A Curious Life for a Lady Read online

  In this carefree and fledgling mood, destinations scarcely seemed important any more. Thus, when her shipboard friend Mrs Dexter, whose son was so ill, begged her to disembark at the Sandwich Isles instead of going straight to California, Isabella agreed, explaining, ‘The only hope for the young man’s life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently shall see the Sandwich Islands.’

  II

  The Sandwich Isles (now the American State of Hawaii) were then the nearest approach to Paradise, the ‘Blessed Isles’, the ‘Isles of Eden’, the ‘peacefullest, restfullest, sunniest, balmiest, dreamiest haven of refuge for the worn and weary spirit the surface of the earth can offer’, as Mark Twain described them in 1866. And so they still proved for Miss Isabella Bird, who reached them in January 1873. She looked a quaint and buttoned-up little figure in that flamboyant landscape, but beneath her sedate exterior bounded all the energy of a twenty-one-year-old, newly-resurrected and in tempestuous spirits.

  As the Nevada trundled toward Honolulu harbour, canoes came bouncing over the surf to greet it; natives floating naked in the blue water and fishermen poking about the coral reefs flapped an easy welcome; and from the steamer’s high decks the passengers, relaxed and jolly after their marine ordeals, yearned towards the solid green hills and smiled down at the crowds on the quay who were laughing and called up at them ‘in a language that seemed without backbone’. ‘Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy, shining black hair, large, brown lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect teeth like ivory.’ Such an exuberance of colour they made – the women in floppy robes of primrose, scarlet, lilac; the men with jaunty bandanas at the throat and, like the women, positively blossoming with tropical flowers, festoons and swathes of them, looped upon their heads, their straw hats, their necks and wrists and swinging in garlands to their waists. At just a small distance, stood a cluster of ‘foreign ladies’ in sprigged muslins and pretty hats, looking, Isabella noticed, ‘so unburdened and innocent of the humpings and bunchings, the monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste’, and beaming, as the whole world beamed on her that day, ‘with cheerfulness, friendliness and kindliness’.

  The warmth of that arrival was happily typical. As Isabella several times remarked, there could have been few places on earth where hospitality was so unstintingly given, the needs of strangers so joyously assuaged, cordial friendship so spontaneously offered as on the Sandwich Isles during the mid-nineteenth century. When Isabella arrived there, she was simply an unknown English lady unarmed with any of those official introductions to high places that would smooth many of her later journeys, and ungirded with the rather formidable reputation for influential comment and disquieting perspicacity that, in years to come, would bring her much flattering attention from some who hoped for an eulogy. The island settlers liked her simply for herself; they opened their homes and sometimes their hearts to her; they planned her excursions and provided her with horses, mules and guides; they admired her energy, sincerity and eager receptive interest. ‘There is something soothing and gratifying in being so much liked,’ she confessed to Hennie. ‘It makes me such a nice, genial and pleasant person!’ And so this softened, newly-genial Isabella who had planned to stay about three weeks on the Islands to help her friends, the Dexters, actually remained for seven months and left mainly because she felt herself succumbing to the temptation to stay for ever.

  Apart from the occasional ship such as the Nevada come up from the Antipodes, communications with the independent kingdom of the Sandwich Islands were scant. One Pacific Mail steamer ploughed back and forth between them and San Francisco about once a month, a small number of whaling and naval vessels nosed in and out and there were a few large sailing vessels that zipped along nicely when the trade winds were favourable.

  On the archipelago there was but one hotel, the Hawaiian, opened the year before. Light and shade from feathery tamarinds quivered across the dining-room tables that were piled high with guavas, bananas, melons, strawberries, limes, mangoes, pineapples plucked fresh for every meal. On the verandahs one could sit for hours watching the blue-green light deepen over the Nuuanu valley and listen, perhaps, to the distant music from a ship’s band in the harbour and the closer chatter of the guests – naval officers from Connecticut or Liverpool, sheep-farmers, sugar-planters and their families, retired whaling captains.

  It was comfortable, sociable, respectable and held few charms for Isabella, once she had settled in and helped Mrs Dexter to arrange medical attention for her son. ‘I dislike health resorts and abhor this kind of life,’ she states abruptly, in personal rejection not only of the Hawaiian, but of all the luxurious hostelries, international menus, bedrooms-with-hot-and-cold, cocktail lounges and guided tours that were developing to satisfy the expectations of that increasingly familiar figure on the world scene – the middle-class, middlingly affluent, western globetrotter. Isabella’s prejudice was a fortunate one. As a future result of it she would spend many a night in log-cabins in the Rocky Mountains, in palm-leaf shanties in the Malayan jungles, in Tibetan tents, Persian caravanserais, Japanese country inns, Kurdish stables, Korean monasteries, Chinese sampans; as an immediate result of it, she was soon out of her comfortable rattan chair on the hotel’s verandah and aboard a steamer bound for the lesser-known island of Hawaii, where she would soon spend her first night in a native hut with grass roof, mud floor and a pillow of tree-fern down.

  The occasional perils of voyages to the Sandwich Islands were minor afflictions compared with the uncertainties of going from one island to another. The 400-ton screw steamer Kilauea that forged the tenuous link looked like ‘a second rate coasting collier’ or ‘an old American tug-boat’ and her past history was as full of ups and downs as any vessel’s could possibly be. Local legend said that she had scraped her doughty bottom on every coral reef in the archipelago; nevertheless, in 1873 she was still wobbling along and Isabella gained first-hand experience of her many vicissitudes. The Kilauea took some three days to amble over the two hundred miles between Honolulu on Oahu and Hilo on Hawaii, lurching remorselessly in the windward swells most of the way. Frequently her machinery ground to a total halt; in the blue tropic afternoons she seemed to fall quite asleep, her rudder drowsily creaking and awnings flipping listlessly against the deck-poles; during storms, water cascaded through the dining-room skylights, while those who could stomach it were served with a good curry by a sweetly-apologetic Malay steward wearing gumboots who waded in from the kitchen. ‘A grand feature of the voyage on the Kilauea’, trumpeted one of the earliest Hawaiian guide-books, ‘consists in the licensed observation of Hawaiian home-life at first hand.’ This was possible, indeed unavoidable, because the native passengers, as the guide continued, ‘are not infrequently so thickly congregated forward of the privileged quarter-deck – reserved for foreigners who pay for the privilege – that they are unable to lie down but remain wedged up in a tangled mess of men, women, children’ and, in addition, as Isabella soon discovered, of ‘dogs, cats, mats, calabashes of poi, coconuts, breadfruit, dried fish’.

  By day, the natives scooped up the poi with their fingers, smelled fiercely of the dried fish and rancid coconut oil, giggled and crooned to their pets, mostly ‘odious, weak-eyed pink-nosed Maltese terriers’; at night, they lay on their mats, if they could find room, and gazed up at the rolling stars. Isabella curiously observed the native home-life during the day, and at night was allotted a berth in a cabin where ‘sex, race and colour are included in a promiscuous arrangement’. She numbered among her sleeping companions the Hawaiian Governor, Mr Lyman; a female American tourist; one Afong, Chinaman; and Governor Nahaolelua of Maui Island whose head, she was told in the morning, she had used as a footstool all night. Other occupants included cockroaches as big as mice ‘of an evil dark red with eyes like lobsters and two-inch-long antennae’. On the second night Isabe
lla joined the natives on the deck.

  And on the third morning they floated into Hilo Bay – a crescent of pearly sand fringed with palm-trees that was gold under the sun, pink at sunset, silver by moonlight, that was perfumed with oleander, jasmine, passion-flowers, that was lulled with the rhythms of surf on sand, patter of gay feet, soft chatter of sugar-canes and banana-groves. Hawaii, in short, embodied that seductive dream of the South Seas, the enchanted isles of the lotos-eaters that, in 1873, was almost as provocative and beguiling as it is today. But, at that time, the gulf between the sweet dream and the reality was much smaller.

  Hilo, the ‘administrative capital of the island’ (to use words that sound grotesque and abrasive in the context) was a large village with a few open stores facing the beach, three churches, a courthouse, a number of white clapboard houses and bunches of native huts that seemed to be growing amid the glossy breadfruit and candlenut trees. The stores sold kerosene lamps, stirrups, peppermints, fish-hooks, wooden tubs and twine; the most imposing church, horned with bell-towers, was for the Catholics; the two smaller, wooden-spired in the thrifty New England manner, were for the Protestants (foreign and native respectively); on the lawn before the court-house, the Sheriff, the Judge, the Governor and other leisured gentlemen played interminable games of croquet. They and other foreign settlers (about thirty in all) lived in white-wood houses, each with a trim parlour adorned with sea-shells, water-colours, vines, manila matting on the floor, net curtains puffing at the open verandahs. Most of the foreigners were Americans who had settled on the Islands and, as Isabella soon discovered, ‘American influence and customs’ were prevalent and ‘Americans “run” the Government and fill the Chief Justiceship and other high offices of State’.

  Nevertheless, at that period it was still the natives who set the tone of Hawaii. The natives, said the foreigners, were like spoiled children – feckless, merry, lackadaisical, innocent, unreliable and picturesque. When they were hungry they had but to shake a pineapple or coconut from a tree or suck a calabash of poi (that glutinous lilac-coloured mush made from baked fermented taro root which tasted, Isabella said, like ‘sour bookbinder’s paste’). When they were hot, they simply scooped off their single garment and cavorted in the nearest pool. When they felt energetic, they jumped on their surfboards and rode shore-wards on breakers that bucked like wild horses, or they saddled steeds of a fleshier kind and galloped over the sand. When they were tired, they simply rolled into a green shade and slept. Their music was a lilt of skin-drum, nose-flute and pipe, their language was a soft song of words composed of only twelve letters, and their dance, the notorious hula, was the most provocative and openly sexual invitation in the world. And so the Sandwich Islanders innocently and charmingly embodied an absolute antithesis to that Anglo-Saxon Puritan-Christian ethic which was the harsh guiding light of the American pioneer missionaries who had landed on their shores in the year 1820.

  Later, Isabella learned the details of that dramatic, explosive encounter; for the moment it was sufficient to land at Hilo herself, amid a chorusing of alohas, a bestowing of kisses, a garlanding of leis, and then to be swept warmly away to the home of the American Sheriff, Luther Severance. As there were no hotels on Hawaii, respectable foreign residents received respectable foreign visitors into their homes, and Isabella was soon friendly with everyone. Her hosts, the Severances, were among her favourites. When he was not playing croquet, Luther Severance trotted off on horseback to the sugar-plantations, kept an eye on the few whalers and the sale of liquor, and, wearing his postmaster’s hat, supervised the distribution of mails. Mrs Severance, like other foreign ladies on Hawaii, was busier than her husband. This was partly because having no servants, except perhaps a Chinese cook, the ladies themselves ‘in their fresh pretty wrappers and ruffled white aprons, sweep the rooms’, and enjoyed doing it. ‘The nuisance of morning calls’ was thus unknown, and people visited after supper, taking their lanterns and just dropping in at the verandah windows for a chat. ‘There are no doorbells [For which Isabella had a peculiarly strong aversion] or solemn announcements by servants of visitors’ names, or “not-at-homes”.’ There were no dressmakers and so no ‘high fashions’; ‘the ladies don’t have to bother with stockings either,’ she told Hennie, and that saved a lot of tiresome mending; there were no carriage roads and so no carriages and no need to keep up with the Joneses with the smartest turn-out; no thieves, and so not a locked door on the island; and ‘no carpets, no dust, no hot water needed’. Freed of so much, the settlers had abundant leisure ‘for reading, music, choir practising, drawing, fernprinting, fancy work, picnics, riding parties’. While the natives, similarly deprived of over-strenuous employment, spent hours making leis and lounging on the sand while their dishes of sweet potato and chicken roasted in outdoor ovens.

  This idyllic picture had its meaner, grosser elements, as Isabella soon realised, but in the first surge of uncritical enthusiasm she just wanted ‘to become Hawaiianised’ in every way – and so made a discovery that was greatly to facilitate her future journeying. Isabella passionately adored horses. One of the few engaging memories of her childhood preserved by her early biographer, Anna Stoddart, is that of a five-year-old Isabella in a simple smock riding a full-size carriage horse through the lanes of Cheshire. Nevertheless she was a frail child, and her activity was cramped by that spinal complaint which continued to afflict her whenever she walked a long distance or rode – in the ladylike side-saddle fashion. Thus, after a short ride out of Hilo, Isabella returned with excruciating backache and the despondent conviction that she would be unable to ride as far as the famous Kilauea volcano which she longed to see.

  Surely what she needed then, said Luther Severance, was a Mexican saddle. A Mexican saddle was a very masculine affair, ornamented and brass-bossed, with a great horn in front and large wooden stirrups with long leathern flaps and guards of tough hide – a seat made for the jaunty bottoms of cow-punchers,bullock-hunters and other wild men of the open prairie. But on the precipitous bridle-tracks of Hawaii everyone used them, even the ladies, who had created for the purpose special straddle-proof ‘riding costumes’ of ‘full Turkish trousers and jauntily made dresses reaching to the ankles’. It was just the job, and Isabella’s friends soon ran one up for her in tartan flannel. In it, she straddled her first horse and discovered that she could gallop comfortably at last – at one with the steed, instead of perched inflexibly on its side. ‘It was only my strong desire to see the volcano which made me consent to a mode of riding against which I have so strong a prejudice,’ she assured her readers hastily. But that prejudice once conquered, Isabella rode many a mile astride many an animal – Arab stallions, Japanese packhorses, Persian mules, Tibetan yaks. She also wore variations of the ‘Hawaiian riding-dress’ theme for years, but the trousers were always utterly concealed beneath the skirts, and when she came to a town of any size she always rode a ladylike side-saddle through its streets. That was Isabella’s way; she was not an iconoclast and confined her comfortable unconventionalities to foreign parts where they were not necessarily judged as such.

  On Hawaii then, where no eye was censorious, Isabella supplemented her riding costume with ‘great rusty New Zealand boots’, a pair of jangling Mexican spurs, a lei of orange pandanus seeds and a ‘coarse broad-brimmed Australian hat which served the double purpose of sunshade and umbrella’. Thus accoutred and securely mounted on the native policeman’s horse with a blue blanket strapped behind her Mexican saddle, Isabella began her explorations. She jogged along under canopies of monkey-pod and mango leaves and loops of flame hibiscus and convolvulus, blue as the sky; she splashed through gulches laced over with ferns and vines; and came to temporary rest below the palms, those muttering, haughty palms, providers of milk, oil, food, matting, with ‘curved, wrinkled perfectly cylindrical stems bulging near the ground like an apothecary’s pestle’ and leaves rearing amber-yellow and aged above the lower greenery. She jogged along, for a start, to a sugar-plantation owned by relati
ves of Mrs Severance.

  The growing of sugar on the Islands was still a fairly speculative proposition. ‘Christian missions and whaling have had their day,’ Isabella noted, ‘and now people talk sugar. Hawaii thrills to the news of a cent up or down on the American market.’ When Mark Twain was in Hawaii he had discovered that as there was never any frost, there was no sugar ‘close season’ and the plantations which then existed could produce up to ‘13,000 pounds of sugar an acre on unmanured soil’. Twain found out the price of everything (as he always did), totted up his arithmetic in good old Yankee greenbacks and announced that, with a little effort and know-how, Hawaii could be ‘the king of the sugar world’. He had it all worked out: the importation of cheap coolie labour from China to work the plantations, so that the whites could drop their shovels and become overseers; the chartering of cargo vessels to carry the sugar to San Francisco; the distillation of ‘inferior molasses’ (then fed to hogs) for the brewing of whisky as a profitable side-line. This all came to pass, more or less, in due season, but less rapidly than Twain had hoped, owing to the natural lethargy of the islanders and the continuing heavy import duties levied by the United States. A new reciprocal trade treaty between American and the Islands was signed three years after Isabella was there, and later sweet fortunes were made in sugar. But in 1873 there were only thirty-five plantations and, in Isabella’s view, ‘few of the planters at present do more than keep their heads above water’.