Statewide County HI Archives News.....Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop. - Part 2. October 2, 2008
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Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 October 6, 2008, 2:41 pm

Keepers Of The Culture, A Study In Time Of The Hawaiian Islands October 2, 2008

Contributed for Use in
USGenWeb Archives
by Darlene E. Kelley
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 
October 2, 2008

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Historical Collections of Hawai'i
Keepers of the Culture
A Study in Time, of the Hawi'ian Islands
Letters if Isabella L. Bird Bishop
" Six Months Among the Palm Groves,
Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of The Sandwich Islands. "
Part 2,
Transcribed 
Letter # I

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Part 2.

LETTER I.

Steamer Nevada, 
North Pacific, 
January 19.

A white, unwinking, scintillating sun blazed down upon Auckland, New
Zealand. Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees and
calla lillies drooped with the heat. Dusty thickets sheltered the
cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the palpitating
atmosphere. In dusty enclosures, supposed to be gardens, shrivelled
geraniums scattered sparcely alone defied the heat. Flags drooped in the
stifling air. Men on the verge of sunstroke plied their tasks
mechanically, like automations. Dogs, with flabby and protruding
tongues, hid themslves away under archway shadows. The stones of the
sidewalks ad the brick of the houses radiated a furnace heat, draught,
and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and oily breezeless seas, of
glaring days, passing through fierce fiery sunsets into stiffling
nights.   

I only remained long enough in the capital to observe that it had a look
of having seen better days, and that its business streets had an
American impress, and,
taking a boat at a wharf, in whose seams the pitch was melting, I went
off to the steamer Nevada, which was anchored out in the bay, preferring
to spend the night in her than in the unbearable heat on shore. She
belongs to the Webb line, an independent mail adventure, now dying a
natural death, undertaken by the New Zealand Governmant, as much
probably out of jealousy of Victoria as anything else. She nearly
floundered on er last voyage; her passengers unanimously signed a
protest against her unseaworhy condition. She was condemned by the
Government surveyor, and her mails were sent to Melbourne. She has,
however, been patched up for this trip, andeight passengers, including
myself, have trusted ourselves to her. She is a huge paddle-steamer, of
the old-fashioned American type, deck above deck, balconies, a
pilot-house abaft the foremast, two monstrous walking beams, and two
masts which, possibly in case of need, might serve a jury masts.

Huge, airy, perfectly comfortable as she is, not a passenger stepped on
board without breathing a more earnest prayer than usual that the voyage
might end propitiously. The very first evening statements were whispered
about to the effect that her state of disrepair is such that she has not
been to her own port for nine months, and has been sailing for that time
without a certificate; that her starboard shaft is partially fractured,
and that to reduce the strain upon itsf loats of her starboard wheel
have been shortened five inches, the strain being further reduced by
giving her a decided list to port; that her crank is "bandaged ," that
she is leaky, that her mainmast is sprung, and that with only four
hours' steaming many of her boiler tubes, even some of those put in at
Auckland, had already given away. I cannot testify concerning the
mainmast, though it certainly does comport itself like no other mainmast
I ever saw; but the oter statements and many more which might be added,
are, I believe, substantially correct. That the caulking of the deck was
in evil case we very soon had proof, for during a heavy rain above, it
was a smart shower in the saloon and state rooms, keeping four stewards
employed with buckets and swabs, and compeling us to dine in waterproofs
and rubber shoes.

In this dilapidated condition, when two days out from Auckland, we
encoutered a revolving South Sea hurricane, succinctly entered in the
log of the day as 
" Encountered a very servere hurricane with a very heavy sea." It began
at eight in the morning, and never spent its fury till nine at night,
and the wind changed its direction eleven times. The Nevada left
Auckland two feet deeper in the water than she ought to have been, and
laboured heavily. Seas strucks her under the guards with a heavy,
explosive THUD, and she groaned and strained as is she would part
asunder. It was a long wierd day. We held no communication with each
other, or with those who could form any rational estimate of the
probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary
invariable routine of the steward department was suspeded withour
notice; the sound were tremendous, and a hot lurid obscurity filled the
atmosphere. Soon after four hours the clamour increased, and the shock
of a sea blowing up a part of the fore-guards made the groaning fabric
reel and shiver throughout her whole huge bulk. At that time, by common
consent, we assembled in the deck-house, which had windows looking in
all directions, and we sat there for five hours. Very few words were
spoken, and very little fear was felt. We understood by intuition that
if our crazy engines failed at any moment to keep the ships' head to the
sea, her destruction wold not occupy, half-an-hour. It was all palpable.
There was nothing which the most experienced seaman could explain to the
merest novice. We hoped for the best, and there was no use in speaking
about the worst .
Not, indeed, was speech possible, unless a humanvoice could have
outshrieked the hurricane.

In this deck-house the strainings, sunderings, and groanings were hardly
audible, or rather were overpowered by a sound which, in thirteen
months' experience of the sea in all wathers, I never heard, and hope
never to hear again, unless in a staunch ship, one loud , awful shriek,
mingled wth a prolonged relentless hiss. No gathering strength, no
languid faintng into momentary lulls, but one protracted gigantic
scream. And this was not the whistle of wind through the cordage, but
the actual sound of air travelling with tremendous velcity, carrying
with it minute particles of water. Nor was the sea running mountains
high, for the hurricane kept it down. Indeed during those fierce hours
no sea was visable, for the whole surface was caught up and carried
furiously in the air, like snow-drift on the prairies, sibilant,
relentless. There was profound quiet  
on the deck, the little life which existed being concentrated near the
bow, where the captain was either lashed to the foremast, or in shelter
in the pilot-house. never a soul appeared on deck, the force of the
hurricane being such that for four hours any man would have been carried
off his feet. Through the swift strange evening our hopes rested on the
engine, and amidst the uproar and din, and drifting spray, and shocks of
pitiless seas, there was a sublime repose in the spectacle of the huge
walking beams, alternately raising and falling, slowly, calmly,
regularly, as if the Nevada were on a holiday trip within the Golden
Gate. At eight in the evening we could hear each other speak, and a
little later, through the masses of hissing drft we discerned black
water. At nine Captain
Blethen appeared, smoking a cigar with nonchalance, and told us that the
hurricane had nearly boxed the compass, nd had been the most severe he
had known for seventeen years. This grand old man, nearly the oldest
captain in the Pacific, won our repect and confidence from the first,
and his quiet and masterly handling of this delapidated old ship is
beyond praise.

When the strain of apprehension was migrated, we became aware that we
had not had anything to eat since breakfast, a clean sweep having been
made, not only of the lunch, but all the glass in the racks above it;
but all requests to the stewards wre insufficient to procure even
biscuits, and at eleven we retired superless to bed, admist a confusion
of awful sounds, and were deprived of lights as well as food. When we
asked for food or light, and made weak appeals on the ground of
faintness, the one steward who seemed to dawdle about for the sole
purpose to making himself disagreeable, always replied," You can't get
anything, the stewards are on duty."

We were not accustomed to recognize that stewards had any other duties
than that of feeding the passngers, but under the circumstances we
meekly acquiesced.
We were alowed to know that a part of the foreguards had been carried
away, and that iron stanchions four inches thick had been gnarled and
twisted like candy sticks, and the constant falling of the saloon casing
of the mainmast, showed something wrong there. A heavy clang, heard at
intervals by day ad night, aroused some suspicions as to more serious
damage, and these were afterwards confirmed. As the wind  fell the sea
rose, and for some hours realized every discription I have read of the
majesty and magnitude  of the rollers of the South Pacific.

The day after the hurricane something went wrong with the engines, and
we were stationary for an hour. We all felt thankful that this
derangement which would have jeopardised or sacrificed sixty lives, was
then only a slight detention on a summer sea. 

Five days out from Auckland we entered the tropics with a temperature of
80 degees in the water and 85 degrees in the air, but as the light head
airs blew the intense heat of our two smoke stacks aft, we often endured
a temperature of 110 degrees. There were quiet heavy tropical showers,
and general misty dampness, and the Navigator Ielands, with their
rainbow-tinted coral forests, their fringe of Coca palms, and groves of
banyan and breadfruit trees, those sunniest isles of the bright South
Seas, resolved themselves into dark lumps looming through a drizzling
mist. But the showers and the dampness were confined to that region, and
for the last fortnight an unclouded tropical sun has blazed upon our
crawling ship. The boiler tubes are giving way at the rate of from ten
to twenty daily, the fracture in the shaft is extending, and so,
partially maimed, the old ship drags her 320 feet of length slowly
along. The captain is continually in the engine-room, and we know when
thing are looking more unpropitious than usual by his coming up puffing
his cigar with unusual strength of determination. It has been so far a
very pleasant voyage. The moral, mental. and social qualities  of my
fellow passengers are of a high order, and since the hurricane we have
been rather like a family circle than a miscellaneous accidental group.
For some time our days  went by in reading aloud, working, chess,
draughts and conversation, with two hours at quoits in the afternoon
exercise.
[ a game in which flat rings of iron or rope are pitched at a stake.]
Four days ago, the only son of Mrs Dexter, who is the only lady on board
besides myself, ruptured a blood vessel on the lungs, and lies in a most
critical state in the deck-house from which he has not been moved,
requiring most careful nursing, incessant fanning, and the attention of
two persons by day and night. Mrs. Dexter had previously won the regard
of everyone, and I had learned to look on her as a friend from whom I
should be grieved to part. The only hope for th young mans life is that
he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has urged me so strongly to
land with her there, where she will be a complete stranger, that I have
consented to do so, and consequently shall see the Sandwich Islands.
This severe illness has cast gloom over our circle of ix, and Mr. dexter
continues in a state of so much exhaustion and peril that all our
arrangements as to occupation, recreation, and sleep, are made with
reference to a sick, and as we sometimes fear, a dying man, whose state
is much aggavated by the maltreatment and stupidity of a dilapidated
Scotch doctor, who must be at least eighty, and whose intellects are
obfuscated by years of whiskey drinking. Two of the gentlemen not only
show the utmost tenderness as nurses, but possess a skill and experience
which are invaluable. they neve leave him a night, and scarcely take
needed rest even in the day, one or other of them being always at hand
to support him when faint, or raie him on pillows.

It is not only that the Nevada is barely seaworthy, and has kept us
broiling in the tropics when we ought to have been at San Francisco, but
her fittings are so old. The mattresses bulge and burst, and cockroaches
creep in and out, the deck is so leaky that the water squishes up under
the soloon matting as we walk over it, the bread swarms with minute
ants,and we have to pick every piece over because of weevils. Existence
at night is an unequal  fight with rats and cockroaches, and at meals
with the stewards for time to eat. The stewards outnumber the
passengers, and are the veriest riff-raff I have seen on board ship. At
meals, when the captain is not below, their sole object is to hurry us
from the table in order that they may sit down to a protracted meal;
they are insulting and disobliging, and since illness has been on board,
have shown a want of common humanity which places them below  the rest
of their species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is
a marvelous contrast to the natural or purchasable civilty or servility
which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side too, and we
are content to laugh at it, and at all the other oddities of this
vaunted " Mail Line."

Our most serious grievance was the length of time that we were kept in
the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early
breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our
cabins, only just kept us alive. We read, wrote, and talked like
automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away. We decided that
heat was less felt in exercise, made up an afternoon quoit party, and
played unsheltered from nearly vertical sun, on decks so hot that we
required thick boots for the protection of our feet, but for three days
were limp and faint, and hardly able to crawl about or eat. The nights
were insupportable. We used to lounge in the bow, and retire late at
night to our cabins, to fight the heat, and scare rats and kill
cockroaches with slippers, until driven by the solar heat to rise again
unrefreshed to wrestle through another relentless day. We read the
Idylls
of the King and talked of misty meres and reedy fens, of the cool north,
with its purple hills, leaping streams, and life-giving breezes, of long
northern winter
with ice and snow, but the realities of sultriness and damp scared away
our coolest of imaginations. In this dismal region, when about forty
miles east of Tutuila, a beast properly known as the
" Flying fox " alighted on our rigging. [ A Frugiferous bat ]  and was
eventually captured as a prize for the zoological collection at San
Francisco. He is a most interesting animal, something like an
exaggerated bat. His wings are formed of a jet black membrane, and have
a highly polished claw at the extremity of each, and his feet consist of
five beautifully polished black claws, with which he hangs on head
downwards. His body is about twice the size of that of a very large rat,
black ad furry underneath, and with red foxy fur on his head and back.
His face is pointed, with a very black nose and prominent black eyes,
with a remorseless savage expression. His wings, when extended, measure
forty-eight inches across, and his flying powers are prodigious. He
snapped like a dog at first
but now quite tame, and devours quanties of dried figs, the only diet he
will eat.

We crossed the Equator at Long. 159 degree 44', but in consequence of
the misty weather  it was nt until we reached Lat. 10 degree N. that the
Pole star, cold and pure, glistened far above the horizon, and two hours
later we saw the coruscating Pleiades, and the starry belt of Orion, the
blessed familiar constellations of " auld lang syne," and a 
" breath of the cool north." the first I have felt for five months,
fanned the tropic night and the calm silvery Pacific. From that time we
have been indifferent to our crawling pace, except for the sick man's
sake. The days dawn in rose colour and die in gold, and through the long
hours a sea of delicious blue simmers beneath the
sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an ocean of its name, the enchanted
region of peretual calm, and an endless summer. Far off, for many an
azure league, rims of rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle
still lagoons, and are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the
ocean breaks all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myrids of flying fish
and a few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the
scacely undulating water. But we lok in vain for the " sails of silk and
ropes of sendal." which are alone appropriate to this dream world. The
Pacific in this region is an indolent  blue expanse, pure and lonely, an
almost untraversed sea. We revel in these tropic days of transcendent
glory, in the balmy breath which just stirs the dreamy blue, in the
brief, fierce crimson sunsets, in the soft splendour of the nights, when
the moon and stars hang like lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and
in the perly cystaline dawns, when the sun rising through a veil of rose
and gold  " rejoices as a giant to run his course." and brghtens by no "
pale graduations " into the perfect day."

P.S. - To-marrow morning we expect to sight land. In spite of minor
evils, our voyage has been a singularly pleasant one. The condition of
the ship and her machinery warrents the strongest condemnation, but her
discipline is admirable, and so many of her regulations, and we might
have had a much more disagreeable voyage in a better ship. Captain
Blethen is beyond all praise, and so is the chief engineer, wose duties
are incessant and most harring, owing to the critical state of the
engines. The Navada now presents a grotesque appearance, for within the
last few hours she has received such an added list to port that her
starboard wheel looks nearly out of the water.

Isabella L. Bird.

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Continued in part 3 - Letter # II


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