THE ISLES OF ROMANCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 65, 8 June 1927, Page 14

THE ISLES OF ROMANCE

There are lands which haunt the dreams of those who have once seen them. There are lands all travellers yearn to see. Kipling has said that when a man’s eyes have once beheld the pine-clad foothills below the snowy ramparts of the Himalayas he must go back to die in their shadow. There are travellers who can never forget the sight of the Sphinx, standing in the Egyptian sands, of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, so like the end of the world. So it is that with many a traveller the ! islands of Hawaii keep a magic and an enduring charm. Mark Twain, who visited them before they had become a centre for the tourists of three continents, has written of the spell they wove around his heart. And the traveller whose first sight of these enchanted shores is on a winter’s morning, as he stands at the rail of the good ship that bears him to Honolulu, eastwards from Yokohama or westwards from San Francisco, never forgets how the green tops of their volcanic hills rise to greet him over the rim of the horizon. There are other places which seem lovely from a ship but lose their charm when the traveller lands, to find himself hemmed in by squalor, dirt, neglect, and unpleasant smells borne on an atmosphere of insufferable heat; but here, in this happy clime where the seasons differ hardly at all, where the golden sunshine and the deep-blue seas are broken only for an hour or two by tropical rains, where modern towns raise their heads amid a fringe of white homesteads to which red roads climb adventurously through hedgerow and copse—here in Hawaii the charm is never broken, but grows .till it holds the traveller spellbound. There are eight main islands in the Hawaii group. Lanai, Niihau, and Kahoolawe are little known and seldom visited; but the others, Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, Kaui, and Molokai, are well known. When Captain Cook first landed at Hawaii, in 1778, the native population pf the islands was 400,000; when King Kamehameha came to London in 1524 the white man’s influence had already reduced the Kanakas to less than 150.000; while to-day, thanks to alcohol and other European influences, scarcely forty thousand remain. But perhaps the best days of Hawaii are to come. At all events the adoption of the islands as a territory of the United States is likely to be good for them. To-day among th£ chief imports into Hawaii are tourists from California; and the lovely beach of Waikiki, spreading under the nodding coconut palms, half an hour’s ride from Honolulu, is bordered with delightful guest-houses. Here is the centre of surf-riding, and it is a sight for the gods to see the young Kanaka men sweeping in from the reef on the top of the white horses of the sea, balanced marvellously above the boiling surf. Here at night under a blaze of stars, the cicadas sing, the frogs croak melodiously and the sweetness of flowers fills the air. Here in this perfumed land, under a magic moon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rupert Brooke found their minds running to the rhythm of fine prose and poetry. In Hawaii evolved those striking lines by the former: “Plangent, hidden from eyes, Somewhere an eukaleli thrills and cries, And stabs with pain the night’s brown savagery.” The population of the whole islands is in itself a patchwork of absorbing interest, particularly in Honolulu, which has a Chinatown, a Japanese town, a Portugese town, and the pure copper Kanaka himself, smoking in the doorway, while the sun ripens his bananas, or taking degrees at the local college of I earning. The marvellous progress the sugar industry has made in the past 20 years has brought general prosperity to native and foreign labour alike, though it is true that the Kanaka regards work rather as an unfortunate importation of the white invader. But as the sugar, fruit, and other trades are sustained by the energy of about 25,000 Portugese from the Azores, of 20,000 Chinese carpenters and shopkeepers, and close upon 80,000 Japanese navvies, coolies, and general busy-bodies, and other motley human mixtures, there is really little left for the Kanaka to do but to sit back while the United States Government make a fuss of him. Is Hawaii profiting by the association with America? Certainly, if the profit is to be measured in Olympic swimming championships; but America did not teach the Hawaiian to swim. He learned that himself on his grey coral reef, where his ancestors had disported themselves for centuries before Captain Cook arrived with his sextant and his log. There has rarely been, in the whole history of races, a people more sorry for themselves than were the Kanakas when their good friend Cook was killed, and it is said that never since, save by accident, has a white traveller come to harm at their hands, though they have come to much harm at the hands of white men. However, they can thank Cook for their cattle and sheep; and sugar and rice, fruit and wool, stately liners from Canada and California. from Australia, New Zealand, and the East, are all doing something to compensate these islanders to-day for the days of the pirates who carried Hawaii’s sons to slavery in the plantations of Queensland, or made galleybondsmen of them on their brigantines. IN CAPTIVITY There is not much fear of man in a menagerie lion. It comes to know that a man can be brushed aside, knocked down, and toyed with. Indeed, menagerie -born lions are more dangerous to train than wild ones which have been caught, for lions born at large have inherited the natural fear of man; those born among men learn liis weakness in time, discover that they can master him, and are prevented from doing so only because they are so liberally fed as to keep them lazy, good-tempered and unambitious.

DAWN The dawn comes cold: the haystack smokes, The green twigs crackle in the fire, The dew is dripping from the oaks, And sleepy men bear milking-yokes Slowly toward the cattle-byre. Down in the town a clock strikes six, The grey east heaven burns and glows, The dew shines on the thatch of ricks, A slow old crone comes gathering sticks, The red-cock in the ox-yard crows. Beyond the stack where we have lain, The road runs twisted like a snake, (The white road to the land of Spain), The road that we must foot again, Though the feet halt and the heart ache. —JOHN MASEFIELD.

YOUTH One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness—and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise, and it isn’t because it’s an undiscovered country. One knows well that all mankind has streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation. —Conrad. FRIENDS We are all travellers in what Bunyan calls the wilderness of the world; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves and when we are alone we are only nearer to the absent. —R.L.S.