
except when he is ruralizing at Waikiki and then he requires no
dressing.
Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the
Household Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of
soldiers usually placed under a corporal in other lands.
Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in
Waiting—high dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.
Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the
Bed-chamber—an office as easy as it is magnificent.
Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a
renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast
and ignorance, a lawyer of "shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a
humble worshiper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of
sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom
that has adopted him—salary, $4,000 a year, vast consequence, and
no perquisites.
Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance,
who handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his
annual "budget" with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of
"finance," suggests imposing schemes for paying off the "national
debt" (of $150,000,) and does it all for $4,000 a year and
unimaginable glory.
Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds
sway over the royal armies—they consist of two hundred and thirty
uniformed Kanakas, mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country
ever gets into trouble with a foreign power we shall probably hear
from them. I knew an American whose copper-plate visiting card
bore this impressive legend: "Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal
Infantry. To say that he was proud of this distinction is stating it
but tamely. The Minister of War has also in his charge some
venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal salutes are
fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port.
Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy—a nabob
who rules the "royal fleet," (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton
schooner.)
And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the
chief dignitary of the "Established Church"—for when the
American Presbyterian missionaries had completed the
reduction of the nation to a compact condition of Christianity,
native royalty stepped in and erected the grand dignity of an
"Established (Episcopal) Church" over it, and imported a cheap
ready-made Bishop from England to take charge. The chagrin of
the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to this
day, profanity not being admissible.
Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public
Instruction.
Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc.,
and after them a string of High Sheriffs and other small fry too
numerous for computation.
Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of
the French; her British Majesty's Minister; the Minister Resident,
of the United States; and some six or eight representatives of other
foreign nations, all with sounding titles, imposing dignity and
prodigious but economical state.
Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house "kingdom" whose
population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls!
The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and
colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir
in Honolulu than a Western Congressman does in New York.
And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined
"court costume" of so "stunning" a nature that it would make the
clown in a circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and
each Hawaiian official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored,
gold-laced uniform peculiar to his office—no two of them are alike,
and it is hard to tell which one is the "loudest." The King had a
"drawing-room" at stated intervals, like other monarchs, and when
these varied uniforms congregate there weak-eyed people have to
contemplate the spectacle through smoked glass. Is there not a
gratifying contrast between this latter-day exhibition and the one
the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded the missionaries
the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing? Behold
what religion and civilization have wrought!
[*]
[p. 486] Missionary phrase.