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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Breakfast, Of
Course, Could Not Be Served, But A Plate Was Put At One End Of The
Table For The
Silent old Scotch captain, who tucked up his feet and
sat with his oilskins and sou'-wester on, while the
Charming
steward, with trousers rolled up to his knees, waded about,
pacifying us by bringing us excellent curry as we sat on the edges
of our berths, and putting on a sweetly apologetic manner, as if
penitent for the gross misbehaviour of the ship. Such a man would
reconcile me to far greater discomfort than that of the "Kilauea."
I wonder if he is ever unamiable, or tired, or perturbed?
The next day was fine, and we were all much on deck to dry our
clothes in the sun. The southern and leeward coasts of Hawaii as
far as Kawaaloa are not much more attractive than coal-fields.
Contrasted with the shining shores of Hilo, they are as dust and
ashes; long reaches of black lava and miles of clinkers marking the
courses of lava-flows, whose black desolation and deformity nature,
as yet, has done almost nothing to clothe. Cocoa-nut trees usually,
however, fringe the shore, but were it not for the wonderful colour
of the ocean, like liquid transparent turquoise, revealing the coral
forests shelving down into purple depths, and the exciting proximity
of sharks, it would have been wearisome. After leaving the bay
where Captain Cook met his death, we passed through a fleet of
twenty-seven canoes, each one hollowed out of the trunk of a single
tree, from fifteen to twenty-five feet long, about twenty inches
deep, hardly wide enough for a fat man, and high and pointed at both
ends.
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