Roughing It
lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or
manner. When we came to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at
his watch and said, “Sixteen minutes—I told you it was in her! that’s
over three miles an hour!” I could see he felt entitled to a compliment,
and so I said I had never seen lightning go like that horse. And I never
had.
The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an
hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could
overtake them. I said, never mind—I preferred a safe horse to a fast
one—I would like to have an excessively gentle horse—a horse with no
spirit whatever—a lame one, if he had such a thing. Inside of five
minutes I was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. I had no
time to label him “This is a horse,” and so if the public took him for a
sheep I cannot help it. I was satisfied, and that was the main thing. I
could see that he had as many fine points as any man’s horse, and so I
hung my hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the
perspiration from my face and started. I named him after this island,
“Oahu” (pronounced O-waw-hee). The first gate he came to he started in;
I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him.
He resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He
backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of
the street. I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six
hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted
thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down
and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and I was literally
dripping with perspiration. He abandoned the gate business after that
and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed
this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill me with
apprehension. I said to my self, this creature is planning some new
outrage, some fresh deviltry or other—no horse ever thought over a
subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. The more
this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I became, until the
suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to see if there was
anything wild in his eye—for I had heard that the eye of this noblest of
our domestic animals is very expressive.
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I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I
found that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a
faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again. He
tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high. I saw that I
must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as
last. I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he
saw it, he surrendered. He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter,
which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me
alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the
sweeping plunging of the _Ajax_ in a storm.
And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a
left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the American saddle.
There is no seat to speak of about it—one might as well sit in a
shovel—and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. If I
were to write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it
would make a large book, even without pictures. Sometimes I got one
foot so far through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an
anklet; sometimes both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the
legs; and sometimes my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly
dangling about my shins. Even when I was in proper position and
carefully balanced upon the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in
it, on account of my nervous dread that they were going to slip one way
or the other in a moment. But the subject is too exasperating to write
about.
A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoanut trees,
with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet
and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-
nuts—not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged parasols,
with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.
I once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a cocoanut tree might be
poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by
lightning. I think that describes it better than a picture—and yet,
without any question, there is something fascinating about a cocoa-nut
tree—and graceful, too.
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About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass,
nestled sleepily in the shade here and there. The grass cabins are of a
grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher
and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly
bound together in bundles. The roofs are very thick, and so are the
walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows. At a little
distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made
of bear skins. They are very cool and pleasant inside. The King’s flag
was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and His Majesty was
probably within. He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his
time there frequently, on sultry days “laying off.” The spot is called
“The King’s Grove.”
Near by is an interesting ruin—the meagre remains of an ancient heathen
temple—a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old
bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin
when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had
shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his
grandmother as an atoning sacrifice—in those old days when the luckless
sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical
happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the
missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them
permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a
place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and
showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what
unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him
how, in his ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no
purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty
cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for
pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of
the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to
think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful
island and never knew there was a hell!
This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a
roofless inclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy
wide—nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a
man’s head. They will last for ages no doubt, if left unmolested. Its
three altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed
away years ago. It is said that in the old times thousands of human
beings were slaughtered here, in the presence of naked and howling
savages. If these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell,
what pictures they could describe, of fettered victims writhing under
the knife; of massed forms straining forward out of the gloom, with
ferocious faces lit up by the sacrificial fires; of the background of
ghostly trees; of the dark pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel
over the uncanny scene, and the peaceful moon looking down upon it
through rifts in the cloud-rack!
When Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ha-may-ah) the Great—who was a sort
of a Napoleon in military genius and uniform success—invaded this island
of Oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent
to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he
searched out the dead body of the King of Oahu, and those of the
principal chiefs, and impaled their heads on the walls of this temple.
Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime.
The King and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made
them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses
and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and
cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then
suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the
sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard
rulers. The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the
tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the
right to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws
for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast
is so strong—the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries
is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest
compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the
condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook’s time, and their
condition to-day.
Their work speaks for itself.
CHAPTER LXV.
By and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which
commanded a far-reaching view. The moon rose and flooded mountain and
valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the
foliage the distant lights of Honolulu glinted like an encampment of
fireflies. The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers. The halt was
brief.—Gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and I clung to
the pommel and cantered after. Presently we came to a place where no
grass grew—a wide expanse of deep sand. They said it was an old battle
ground. All around everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones
of men gleamed white in the moonlight. We picked up a lot of them for
mementoes. I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones—of great
chiefs, may be, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle in the
old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood—and wore the
choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go. All sorts
of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said, irreverently,
that there had been an unusual number of “skull-hunters” there lately—a
species of sportsmen I had never heard of before.
Nothing whatever is known about this place—its story is a secret that
will never be revealed. The oldest natives make no pretense of being
possessed of its history. They say these bones were here when they were
children. They were here when their grandfathers were children—but how
they came here, they can only conjecture. Many people believe this spot
to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so; and they
believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their
proprietors fell in the great fight. Other people believe that
Kamehameha I. fought his first battle here. On this point, I have heard
a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which
have been written concerning these islands—I do not know where the
narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a
subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a
large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched
against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily
acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where
these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all,
they would never retreat beyond this boundary. The priests told them
that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated