71. CHAPTER LXXI.
AT four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a
mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our
pleasant land journey. This lava is the accumulation of ages; one
torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and
built up the island structure higher and higher. Underneath, it is
honey-combed with caves; it would be of no use to dig wells in
such a place; they would not hold water—you would not find any
for them to hold, for that matter. Consequently, the planters
depend upon cisterns.
The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are
none now living who witnessed it. In one place it enclosed and
burned down a grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava
where the trunks stood are still visible; their sides retain the
impression of the bark; the trees fell upon the burning river, and
becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterpart of
every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut, for curiosity seekers
of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at.
There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard
hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures
in the lava as the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii
did. It is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting; but
so it is. They probably went away. They went away early,
perhaps. However, they had their merits; the Romans exhibited
the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the sounder
judgment.
Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so
familiar to every school-boy in the wide world—Kealakekua
Bay—the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator,
was killed by the natives, nearly a hundred years ago. The setting
sun was flaming upon it, a Summer shower was falling, and it was
spanned by two magnificent rainbows. Two men who were in
advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their
garments shone with a more than regal splendor. Why did not
Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the
Rainbow Islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at
every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible
every day, and frequently at night also—not the silvery bow we see
once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all
bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I
saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call
"raindogs"—little patches of rainbow—are often seen drifting about
the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows.
Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a
snail-shell, winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a
mile wide from shore to shore. It is bounded on one side—where
the murder was done—by a little flat plain, on which stands a
cocoanut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a
thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at
the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner
extremity of it. From this wall the place takes its
name, Kealakekua,
which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of the Gods."
They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in
Christianity), that the great god Lono, who
used to live upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway
when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs called him
down to the seashore in a hurry.
As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall,
clean stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat
through the bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of
the water on the flat rock pressed by Captain
Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which took away his life, and
tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the
midst of the multitude of exasperated savages—the men
in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious
dismay toward the shore—the—but I discovered that I could not do
it.
It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that
the distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I
adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down
to smoke and think, and wish the ship would make the land—for
we had not eaten much for ten hours and were viciously
hungry.
Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain
Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable
homicide. Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially
received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his
ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these
kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment. Perceiving that the
people took him for the long vanished and lamented god Lono, he
encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the limitless
power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at this spot,
and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen
thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his
earthly origin with a groan. It was his death-warrant. Instantly a
shout went up: "He groans!—he is not a god!" So they closed in
upon him and dispatched him.
His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine
pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was
hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three
children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these
children grew to be a very old man, and died in Honolulu a few
years ago. Some of Cook's bones were recovered and consigned to
the deep by the officers of the ships.
Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of
Cook. They treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and
his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different
times, and killed at least three of them before they offered any
proportionate retaliation.
Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"—only a cocoanut
stump, four feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It
had lava boulders piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in
its place, and it was entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom,
with rough, discolored sheets of copper, such as ships' bottoms are
coppered with. Each sheet had a rude inscription scratched upon
it—with a nail, apparently—and in every case the execution was
wretched. Most of these merely recorded the visits of British
naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this
legend:
"Near this spot fell
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,
The Distinguished Circumnavigator, who Discovered these
Islands A. D. 1778.
After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the
ship, opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one
of his cannon balls cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this
monumental stump standing. It looked sad and lonely enough to
us, out there in the rainy twilight. But there is no other monument
to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountain side we had passed by
a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of lava blocks,
which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from his
bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was
erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the
circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.
A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall
pole, and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the
memorable occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and
the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.
Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner
soon worked herself into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came
ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all
gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea,
and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing
sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to
the weary and the innocent.