Statewide County HI Archives News.....Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop. - Part 3. October 4, 2008
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 October 6, 2008, 2:47 pm

Keepers Of The Culture, A Study In Time Of The Hawaiian Islands October 4, 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 4, 2008

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Historical Collections of Hawai'i
Keepers of the Culture
A Study in Time, of the Hwai'ian Islands
Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop
" Six Month's among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands. "
Letter # II -- part 1
Transcribed.
by Darlene E. Kelley

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[ Transcriiber's Notes;  Isabela Bird's' descriptive letters adds  a
refreshing outlook on the culture of the times of the early Sandwich
Islands peoples, as seen by foreign eyes of one who visits the islands
for the first time. ]    

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" SIX MONTH'S AMONG THE PALM GROVES, CORAL REEFS,and VOLCANOES OF THE
SANDWICH ISLANDS " by Isabella L. Bird 

Letter # II. -- part 1.

Hawaiian Hotel, Honolulu
January 26th.


Yesterday morning at 6:30, I was aroused by the news that " The Islands
" were in sight. Oahu in the distance, a group of grey, barren peaks
rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an exception to the
rule that the first sight of land is a diappointment. Owing to the clear
atmosphere, we seeemed only five miles off, but in reality, we were
twenty,and the land improved as we neared it; It was the fiercest day we
had had, the deck was amost too hot to stand upon, the sea and sky were
both magnificently blue, and the unveiled sun turned every minute ripple
into a diamond flash. As we approached, the island changed its
character. There were lofty peaks, truly --- grey and red, sun-scorched
and wind-bleached, glowing here and there with traces of their fiery
origin; but they were cleft by deep chasms and ravines of cool shadow
and entrancing green, and falling water streaked their sides - a most
wlcome vision after eleven months of desert sea and dusty browns of
Austrailia and New Zealand. Nearer yet, the coast line came into sight,
fringed by the feathery cocoanut tree of the tropics, and marked by a
long line of surf. The grand promontory of Diamond Head, its fiery sides
now softened by a haze of green, terminated the wavy line of palms; then
the Punchbowl, a very perfect crater, brilliant with every shade of red
volcanic ash, blazed against the green skirts of the mountains. We were
close to the coral reef before the cry, " There's Honolulu!"
made us aware of the proximity of the capital of the island kngdom, and
then, indeed, its existence had almost to be taken upon trust, for
besides the lovely wooden and grass huts, with deep verandahs, which
nestled under palms and bananas on soft green sward, margined by the
bright sea sand, only two church spires and a few grey roofs appeared
above the trees.

We were just outside the reef, and near enough to hear that deep sound
of the surf which, through the ever serene summer years girdles the
Hawaiian Islands with perpetual thunder, before the pilot glided
alongside, bringing the news which Mark Twain had prepared us to receive
with interest, that " Prince Bill " had been unanimously elected to the
throne. The surf ran white and pure over the environing coral reef, and
as we passed through the narrow channel, we almost saw the coral forests
deep  down under the Nevada's keel; the coral fishers plied their
graceful trade; canoes with outriggers rode the combers, and glided with
inconceivable rapidity round our ship:
amphibious brown beings sported in the transparent waves; and within the
reef lay a calm surface of water of a wonderful blue, entered by a
narrow, intricate passage of the deepest indigo. And beyond the reef and
beyond the blue, nestling among cocoanut trees and bananas, unbrella
trees and breadfruits, oranges, mangos, hibiscus, algaroba, and
passion-flowers, almost hidden in the deep, dense greenry, was Honolulu.
Bright blossem of a summer sea ! Fair Paradise of the Pacific !

Inside the reef the magnificent iron-clad California ( the flag-ship )
and another huge American war vessel, the Benicia, are moored in line
with the British corvette Scout, within 200 yards of the shore; and
their boats were constantly passing  and re-passing, among countless
canoes filled with natives, was just coming in. By noon the great
decrepit Nevada, which has no wharf at which she can lie in sleepy New
Zealand, was moored alongside a very respectful one in this enterprising
little Hawaiian capital.

We looked down from the towering deck on a crowd of two or three hundred
thousand people---whites, Kanakas, Chinamen--- and hundreds of them at
once made their way on board, and steamed over the ship, talking,
laughing, and remarking upon us in a language which seemed without
backbone. Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy, shining
black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect teeth like
ivory. Everyone was smiling. The forms of the women seem to be inclined
towards obesity, but their drapery, which consists of a sleeved garment
which falls in ample and unconfined folds from their shoulders to their
feet, partly conceals this defect, which is here regarded as a beauty.
Some of these dresses are black, but many of these worn by the younger
women were of pure white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light
green. The men displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best
advantage in white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts. A few of the women
wore coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both
men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntly on one side of
their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by bandana
handkerchiefs of rich bright colours around their necks, knotted loosely
on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no Anglo-Saxon dandy
could attain. Without an exception the en and women wore wreaths and
garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure white, twined round their
hats, and thrown carelessly round their necks, flowers unknown to me,
but redolent of the tropics in fragrance and colour. Many of the young
beauties wore the gorgeous blossom of the red hibiscus among ther
abundant, unconfined, black hair, and many, besides the garlands, wore
festoons of a sweet-scented vine, or of an exquistely beautiful fern,
knotted behind and hanging half-way down their dresses. These adornmants
of natural flowers are most attractive  Chinamen, all alike, very
yellow, with almond eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long pigtails,
spotlessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled cunning and
simplicity, 
" foreigners," half-whites, a few negroes, and a very few dark-skinned
polynesians from the far-off South Seas, made up the rest of the
rainbow-tinted crewd.

The " foreign " ladies, who were there great in nunbers, generally wore
simple light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many of them
so far confomed to native custom as to wear natural flowers round their
hats and throats. But where were the hard, angular, careworn, sallow,
passinate faces of men and women, such as form the majority of every
crowd at home, as well as in America and Australia? The condtions
of life must surely be easier here, and people must have found rest from
some of its burdensome conventionalities. The foreign ladies, in their
simple, tasteful, fresh atire, innocent of the humpings and bunchings,
the monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste, beamed
with cheerfulness, friendlinss, and kindliness. Men and women looked as
easy, contented, and happy as if care never came near them. I never sae
such healthy, bright cmplexions as among women, or such " sparkling
smiles," or such a diffusion of femine grace and graciousness anywhere.

Outside this motley, genial, picturesque crowd about 200 saddled horses
were standing, each with the Mexican saddle, with its lassoing horn in
front, high peak behind, immense wooden stirrups, with great leathern
guards, silver or brass bosses, and colored saddle-cloths. The saddles
were the only element of the picturesque that these Hawaiian steeds
possessed. They were sorry, lean, undersized beasts, looking in general
as if the emergencies of life left them little time for eating or
sleeping. They stood calmly in the broiling sun, heavy-headed and
heavy-hearted, with flabby ears and pendulous lower lips, limp and
rewboned, a doleful type of the " ceation which groaneth and travaileth
in misery." All these belonged to the natives, who are passionately fond
of riding. Every now and then a flower-wreathed Hawaiian woman, in her
full radiant garment, sprang on one of these animals astride, and dashed
along the road at full gallop, sitting on er horse as square and easy as
a hussar. In the crowd and outside of it, and everywhere, there were
piles of fruit for sale -- oranges and guavas, strawberries, papayas,
bananas ( green and golden ), cocoanuts, and other rich fantastic
productions of a prolific climate, where nature gives her wealth the
whole year round. Strange fishes, strange in shape and colour, crimson,
blue, ornage, rose, gold, such fishes as flash like living light through
the coral groves of these enchanted seas, were there for sale, and coral
divers were there with their treasures -- branch coral, as white as
snow, each perfect specimen weighing from eight to twenty pounds. But no
one pushed his wares for sale-- we were at liberty to look and admire,
and pass on unmolested. No vexatious restrctions obstructed our landing.
A sum of two dollars for the support of the Queen's Hospital is levied
on each passenger, and the examination of ordinary luggage, if it
exists, is a mere form. From the demeanour of the crowd it was at once
apparent that the conditions of conquerors and conquered do not exist.
On the contrary, many of the foreigners there are subjects of a Hawaiian
King, a reversal of the ordinary relations between a white and a
coloured race which is not easy yet to appreciate.

Two of my fellow-passengers, who wre going to San Francisco, were
anxious that I should accompany them to the Pali, the great excursion
from Honolulu; and leaving Mr. M-- to make all arrangements for the
Dexters and myself, we hired a buggy, destitute of any peculiarity but a
native driver, who spoke nothing but Hawaiian, and left the ship. This
place is quite unique. It is said that 15,000 people are buried away in
these low-browed, shadowy houses, under the glossy, dark leaved trees,
but except in one or two streets of miscellaneous, old-fashioned looking
stores, arranged with a distinct leaning towards native tastes, it looks
like a large village, or rather like an aggregate of villages. As we
drove through the town we could only see our immediate surroundings, but
each with a new fascination. We drove along roads with over-arching
trees, through whose dense leafage the noon sunshine only trickled in
dancing, broken lights; unbrella trees, caoutchouc, bamboo, mango,
orange, breadfruit, candlenut.monkey pod, date and coco palms, alligator
pears, " prides' of Barbary, India, and Peru, and huge-leaved,
wide-spreading trees, exotics from the South Seas, many of them rich in
parasitic ferns, and others blazing with bright, fantastic blossems. The
air was heavy with odours of gardenia, tuberose, oleanders, roses,
lilies, and the great white trumpet-flower, and myriads of others whose
names I do not know, and varandahs were festooned with a gorgeous
trailer with magenta blossoms, passion-flowers, and a vine with masses
of trunpet-shaped. yellow, waxy flowers. The delicate tamatind and the
feathery algaroba intermingled their fragile grace with the dark, shiny
foliage of the South Seas exotics, and the deep red, solitary flowers of
the hibiscus rioted among dear familiar fushias and geraniums, which
here attain the height and size of large rhododendrons.

Few of the new trees suprised me more than the papaya. It is a pefect
gem of tropical vegetation. It has a soft, indented stem, which runs up
quite straight to a height of from 15 to 30 feet, and is crowned by a
profusion of large, deeply indented leaves, with long foot-stalks, and
among, as well as considerably below these, are the flowers or the
fruit, in all stages of development. This when ripe, is bright yellow,
and the size of a musk melon. Clumps of bananas, the first sight of
which, like that of a palm, constitutes a new experience, shaded the
native houses with their wonderful leaves, broad and green, from five to
ten feet long. The breadfruit is a superb tree, about 60 feet high, with
deep green, shinning leaves, a foot broad, sharply and symmetrically ct,
worthy, from exceeding beauty of form, to take place of the acanthus in
architectural ornament, and throwing their pale geen fruit into a
delicate contrast. All these, with exquisite rose apple, with a deep red
tinge in its young leaves, the fan palm, the chirimoya, and nunberless
oters, and the slender shafts of the coco palms rising hig above them,
with their waving olumes and perpetual fruitage, were a perfect festival
of beauty.

In the deep shade of this perennial greenry the people dwell. The
foreign houses show a very various individuality.
The peculiarity in which all seem to share is, that everything is
decorated and festooned with flowering trailers. It is ofen difficult to
tell what the arcitecture is. or what is house and what is vegetation;
for all angles, and lattices and bulustrades, and verandahs are hidden
by jessamine or passion-flowers, or the gorgeous flamekike
Bougainvillias. Many of the dwellings straggle over the ground with an
upper story, and have deep verandahs, through which I caught glimpses of
cool, shady rooms, with matted floors. Some look as if they had been
transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut Valley,
with their clap-board fronts painted white and jalousies painted green;
but then the deep verandah in which families lead a open-air life has
been added, and the chimneys have been omitted, and the New England
severity and angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these
festoons of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropica climbing plants.
Besides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a
cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or large
sun-baked bricks, plastered; houses of greass and bamboo; houses on the
ground and houses raised on posts; but nothing looks prosaic,
commonplace, or mean, for the glow and luxuriance of the tropios rest on
all. Each house has a large garden or yard, with lawns of bright
perennial greens and banks of blazing, many tinted flowers. the
night-blowing Cereus, and the tropaeolum, mixed with geraniums, fushia,
and jessamine, which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable
profusion. A soft air moves through the upper branches, and the drip of
water from miniature fountains fals musically on the perfumed air. This
is midwinter! Te summer they say, is thermometrically hotter, but
practically cooler, because of th regular trades which set in in April,
but now,with the shaded thermometer at 80 degrees and the sky withour
clouds, the heat is not oppressive.

The mixture of the neat grass houses of the natives with the more
elaborate homes of the foreign residents has a very pleasant look. The "
aborigines " hve not been crowded out of sight, or into a special "
quarter." We saw many groups of them sitting under the trees outside
their houses, each group with a mat in the centre, with calabashes upon
it containing poi, the national Hawaiian dish, a fermented paste made
from the root of th kalo, or arum esculentum. As we emerged on the broad
road which leads up the Nuuanu Valley to the mountains, we saw many
patches of this kalo, a very handsome tropical plant, with large leaves
of a bright tender green. Each plant was growing on a small hillock,
with water round it. There were beautiful vegetable gardens also, in
which Chinamen raise for sale not only melons, pineapples,sweet
potatoes, and other edibles of hot climates, but the familiar fruits and
vegetables of the temperate zones. In patches of surpassing neatness,
there are strawberries, which are ripe here all year, peas, carrots,
turnips, asparagus, lettuce, and celery. I saw no other plants which
grow at home, but recognied as hardly less familar growths the Victorian
Eucalyptus, which has not had time to become gaunt and straggling, the
Norfolk Island pine, which grows superbly here, and the handsome Moreton
Bay fig. But the chief feature of this road is the number of residences;
I had almost written of pretentious residences, but the term would be
base slander, as I have jumped to the conclusion that the twin
vulgarities of ostentation and pretence have no place here. But
certainly for a mile and a half or more there are many very
comfortable-looking dwellings, very attractive to the eye, with an ease
and imperturbable serenity of demeanour as if they had nothing to fear
from heat, cold, wind, or criticism. Their architecture is absolutely
unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are embowered among
trailers, shadowed by superb exotics, and surrounded by banks of
flowers, while the stately cocoanut, the banana, and the candlenut, the
aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced. One house has extensive
grounds, a perfect widerness of vegetation, was pointed out as the
summer palace of Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani, widow of Kamehameha IV.,
who visited England a few years ago, and the finest garden of all as
that of a much respected Chinese merchant, named Afong. Oahu, at least
on this leeward side, is not tropical looking, and all this tropical
variety and luxuriance which delight the eye result from foreign
enthusiasm and love of beauty and shade.

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Letter # II is continued in Part 2.



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