A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  The Hawaiian monarchy, as Isabella explained, was ‘no longer an old-time chieftaincy made up of calabashes and poi and feather-cloaks’ but had a proper ‘civilised constitutional king, the equal of Queen Victoria’, who commanded a great deal of loyalty. And so, ‘the good people of Hilo have been decorating their houses anew with ferns and flowers, furbishing up their clothes, and holding mysterious consultations regarding etiquette and entertainments, just as if royalty were about to drop down in similar fashion on Bude or Tobermory. There were amusing attempts to bring about a practical reconciliation between the free-and-easiness of Republican notions and the respect due to a sovereign who reigns by “the will of the people” as well as by “the grace of God”, but eventually the tact of the King made everything go smoothly.’

  Early one morning, an American ironclad with the King and several high-ranking American officers aboard came chugging into Hilo Bay. Bunting bloomed amid the palms and the long tattered banana-leaves with their heavy whorls of golden fruit shining in the sun; every balcony and stair in town was packed with people in their smartest hats and bonnets; the beach was a jostle of garlanded natives on horseback who waved brilliant bandanas when the King disembarked and whose children ran ahead of him in a joyous riot of colour, while a huge chuckling native called Upa beat a big drum. The King, whose lilting name was Lunalilo, had been on the throne only three months when he went to Hilo and would be dead in about a year. He was a genial, tolerant man of thirty-eight who believed in a liberal constitutional monarchy and was therefore a great improvement on the old-time chieftains, whose rule a historian wrote, had been one of ‘despotism tempered by assassination’. Lunalilo was ‘above all’, ‘the well beloved’, ‘the darling of the people’ and formally elected by them when the previous King, Kamehameha V, died without a successor. Unfortunately Lunalilo, like several past members of the royal family, ‘was witty when drunk and wise when sober’, as Miss Cummings put it – and he often preferred being witty.

  But on that day in Hilo the King, who was trying to reform, behaved impeccably. His muscular brown frame was carefully stuffed inside ‘a sort of shooting suit, a short brown cutaway coat, an ash-coloured waistcoat and ash-coloured trousers with a blue stripe’. It was a dreadful rig-out, Isabella added for Hennie’s benefit, but was fortunately concealed beneath welcoming festoons of light-lemon amaranth, spiky rose ohia blooms, purple and cream passion-flowers. His Highness paid a courtesy call on Mr Coan, patiently listened to the Flute Band of Father Lyman’s Mission School and graciously received bounteous loads of offerings from his subjects. This present-giving, an old Hawaiian custom called hookupu, was both touching and gay. It took place at the court-house the next morning, and ‘long before ten, crowds had gathered outside the low walls of the lawn, natives and foreigners galloped in all directions, boats and canoes enlivened the bay, bands played, and the foreigners, on this occasion rather a disregarded minority, assembled in holiday dress in the upper verandah … Hawaiian flags on tall bamboos decorated the little gateways which gave admission to the lawn, an enormous standard on the government flagstaff could be seen for miles, and the stars and stripes waved from the neighbouring plantations….’ At ten, the King, his suite and the foreign administrators of Hawaii appeared on the lower verandah and the people trooped by in their thousands, not a one empty-handed. ‘Many of the women presented live fowls tied by the legs, which were deposited, one upon another, till they formed a fainting palpitating heap under the hot sun. Some of the men brought hogs decorated with leis of orange blossom, which squealed so persistently in the presence of royalty that they were removed to the rear. Hundreds carried nets of sweet potatoes, eggs and taro artistically arranged. Men staggered along in couples with bamboos between them, supporting clusters of bananas weighing nearly a hundredweight. Others brought yams, coconuts, oranges, onions, pumpkins, early pineapples and even the great delicious fruit of the large passion-flower. A few maidens presented the king with bouquets of choice flowers and costly leis of the yellow feathers of the Melithreptes pacifica.’ (Melithreptes pacifica, popularly known as the Royal Bird, was a glossy black songster with the misfortune of having one beautiful gold feather under each wing. The feathers were collected, usually at the expense of their owners’ lives, and woven into lustrous leis or cloaks fit for kings. The gold-feather cloak buried with Lunalilo a year later was said to be worth a hundred thousand dollars.)

  From the court-house balcony, overlooking his hill-high heaps of gifts, Lunalilo expressed his gratitude and told his people, ‘You must persevere in your search of wisdom and in habits of morality.’ (Cheers from the crowd). And, he concluded significantly, ‘At the present time I have four foreigners as my ministerial advisers. But, if among these young men now standing before me, and under this flag, there are any who shall qualify to fill these positions, then I will select them to fill their places.’ The loudest cheers of all greeted this overt suggestion that foreign influence in the Island’s affairs was predominant, but not necessarily desirable. It was of course logical. Foreigners had introduced the whole western-style apparatus of constitutional government and then had to provide trained officials to make it function. Most members of the Hawaiian Cabinet therefore, were American lawyers, missionaries, business men, and teachers; foreigners headed the new ministerial departments at pleasantly adequate salaries, for those days, of four thousand dollars a year each.

  The flummery of western-style public life had been introduced along with its institutions: there were royal garden-parties where sombre-suited Cabinet Ministers with starchy wives nibbled meringues in company with former tribal chiefs resplendent in military uniforms encrusted with flourishes of epaulettes and gold lace. Later, in Honolulu, Isabella attended such a party, at which ‘tea and ices were handed round on Sèvres china by footmen and pages in appropriate liveries’. The islanders had, of course, gained much more than footmen and Sèvres. An effective system of education had been initiated by the missionaries, there were a supreme court, a police force, numerous hospitals, not to mention more dubious benefits such as all those competing churches, a civil list, a regiment of household troops and a national debt (the latter recently doubled by government financing of the Hawaiian Hotel). Naturally enough, some opposition to all this had developed, and when Isabella attended a meeting where one American settler openly advocated the immediate annexation of the Islands by America, she heard faint dissenting cries of ‘Hawaii for the Hawaiians’. It was to this latent undertow of anti-foreign nationalism that Lunalilo appealed when he made his speech from the court-house balcony.

  But at that time the theme was not pursued. It scarcely could be when Lunalilo had been brought to Hilo on an American naval vessel and had been burdened with an official programme that seemed designed principally by and for the foreign residents. It included, for instance, a ‘social evening’ at Father Lyman’s where Isabella was officially presented to the King. Unofficially, she had met him the day before when, on a fern-gathering expedition, she had trotted round a corner of a bridle-path and there he was – slap-bang in front of her, with members of his suite about him. ‘When I saw these strangers and their wild stares,’ she told Hennie, ‘I remembered that I was in my Bloomer Suit and astride a horse and that probably they had never seen such a thing before. And I wished I were anywhere else!’ So she turned and cantered away into a grove of breadfruit trees. The King chose to ignore this episode, or perhaps he did not even recognise the small lady in rustling black silks who was presented to him at what she terms ‘the Lymans’ horribly stiff and dull party’. The King was handsome, with large, dark, melancholy eyes, whiskers ‘cut in the English fashion’ that concealed a soft full mouth. He questioned Isabella intently about the powers of the British monarchy and its possession of a parliamentary veto, while ‘Father Lymans’ boys’ serenaded interminably on the verandah. ‘The Lymans are trying to make the King good,’ she told Hennie, ‘and I fear the result will be a reaction into a most outrageous spree when he
gets out of their hands.’

  But the King was not yet out of the foreigners’ hands; there was a supper party at the Sheriff’s to attend first. And Isabella gladly joined in the turmoil of preparation and cooked for thirty-six hours at a stretch, along with Mrs Severance, a Chinese chef and ‘a Chinese prisoner’ who was a dab hand at grating coconut. They made sponges, ‘drops’, custards, and Isabella’s special was a huge trifle into which she surreptitiously poured some sherry (the Severances, like most of the Americans there, were Good Templars). The trifle was an astonishing success and after-supper jollity included ‘a refined kind of blind man’s buff’ and dancing under swinging Chinese lanterns, when ‘the King insisted on teaching me to dance the polka on the verandah’.

  Everyone enjoyed it, Isabella decided, even the King and the docile round-eyed islanders who stood outside the whole evening, peering over the garden fence. Certainly the King must have enjoyed meeting Isabella, for he called the next afternoon bearing a verse he had composed to wish her God-speed on a journey she was about to take to nearby Waimea, and when she left Hilo he escorted her to the steamer and ‘helped with the luggage’! As for Isabella, ‘I found him peculiarly interesting and attractive,’ she wrote home, ‘but sadly irresolute about the mouth and I saw from little things that he could be persuaded into anything.’ Lunalilo was, unfortunately, persuaded into many things that were detrimental to his own good, and when he died the next year of tuberculosis aggravated by alcoholism, he was, according to the missionaries, a victim of the unscrupulous ‘reprobate whites’ who had led him astray.

  III

  Until she visited the 2,500-foot-high tableland of Waimea that stretched along the leeward side of Hawaii, Isabella knew little about that numerous body of settlers, often classed as ‘reprobate whites’, who were not missionaries, teachers, lawyers or business men and who had little in common with those who were. But now she had arrived in rough-and-ready cattle-raising country; cool airs ruffled the pastures and ‘there are few hours of day or night in which the tremulous thud of shoeless horses galloping on grass is not heard in Waimea’. From the green roots of the plains the great bulks of two volcanoes – Mauna Kea and, beyond it, Mauna Loa – swept skyward; between the pasture and the sea burned a bald desert ‘unwatered and unfruitful, red and desolate under the sun’; from the beach where the steamer called a rutted mule-track stretched ten miles up and away across the torrid zone to the farming settlements and Mr Spencer’s sheep-station where Isabella stayed.

  Compared to the trim, slightly starchy homes of the Hilo residents, Spencer’s house was a slapdash sort of place where you were quite likely to find a hen underfoot or a baby helping himself to your bowl of poi or a few fleas snuggled in your pulu shakedown. Spencer was a Tasmanian with a half-white wife, a bluff, outdoor fellow and one of the many settlers who, she said, ‘admire courage, perseverence and jollity above all’. Isabella made herself easily at home and particularly liked Spencer’s mother-in-law, a roly-poly old party who spoke excellent English and loved to tease the whites, who were ‘a sour, morose, worrying, forlorn race’ in her view. And Isabella, watching the carefree routines of the household’s women – making quilts, collecting flowers, weaving sunhats, ‘talking, bathing, riding, visiting’ – could see her point.

  The life at Waimea made Isabella realise that though the New England Christian ethic had been successfully screwed upon some of the natives, there was a reverse trend in operation – other settlers had gaily and unashamedly ‘gone Hawaiian’. Most of these were men, whalers, bullock-hunters, sheep-shearers, plantation overseers, and their talents were lassoing the one calf from the herd, shooting, curing hides, breaking the wildest stallions. Often they had floated on to the island’s romantic shores by chance and, liking what they saw, had shacked up with native women and stayed. There were ex-cabin boys from Liverpool, steamboat-men from the Mississippi, gold-rushers who hadn’t ‘seen the colour’ in ’49, farmboys from the mid-West, itinerant printers from London, ex-trappers from the Canadian Rockies, ex-sailors from just about everywhere. As a result, Isabella felt, ‘the moral atmosphere of Waimea had never been a wholesome one’. The ‘flagrant immorality and outrageous licence of former years’ had been curbed by the imposition of legal penalties handed down by the new courts, but still ‘“the Waimea crowd” is not considered up to the mark’. And, Isabella adds, ‘it was in such quarters that the great antagonistic influence to the complete Christianisation of the natives was created and it is from such suspicious sources that the aspersions on missionaries are usually derived’.

  As Isabella suggests, this ‘antagonistic influence’ had been stronger in the earlier period when a flourishing whaling trade had centred on the Islands. As recently as ’66, when Twain was around, all the talk was still of whaling, and he gives a graphic account of what racy, rumbustious talk it was. There were heated disputes over ‘long lays’ and ‘short lays’, which were the proportions of profit to which each sailor and officer was entitled. Whaling was a risky business: crews were not paid fixed wages but simply took a percentage of the net profits when all the oil from the sperm-whales and bone from the Ochotsk and Arctic whales has been sold. As Twain pointed out, the sailors often got a raw deal as numerous deductions were made for freight, leakage and ‘slops’ (items bought by the crew on board) before the proportion of gold coin payable to each man was calculated.

  Now most of the whalers had gone elsewhere, but the fundamental antagonisms between those who had revelled in the pagan, amoral, ‘innocent’ Islands of the recent past and those who wanted to christianise and ‘civilise’ them for a progressive future still remained. The Islanders were now a wretched and dwindling race because the missionaries had forced them to wear clothes and go to school and thus ruined their constitutions, said the ‘reprobate whites’. The islanders were decreasing in numbers because of the venereal disease and ruinous addiction to bad whisky introduced by immoral foreigners, said the missionaries. Indubitably there were fewer islanders since the white men arrived, and among the principal causes were emigration (mostly of young men gone a-whaling), the inroads of smallpox and, increasingly, of leprosy, and the notorious carelessness with which the native mothers treated their children. A noisy baby was no longer buried under the living-room floor, but a family would cheerfully give one away, if there were any takers.

  As a result of all these factors there were fewer than 52,000 natives left on the Islands by 1873 (as compared to some 85,000 twenty years earlier) and Isabella often came upon deserted hamlets, fields that were no longer tilled, churches and schools much too large for their present flocks. ‘Whites,’ she concluded, ‘have conveyed to these shores slow but infallible destruction on the one hand and on the other the knowledge and skills of civilisation and the hope of a life to come; and the rival influences of blessing and cursing have now been fifty years at work.’

  But on the plains of Waimea that were so airy and vast, flecked only with cattle and the sailing shadows of clouds, it was easy to forget that other people were necessary and to ‘be’ simply, just where she was. On the first morning after leaving Spencer’s sheep station, she was, by eight o’clock, again atop the precipice of the Waipio Valley, looking down its enchanted length, ‘full of infinite depths of blue – blue smoke in lazy spirals curled upwards; it was eloquent in a morning silence that I felt reluctant to break. Against its dewy greenness the beach shone like coarse gold, and its slow silver river lingered lovingly, as though loath to leave it and be merged in the reckless, loud-tongued Pacific.’

  For the next few days she meandered about the remote coastline. She came to a river that acted as highway for the nearby hamlets and rode up it in triumphant procession, the water lapping over her horse’s belly, she with her feet on the animal’s neck, while two canoes and all the children and dogs for miles around paddled along behind her. She rode up the shelving sides of a 2,500-foot-high pali, the track so narrow that she had to take her left foot out of the stirrup to prevent cru
shing it against the cliff-wall, while her right dangled over the precipice, and dislodged stones bounced sickeningly off into the void. At one place the track completely disintegrated and she had to dismount, an alarming manoeuvre when there was no ground to dismount upon. ‘I somehow slid under him,’ she explains, ‘being careful not to turn the saddle, and getting hold of his hind leg, screwed myself round behind him’ and went the rest of the way up hanging for dear life on to his tail.

  Isabella describes her excursions in the Waimea region gaily and with seeming completeness, but something else happened during that time which, in its very different way, probably made her feel as giddy as the pali-climbing. It is not mentioned in her book, but she told Hennie about it. Among the men of the ‘Waimea crowd’ whom she met at Spencer’s station was a certain Mr Wilson, a hunter of bullocks, maker of roads, jack-of-all-trades, ‘a fine pleasant backwoodsman’, Isabella says. Wilson got into the habit of calling at Spencer’s constantly when Isabella was there (and she was there for several weeks, on and off). They went riding together and talked about wool prices, the raising of bullocks, the uncertain future of the Islands. He liked her earnest commonsense, her demure sense of humour, her utter fearlessness; he liked to watch her at the Spencers’ where, because she had few clothes, she sometimes wore her ‘black silk with the low front’ which, she candidly admits, ‘looked grotesque’ in the room she shared with ‘magpies, ducks, fowls and a carpenter’s bench’.

  Anyway, Wilson liked this little English lady so much that one day she received a note: ‘My friend Mr Wilson is most anxious to propose to you but dare not after so short an acquaintance. I can only say that his character is excellent, that he is about the best-hearted fellow on the island – Spencer.’ Wilson may have experienced initial shyness, but he had the blunt persistence that sometimes accompanies it, and soon appeared to plead his suit. He told Isabella that he had felt ‘stronger all over’ the first time she spoke to him, and that he ‘had never felt so good and happy as the night before when he was talking with me, and that the sight of my knitting needles had affected him so by reminding him of his mother in Canada’. Isabella felt inclined to laugh, for she did not believe his affections were seriously engaged and, probably, did not find the comparison to his mother particularly warming. ‘He was so perfectly respectful and yet so perfectly assured,’ she marvelled. And this very assurance made Wilson determined that she should see him plain. ‘He told me that he could not deceive me, that he had been what women call very wild. And what this means in Waimea,’ Isabella added, ‘it is fearful to think of!’ All in all, she told him, there were fifty reasons why it would not do, and he leaned over her smiling and said that if she’d stay and tell them, he would dispose of every one. ‘He was a splendid-looking fellow,’ she explained to Hennie, ‘and what I might have said if it had not been for you I don’t know.’ She considered mentioning the difference in their social backgrounds ‘or some such stereotyped thing’ but she charitably refrained, evading him with the excuse that she had to return to England ‘to earn a living’ (which was not strictly true), and promising to write to him when she got to Honolulu. ‘Oh now don’t go, stay and try if you can’t like me,’ he concluded rather pathetically.