72. CHAPTER LXXII.
IN the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined
temple of the last god Lono. The high chief cook of this
temple—the priest who presided over it and roasted the human
sacrifices—was uncle to Obookia, and at one time that youth was
an apprentice-priest under him. Obookia was a young native of
fine mind, who, together with three other native boys, was taken to
New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of
Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the attention
of the religious world to their country. This resulted in the sending
of missionaries there. And this Obookia was the very same
sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept
because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been
very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday School
book—aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried
over it in Sunday School myself, on general principles, although at
a time when I did not know much and could not understand why
the people of the Sandwich Islands needed to worry so much about
it as long as they did not know there was a Bible at all.
Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have
returned to his native land with the first missionaries, had he lived.
The other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did
good service, but the third, William Kanui, fell from grace
afterward, for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in
California he journeyed thither and went to
mining, although he was fifty years old. He succeeded pretty well,
but the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six
thousand dollars, and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a
bankrupt in his old age and he resumed service in the pulpit again.
He died in Honolulu in 1864.
Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the
sea to the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden
times—so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot
upon it it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time
had come. He might go around it by water, but he could not cross
it. It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with
awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. There was a
temple devoted to prayers for rain—and with fine sagacity it was
placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed
there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it
every time. You would seldom get to your Amen before you
would have to hoist your umbrella.
And ther was a large temple near at hand which was built in a
single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the
ghastly hands of dead men! Tradition says that by the
weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms
were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of
night—flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks
clasped in their nerveless fingers—appearing and disappearing as
the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded away again. Even
to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread structure in awe
and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night.
At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing
in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them
from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was
rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk. But
they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport. They
were finished swimmers and divers, and enjoyed themselves to the
last degree.
They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other
about, and filled the air with their laughter. It is said that the first
thing an Islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a
matter of smaller consequence, comes afterward. One hears tales
of native men and women swimming ashore from vessels many
miles at sea—more miles, indeed, than I dare vouch for or even
mention. And they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty
or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil! I think
he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.
However I will not urge this point.
I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono—I may as well
furnish two or three sentences concerning him.
The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender,
unornamented staff twelve feet long. Tradition says he was a
favorite god on the Island of Hawaii—a great king who had been
deified for meritorious services—just our own fashion of rewarding
heroes, with the difference that we would have made him a
Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. In an angry moment he
slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aiii. Remorse of
conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular
spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing
grief he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling
with all whom he met. Of course this pastime soon lost its
novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily have been the case that
when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent "to grass" he
never came back any more. Therefore, he instituted games called
makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and
then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that
he would return some day—and that was the last of Lono. He was
never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps. But the
people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to
accept Captain Cook as the restored god.
Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of
their death; but many did not, for they could not understand how
he could die if he was a god.
Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic
interest—the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. Of
course we visited it, and came away as wise as most people do
who go and gaze upon such mementoes of the past when in an
unreflective mood.
While the first missionaries were on their way around the
Horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as
far back as tradition reached were suddenly broken up. Old
Kamehameha I., was dead, and his son, Liholiho, the new King
was a free liver, a roystering, dissolute fellow, and hated the
restraints of the ancient
tabu.
His assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen
dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated
the
tabu because it restricted
the privileges of her sex and degraded all
women very nearly to the level of brutes. So the case stood.
Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down, Kaahumahu had a
whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did the rest.
It was probably the rest. It was probably the first time whiskey
ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization. Liholiho came
up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the
determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless
pitch, and then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he
moved deliberately forward and sat down with the women!
They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were
appalled! Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King
ate,
still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were
withheld! Then conviction came like a revelation—the
superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the
people like a cloud, and a shout went up,
"the
tabu is broken!
the
tabu is broken!"
Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the
first sermon and prepare the way for the new gospel that was
speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic.
The tabu broken
and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the
people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always
characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were
a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the
conclusion that Captain Cook was no god, merely because he
groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire
whether a god might not groan as well as a man if it suited his
convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols were powerless to
protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled them
down—hacked them to pieces—applied the torch—annihilated
them!
The pagan priests were furious. And well they might be; they
had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were
beggared; they had been great—they had stood above the
chiefs—and now they were vagabonds. They raised a revolt; they
scared a number of people into joining their standard, and
Bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily
persuaded to become their leader.
In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal
army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to
march upon Kailua. The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate
them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation;
the savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill
him. So the King sent his men forth under Major General
Kalaimoku and the two host met a Kuamoo. The battle was long
and fierce—men and women fighting side by side, as was the
custom—and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every
direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and
the tabu were dead in the land!
The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new
dispensation. "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are
a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak; the army
without idols was strong and victorious!"
The nation was without a religion.
The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed
by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel
was planted as in a virgin soil.