Statewide County HI Archives News.....Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop. - Part 8. October 10, 2008
************************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://www.usgwarchives.net/hi/hifiles.htm
************************************************

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 October 12, 2008, 10:27 pm

Keepers Of The Culture, A Study In Time Of The Hawaiian Islands October 10, 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 10, 2008

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Historical Collections of Hawi'i
Keepers of the Culture
A Study in Time, of the Hawai'ian Islands
Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop
" Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands "
Letter # V - part 1
Transcribed

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Letter # V - Part 1

"Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands "


Volcano of Kilauea
Jan 31.

Bruised aching bones, strained muscles, and overwhelming fatique, render
it hardly possible for me to undergo the physical labour of writing, but
in spirit I am so elated with the triumph of success, and so thrilled by
new sensations, that though I cannot communicate the incommunicable, I
want to write to you while the impression of Kilauea is fresh, and by "
the light that never was on sea or shore."

By eight yesterday morning our preparations were finished, and Miss
Karpe, whose conversance with the details of traveling I envy, mounted
her horse on her own side-saddle, dressed in a short grey waterproof,
and a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat tied so tightly over her ears with a
green veil as to give it the look of a double spout. The only pack her
horse carried was a bundle of cloaks and shawls, slung together with an
umbrella on the horn of her saddle. Upa, who was most picturesquely got
up in the native style with garlands of flowers round his hat and
throat, carried our saddlebags 
on the peak of his saddle, a bag with bananas, bread, and a bottle of
tea on the horn, and a canteen of water round his waist. I had on my
course Australian hat which serves the double purpose of sunshade and
umbrella, Mrs. Thompson's riding costume, my great rusty New Zealand
boots, and my blanket strapped behind a very gaily ornamented
brass-bossed demi-pique Mexican saddle, which one of the missionary's
daughters had lent me. It has a horn in front, a low peak behind, large
wooden stirrups with leathern flaps the length of the stirrup leathers,
to prevent the dress from coming
in contact with the horse, and strong guards of hide which hang over and
below the stirup, and cover it and the foot up to the ankles, to prevent
the feet or boats from being torn in riding through the bush. Each horse
had four fathoms of tethering rope wound several times round his neck.
In such fahion must all travelling be done on Hawaii, whether by ladies
or gentlemen.

Upa supplied the picturesque element, we were the grotesque. The morning
was moist and unpropitious looking. As the greater part of thirty miles
has to be travelled at a foot's-pace the guide took advantage of the
soft grassy track which leads out of Hilo, to go off at a full gallop, a
proceeding which made me at once conscious of the demerits of my ovel
way of riding. To guide the horse and to clutch the horn of the saddle
with both hands were clearly incompatible, so I abandoned the first as
being the least important. Then my feet either slipped too far into the
stirrups and were cut, or they were jerked out; every corner was a new
terror, for at each I was nearly pitched off on one side, and when at
last Upa stopped, and my beast stopped without consulting my wishes,
only a desperate grasp of mane and tethering rope saved me from going
over his head. At this ridiculous moment we came upon a bevy of bron
maidens swimming in a lakelet by the roadside, who increased my
confusion by a chorus of laughter. How fervently I hoped that the track
would never admit of galloping again!

Hilo fringes off with pretty native houses, kalo patches and mullet
ponds, and in about four miles the track, then formed a rough hard lava,
and not more than 24 inches wide, enters a forest of the densest
description, a burst of true tropical jungle.
I could not have imagined anything so perfectly beautiful, nature seemed
to riot in the production of wonderful forms, as if the moist hot-house
air encouraged her in lavish excesses. Such endless variety, such depths
of green, such an impassable and altogether inextricable maze of forest
trees, ferns, and lianas! There were palms, breadfruit trees, ohias,
eugenias, candle-nuts of immense size, Koa (acacia) bananas, noni,
bamboos, papayas, 
( Carica papaya) guavas, ti trees 
( Cordyline terminalis), tree-ferns, climbing ferns, parasitic ferns,
and ferns themselves the prey of parasites of their own species. The
lianas were there in profusion climbing over the highest trees, and
entangling them, with stems varying in size from those as thick as a
man's arm to those as slender as whipcord, binding all in an impassable
network, and hanging over our heads in rich festoons or tendrils swaying
in the breeze. There were traiers, ie ( Freycinetia scandens ) with
heavy knotted stems, as thick as a frigate's stoutest hawser, coiling up
over the tops of tall ohias with tufted leaves like yuccas, and crimson
spikes of gaudy blossom.
The shining festoons of the yam and the graceful trailers of the maile (
Alyxia Olivacformis ), a sweet scented vine, from which the natives make
garlands, and the glossy leaved climbers hung from tree to tree, and to
brighten all, huge morning glories of a heavenly blue opened a thousand
blossoms to the sun as if to give a tender loveliness to the forest.
Here trees grow and fall, and nature covers them where they lie with a
new vegetaion which altogether obliterates their asty decay. It is four
miles of beautiful and inextricable confusion, untrodden by human feet
except the narrow track.
" Of every tree in this garden yhou mayest freely eat." and no serpent
or noxious thing trails it hideous form through this Eden.

It is quite intoxicating, so new, wonderful,
an solemn withal, that I was sorry whenwe emerged from its shady depths
upon a grove of cocoanut trees and the glare of day. Two very
poor-looking grass huts, with a ragged patch of suga-cane beside them,
gave us an excuse for a half hour's rest. A old woman in a red sack,
much tattooed, with thick short grey hair bristling on her head, sat on
a palm root, holding a nude brown child; a lean hideous old man, dressed
only in a malo, leaned against its stem, our horses with their higly
miscellaneous gear were thethered to a fern stump, and Upa, the most
picturesque of the party, served out tea. He and the natives talked
incessantly, and from the frequency with which the words "wahine haole "
( foreign woman ) occurred, the subject of their conversation was
obvious. Upa has taken notion from something M. S-- said, that I am a "
high chief," and related to Queen Victoria, and he was doubtlessly
imposing this fable on the people. In spite of their poverty and
squalor, if squalor is a term which can be applied to aught beneath
these sunny skies, there is a kindliness about them which they made us
feel, and the aloha with which they parted from us had a sweet friendly
sound.

From this grove we travelled as before in single file over a immense
expanse of lava of the kind called pahoehoe, or satin rock, to
distinguish it from the a-a, or jagged, rugged, impassable rock. Savants
all use these terms in the absence of any equally expressive in English.
The pahoehoe extends in the Hilo direction fom hence about twenty-three
miles. It is the cooled and arrested torent of lava which in past ages
has flowed towards Hilo from Kilauea. It lies in hummocks, in coils, in
rippled waves, in rivers, in huge convolutions, in pools smooth and
still, in caverns which are really bubbles. Hundreds of square miles of
the island are made up of this and nothing more. A very frequent aspect
of pahoehoe is the likeness on a magnificent scale a thick coat of cream
drawn in wrinkling folds to the side of a mile-pan. This lava is all
grey, and the greater part of its surface is slightly roughened.
Whenever this is not the case the horses slip upon it as upon ice.

Here I began to realize the universally igneous origin of Hawaii, as I
had not done among the finely disintegrated lava of Hilo. From the hard
black rocks which border the sea, to the loftiest mountain dome or peak,
every stone , atom of dust, and foot of fruitful or barren soil bears
the Plutonic mark. In fact, the island has been raised in a heap on
heap, ridge on ridge, mountain on mountain, to nearly the height of Mont
Blanc, by the same volcanic forces which are still in operation here,
and may still add at intervals to the height of the blue dome of Mauna
Loa, of which we caught occasional glimpses above the clouds. Hawaii is
actually at the present time being built up from the ocean, and this
great sea of pohoehoe is not to be regarded as a vindictive eruption,
bringing desolation on a fertil region, but as an architecttural and
formative process.

There is no water, except a few deposits of rain-water in holes, but the
moist air and incessant showers have aided nature to mantle this
frightful expanse with abundant vegetation, principally verns of an
exquisite green, and the most conspicious being the Sadleria, the
Gleichenia Hawaiiensis, a running wire-like fern, and the exquiste
Microlepia tenuifolia, dwarf guava, with its white flowers resembling
orange flowers in odour, and ohelos ( Vaccinium reticulatum), with their
red and white berries, and a profusion of small leaved ohias (
Metrosideros polymorpha), with their deep crimson tasselled flowers, and
their young shoots of bright crimson, relieved the monotony of green.
These
crimson tassels deftly strung on thread or fibers, are mush used by the
natives for their leis, or garlands. The ti tree   (Cordyline
terminalis) which abounds also on the lava, is most valuable. They cook
their food wrapped up in its leaves, te porus root when baked, has the
taste and texture of molasses candy, and when distilled yeilds a spirit,
and the leaves form wrappings for fish, hard poi, and other edibles.
Ocassionally a clump of tufted coco-palms, or the beautiful candle-nut
rose among the smaller growths. To our left a fringe of palm marked the
place where lava and the ocean met, while on our right, we were seldom
out of sight of the dense timber belt, with its fringe of tree-ferns and
bananas, which girdles Mauna Loa.

The track, on the whole, is a perpetual upward scramble; for, though the
ascent is so gradual, that it is only by the increasing coolness of the
atmosphere that the increasing elevation is denoted, it is really nearly
4,000 feet in thirty miles. Only strong, sure-footed, well-shod horses
can undertake this journey, for it is constant scramble over rocks,
going up or down natural steps, or cautiously treading along ledges.
Most of the track is quite legible owing to the vegetaion having been
worn off the lava, but the rock itself hardly shows the slightest
abrasion.

Upa had indicated that we were to stop and rest at the " Half Way
House," and, as I was hardly able to sit on my horse owing to fatigue, I
consoled myself with visionsof a comfortable sofa and a cup of tea. It
was with real dismay that  found the reality to consist of a grass hut,
much out of repair, and which, bad as it was, was locked. Upa said we
had ridden so slowly that it would be dark before we readhed the
volcano, and only allowed us to rest on the grass for a half-hour. He
had frequently reiterated " Half Way House, you wear spur;" and, on our
remounting, he buckled on my foot a heavy rusty Mexican spur, with
jingling ornaments and rowels an inch and a half long. These horses are
so accustomed to be jogged with these instruments that they won't move
without them. The prospct of five hours more riding looked rather black,
for I was so exhausted, and my shoulders and knee-joints were in severe
pain. Mis K's horse showed no othere appreciation of a stick with which
she belaboured him than flourishes of his tail,so, for a time, he was
put in the middle, that Upa might add his more forceful persuasions, and
I rode first and succeeded in getting my lazy animal into a priestly
amble known at home a " a butter and eggs trot." the favourite
trevelling pace, but this was not suiting the guide's notion of
progress, he frequently rushed up behind with a torrent of Hawaiian,
emphasized by heavy thumps on my horse's back, which so sorely
jeopardised my seat on the animal, owing to his resenting the
interference by kicking, that I ' dropped astern" for the rest of the
way, leaving Upa to belabour Miss K's steed for his diversion. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Letter # V continued in part 2.



File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/hi/statewide/newspapers/letterso63nnw.txt

This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/hifiles/

File size: 13.3 Kb