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.
