ACROSS PACIFIC SEAS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 21, 12 June 1902, Page 3

ACROSS PACIFIC SEAS.

11.— AN ISLAND PARADISE.

(By Rev. H. W. Cleary.)

Vancouver, April 17. We went ashore at Honolulu when the morning of April 9 was still young. People called it spring in the Hawaiian capital — ' the boyhood of the year.' But the sun beamed like a blessing from heaven, a blood-warm glow filled the atmosphere, and there was a soft, caressing touch in the leisurely breeze that sauntered along over the coral reefs and the yellow strand and greun uplands and played lightly over your face and Fet the long drooping slems of the palm trees drowsily ' nodding, nid-nid-nodding.' It was just the breath which you would give to perpetual summer, if you had the making of it. It set me mentally calculating what would be the glow of the dog-days in Honolulu, when that spring morning felt like one of those still, brooding summer days that steal upon Timaru and are called perfect. But official figures, Reen later on in the day, knocked my crude calculations into smithereens. They showed that the nMxirnum toaoperature for 1899 (an average year) was only 88 degrees Fahrenheit and the minimum 58 — an extreme variation of only 30 degrees. For there is perpetual Fummer in this islandparadise and the ecent of flowers never passes out ot its balmy and fragrant atmosphere.

Honolulu ia a tropical E'len of vegetation, with a good deal of the serpent's trail upon it. To reach it from the ship you pass over a few hundred yards' wilderness of unformed ground won by suction dredges from the sea— dust when the weather is dry, puddle* and quagmire in the bruf season of the rains, and suggestive of the conditions created by the long-drawn dispute between the Dunedin City Council and the Harbor Board. The broad, covered, markets, with their surroundings of green leafage, first meet the traveller's footsteps, and attracted the eager attention of the paßeengers by their rich display of native products and their endless apsortmtnt of etrangely-sbaped and brilJiant-hued fishes. Among the latter I noticed that strange ."reak of the ocean, a hammer-beaded shark, an article of diet among th^ Chinese residents of Honolulu. (It is likewise for the Celestial palate that the extensive trade in dried sharks' fins is conducted in the islands of the Fiji gronp.) Our first visit was to the cathedral. It is a large and ornate stone structure, erected nearly half a century ogo, and now too small to meet the expansion of the Catholic community of Honolulu. The Bishop (Monsignor Roper) was absent on a visit to Bom« of the other islands, and the honors of hospitality were done by Father Sylvester. With him we visited the

Fine College

of St. Louie, founded by him in 1882. It consists of a eerie* of detached buildings (residence, class and ttudy-halls, a fine theatre or lecture hall, infirmary, schools, museum) standing in a large enclosure of five acres, and comprising a boarding-sohool with over 80 rehiient students, and parochial schools in which a Christian education is imparted to some 600 boys. (The girls' schools, both primary and secondary, adjoin the cathedral). St. Louis College is conduct dby the Brothers of the Society of Mary. Ey the Principal (Brother Bertram) and his assistants we were received with a graceful and winning courtesy which inakeß the pleasantest recollection of our brief stay in Honolulu. It wan holiday time in the college, and Brother Thomas (the second in charge) became our guide, philosopher, and friend so long as our feet were upon the shores of Oahu. The pleasantest of companions waß he, and he led oar footsteps in pleasant paths, and his mind, stored with 17 years' experience of the Hawaiian Islands as a monarchy, a republic, and (since 1900) an annexed outpost of the realms of Uncle Sam, left nothing 1 unseen or unexplained that could appeal to the eye or mind of the two casual strangers from the far south (Father Barlow and the writer) whose good fortune it was to be entrusted to his gentle care in Honolulu, The college itself, and especially its beautiful grounds, formed a subject of great interest to us. The grounds were formerly the botamc gardens of Honolulu, and the Principal has added much to their former charms. They are, in fact, five acres of chequered shade and sunshine, grateful in such a climate — an epitome of the varied tropical vegetation of Honolulu, and contain, in addition, many strange plants of other lands from China to Peru —

' A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend

Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view.' When the sudden tropical night falls, after a brief r»d afterglow the electric light — which is uuhers.il in Honolulu — lights np the buildings and the green leafy roof of the ground*. One of their most striking attractions ia a noble avenue of tal 1 straight-boled royal palms. Beside the Cathedral we had seen the fir^t algeroba— a most useful tree with a spray of feathery leaves — introduced into those iwlam's from Peru by Father Bachelot. Honolulu and its surroundings are now fairly peppered over with this hardy and useful southern tret 1 . Ihe college grounds contain the tall and rugged old giant, ' With his leaves of beauty, his fruit of balm,' that is the patuarch of all the date-palms introduced into the group — a blessed gift for which the wandering Arab thanked the Creator : ' " Allah il Allah ! " he sings his ps-alm, On the Indian Sen, by the isles of balm ; '• Thanks to Allah, Who gives the palm." ' Besides this noble fruit-tree we saw in this .fair Pacific garden tva, fur, and traveller's paims, mefquites, rose and mam in c apples, breadf uit trees, papaws, raacadetnia trees (nut- bean r«), monkeypod, tall cimphor tree.", umbrella trees (which the natives consider unlucky about the house or yard), caoutchouo trees, mangoes, tamarinds, sepolto pears (ripe and luscious), alligator pears, Peruvian plums, several varieties of pino. and, all over the place, the showy scarlet hibiscus, aglow with blo^m— the favorite hedge-plant in and about Honolulu. It is a splendid specimen of a cool tropical garden, and one is not surprised to find there, as in his natural habitat, the fat, lumbering alligator that was brought thither years ago from the swamps of Florida and hss grown up in his pond enclosure from the size of an Australian club lizard to his present portly and inactive bulk. Hard by, the familiar, pipe-like note of a fat and comfortable Australian captive magpie — an Arthur Orton of imprisoned corpulency — caught our surprised ear ; and in the palm branches overhead and in the close, glossy, dark-green foliage of the guava-troe«, Indian minaa - the pebt of Melbourne— jarred and chattered, and hundreds of

Perky English Sparrows

filled the air with their shrill and incessant nag-gin?. What colonists those sparrows arc, to be pure I— facing every clime and adapting themselves to every play of circumstances from within the Arctic circle to the Bluff, and, if I mistake not, to the far-off i-horea of Tierra del Fuego. And the frozen north and torrid zone of Capricorn and Cancer and the furnace-glow of the Fandy Australian hinterland have alike left him the same old graoelef-s, vociferous feathered street-arab — as mifchievous, as thievish, as pig-headed (if I may thus refer to hia inveterate habit of building his nest in

downpipea, despite all the bitter ages of experience), as he bas been for centuries under the gargoyles of Weßirninster Abbey or of Canterbury Cathedral. A bold, steep-sided bluff, 800 ft high, rises back a little way from a residential quarter — the West End— of Honolulu. It ia known aa

The Pacific Heights,

and is one of the prettiest of the foothills which buttress up the ranges thai rise tier over tier behind the mM-Pacific capital, is scaled by an electric tram, and iiffoids the finest panorama that is readily obtainable of the city and the cnciic'ing nnd over the hilis and far away. A mule tram le?ds to the foot of the as-c^nt, thence an electric tramway zigzagsg zags up a steep and perilous-looking track to the round top of the height. The running along the mule-track ia sweetly irregular. The particular trip which brought us and our genial guide to the Pacific Heights juetified to some extent the boyish description of the mule as an animal that has two feet to walk with and two more to kick with. Many years ago, at a n»sty bend in the winding hill -road that leads to Montserrat in Spain, I witnessed an emphatic exhibition of heel-skying by a dark, lanky, cranky mule—' stubborn as aD allegory on the banks of the Nile ' — that was engaged to lug our lumbering diligence to the famous shrine. The diiver loaded tne atmosphere with language that was painful and frequent and free. I made a remark to that <-ff ct to a Sydney lady who occupied a seat in the diligence. 'Itit a caution,' she replied, ' but you must admit that it is very appropriate in the circumstances.' The uniformed Hawaii an driver takes things more coolly, and no doubt ' jjits thar' all the sooner in consequence. At any rate, we were soon buzzing up the rapid slopes in an eleoUio tramcar, coasting along steep embankments of stone that looked far and even farther down into a deep verdant valley chequered off into close-set market-gardens as fenceless as Belgian cotters' plots, and green with the large, dimpled, geranium-like leaf of the taro and other vegetables ijalure. We crawled cautiously around short and villainous-looking curves armed with guard-rails — some of the curves apparently resting unsupported in mid air, and swept with a merry hum past banks on which, not the wild thyme, but the wild mango, grows and the flowering lantana (which I noticed as an unmitigated pest in the Bulli district, New South Wales) scrambles about in tangled thickets, and is as difficult to eradicate as the Canadian thistle or the bubonic plague. Charming villas occupy posts of vantage on airy spurs and terraces up the iron track and every turn brings before the delighted eye fresh and charming pictures of sea and land. The view from the top of the steep height is something that, once seen, can never be forgotten — a vast stretch of sea and land barriered on the one side by the tall grey range of Nuuanu and on the other by the heights of Waianae. For miles along the front the calm Pacific heaves gently against the coral-barrier that shoulders it off, and its upper waters flow over the reefs in a long fringe of white foam, the soft booming of which floats up to us like the faint pulse of distant music. Down the elopes and along the plain and up the hillsides there is every green known to the palette of the landscape artist, and here and there great cataracts and pools of emerald break into

A Foam of Flowers.

Yonder are the flooded ricefields that were ploughed by the wallowing water-buffalo; h 're great stretches of sujar-cane (the chief product of the group) , and neartr mill palm-groves, and the city parks and gardens, aid the and almost unbroken niassss of foliage above whot-e sleeping eh idow 8 rise hundreds of villa and mansion roofV. staintd bnck-re 1 or olive preen. The jagged rampart of hills toat stretch like a lone irregular half-moon, enclose a bn-ne which, an a picture, fir huioa.ssts m btauty the tamed view of the Buy of Naple-t and Vesuvius aa in in the Vomero. A far-travelled earth-wan len r among our poty compared the exquisite picture to that of the luubois ot Ui i and Nagasaki, aid ihone of our fellow -traveller « ho \i-i ed the Pacific Heights have carried away with them the m< uu»y of the most exquisite scene that it ih (riven to the ho] miner ot a day to gaze upon in this tropical mid-ocean paiadiso. Mr Fronde, who haw the city in its more unformed days in 18sr>, thuH writes of it in his Occana : 'We waked under flowing acaci.is, pal.ne. tow, breadfruit trees, magnolias, and innumerable shiubs m the trlowmg bloom of the bloi-t-oms. Hibiscua and pomegranate crimsoned the hedges, passion flowers, tougainville.iH, am convolvulus crept up the tree stems or hung in ma^es on the walls Lvtu the wouden houses in which the poorer uativea lived, mean and featuielesa as they might be, were redeemed from entire u^ln^s by the foliage in which they were buried and the bits of ganlej surrounding thun.' Another \ vnitor, Mr Edward Cliflord, in l.sS'.l. was enraptuied by the delicious \ Htreamn tor ever falling by sroiuo down the given precipices of \ Hawaii into the blue sea — ' Iluw lovely that sea is can scarcely be \told. One puts one's haid m, and all round it is the softest and moat brilliant blue; below are j/nmthw o f p, ire white coral, and among- them swim fishes us brilliant as paroquets Someaie yellow, like canaries Some are gorgeoun oringe or bright red. 1 tried tv paint a blue fi-h, but no pigment could r< present ltd intensity. The loveliest ot all wan like nothing but a lambuw as v spoiu d b< 1 w me. Groves of oocoanut trees rise trom the water .s "dge Tne gardens are rich with ro&ee, lilies, myrtlp.s, g.iidtnia, hehutioLe and passion flowers.' ' Here in the Ilawaiis we stand in the ancestral isled of The New Zealand Miori. By occasionally changing tne -oft Polynesian L into thewg, rous kettle irum il of the Maori, a d the Fmtj the H, rno-t of the Hawaiian native names could und their counti ip.ut m New Zealand. Thus, Tali (clifl) bee nn^ P.u: ( w m l\i.nuuk,t), Wailua (which 1 may translate 'the Mertu v. ot the Waters) changes into uur Waiiuu or Wanoa, and Ah U (the lauuhar salutation of the nativej of the mid-I'auilic grouj ) turns into the Aioha ot their

more Doric-tongued kinsmen of New Zealand. The Hawaiian Islands gave our far southern land its first population, its language — and its taro. The rest of the day we spent in visiting sundry points of general interest in and around Honolulu — still under the sheltering wing ot our pleasant guide from St. Louis College, and generally in the beautifully-fitted and up-to-date American tram-cars of the Rapid Transit Company. Even in the principal thoroughfares the streets are narrow — about a half-chain wide— and ill-formed. Some of the m> formed <*ide «treetp in the Japanese quarter are scored with wheel-marks like a malice road near Warracknabeal in Victoria. _ But a change i« rapidly coming. A feverish activity in the building trade is adorning the city with great ornate stone-built stores and offices of a style of architecture and a finish of which we have not many examples in New Zealand. There ia an endless charm hi the well-roaded and far-extending residential districts that circle round about the business quarters of the city. There is a charming variety of designs of villas and mansions. Many of these buildings are very costly, and in whole quarters (as about Punahou and up the Pacific Heights) their close-shaven and terraced green swards, adorned with beautiful foliage and flowering plants, slope down without fence or barnei to the footpaths of the shady streets. To our unaccustomed touthern eyes this had a charming effect. We have nowhere seen a spot of earth where wealth and luxury have found themselves ho novel and fragrant a Capua in which to 101 l and laze and loiter life away as in this coral-girt city on Oahu. The population of Honolulu is

A Strange Salmagundi

of white man, yellow man, and ducky Polynesian — a greater Port Said of many tribes and tongues. The total population of the group is 153,727. The American law restricts the landing of John Chinaman, but some 25,000 of them have found a resting-place for the soles of their feet in the ielands — a big invasion since the days when, in 1872, there were only 193S representatives of the Flowery Kingdom in the group. White people make a somewhat bigger count of heads than the heathen Chinee— 2B,s33 (of whom 8000 are Portuguese) is the number opposite their names in last year's statistical reports. The native Hawaiians are, like their New (Zealand kinsmen, the Maoris, a tall, deep-chested, handsome race, and their curious customs and happy ways formed the subject of some of the most interesting of Lady Brassey'a Voyage in the Sunbeam. But, like their other kith and kin of the Fijis, they are fast becoming 'good Injuns' — the conservative power of Catholic colonising nations has never shielded them, as it shielded the Red Man in Central and South America, and they are melting away off the face of the earth. There ia open before me the Report of the Governor of Hawaii to the United States Government for tbe year 1901. It makes, in this connection — and in another which will be noted later on — melancholy reading In[lS72 the native Hawaiiana numbered 49,044. At the census of 11)00 thpy had dropped to a paltry 29,834. — the doomed and decaying but happy-go-lucky remnant of a stalwart population that was estimated at 300,000 in the year when the bows of Captain Cook's exploring ships cleaved the blue waters that lap the shores of those favored l^lea The day is not far off when the Hawaiian race will entirely disappear from the peoplts of the earth. A color-scheme of th« population of Honolulu would be a Joseph's coat of u,any col jib, Men may come and m.n may go, but the small.

Japanese

is lord of Honolulu. Some fine day, perhaps twenty years ago, he 'dropped in promiscuous-like' into the sofG green Hawaiiaus and found them good — he had touched the bpot of earth that bad, perhaps, appeared in his Eastern slumbers like ' the shapes of a dream.' And then the Ballow-tao.id prooension began. In I*B4 there were (according to the c fficia.l returns before me) only 1 1<> Japanese in all the happy island* of the group. At the census of l!>00 there were <! 1,1 22 —almost half of the entire population. In Honolulu they swaim everywhere . the light, dwpper little fello.vs are the domedtij servants of the place— cooka, home-m aids. scullery-m aids, 'generals,' and the rest; they do the navvying, the clerking, and pretty nearly everything cxci pt clothe>*-wa«hu.g— that is the Chinese monopoly still , the y 'run' stores of all sorts ; they turn readily to almost eveiy art and o r aft, from carriage-building to watchmaking and jewel- etting ; the men appt ar m all soits of costumes from the garb of tne unchanging East to the latest, London cut of sartorial upholttery ; and they have a quarter of the city which is all thdr own, wheie you see their girlish-looking matrons wearing the hnnino, and the grave-faced children that romp and akip and play, with never a smile, as if, like the enterprising islanders of the We-a, they took their pleasures sadly. And those marvellous enterprising and go-ahead Asiatics keep trooping into the Hawaiian:* at the rate of 100 a month And none dart s say them nay. For, aa regards tho-e go- .head lit 1 le men, and their position in the islands of the hither and farther l\ieitic seas, the battle of the Yalu was more fatetul than that of Tr.wa'gur was to the British. You may make, and sat< ly enforce, immigration laws against John Chinaman and smiie v hen old Li Hung Chang or his successor, or 'The Immortal' ('Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand Years,' as the Emperor of China is styled) uttets a prote-t ; for jou ki ow he has no ' miiled fist ' to blicken yoir tye. But immigration restriction laws are not for the bu-th: g Japanese, who have no nted, uince the days of Yalu, to chant ' We don't want to fi^ht, But by Jiriffo if we do, We've got tt c men, we've got the ships, We've got the money, too ' With a somewhat apgreisive expansionist i olicy at work in the Philippine-, a n.0.-t under the crrae t.l Japan, there are wide

possibilities for interesting complications in the rushing onward sweep of Japanese colonisation under the American flag in the Hawaiian group. And perhaps those who live pome thirty or fifty years more will read of wild times in the mid-Pacific paradise that circles round about from Honolulu, when the feet of the writer will be pointing to the roots of the daisies. Tbe various histories of the Hawaiians — I have come across some three or four — have a world of things to say about

' The Missionaries '

(by wbieh term is always locally meint the Protestant missionaries). On cir voja^e from Honolulu to Vancouver I fell in with many white non-Catholic natives and ro-idcits ot t^e Mawaimn?. himl wh» surprised to find the extent to which ' the mis-io-iaries' were spontaneously introduced into their conversation, 'lhes cial, commercial, and political positions achieved by them and their sons — who are the dollar-aristocracy of Honolulu — sufficiently account for this From 1820 and for many years onwards missionaries had the religious and political destinies of the Hawaiian Islunds in their hands. But they sadly faile 1 to rise to the level of their opportunities. They were at first allowed to open schools and erect churches. But they gradually got possession of the land and rose to positions of high power and influence in the civil administration of the group. One of them became Prime Minister, and clambered to the highest post of the treasury, another held the administration of justice in his hand, and, 'tickled with good success,' they ruled the islands in a way that has been aptly described as more ministerial than missionary, and more calculated to pile up shekels than to make converts. When the Picpus Fathers (Congregation of the SS. Heart) were sent to the Islands their kind manners and unselfish ways greatly attracted the natives. The ruling powers, however, soon interfered, at first by harassing enactments. The Picpus Fathers were after a time placed in a small vessel with two bottles of water and some biscuit. Only two of them reached the shores of California alive. It is only fair to state that ' the missionaries ' protested their blamelessness in connection with this bad business and threw the blame of it upon the native Government. The native Catholic converts were treated with great inhumanity, but they held fast by the faith that was in them. A French war frigate finally righted matters. It dropped into Honolulu harbor one sunny morning. The commander talked some ' plain English ' — or French, as the case may be ; at any rate it was plain and forcible and to the point. The persecution dropped ; the Picpus Fathers returned to the Islands and performed their sacred duties in peace. And there they remain to the present day. The Statesman 'x Year Book for 1899 — the only one that I find at hand as I pen these hurried lines — sets down the Catholics in the Hawaiian group at 2(5,363, and all the various Protestant denominations collectively at 23,773. ' The mi°sionarie?,' however, had — in ' rare Ben Jonson's ' words — abundant scope to applaud themselves with joy 'to see how plump their bags were and their barns.' They had seized the best that was in the islands and made it their heritage and while the native race melted miserably away and their missions became — as one of their clergy lately described them — ' a disgraceful failure,' they and their sons waxed fat and rich and became the nabobs of the central Pacific seas. The ronCatholic Professor W. C. Stubbs, of New Orleans, who lately made an extensive tour through the Hawaiian group, spoke as follows, on his return, to the student 3of Tulane University : — ' The charge was made at the time and diligently spread over Europe that selfish motives actuated the missionaries in going to Hawaii. This charge is seemingly sustained by subsequent events. Their influence has been exerted in modifying the form of government favorable to their own control and personal aggrandizement. So well have they succeeded that to-day their sons are the rulers of the islands, politically, financially, religiously and socially ; and many of them are millionaires many times over, owning most of the land. . . . Once on the islands, they shaped and directed affairs according to their ideas of what was right to themselves and to tbe heathen ; and, true Yankees as they were, they lost no opportunity of acquiring and retaining everything of value.' When our vessel (the Moana) left Honolulu there were a considerable number of local passengers on board bound for Vancouver. They were gaily decorated by their friends, in the native fashion, by leis or long wreaths of beautiful flowers. We were soon in easy view of the island of death — Molokai of the lepers. But thereby hangs another tale.