A Curious Life for a Lady Read online

  However, the blissful picture she draws of the Onomea plantation where she stayed suggests that its owners, at least, were comfortably afloat in their well-ordered semi-feudal world. Judge Austin and his wife of Onomea lived in a roomy frame-house on a slope, a grass-hut village dozed in the valley below and the land behind swept high to a belt of forest whose shades ‘threw into greater brightness the upward glades of grass and the fields of sugar cane’ in the foreground. Little houses for the overseers, bookkeepers, sugar-boilers and machinists dotted the compound, there was a store run, inevitably, by a Chinaman and the mill itself where the cane-juice poured ‘as a pale green cataract’ into the troughs and later burbled reddish-brown, oily and seething at a temperature of 150°.

  When Isabella strolled upon the verandah of the main house, she could hear the distant cadence of breakers on the shore and the cheery rustle of cane that had never known a frost; she could smell the passion-flowers on the trellis, the grittiness of dust kicked by horses’ hooves, the over-ripeness of molasses; and she could watch the satisfactory bustle in the compound, ‘overseers, white and coloured, natives riding up at full gallop and people coming on all sorts of errands, the hum of the crushing mill, the rush of water in the flumes and the grind of the waggons carrying cane’. Sometimes a procession of mules plodded by loaded with iron-banded wooden kegs of sugar to be piled in the sandy cove below for shipment by schooner to Honolulu when the wind was favourable. Six hundred tons of sugar a year jolted away from the mill in this fashion, its cane leaves were chewed by the baggage animals, its ‘trash’ (dried stalks from which the juice had been pressed) was dried in the sun and re-used for fuel, its silvery tassels were woven into sunhats worn by the workers. The crop was beautiful at every stage; its patterns were perfect.

  And here, at the pattern’s centre, lived the Austins and their four merry barefoot sons – typical settlers, Isabella thought, with ‘faces not soured by the east wind or wrinkled by the worrying effort to “keep up appearances’”; with leisure enough to be ‘kind, cultured and agreeable’, with honesty enough to ask any congenial traveller ‘to occupy the simple guest chamber or share the simple meal’. At the meals, the food was wholesome and unpretentious – sweet potatoes, sliced guavas, griddle cakes with (of course) molasses; and the talk was the sort that Isabella enjoyed – gossipy, homely but full of interest and surprise to a stranger. She heard about a scheme for introducing mongooses from India to battle with the increasing number of rats, about the habits of the industrious Chinese coolies, some of whom gambled half their wages away and bought opium with the rest, and about the much less industrious natives who, lengthening their jolly faces into lugubriousness, would complain of multifarious minor afflictions in order to get off work for a day. One lunch-time, Mr Austin suggested that Isabella should visit the famously beautiful Waipio Valley and he arranged for a native girl, Deborah, to guide her and lent her his favourite mule, a creature adept at putting its feet together and sliding over rough places.

  The trip took five days and proved quite adventurous. En route they were joined by a young man called Kaluna, Deborah’s cousin and a zany addition to the party. ‘His movements are impulsive and uncontrolled and his handsome face looks as if it belonged to a half-tamed creature out of the woods. He talks loud, laughs incessantly, croons a monotonous chant, which sounds almost as heathenish as tom-toms, throws himself out of his saddle, hanging by one foot, lingers behind to gather fruits and then comes tearing up, beating his horse over the ears and nose, with a fearful yell and a prolonged sound like har-r-rouche, striking my mule and threatening to overturn me as he passes on the narrow track…. His manner is familiar. He rides up to me, pokes his head under my hat, and says interrogatively, “Cold!” by which I understand that the poor boy is shivering himself. In eating he plunges his hand into my bowl of fowl or snatches half my biscuit.’ He was the ‘most thoroughly careless and irresponsible being’ the maiden lady from Edinburgh had ever met, but ‘I daresay he means well’, she concludes placidly and found most of his antics amusing. Though an emotional and highly-strung woman who responded tensely to the stresses of modern society, Isabella was quite unflappable when faced with untoward behaviour such as this. She realised that she often cut quite a ludicrous figure on the foreign scene and that the natives often poked fun at her. But she never displayed any irritation or alarm and she put up a front of imperturbable good humour that blunted all mockery. She needed her reserves of equanimity that night – her first in entirely native surroundings.

  There were drenched by a slapping rain long before they reached ‘the house of a native called Bola-Bola’ where they planned to stay. Squelching across a pig-ridden yard, they found Bola-Bola’s house to be a derelict and dirty one-room shack that already contained ‘mats, boxes, bamboos, saddles, blankets, lassoes, coconuts, taro roots, bananas, quilts, pans, calabashes, bundles of hard poi in ti leaves, bones, cats, fowls, clothes’ together with a frightful, shrivelled nude old woman tattooed all over, a girl of twelve ‘with torrents of shining hair’, two other young women ‘in rose-coloured chemises’ cradling a baby, and Bola-Bola himself, who hospitably killed a fowl for their dinner. When darkness fell, a piece of beef fat was lit in a hollow stone, and by its sputtering gleam the women stared remorselessly at their weird visitor. At last, to Isabella’s relief, a curtain was pulled to shield her from those brown, inert eyes and a pulu shakedown was produced. Pulu was a silky fibre that grew on the fronds of the Hawaiian tree-fern. Before the foreigners came and introduced the word ‘export’ to the islanders, they used pulu to stuff quilts and the cavities of their dead, as part of a traditional embalming process; between the 1850s and 70s, having learned the meaning of ‘export’, they gathered bumper bundles of the fibre from the forests and sent it overseas to stuff the pillows and eiderdowns of the merely sleeping. So a pulu shakedown must have been comfortable, but Isabella couldn’t sleep on hers. She was lying directly below a broken window through which jumped and landed on her, one after the other, five large wild wet cats, and ‘had there been a sixth,’ Isabella concluded, ‘I think I could not have borne the infliction quietly’. Each cat stole a strip of the jerked beef that hung stiffly from the rafters, but one let a piece fall which wakened everyone, and so the natives all got up again and smoked and ate more poi and laughed together until a pallid watery dawn crept through the thatch.

  Starting early, Isabella, Deborah and Kaluna trotted past herds of semi-wild bullocks with crooked horns that were being driven to Hilo market by yelling cowhands, past villages, each with its glitter of goldfish ponds, taro patch, grove of orange and coffee in blossom, and alongside streams where native women were shrimping, up to their ample bosoms in the water, pushing trumpet-shaped baskets before them. Shrimps were a delicacy to be eaten raw and so very very fresh that, as the people chewed their juicy heads, their pink tails were still threshing against the chewers’ white teeth. It was, Isabella remarked, a repulsive sight.

  The next day they reached the grandiose falls that plummeted down the Waipio Valley, and Isabella left her companions to wade along the river until the tepid water was up to her throat and ‘the scene became real’ to her. The thunder of many waters was always close on Hawaii – the high white surf pounding sand, tinkling village streams and cascades that poured down the beautiful, dangerous palis, precipitous chasms of volcanic rock, often measuring some 4,000 feet from cliff-top to valley floor, which gashed the coastline. There were no bridges across the palis then and travellers slithered down steep zigzag paths, forded the waters, clambered up the far side. Isabella and her companions crossed several of these, but as the rains continued, each torrent surged deeper and faster than the last, till, on the return journey, they reached the mightiest of all, the Hakalau gulch. ‘The roar was deafening and the sight terrific. Where there were two shallow streams a week ago, with a house and a good-sized piece of ground above their confluence, there was now one spinning, rushing, chafing, foaming river, twice as wide as the Clyde
at Glasgow.’ Kaluna was off on some acrobatic exercise of his own and Isabella begged Deborah to turn back. But the girl wanted to get home and simply ploughed in, calling ‘Spur, spur all the time.’ Deborah was mounted on a strong large horse, Isabella on an unshod, untried mare called Bessie Twinker that she had bought the day before. Thinking this might be Bessie’s and her last ride, Isabella cut loose a bunch of coconuts from her saddle and plunged. Bessie, knocked off her feet by the brawling waters, swam, struggled and snorted, Deborah shrieked as she was carried out towards the vast breakers on the nearby shore, Isabella, battered, dizzy and deafened, spurred landwards and at last Bessie’s floundering hooves clawed the opposite bank. Ahead of them, Deborah’s burly steed had also touched ground and they were safe. It was a foolhardy exploit, but one that excited Isabella with its authentic smell of danger, its promise of how well she could perform under physical stress. Some other travellers reached the gulch soon afterwards and, she records smugly, ‘suffered a two-day detention rather than incur a similar risk’.

  Having dried out and rested, Isabella returned to the unruffled, claustrophobic, amiable Severance home in Hilo and ‘the pleasant little gatherings for sewing, while some gentlemen read aloud, fern-printing in the verandah, microscopic and musical evenings, little social luncheons and on Sunday evenings what is colloquially termed “a sing”’. Clearly, the prevailing social tone of the respectable settlers’ life was prescribed by the American missionary contingent, and patriarch among them in Hilo was the Rev. Titus Coan, whose company Isabella enjoyed.

  Coan was a pioneer missionary who had reached the Sandwich Isles in 1835 – accompanied by his wife who had borne the delicious maiden name of Fidelia Church. Now he was a courtly venerable pastor of his native flock who liked to relax in the shade of his latticed verandah and tell visitors about his early adventures during month-long ‘missionings’ into the Hawaiian interior. In those days there were few tamed horses, so Coan travelled on foot armed with nothing other than two calabashes (one for food, one for Bibles), but fierce and potent with the word of the Lord. He scrambled down pali sides on a rope, swam the foaming torrents, preached up to thirty sermons a week in as many villages. As Mark Twain put it, rather brutally, ‘The missionaries braved a thousand privations’ to come and make the islanders ‘permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and blissful a place heaven is and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor natives how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for the next day as compared with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through the eternal summer and eating of the bounty that nobody laboured to provide but Nature.’

  Needless to say, this was not how Titus Coan described his evangelistic endeavours to Isabella, nor would she have regarded them thus. In the course of her journeys, she met – and enjoyed meeting – numbers of the ‘unconverted heathen’ and she certainly did not unconditionally consign them to damnation. But she ardently believed that Christianity was a beneficent and civilising creed that spread a salutary moral influence and was infinitely preferable to, for instance, the amoral, crude, sometimes savage code by which the Sandwich Islanders had lived before the white men arrived. So she listened with enthusiastic sympathy as Coan told her about the Presbyterian pioneers who broke the spiritual trail and of their glorious heydays – the ‘Great Revival’ of the late 1830s and 40s when the message of the Gospel seemed to sweep across the islands like spring rain and converts sprouted thick as rice seedlings in the valleys. That this revival began on Hawaii was largely due to the zeal and open-heartedness of Coan himself. Most of the evangelists before him had followed an exclusive and doctrinaire line, as typified in this report from a missionary on Hawaii to his Church Board in New England: ‘The attention to religion here continues and pressure to get into the church is very great; and if an entrance into the visible church was a guarantee of salvation we should do wrong to hold the people back. But we find so little of the deep feeling of sinfulness and unworthiness which a correct knowledge of the human heart and a clear discovery of the character of God always produces, that we feel justified in putting off almost all applications for admittance to the Church.’

  Such painful and stringent entry requirements naturally disqualified many, but Coan introduced what a later historian terms ‘a more wholesale policy’ towards conversion. His sermons were highly emotional, rhetorical and revivalist in tone and the people responded to them: ‘I wish you could have heard Mr Coan … tell of that stirring time,’ Isabella wrote to Hennie, ‘when nearly all the large population of the Hilo and Puna districts turned out to hear the Gospel and how the young people went up into the mountains and carried the news of the love of God and the good life to come to the sick and old, who were afterwards baptised, when often the only water which could be obtained for the rite was that which dripped sparingly from the roof of caves.’ The people accepted Christianity wholeheartedly, its new promises and its new taboos. They pulled up their tobacco plants and cast them in the sea, they threw their pipes on the fire, they poured away their fermented liquors and, in Coan’s words, ‘The nation became a great Temperance Society with the King at its head.’

  Sexual licence was less easy to eliminate. Many of the native huts were like Bola-Bola’s with but a single room, and at night, as Miss Constance Cummings (a Scottish traveller, there a few years after Isabella) carefully puts it: ‘Men and women, lads and lasses are all herded together promiscuously with one large sheet of woven grass acting as a household blanket.’ This custom had not resulted in any problem of over-population, however. If a baby, perhaps one born on the wrong side of the blanket, was unwanted or was inconveniently noisy, the parents had a simple remedy, as Miss Cummings explained: ‘A hole was dug in the earthen floor of the house and the wailing baby was therein deposited, a bit of cloth thrust into its mouth to still its cries, the earth and mats replaced and quiet being thus restored, domestic life continued peaceful as before.’

  Nakedness was another new sin, and Isabella records that the missionary wives ‘daily assembled the women and children and taught them the habits and industries of civilisation, to attend to their persons, to braid hats and to wear and make clothes’. And soon, at the white man’s approach, the natives obligingly donned short shirts and old top-hats so as not to offend his sensibilities. During this dramatic period, hundreds of islanders flocked to Hilo where they were taught, watched over and examined by the missionaries. Then the ‘accepted candidates’ assembled for mass baptism, one of which Coan described to Isabella: ‘On the first Sunday in July 1838, 1705 persons, formerly heathens, were baptised. They were seated close together on the earth-floor in rows, with just space between for one to walk and Mr Lyman [another venerable missionary] and Mr Coan passing through them, sprinkled every bowed head, after which Mr C. admitted the weeping hundreds into the fellowship of the Universal Church by pronouncing the words, “I baptise you all in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”’

  But while the new life offered by Christianity may have been more wholesome and charitable, it brought new complexities and dissensions. In 1840 some French Catholics built a mission in Honolulu, and they informed the natives that there was no necessity for them to give up tobacco or liquor or wear clothes after all – as long as they attended the right services and learned the right prayers they would be saved. Later the Mormons came and, in Coan’s words, ‘spread themselves in squads all over the islands like frogs on Egypt’. Then, in 1862, as a result of active encouragement from the Hawaiian royal family, who corresponded with Queen Victoria on the subject, an Episcopalian Church was founded with Dr Staley, self-styled ‘Lord Bishop of Honolulu’, at its head. This church was distinctly Anglican-Establishment in style and, inevitably, sharp controversy flared between it and the unadorned fundamentalism of the New England missions.

  But Coan’s b
itterest ire was reserved for the Catholics who, he felt, actively encouraged the natives to break the new taboos that he and his colleagues had framed. This hostility intensified as the Catholics gained ground and Coan frequently came upon ‘many confident Romanists’ in villages where, formerly, he alone had held the key to salvation. ‘I asked some of them if they read the Bible,’ he writes, ‘and they answered “Yes”, showing me their little catechism with more prayers to Mary than to God. I asked one who claimed to be a teacher how many commandments there were in the Decalogue. He answered “Ten”; but on going through them in order I found that he omitted the second and divided the tenth in two parts to make good the number.’ One evening, as he was riding home from a ‘missioning’, Coan met the local Catholic priest and some converts who started shouting insults at him. ‘Peter is the Head of the Church,’ thundered the priest; ‘No, it is Jesus’, roared back Coan, and the altercation continued for a considerable period. It was a sorry spectacle in that island sunset: the two black-robed men of God shaking their fists at each other and positively quivering in their saddles with hatred, while their native converts stood silently by in open-mouthed bewilderment.

  And so the voice of the ageing patriarch on his verandah grew fretful as he lamented that the schisms in the church had brought dissension to the Islands. And Isabella, who often deplored the fruitless arrogance of sectarian strife, heartily agreed, though it probably occurred to her that holding impromptu examinations in the Decalogue and engaging in public slanging matches did little to mend matters. She did not say so; it would have been no use; and besides she was easy and happy in the sun. It was pleasanter and kinder to divert Coan’s thoughts elsewhere – to the alarming behaviour of the island’s turbulent volcanoes for instance, on which he was something of an expert, or the preparations for the impending visit to Hawaii of the King of the Sandwich Isles.