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.
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 thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a
tall pole, and formerly there was an inscription upon it
describing the memorable occurrence that had there taken place;
but the sun and the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render
it illegible.
Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon
worked herself into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came ashore
for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all
gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and
we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep
and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the
weary and the innocent.
