A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  But she didn’t stay. Throughout her life, her instinct was to fly from the threat of any intimate personal entanglement, as she herself partly recognised, for she sometimes complained (rather guiltily) that the very presence of people exhausted her emotional reserves. So to escape Mr Wilson she went to Honolulu, intending to leave the Islands forthwith and return directly to ‘the hard prosaic north’ which would be warmed only by the securely familiar and beloved face of her sister. But Honolulu only served as a sharp, unwelcome reminder of all the civilised trappings of her homeland. It was, even then, something of ‘a metropolis, gay, hospitable and restless’. Along the dusty palm-and banana-shaded streets you could buy almost anything – ‘good black silks’ for ladies, milk-pails, chandeliers, topsail chains, photographic volcanic ‘Views’, ‘souvenir Polynesian war-implements’ and melon-flavoured ice-cream. Four newspapers circulated every crumb of local gossip, and a frantic social whirl kept the journalists off the breadline. ‘Visiting begins at breakfast-time, when it ends I know not, and receiving and making visits, court festivities … entertainments given by the commissioners of the great powers, riding parties, picnics, verandah parties, “sociables” and luncheon and evening parties on board the ships of war succeed each other with frightening rapidity.’

  Isabella’s reaction to all this was a return of her nervous attacks and headaches. Her face, that had been reddened, freckled, opened by the sun and wind, began again to look drawn and aged. While she was conscientiously finding out about the Islands’ constitutional framework, attending social functions and lectures on the country’s economic future, a part of her was aching for a return to ‘the congenial life of the wilds’ where she had ‘rioted most luxuriantly’. ‘The uncertain future and the disappointment which it always is to me to break down when I am among people and ordinary ways make me feel depressed,’ she explained. ‘I like congenial, informal cultivated people, yet I feel that, however much I may recover, I shall never be able to enjoy more than the very quietest society.’ While she was in that rebellious, nostalgic, self-punishing mood, a packet of letters arrived from Hennie saying that she was well and happy. The lifeline was secure, and Isabella, grabbing at the leeway offered her, decided at once to stay four months longer on the Islands. So she boarded the sixty-ton schooner Jenny which was scheduled to carry an overload of natives, cattle, hides, sugar and molasses to the little round island of Kauai. Mrs Dexter, who was still stranded on Honolulu with her ailing son, saw her friend off and, Isabella says, ‘pitied me heartily, for it made her quite ill to look down the cabin hatch; but I convinced her that no inconveniences are legitimate subjects for sympathy which are endured in the pursuit of pleasure’. It was another of her lifelong Travelling Principles, though in later years she occasionally forgot it.

  Kauai, the ‘Garden Isle’, was a distant, lonely, gentle place with none of the fiery volcanic dramas of Hawaii or the sophistication of Oahu’s Honolulu. Some five thousand natives, accounted rustics by the inhabitants of the other islands, were scattered about its wooded, fertile terrain which, at that time of year, was cooled by a riotous trade wind and warmed by a mild sun. Very few foreigners lived on Kauai, but among them Isabella discovered the Sinclairs, the most attractive and original family she met anywhere on the archipelago. Her book indicates that they interested her; her letters make it clear that, for a time, she found them absolutely fascinating.

  The Sinclairs had been among the early pioneer settlers on Kauai, and matriarch of the clan was a seventy-two-year-old widow, ‘a lady of the old Scotch type, very talented, bright, humourous, charming, with a definite character which impresses its force upon everybody; beautiful in her old age, disdaining that servile conformity to prevailing fashion which makes many old people at once ugly and contemptible’. Mrs Sinclair and her husband had originally settled in New Zealand and had brought up a large family there on a large sheep-farm. After her husband’s death, the widow decided that, instead of declining into a placid old age, she wanted to see more of the world and persuaded the whole family to join her. So they sold their property, bought a clipper barque and simply set sail over the Pacific on a voyage of discovery. Thus it was that there appeared at the Honolulu wharf one day during the early 60s a ‘trim barque with this large family on board, with a beautiful and brilliant old lady at its head, books, pictures, work and all that could add refinement to a floating home, about them, and cattle and sheep of valuable breeds in pens on deck’. The family, who undoubtedly had a good deal of ancestral canniness about them, bought the whole off-shore island of Niihau from the then king for a very low price, and there settled. By the time Isabella met them, Mrs Sinclair and most of the family were living on nearby Kauai, in an airy, isolated house on a cool green plateau fringed with orange-groves. From the front verandah, one looked over a steep ravine to a golden empty sea on which the island of Niihau floated ‘like amethyst’. There, one of the Sinclair sons reigned ‘like a prince’ over 350 natives and some 20,000 sheep. In the main house too, the life-style was unabashedly feudal and conducted with an old-fashioned, independent grace that appealed to Isabella enormously, so that her letters on the subject gush in an uncharacteristic way.

  She had been there a few days when Mrs Sinclair appeared, a quaint figure on horseback ‘in a large drawn silk bonnet which she rarely lays aside, as light in her figure and step as a young girl, looking as if she had walked out of an old picture’. The formidable lady reigned over the household of a bachelor son, two widowed daughters and three grandsons, dashing moustachioed princelings in scarlet shirts, tight leather trousers, boots and spurs. Their lithe bodies were masters of the surf-board, the lasso, the galloping stallion, and when they thudded back from a late herding, winding their horns as they came, the women rushed to the verandah to greet them ‘just as in olden days’. Proficient too in more formal arts, the boys learned Greek and German from one Mr Müller, a Prussian who had been with Maximilian in Mexico, and of him, at first, Isabella could not find enough kind things to say. He was ‘brilliant, sparking, exquisitely refined’, a ‘converted Christian’, the Bible never far from his sensitive hand, ‘his prayers are so wonderful, … but I dislike his ideas’. Prayers, ideas and all were enunciated by Mr Müller in the most beautiful English, for ‘his refined instincts make him avoid all Americanisms’. During the cool of the evening, Müller played the piano ‘exquisitely’ in the elegant drawing-room, and then, as the notes died away, he ‘turned his radiant face to one with the query, “What does that say to you?”’ (But there was, as one might guess, something suspicious about Mr Müller. All praise of his ‘“spirituelle” character’ ceases abruptly in the letters. In the book, Isabella comments briefly that he was ‘still suffering from Mexican barbarities’.)

  The late evening talk was of politics, theology, current books – a refreshing change from the webs of Hilo gossip. The family were thoroughly conversant with the language and culture of their adopted homeland and from them Isabella learned much about the Island’s history – that sweet dream of indolence and plenty which was sometimes barbed and mutilated to a nightmare by the savage, senseless tyranny of the tabu. The tabu system had been operated by, and for, the priests and chiefs, whose catalogue of ‘thou shalt not’ was longer than any Presbyterian missionary’s. Not only were women forbidden to eat with men (a common restriction among primitives) but any woman entering a room where men were eating was killed. Now and then the priests proclaimed a period of general tabu, an orgy of masochism that was, perhaps, a psychological necessity in a land of such natural ease and bounty. During it, canoeing, swimming, fishing, dancing were prohibited; no fire could be lit, no noise could be made. This latter injunction was so strictly enforced that, according to Miss Cumming, even the mouths of the priests’ dogs were tied to prevent them barking and fowls were swathed in cloth and penned under calabashes lest they should venture to cackle!

  In contrast to the earnest discussions of the Sinclair family evenings, the days seemed simply for
fun, more ‘sybaritic’ fun than Isabella had ever experienced. Isabella was fond of the word ‘sybarite’ and often protests that she was not one, as indeed she was not; but for a while she indulged herself in the general frolics. A party of them rode to the mountains where they ‘played at living’ for three days, eating wild roast pig and mangoes, bathing in ‘fern shrouded streams that brawled among wild bananas’, sleeping in a forest ‘bird-house’. This enchanted dwelling was shaded with candlenut trees, wreathed in morning-glories and orange star-blossom, and its roof was hung about with wasps’ nests – but even the wasps didn’t sting.

  The sting, for Isabella, came when amid that riot of colour and plenty she pictured dear Hennie, pallid in a lacklustre land which was then crouched grey under the slashing rains and winds of March. Writing home in a mood of guilt-ridden love and mad optimism, Isabella suggested that they should perhaps move to the Islands? They could have a ranch with lots of horses, and they could ‘help the natives’; Hennie could pay visits easily; no one would mind if their furniture was a bit shabby; they wouldn’t be made miserable by poor servants, for few were employed here; you could buy two sirloins of beef for what a pound of chops cost in Edinburgh. And she was so fitted for island life now, she could cook, wash, mend clothes, saddle and bridle horses and felt so much more at ease ‘with manual than intellectual matters’. Then Isabella imagined Hennie reading the letter and being happy and excited with it and showing it to a dear friend Bessie – but shrewd Bessie ‘will toss her head and say, “She better stay where she is, for she’ll only come back to grumble at everything and hate us all!”’ And so Isabella, on lush Kauai, sighed and smiled at the thought of Bessie’s home-truths, and her romantic castle-in-the-air probably tumbled even before she sealed the envelope. It was the only time that she allowed herself to be briefly seduced by the dream that she could make one entity of her two divided lives – the adventurer-traveller and the English gentlewoman. But poor Hennie, who lost most from the division, took the dream rather seriously and sat down at once in her dreary little drawing-room and wrote to say that, yes, perhaps she should join dear Isa in Hawaii, for it all sounded so wonderful. Isabella received this proposal just as she was finally leaving the Islands about three months later – and in a hastily-written reply, squashed it very flat. Hennie’s role was the traditionally female one of waiting and watching; ranching and riding would be most unsuitable for her delicate constitution. Hennie had to be the stay-at-home to whom all happy wanderers return, trailing their bright tales behind them.

  IV

  And so, while Hennie waited, Isabella accumulated more tales for the telling. She tore herself away from the sybaritic Sinclairs and cantered back to the other side of Kauai alone. The aloneness was intoxicating. ‘I liked it, oh how I liked it,’ she told her sister. ‘I did wild things which I can’t do with white people, such as galloping wildly up and down hill, hallooing a horse to make it go, twisting my knee for a few minutes around the horn of the saddle, riding without stirrups and other free and easy ways. I thought of nothing all that day.’ And natives who saw her madcap capers laughed and waved and threw flowers after her and shouted ‘paniola, paniola’ and she laughed back, liking its sound. The word meant ‘cowboy’, she learned later, ‘lassoing cattle and all that kind of thing’, and secretly Isabella hugged it as a compliment, though it was not generally used as such about a foreign lady.

  She was thoroughly a fully-fledged paniola by now and continued to island-hop alone until May, when she returned to Hilo. From there she made a short expedition to the southern Puna district with Luther Severance and his wife, whose company she preferred ‘even to solitude’. They jogged over grasslands dotted with pandanus and clumps of eugenia hung with crimson ‘native apples’ crammed with tart juicy pulp. The sea stirred close and ‘surf kept bursting up behind the trees in great snowy drifts’; birds, crimson as apples, bounced among the palms and below, in their fan-tailed shadows, coconuts tumbled in tawny heaps and were chewed open by dogs, cats, hogs. They visited the ‘sight’ of the region – a natural pool cradled in basalt. The water, bluer than any Italian grotto, glazed coconut shells and rocks on the pool’s floor with frosted azure and changed to blue-tinged marble the limbs of the foreigners as they floated about in it, gazing up at golden balls of guava fruit that swung overhead. Lulled in all this beauty, Isabella realised that she had ‘developed a capacity for doing nothing which horrified me and except when we energised ourselves to go to the hot spring, my companions and I were content to dream in the verandah and watch the lengthening shadows and drink coconut milk till the abrupt exit of the sun startled us and we saw the young moon carrying the old one tenderly and a fitful glare sixty miles away, where the solemn fires of Mauna Loa are burning at a height of nearly 14,000 feet’.

  Mauna Loa, there at least was a challenge, a brute fact to stiffen the indolent will, and every time she looked towards it, the biblical question of Hazael to Elisha thrummed in her mind: ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’ The query seems a little high-flown in the context, but to Isabella it apparently suggested a ‘cowardly’ protest against the reckless self-punishing compulsion of the explorer that was tempting her with the summit of Mauna Loa, Isabella’s awe, admiration, fear of Mauna Loa was not groundless; she was not making a mountain out of a molehill. This ‘Matterhorn of the Pacific’, largest volcano in the world, sweeps to a height of 13,650 feet; the circumference of its base is some 180 miles; from the height of 7,000 feet it rises as a harsh desert of tossed and twisted lava, riven into crevasses and blown into gigantic bubbles of rock by frequent earthquakes. The few men who had climbed it invariably returned shaken, bruised, their eyebrows burnt off, reeling with exhaustion and the effects of altitude sickness; as far as people knew, only one foreign woman had ever reached the top – so far.

  Knowing all this, Isabella might have submitted to her cowardly doubts had it not been for Mr William Green, shipping agent, acting British consul and amateur expert on volcanic phenomena. But Mr Green, as it happened, was planning an ascent of Mauna Loa, and it was soon the hottest news of the day in Hilo that the English lady Miss Bird was going up with him. When she went to the beach-stores to buy camp supplies of potted meat, chocolate and oats for the horses, everyone said, ‘So you’re going up the mountain with Mr Green,’ and they all wished her luck and thought she was mad. No one, however, seems to have thought it in the least ‘improper’ that Isabella should be going off unchaperoned with Mr Green, a man of about her own age. On several future occasions too, she was to travel in the company of a male with whom she would share the inevitable proximities of camp life. For, once she had fixed on some particular goal, she quite ruthlessly made use of men and animals in order to reach it. But she must have gone about it in such a straightforward, single-minded, matter-of-fact way that not an eyebrow was raised. ‘Travellers are privileged to do the most improper things with perfect propriety, that is one charm of travelling,’ she later declared. It was a strategy which liberated her and she first began to practise it with success on the Sandwich Islands. So, in this instance, the residents of Hilo, far from being scandalised by the proposed expedition, were most helpful and lent her a camp-kettle, a peaked cap and an enormous Mexican poncho. Mrs Severance rustled up some thick chemises, and an aged Scotswoman produced from the bottom of an old trunk ‘a stout flannel shirt and a pair of venerable worsted stockings’. Offering them, the old woman said, with a mixture of awe and disapproval, ‘Oh my, what some people will do!’ Isabella rather liked that.

  She liked starting off too, early one morning on mule-back, shaking with excitement, ‘for everything is happening that could happen…. I had on my usual red suit, my little brown hat, the long white scarf wound several times round my neck, a handkerchief tied over my face. A bag with six pounds of oats tied to the horn of my saddle, your shawl with ends hanging down in front of me, some strips of rawhide and a lasso which I have been obliged to borrow of Mr Wilson for a tether, rop
e hung to one side of the rings and immense saddlebags behind. Several of the Hilo people came to their garden gates as we went by.’

  As an apéritif, she and Mr Green climbed 4,000 feet to the crater of Kilauea, and stood dazed above its lakes of molten fire as the blasted ground reeled and rumbled beneath them. ‘The motion was as violent as that of a large ship in a mid-Atlantic storm,’ she decided, and added, ‘I am glad to have felt such good earthquakes.’ Between this journey and the big ascent, they spent a night in a flea-ridden, desolate grass house among a number of cross-grained, lugubrious ranch-hands who were full of fearful prophecies about their forthcoming adventure, and ‘entertained us with the misfortunes of our predecessors on which they seem to gloat with ill-omened satisfaction.’ Outside too the landscape had become ominous – a cracked tableland of volcanic waste, blotched with clumps of sow-thistle, wintry trees, dense cold fog. But inside, huddled round a wood-fire, Isabella was happy in spite of the omens, having ‘Volcanic talk’ with William Green, eating doughnuts and stewed chicken, making cruppers for the pack-horse out of goats’ hair and old stockings. Isabella had taken her travelling companion’s measure by now and, while she liked him, she did not feel as totally in his debt as she had at the outset. She told Hennie that Green, ‘like many thinking and scientific men who have good wives, is quite in a dream about practical things … I have to remind him of everything and suggest plans’. Still, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement: he had gained a valuable travelling housekeeper and she so far ‘had led him with a thread of silk, and often think how much better it is to travel with a man than almost any woman’.