The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
- Page 11 of 244 - First - Home
Two Coasting Schooners Were
Just Leaving The Harbour, And The Inter-Island Steamer Kilauea, With
Her Deck Crowded With Natives, Was Just Coming In.
By noon the
great decrepit Nevada, which has no wharf at which she can lie in
sleepy New Zealand, was moored alongside a very respectable one in
this enterprising little Hawaiian capital.
We looked down from the towering deck on a crowd of two or three
thousand people - whites, Kanakas, Chinamen - and hundreds of them at
once made their way on board, and streamed over the ship, talking,
laughing, and remarking upon us in a language which 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. Everyone was smiling. The forms of the women
seem to be inclined towards obesity, but their drapery, which
consists of a sleeved garment which falls in ample and unconfined
folds from their shoulders to their feet, partly conceals this
defect, which is here regarded as a beauty. Some of these dresses
were black, but many of those worn by the younger women were of pure
white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light green. The men
displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best advantage in
white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts. A few of the women wore
coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both
men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one
side of their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by
bandana handkerchiefs of rich bright colours round their necks,
knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no
Anglo-Saxon dandy could attain. Without an exception the men and
women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure
white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their
necks, flowers unknown to me, but redolent of the tropics in
fragrance and colour. Many of the young beauties wore the gorgeous
blossom of the red hibiscus among their abundant, unconfined, black
hair, and many, besides the garlands, wore festoons of a sweet-
scented vine, or of an exquisitely beautiful fern, knotted behind
and hanging half-way down their dresses. These adornments of
natural flowers are most attractive. Chinamen, all alike, very
yellow, with almond-shaped eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long
pigtails, spotlessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled
cunning and simplicity, "foreigners," half-whites, a few negroes,
and a very few dark-skinned Polynesians from the far-off South Seas,
made up the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd.
The "foreign" ladies, who were there in great numbers, generally
wore simple light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many
of them so far conformed to native custom as to wear natural flowers
round their hats and throats. But where were the hard, angular,
careworn, sallow, passionate faces of men and women, such as form
the majority of every crowd at home, as well as in America, and
Australia?
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 11 of 244
Words from 5302 to 5806
of 127766