Roughing It
“Poultices do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes
leather to resist. Our notions empower wisdom, her let’s afford while we
can. Butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we’ll wean him from his
filly. We feel hot. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.’
“I was still not satisfied. These generalities did not meet the
question. They were crisp, and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence
that almost compelled conviction; but at such a time as this, with a
human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad
taste. At any other time I would have been not only glad, but proud, to
receive from a man like Mr. Greeley a letter of this kind, and would
have studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all I could; but
now, with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, I had no
heart for learning.
“Three days passed by, and I read the note again. Again its tenor had
changed. It now appeared to say:
“Potations do sometimes wake wines; turnips restrain passion; causes
necessary to state. Infest the poor widow; her lord’s effects will be
void. But dirt, bathing, etc., etc., followed unfairly, will worm him
from his folly—so swear not. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.’
“This was more like it. But I was unable to proceed. I was too much
worn. The word ‘turnips’ brought temporary joy and encouragement, but my
strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for
the boy, that I relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation
further, and resolved to do what I ought to have done at first. I sat
down and wrote Mr. Greeley as follows:
“DEAR SIR: I fear I do not entirely comprehend your kind note. It cannot
be possible, Sir, that ‘turnips restrain passion’—at least the study or
contemplation of turnips cannot—for it is this very employment that has
scorched our poor friend’s mind and sapped his bodily strength.—But if
they do restrain it, will you bear with us a little further and explain
how they should be prepared? I observe that you say ‘causes necessary to
state,’ but you have omitted to state them.
“Under a misapprehension, you seem to attribute to me interested motives
in this matter—to call it by no harsher term. But I assure you, dear
sir, that if I seem to be ‘infesting the widow,’ it is all seeming, and
void of reality. It is from no seeking of mine that I am in this
position. She asked me, herself, to write you. I never have infested
her—indeed I scarcely know her. I do not infest anybody. I try to go
along, in my humble way, doing as near right as I can, never harming
anybody, and never throwing out insinuations. As for ‘her lord and his
effects,’ they are of no interest to me. I trust I have effects enough
of my own—shall endeavor to get along with them, at any rate, and not go
mousing around to get hold of somebody’s that are ‘void.’ But do you not
see?—this woman is a widow—she has no ‘lord.’ He is dead—or pretended to
be, when they buried him. Therefore, no amount of ‘dirt, bathing,’ etc.,
etc., howsoever ‘unfairly followed’ will be likely to ‘worm him from his
folly’—if being dead and a ghost is ‘folly.’ Your closing remark is as
unkind as it was uncalled for; and if report says true you might have
applied it to yourself, sir, with more point and less impropriety. Very
Truly Yours, SIMON ERICKSON.
“In the course of a few days, Mr. Greely did what would have saved a
world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and
misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner. To wit, he sent an
intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a
plain hand by his clerk. Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his
heart had been right, all the time. I will recite the note in its
clarified form:
[Translation.] ‘Potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain
passive: cause unnecessary to state. Inform the poor widow her lad’s
efforts will be vain. But diet, bathing, etc. etc., followed uniformly,
will wean him from his folly—so fear not. Yours, HORACE GREELEY.’
“But alas, it was too late, gentlemen—too late. The criminal delay had
done its work—young Beazely was no more. His spirit had taken its flight
to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires
gratified, all ambitions realized. Poor lad, they laid him to his rest
with a turnip in each hand.”
So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and
abstraction. The company broke up, and left him so.... But they did not
say what drove him crazy. In the momentary confusion, I forgot to ask.
CHAPTER LXXI.
At four o’clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of
dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land
journey. This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire
after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island
structure higher and higher. Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves;
it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold
water—you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter.
Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.
The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now
living who witnessed it. In one place it enclosed and burned down a
grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks
stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark;
the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged,
left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf,
and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon
and wonder at.
There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at
that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as
the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did. It is a pity it is
so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is. They probably
went away. They went away early, perhaps. However, they had their
merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed
the sounder judgment.
Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to
every school-boy in the wide world—_Kealakekua_ Bay—the place where
Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives,
nearly a hundred years ago. The setting sun was flaming upon it, a
Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent
rainbows. Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these
and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.
Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery
the Rainbow Islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at
every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every
day, and frequently at night also—not the silvery bow we see once in an
age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and
beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of
them a few nights ago. What the sailors call “raindogs”—little patches
of rainbow—are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes,
like stained cathedral windows.
_Kealakekua_ Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell,
winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from
shore to shore. It is bounded on one side—where the murder was done—by a
little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined
houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and
three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and
bounds the inner extremity of it. From this wall the place takes its
name, _Kealakekua_, which in the native tongue signifies “The Pathway of
the Gods.” They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal
education in Christianity), that the great god _Lono_, who used to live
upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business
connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a
hurry.
As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean
stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the
bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the
flat rock pressed by Captain Cook’s feet when the blow was dealt which
took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man
struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages—the men
in the ship crowding to the vessel’s side and gazing in anxious dismay
toward the shore—the—but I discovered that I could not do it.
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It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the
distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to
the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think,
and wish the ship would make the land—for we had not eaten much for ten
hours and were viciously hungry.
Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook’s
assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide.
Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and
welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all
manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-
treatment. Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and
lamented god _Lono_, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of
the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at
this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen
thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly
origin with a groan. It was his death-warrant. Instantly a shout went
up: “He groans!—he is not a god!” So they closed in upon him and
dispatched him.
His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of
it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a
native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook
it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old
man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook’s bones were
recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.
Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook. They
treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and his men inflicted
bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed at least
three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.
Near the shore we found “Cook’s Monument”—only a cocoanut stump, four
feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders
piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was
entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored
sheets of copper, such as ships’ bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet
had a rude inscription scratched upon it—with a nail, apparently—and in
every case the execution was wretched. Most of these merely recorded the
visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore
this legend:
“Near this spot fell CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, The Distinguished
Circumnavigator, who Discovered these Islands A. D. 1778.”
After Cook’s murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened
fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon
balls cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump
standing. It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy
twilight. But there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on
the mountain side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-
pen, built of lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook’s flesh was
stripped from his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument
since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to
the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him. A