Roughing It
absurd enough at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of
the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks
plausible.
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In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of wives was
customary, but a _plurality of husbands_ likewise. Some native women of
noble rank had as many as six husbands. A woman thus supplied did not
reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each
in turn. An understood sign hung at her door during these months. When
the sign was taken down, it meant “NEXT.”
In those days woman was rigidly taught to “know her place.” Her place
was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and
content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his
dinner. She was not only forbidden, by ancient law, and under penalty of
death, to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred, under
the same penalty, from eating bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other
choice fruits at any time or in any place. She had to confine herself
pretty strictly to “poi” and hard work. These poor ignorant heathen seem
to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in
the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.
But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things.
They liberated woman and made her the equal of man.
The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children
alive when the family became larger than necessary. The missionaries
interfered in this matter too, and stopped it.
To this day the natives are able to _lie down and die whenever they want
to_, whether there is anything the matter with them or not. If a Kanaka
takes a notion to die, that is the end of him; nobody can persuade him
to hold on; all the doctors in the world could not save him.
A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large funeral.
If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only
necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour and he will be
on hand to the minute—at least his remains will.
All the natives are Christians, now, but many of them still desert to
the Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of trouble. An
irruption of the great volcano of Kilauea, or an earthquake, always
brings a deal of latent loyalty to the Great Shark God to the surface.
It is common report that the King, educated, cultivated and refined
Christian gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of
his fathers for help when disaster threatens. A planter caught a shark,
and one of his christianized natives testified his emancipation from the
thrall of ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a
fashion forbidden by his abandoned creed. But remorse shortly began to
torture him. He grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his sin,
refused food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had
sinned against the Great Shark God and could never know peace any more.
He was proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day
or two took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of
disease. His young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate
within the week. Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone
and it is only natural that it should crop out in time of distress.
Wherever one goes in the Islands, he will find small piles of stones by
the wayside, covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives
to appease evil spirits or honor local deities belonging to the
mythology of former days.
In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes
upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea
without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the
matter of hiding their nakedness. When the missionaries first took up
their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families
frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush. It
was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather
indelicate. Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose
calico robes, and that ended the difficulty—for the women would troop
through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms,
march to the missionary houses and then proceed to dress!—
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The natives soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was
shortly apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur. The missionaries
imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing
apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to
come to church naked, next Sunday, as usual. And they did not; but the
national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors
who were not at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers
could hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations. In the
midst of the reading of a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the
aisle with a world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a
“stovepipe” hat and a pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow,
tricked out in a man’s shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter
with a flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied
around her waist and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a
peacock’s tail off duty; a stately “buck” Kanaka would stalk in with a
woman’s bonnet on, wrong side before—only this, and nothing more; after
him would stride his fellow, with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied
around his neck, the rest of his person untrammeled; in his rear would
come another gentleman simply gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a
striped vest.
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The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious
of any absurdity in their appearance. They gazed at each other with
happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were
taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had
always lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for;
here was the evidence of a dawning civilization. The spectacle which the
congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that
the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with
the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a
general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some
irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was
nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and
dismiss the fantastic assemblage.
In our country, children play “keep house;” and in the same high-
sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little
material of slender territory and meagre population, play “empire.”
There is his royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective’s income
of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the “royal civil
list” and the “royal domain.” He lives in a two-story frame “palace.”
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And there is the “royal family”—the customary hive of royal brothers,
sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to
monarchy,—all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing
such titles as his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-
so. Few of them can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in
carriages, however; they sport the economical Kanaka horse or “hoof it”
with the plebeians.
Then there is his Excellency the “royal Chamberlain”—a sinecure, for his
majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing
at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing.
Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household
Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually
placed under a corporal in other lands.
Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting—high
dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.
Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber—an
office as easy as it is magnificent.
Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American
from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of
“shyster” calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre
above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or
glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him—salary, $4,000 a
year, vast consequence, and no perquisites.
Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who
handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual
“budget” with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of “finance,” suggests
imposing schemes for paying off the “national debt” (of $150,000,) and
does it all for $4,000 a year and unimaginable glory.
Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds sway over the
royal armies—they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed Kanakas,
mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble
with a foreign power we shall probably hear from them. I knew an
American whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend:
“Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Infantry.” To say that he was proud of
this distinction is stating it but tamely. The Minister of War has also
in his charge some venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal
salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port.
Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy—a nabob who rules the
“royal fleet,” (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.)
And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the chief
dignitary of the “Established Church”—for when the American Presbyterian
missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact
condition of Christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected the
grand dignity of an “Established (Episcopal) Church” over it, and
imported a cheap ready-made Bishop from England to take charge. The
chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to
this day, profanity not being admissible.
Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction.
Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc., and after
them a string of High Sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for
computation.
Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister
Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the French; her
British Majesty’s Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States;
and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with
sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state.
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Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house “kingdom” whose population
falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls!
The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal
magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu
than a Western Congressman does in New York.
And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined “court
costume” of so “stunning” a nature that it would make the clown in a
circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each Hawaiian
official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced uniform
peculiar to his office—no two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell
which one is the “loudest.” The King had a “drawing-room” at stated
intervals, like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms
congregate there—weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle
through smoked glass. Is there not a gratifying contrast between this
latter-day exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these
magnates afforded the missionaries the Sunday after the old-time