The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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I Am Quite Interested With A Native Lady Here, The First I Have Met
With Who Has Been Able To Express Her Ideas In English.
She is
extremely shrewd and intelligent, very satirical, and a great mimic.
She very cleverly burlesques the way in which white people express
their admiration of scenery, and, in fact, ridicules admiration of
scenery for itself.
She evidently thinks us a sour, morose,
worrying, forlorn race. "We," she said, "are always happy; we never
grieve long about anything; when any one dies we break our hearts
for some days, and then we are happy again. We are happy all day
long, not like white people, happy one moment, gloomy another:
we've no cares, the days are too short. What are haoles always
unhappy about?" Perhaps she expresses the general feeling of her
careless, pleasure-loving, mirth-loving people, who, whatever
commands they disobey, fulfil the one, "Take no thought for the
morrow." The fabrication of the beautiful quilts I before wrote of
is a favourite occupation of native women, and they make all their
own and their husbands' clothes; but making leis, going into the
woods to collect materials for them, talking, riding, bathing,
visiting, and otherwise amusing themselves, take up the greater part
of their time. Perhaps if we white women always wore holukus of one
shape, we should have fewer gloomy moments!
I.L.B.
LETTER XVI.
WAIMANU VALLEY. HAWAII.
I am sitting at the door of a grass lodge, at the end of all things,
for no one can pass further by land than this huge lonely cleft.
About thirty natives are sitting about me, all staring, laughing,
and chattering, and I am the only white person in the region. We
have all had a meal, sitting round a large calabash of poi and a
fowl, which was killed in my honour, and roasted in one of their
stone ovens. I have forgotten my knife, and have had to help myself
after the primitive fashion of aborigines, not without some fear,
for some of them I am sure are in an advanced stage of leprosy. The
brown tattooed limbs of one man are stretched across the mat, the
others are sitting cross-legged, making lauhala leis. One man is
making fishing-lines of a beautifully white and marvellously
tenacious fibre, obtained from an Hawaiian "flax" plant (possibly
Urtica argentea), very different from the New Zealand Phormium
tenax. Nearly all the people of the valley are outside, having come
to see the wahine haole: only one white woman, and she a resident
of Hawaii, having been seen in Waimanu before. I am really alone,
miles of mountain and gulch lie between me and the nearest whites.
This is a wonderful place: a ravine about three miles long and
three-quarters of a mile wide, without an obvious means of ingress,
being walled in by precipices from 2000 to 4000 feet high. Five
cascades dive from the palis at its head, and unite to form a placid
river about up to a horse's body here, and deep enough for a horse
to swim in a little below.
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