Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands Part 5

The Government maintains a careful guard over the schools. A compulsory education law obliges parents, under fixed penalties, to send their children to school; and besides the common or primary schools, there are a number of academies, most of which receive some help from the Government, while all are under Government supervision. The census gives the number of children between six and fifteen years of age at 6931; and there are 324 teachers, or one teacher for every twenty-seven children in the whole group. Attendance at school is, I suspect, more general here than in any other country in the world. The last report of W.P. Kamakau, the President of the Board of Education, made in March, 1872, returns 8287 children actually attending upon 245 schools of various grades, 202 being common schools. Under this system there is scarcely a Hawaiian of proper age who can not both read and write.

Churches they maintain by voluntary effort, and their contributions are very liberal. They take a pride in such organizations. Dr. Coan's native church at Hilo contributes $1200 per year to foreign missions.

There are no beggars, and no public paupers except the insane, who are cared for in an asylum near Honolulu, and the lepers, who are confined upon a part of Molokai. The convicts and the boys in the reform school contribute to their own support by their labor. The Queen's Hospital is only for curable cases, and the people take care of their own infirm, aged and otherwise incapable dependents.

It seems to me that very unusual judgment has been shown in the manner in which benevolent and penal inst.i.tutions have been created and managed among these people; for the tendency almost everywhere in countries which call themselves more highly civilized is to make the poor dependent upon charity, and thus a fatal blow is struck at their character and respectability. Here, partly of course because the means of living are very abundant and easily got, but also, I think, because the government has been wisely managed, the people have not been taught to look toward public charity for relief; and though we Americans, who live in a big country, are apt to think slightingly of what some one called a toy kingdom, any one who has undertaken to manage or organize even a small community at home will recognize the fact that it is a task beset by difficulties.

But in these Islands a state, a society, has been created within a quarter of a century, and it has been very ably done. I am glad that it has been done mainly by Americans. Chief-justice Lee, now dead, but whose memory is deservedly cherished here; Dr. Judd, who died in August, 1873; Mr. C.C.

Harris, lately Minister of Foreign Relations, and for many years occupying different prominent positions in the Government; Dr. J. Mott Smith, lately the Minister of Finance; Chief-justice Allen, and Mr. Armstrong, long at the head of the Educational Department, the father of General Armstrong, President of the Hampton University in Virginia, deserve, perhaps, the chief credit for this work. They were the organizers who supplemented the labors of the missionaries; and, fortunately for the native people, they were all men of honor, of self-restraint, of goodness of heart, who knew how to rule wisely and not too much, and who protected the people without destroying their independence. What they have done would have given them fame had it not been done two thousand miles from the nearest continent, and at least five thousand from any place where reputations are made.

Of a total native population of 51,531, 6580 are returned by the census as freeholders--more than one in every eight. Only 4772 are returned as plantation laborers, and of these probably a third are Chinese; 2115 returned themselves as mechanics, which is a very large proportion of the total able-bodied population. I believe that both freeholders and mechanics find employment on the plantations as occasional laborers.

A people so circ.u.mstanced, well taught in schools, freeholders to a large extent, living in a mild and salubrious climate, and with cheap and proper food, ought not, one would say, to decrease. There are, of course, several reasons for their very rapid decrease, and all of them come from contact with the whites. These brought among them diseases which have corrupted their blood, and made them infertile and of poor stamina. But to this, which is the chief cause, must be added, I suspect, another less generally acknowledged.

The deleterious habit of wearing clothes has, I do not doubt, done much to kill off the Hawaiian people. If you think for a moment, you will see that to adopt civilized habits was for them to make a prodigious change in their ways of life. Formerly the maro and the slight covering of the tapa alone shielded them from the sun and rain. Their bodies became hardy by exposure. Their employments--fishing, taro-planting, tapa-making, bird-catching, canoe-making--were all laborious, and pursued out-of-doors.

Their gra.s.s houses, with openings for doors and windows, were, at any rate, tolerably well ventilated. Take the man accustomed thus to live, and put shoes on his feet, a hat on his head, a shirt on his back, and trowsers about his legs, and lodge him in a house with close-shutting doors and windows, and you expose his const.i.tution to a very serious strain, especially in a country where there is a good deal of rain. Being, after all, but half civilized, he will probably sleep in a wet shirt, or c.u.mber his feet with wet shoes; he will most likely neglect to open his windows at night, and poison himself and his family with bad air, to the influence of which, besides, his unaccustomed lungs will be peculiarly liable; he will live a less active life under his changed conditions; and altogether the poor fellow must have an uncommonly fine const.i.tution to resist it all and escape with his life. At the best, his system will be relaxed, his power of resistance will be lessened, his chances of recovery will be diminished in the same degree as his chances of falling ill are increased. If now you throw in some special disease, corrupting the blood, and transmitted with fatal certainty to the progeny, the wonder is that a people so situated have not died out in a single generation.

In fact they have died out pretty fast, though there is reason to believe that the mortality rate has largely decreased in the last three years; and careful observers believe even that in the last year there has been an actual increase, rather than a decrease in the native and half caste population. In 1832 the Islands had a population of 130,315 souls; in 1836 there were but 108,579; in 1840, only 84,165, of whom 1962 were foreigners; in 1850, 69,800, of whom 3216 were foreigners; and in 1860, 62,959, of whom 4194 were foreigners. The native population has decreased over sixty per cent. in forty years.

In the same period the foreigners have increased very slowly, until there are now in all 5366 foreigners and persons born here, but of foreign parentage, on the Islands. You will see that while the Hawaiians have so rapidly decreased that all over the Islands you notice, in waste fields and desolate house places, the marks of this loss, foreigners have not been attracted to fill up their places. And this in spite of the facts that the climate is mild and healthful, the price of living cheap, the Government liberal, the taxes low, and life and property as secure as in any part of the world. One would think that a country which offers all these advantages must be a paradise for poor men; and I do not wonder that in the United States there is frequent talk of "annexing the Islands."

But, in fact, they offer no advantages, aside from those I have named, to white settlers, and they have such serious natural disabilities as will always--or, at least, for the next two or three millions of years--repel our American people, and all other white settlers.

In the first place, there is very little of what we call agricultural land on the Islands. They are only mountains rising from the sea, with extremely little alluvial bottom, and that usually cut up by torrents, and water-washed into gulches, until it is difficult in many parts to find a fair field of even fifty acres. From these narrow bottoms, where they exist, you look into deep gorges or valleys, out of which issue the streams which force their way through the lower fields into the sea.

These valleys are never extensive, and are always very much broken and contracted. They are useless for common agricultural purposes. In several the culture of coffee has been begun; but they are so inaccessible, the roads into them are so difficult, and the area of arable soil they contain is, after all, so insignificant, that, even for so valuable a product as coffee, transportation is found to be costly.

But it is along and in the streams which rush through the bottoms of these narrow gorges that the Hawaiian is most at home. Go into any of these valleys, and you will see a surprising sight: along the whole narrow bottom, and climbing often in terraces the steep hill-sides, you will see the little taro patches, skillfully laid so as to catch the water, either directly from the main stream, or from ca.n.a.ls taking water out above.

Such a taro patch oftenest contains a sixteenth, less frequently an eighth of an acre. It consists of soil painfully brought down from above, and secured by means of substantial stone walls, plastered with mud and covered with gra.s.s, strong enough to resist the force of the torrent. Each little patch or flat is so laid that a part of the stream shall flow over it without carrying away the soil; indeed, it is expected to leave some sediment. And as you look up such a valley you see terrace after terrace of taro rising before you, the patches often fifty or sixty feet above the brawling stream, but each receiving its proper proportion of water.

Near by or among these small holdings stand the gra.s.s houses of the proprietors, and you may see them and their wives, their clothing tucked up, standing over their knees in water, planting or cultivating the crop.

Here the Hawaiian is at home. His horse finds its scanty living on the gra.s.s which fringes the taro patches; indeed, you may see horses here standing belly deep in fresh water, and feeding on the gra.s.ses which grow on the bottom; and again you find horses raised in the drier parts of the islands that do not know what water is, never having drunk any thing wetter than the dew on the gra.s.s. Among the taro patches the house place is as narrow as a fishing schooner's deck--"two steps and overboard." If you want to walk, it must be on the dikes within which the taro land is confined; and if you ride, it must be in the middle of the rapid mountain torrent, or along a narrow bridle-path high up on the precipitous side of the mountain.

Down near the sh.o.r.e are fish ponds, with wicker gates which admit the small fry from the sea, but keep in the large fish. Many of these ponds are hundreds of acres in area, and from them the Hawaiian draws one of his favorite dishes. Then there may be cocoa-nuts; there are sure to be bananas and guavas. Beef costs but a trifle, and hogs fatten on taro. The panda.n.u.s furnishes him material for his mats, and of mats he makes his bed, as well as the floor of his house.

In short, such a gorge or valley as I have tried to describe to you furnishes in its various parts, including the sea-sh.o.r.e, all that is needed to make the Hawaiian prosperous; and I have not seen one which had not its neatly kept school-house and church, and half a dozen framed houses scattered among the humbler gra.s.s huts, to mark the greater wealth of some--for the Hawaiian holds that the wooden house is a mark of thrift and respectability.

But the same valley which now supports twenty or thirty native families in comfort and happiness, and which, no doubt, once yielded food and all the appliances of life in abundance to one or two hundred, would not tempt any white man of any nation in the world to live in it, and a thousand such gorges would not add materially to the prosperity of any white nation.

That is to say, the country is admirably adapted to its native people.

It favors, as it doubtless compelled and formed, all their habits and customs. But it would repel any one else, and an American farmer would not give a hundred dollars for the whole Wailuku Valley--if he had to live in it and work it--though it would be worth many thousands to the natives if it were once more populous as of old.

As you examine the works of the old Hawaiians, their fish ponds, their irrigation ca.n.a.ls, their long miles of walls inclosing ponds and taro fields, you will not only see the proofs that the Islands were formerly far more populous than now, but you will get a respect for the feudal system of which these works are the remains.

The Hawaiian people, when they first became known to the world, were several stages removed from mere savagery. They had elaborated a tolerably perfect system of government and of land tenure, which has since been swept away, as was inevitable, but which served its day very well indeed.

Under this system the chiefs owned every thing. The common people were their retainers--followers in war and servants in peace. The chief, according to an old Hawaiian proverb, owned "all the land, all the sea, and all the iron cast up by the sea."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAWAIIAN WARRIORS.]

The land was carefully parceled out among the chiefs, upon the plan of securing to each one from his own land all that he and his retainers needed for their lives. What they chiefly required was taro ground, the sea for fish, the mulberry for tapa, and timber land for canoes; but they required also _ti_ leaves in which to wrap their parcels, and flowers of which to make their _les_, or flower necklaces. And I have seen modern surveys of old "lands" in which the lines were run very irregularly, and in some cases oven outlying patches were added, because a straight line from mountain to sea was found to exclude some one product, even so trifling as the yellow flowers of which _les_ are often made.

On such a "land," and from it, the chief and his people lived. He appears to have been the brains and they the hands to work it. They owed him two days' labor in every seven, in which they cultivated his taro, cleaned his fish pond, caught fish for him, opened paths, made or transported canoes, and did generally what he required. The remainder of the time was their own, to cultivate such patches of taro as he allowed them to occupy, or to do what they pleased. For any important public work he could call out all his people, and oblige them to labor as long as he chose, and thus were built the surprisingly solid and extensive walls which inclose the old fish ponds, and many irrigating ca.n.a.ls which show not only long continued industry, but quite astonishing skill for so rude a people.

The chief was supreme ruler over his people; they lived by his tolerance, for they owned absolutely nothing, neither land, nor house, nor food, nor wife, nor child. A high chief was approached only with abject gestures, and no one dared resist his acts or dispute his will. The sense of obedience must have been very strong, for it has survived every change; and only the other day a friend of mine saw a Hawaiian lady, a chiefess, but the wife of an American, and herself tenderly nurtured and a woman of education and refinement, boxing the ears of a tall native, whom she had caught furiously abusing his wife, and the man bore his punishment as meekly as a child. "Why?" "He knows I am his chief, and he would not dare raise even an angry look toward me; he would not think of it, even," was her reply, when she was asked how she had courage to interfere in what was a very violent quarrel. Yet the present law recognizes no allegiance due to a chief.

When the young king Lunalilo returned to the palace after the coronation, the pipe-bearer, an old native retainer, approached him on his knees, and was shocked at being ordered to get up and act like a man. The older natives to this day approach a chief or chiefess only with humble and deprecatory bows; and wherever a chief or chiefess travels, the native people along the road make offerings of the fruits of the ground, and even of articles of clothing and adornment. One of the curious sights of Honolulu to us travelers, last spring, was to see long processions of native people, men, women, and children, marching to the palace to lay their offerings before the king, who is a high chief. Each brought something--a man would walk gravely along with a pig under his arm; after him followed perhaps a little child with half a dozen bananas, a woman with a chicken tied by a string, a girl with a handkerchief full of eggs, a boy with a cocoa-nut, an old woman with a calabash of poi, and so on.

In the palace yard all this was laid in a heap before the young king, who thereupon said thank you, and, with a few kind words, dismissed the people to their homes.

As an ill.u.s.tration of the power of the old chiefs, as well as of the density of the population in former times, it is related that when the wall inclosing a certain fish pond on the windward side of Oahu was to be built, the chief then ruling over that land gave notice that on a certain day every man, woman, and child within his domain must appear at a designated point, bearing a stone. The wall, which stands yet, is half a mile long, well built, and probably six feet high; and it was begun and completed in that one day.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LUNALILO.]

I was shown, on Kauai, a young man of insignificant appearance, and of no particular merit or force of character. To him an old woman recently dying had by a will, written out for her by a friend of my own, left all her property--a taro patch, a house, and some other land. My friend asked why. He is my chief, was the reply; and sure enough, on inquiry my friend discovered, what he had not before known, that the man was a descendant of one of the chief families, of whom this old woman had in her early days been a subject.

As the chief was the ruler, the people looked to him for food in a time of scarcity. He directed their labors; he protected them against wrong from others; and as it was his pride that his retainers should be more numerous and more prosperous than those of the neighboring chief, if the head possessed brains, no doubt the people were made content. Food was abundant; commerce was unknown; the chief could not eat or waste more than his people could easily produce for him; and until disturbing causes came in with Captain Cook, no doubt feudalism wrought satisfactory results here. One wonders how it was invented among such a people, or who it was that first had genius enough to insist on obedience, to make rules, to prescribe the tabu, and, in short, to evolve order out of chaos.

The tabu was a most ingenious and useful device; and when you hear of the uses to which it was put, and of its effectiveness, you feel surprised that it was not found elsewhere as an appurtenance of the feudal machinery. Thus the chief allowed his people to fish in the part of the ocean which he owned--which fronted his "land," that is to say. He tabued one or two kinds of fish, however; these they were forbidden to catch; but as a fisherman can not, even in these islands, exercise a choice as to the fish which shall enter his net or bite at his hook, it followed that the tabued fish were caught--but then they were at once rendered up to the chief. One variety of taro, which makes poi of a pink color, was tabued and reserved for the chiefs. Some birds were tabued on account of their feathers; one especially, a black bird which has a small yellow feather under each wing. The great feather cloak of Kamehameha I., which is still kept as a sign of royalty, is made of these feathers, and contains probably several thousand of them, thus gathered, two from each bird.

Further, a tabu prohibited women from eating with men, even with their husbands; and when, on the death of the first Kamehameha, his Queen Kahumanu, an energetic and fearless virago, dared for the first time to eat with her son, a cry of horror went up as though "great Pan was dead;"

and this bold act really broke the power of the heathen priests.

A tabu forbade women to eat cocoa nuts and some other articles of food; and the prohibition appears to have been used also to compel sanitary and other useful restraints, for I have been told that a tabu preserved girls from marriage until they had attained a certain age, eighteen, I believe; and to this and some other similar regulations, rigorously enforced in the old times, I have heard old residents attribute the fertility of the race before foreigners came in.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KAMEHAMEHA I.]

He who violated a tabu was at once killed. Capital punishment seems to have been an effective restraint upon crime among these savages, contrary to the theories of some modern philosophers; probably it was effective for two reasons, because it was prompt and because it was certain. One wonders how long the tabu would have been respected, had a violator of it been lodged in jail for eighteen months, allowed to appeal his case through three courts, and at last been brained amidst the appeals for mercy of the most respectable people of his tribe, and had his funeral ceremonies performed by the high-priest, and closed with a eulogy upon his character, and insinuations against the sound judgment and uprightness of the chief who ordered the execution.

The first Kamehameha, who seems to have been a savage of considerable merit, and a firm believer in capital punishment, subdued the Islands to his own rule, but he did not aim to break the power of the chiefs over their people. He established a few general laws, and insisted on peace, order, and obedience to himself. By right of his conquest all lands were supposed to be owned by him; he gave to one chief and took away from another; he rewarded his favorites, but he did not alter the condition of the people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: QUEEN OF KAMEHAMEHA I.]

But as traders came in, as commerce began, as money came into use, the feudal system began to be oppressive. Sandal-wood was long one of the most precious products of these islands--their Chinese name, indeed, is "Sandal-wood Islands." The chiefs, greedy for money, or for what the ships brought, forced their unhappy retainers into the mountains to gather this wood. Exposed to cold, badly fed, and obliged to bear painful burdens, they died in great numbers, so that it was a blessing to the Islanders when the wood became scarce. Again, supplies of food were sold by the chiefs to the ships, and this necessitated unusual labor from the people.

One famous chief for years used his retainers to tow ships into the narrow harbor of Honolulu, sending them out on the reef, where, up to their middle in water, they shouldered the tow-line.

Thus when, in 1848; the king, at the instance of that excellent man and upright judge, Chief-justice Lee, gave the kuliana rights, he relieved the people of a sore oppression, and at a single blow destroyed feudalism.

The kuliana is the individual holding. Under the kuliana law each native householder became ent.i.tled to the possession in fee of such land as he had occupied, or chose to occupy and cultivate. He had only to make application to a government officer, have the tract surveyed, and pay a small sum to get the t.i.tle. It is creditable to the chiefs that, under the influence of the missionaries, they consented to this important change, fully knowing that it meant independence to the common people and an end of all feudal rights; but it must be added that a large part of their lands remained in their hands, making them, of course, still wealthy proprietors.

Thus the present system of land tenure on the Islands is much the same as our own; but the holdings of the common people are generally small, and the chiefs, or their successors in many cases foreigners, still maintain their right to the sea fisheries as against all who live outside the old boundaries of their own "lands."

The families of most of the great chiefs have become extinct. Their wealth became a curse to them when foreigners came in with foreign vices and foreign luxuries. They are said to have been remarkable as men and women of extraordinary stature and of uncommon perfection of form. I have been told of many chiefesses nearly or quite six feet in height, and many chiefs from six feet two inches to six feet six, and in one case six feet seven inches high. There is no reason to doubt the universal testimony that they were, as a cla.s.s, taller and finer-looking than the common people; but the older missionaries and residents believe that this arose not from their being of a different race, but because they were absolutely relieved from hard work, were more abundantly and carefully fed, and used the lomi-lomi constantly. It is supposable, too, that in the wars which prevailed among the tribes the weaklings, if any such were among the chiefs, were pretty sure to be killed off; and thus a natural selection went on which weeded out the small and inefficient chiefs.

Their government appears to have been a "despotism tempered by a.s.sa.s.sination," for great as was the respect exacted by a chief, and implicit as was the obedience he commanded, if he pushed his tyranny too far, his people rose and slew him. Thus on Kauai, in the lower part of the Hanapepe Valley, a huge cliff is shown, concerning which the tradition runs that it was once the residence of the chief who ruled this valley.

This person, with a t.i.tanic and Rabelaisian humor, was accustomed to descend into the valley in the evening, seize a baby and carry it to his stronghold to serve him as a pillow. Having slept upon it he slew it next morning; and thus with a refinement of luxury he required a fresh baby every evening. When patience had ceased to be a virtue, according to our more modern formula, the people went up one night and knocked his brains out; and there was a change of dynasties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANCIENT G.o.dS OF HAWAII.]

The Hawaiian of the present day reads his Bible and newspaper, writes letters, wears clothes, owns property, serves in the Legislature or Parliament, votes, teaches school, acts as justice of the peace and even as judge, is tax collector and a.s.sessor, constable and preacher. In spite of all this, or rather with it, he retains the oddest traces of the habits and customs of another age. For instance, he will labor for wages; but he will persistently and for years give away to his relations all his pay except what he needs for his actual subsistence, and if he is prosperous he is pretty sure to have quite a swarm of people to support. A lady told me that having repeatedly clothed her nurse in good apparel, and finding this liberal soul, every time, in a day or two reduced to her original somewhat shabby clothing, she at last reproached her for her folly. "What can I do?" the woman replied; "they come and ask me for the holaku, or the handkerchief, or whatever I have. Suppose you say they are yours--then I will not give them away." Accordingly, the next new suit was formally declared to belong to the mistress: it was not given away. An old woman, kept chiefly for her skill in lomi-lomi by an American family, asked her master one day for ten dollars. He gave her two five-dollar gold pieces, and, to his amazement, saw her hand them over immediately, one to a little girl and one to a boy, who had evidently come to get the money--not for her use at all. A cook in my own family asked for the wages due him, which he had been saving for some time; he received forty-four dollars, and gave the whole amount at once to his father-in-law, who had come from another island on purpose to get this money. Nor was it grudged to him, so far as any of us could see. "By-and-by, if we are poor and in need, they will do as much for us," is the excuse.

As you ride along in the country, you will see your guide slyly putting a stone or a bunch of gra.s.s on a ledge near some precipice. If you look, you will see other objects of the same kind lying there. Ask him about it and he will tell you, with a laugh, that his forefathers in other times did so, and he does the same. It is, in fact, a peace offering to the local divinity of the place. Is he, then, an idolater? Not at all; not necessarily, at least. He is under the compulsion of an old custom; and he will even tell you that it is all nonsense. The same force leads him to treat with respect and veneration a chief or chiefess even if abjectly poor, though before the law the highest chief is no better than the common people.