The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 18

CHAPTER IV
KAAHUMANU

Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. “You are old,” they argued; “soon you will die; what use will it be to you?” “Let the bird go,” said the King. “It will be for my children afterwards.” Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.

The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to identify. It was this missionary’s habit to go walking in the morning ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea. The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people, observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary’s path, and drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began to press the King with Christianity. “If you will throw yourself from that cliff,” said Kamehameha, “and come down uninjured, I will accept your religion: not unless.” But the missionary was a man of parts; he wrote a deep impression on his hearer’s mind, and after he had left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King’s servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other’s; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King’s men were dragged in a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance; the King’s misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his son’s estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the King. “A man to your god!” they urged – “a man to your god, that you may recover!” “The man is sacred to (my son) the King,” replied Kamehameha. So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead) that which he had spared to do while living.

No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: “If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it.” The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King’s death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. “(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together.” He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis.

The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820), all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.

Kaahumanu was a woman of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was “beautiful for a Polynesian”; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to make a crime of it against the mission. Party spirit ran very violent in the islands; tears were shed, threats flying; and Kaahumanu called a council of the chiefs. In that day stood forth the native historian, David Malo (though his name should rather have been Nathan), and pressed the regent with historic instances. Who was to be punished? – the whaler guilty of the act, the missionary whose denunciation had provoked the scandal? “O you, the wife of Kamehameha,” said he, “Kanihonui came and slept with you Luheluhe declared to Kamehameha the sleeping together of you two. I ask you, which of these two persons was slain by Kamehameha? Was it Luheluhe?” And she answered: “It was Kanihonui!” Shakespeare never imagined such a character; and it would require none less than he to represent her sublimities and contradictions.

After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait. Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night, plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran past the City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began to bark. “Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!” said the messengers, and returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations was restored.

A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her, when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not see her until 1820, thought her “beautiful for a Polynesian,” and while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal.

CHAPTER V
THE LEPERS OF KONA

A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife, brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there, hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group, similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some are desperate fellows; some mournful women – mothers and wives; some stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped, the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice. How does their own poet sing?

 
In the land of distress
My dwelling was on the mountain height,
My talking companions were the birds,
The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing.
 

It is for no crime this law-abiding race flee to the woods; it is no fear of the gallows or the dungeon that nerves themselves to resist and their friends to aid and to applaud them. Their liability is for disease; they are lepers; and what they combine to combat is not punishment but segregation. While China, and England, and France, in their tropical possessions, either attempt nothing or effect little, Hawaii has honourably faced the problem of this ancient and apparently reviving malady. Her small extent is an advantage; but the ruggedness of the physical characters, the desert woods and mountains, and the habit of the native mind, oppose success. To the native mind, our medical opinions seem unfounded. We smile to hear of ghosts and gods; they, when they are told to keep warm in fevers or to avoid contagion. Leprosy in particular they cannot be persuaded to avoid. But no mere opinion would exalt them to resist the law and lie in forests did not a question of the family bond embitter and exasperate the opposition. Their family affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent, circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the dwellers are well used in Molokai; they receive letters from friends already there who praise the place; and could the family be taken in a body, they would go with glee, overjoyed to draw rations from Government. But all cannot become pensioners at once; a proportion of rate-payers must be kept; and the leper must go alone or with a single relative; and the native instinctively resists the separation as a weasel bites. A similar reluctance can be shown in Molokai itself. By a recent law, clean children born within the precinct are taken from their leper parents, sent to an intermediate hospital, and given a chance of life and health and liberty. I have stood by while Mr. Meyer and Mr. Hutchinson, the luna and the sub-luna of the lazaretto, opened the petitions of the settlement. As they sat together on the steps of the guest-house at Kalawao, letter after letter was passed between them with a sneer, and flung upon the ground; till I was at last struck with this cavalier procedure, and inquired the nature of the appeals. They were all the same; all from leper parents, all pleading to have their clean children retained in that abode of sorrow, and all alleging the same reason —aloha nuinui– an extreme affection. Such was the extreme affection of Kaahumanu for Kanihonui; by which she indulged her wantonness in safety and he died. But love has a countenance more severe.

The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong.

I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song. The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way. “That was not singing,” explained the schoolmaster’s wife on my return, “that was crying.” And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the lament: “O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now you are taken away from me at last,” and so on without end.

The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows – the look of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely birth – perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the lament – subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England to whom my superfluity had proved more useful; but the next morning saw me at the pest-house, under convoy of the schoolmaster and the policeman.

The doors were again open. A fire was burning and a pot cooking on the lava, under the supervision of an old woman in a grass-green sacque. This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals – the girl in the same black weed and bowed in the same attitude as yesterday. It was painfully plain she would conceal, if possible, her face. Perhaps she had been beautiful: certainly, poor soul, she had been vain – a gift of equal value. Some consultation followed; I was told that nothing was required for outfit, but a gift in money would be gratefully received; and this (forgetting I was in the South Seas) I was about to make in silence. The confounded expression of the schoolmaster reminded me of where I was. We stood up, accordingly, side by side before the lepers; I made the necessary speech, which the schoolmaster translated sentence by sentence; the money (thus hallowed by oratory) was handed over and received; and the two women each returned a dry “Mahalo,” the girl not even then exhibiting her face.

Between nine and ten of the same morning, the schooner lay-to off Hookena and a whaleboat came ashore. The village clustered on the rocks for the farewell: a grief perhaps – a performance certainly. We miss in our modern life these operatic consolations of the past. The lepers came singly and unattended; the elder first; the girl a little after, tricked out in a red dress and with a fine red feather in her hat. In this bravery, it was the more affecting to see her move apart on the rocks and crouch in her accustomed attitude. But this time I had seen her face; it was scarce horribly affected, but had a haunting look of an unfinished wooden doll, at once expressionless and disproportioned; doubtless a sore spectacle in the mirror of youth. Next there appeared a woman of the middle life, of a swaggering gait, a gallant figure, and a bold, handsome face. She came, swinging her hat, rolling her eyes and shoulders, visibly working herself up; the crowd stirred and murmured on her passage; and I knew, without being told, this was the mother and protagonist. Close by the sea, in the midst of the spectators, she sat down, and raised immediately the notes of the lament. One after another of her friends approached her. To one after the other she reached out an arm, embraced them down, rocked awhile with them embraced, and passionately kissed them in the island fashion, with the pressed face. The leper girl at last, as at some signal, rose from her seat apart, drew near, was inarmed like the rest, and with a small knot (I suppose of the most intimate) held some while in a general clasp. Through all, the wail continued, rising into words and a sort of passionate declamatory recitation as each friend approached, sinking again, as the pair rocked together, into the tremolo drone. At length the scene was over; the performers rose; the lepers and the mother were helped in silence to their places; the whaleboat was urged between the reefs into a bursting surge, and swung next moment without on the smooth swell. Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears.

It was odd, but perhaps natural amongst a ceremonious, oratorical race, that the boat should have waited while a passenger publicly lamented on the beach. It was more odd still that the mother should have been the chief, rather the only, actor. She was leaving indeed; she hoped to be taken as a Kokua, or clean assistant, and thus accompany her daughter to the settlement; but she was far from sure; and it was highly possible she might return to Kona in a month. The lepers, on the other hand, took leave for ever. In so far as regarded their own isle and birthplace, and for their friends and families, it was their day of death.

 
The soldier from the war returns,
The sailor from the main:
 

but not the sick from the gray island. Yet they went unheeded; and the chief part, and the whole stage and sympathy, was for their travelling companion.

At the time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their arrival, and that place itself.⁵