 This is Section 63 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 63, The Sacramento Daily Union, September 1866, Part II. The Sacramento Daily Union, September 22, 1866. Kealakakua Bay, July 1866. The Romantic God-Lono. I have been writing a good deal of late about the great God-Lono and Captain Cook's personation of him. Now, while I am here in Lono's home upon ground which his terrible feet have trodden in remote ages, unless these natives lie—and they would hardly do that, I suppose—I might as well tell who he was. The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff, twelve feet long. Unpoetical history says he was a favorite God on the island of Hawaii, a great king who had been deified for meritorious services, just our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would have made him a postmaster instead of a God, no doubt. In an angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Ali. Remorse of conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle of a God travelling on the shoulder, for in his gnawing grief he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily have been the case that, when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent to grass, he never came back any more. Therefore he instituted games called Makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honour, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day, and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen any more, his raft got swamped perhaps, but the people always expected his return, and they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as the restored God. The poetic tradition. But there is another tradition which is rather more poetical than this bald historical one. Lono lived in considerable style up here on the hillside. His wife was very beautiful, and he was devoted to her. One day he overheard a stranger proposing an allopment to her. And without waiting to hear her reply, he took the stranger's life, and then upgraded Kaikilani so harshly that her sensitive nature was wounded to the quick. She went away in tears, and Lono began to repent of his hasty conduct almost before she was out of sight. He sat him down under a coconut tree to await her return, intending to receive her with such tokens of affection and contrition as should restore her confidence, and drive all sorrow from her heart. But hour after hour winged its tardy flight, and yet she did not come. The sun went down and left him desolate. His all-wise instincts may have warned him that the separation was final, but he hoped on nevertheless, and when the darkness was heavy he built a beacon-fire at his door to guide the wanderer home again if by any chance she had lost her way. But the night waxed and waned and brought another day, but not the goddess. Lono hurried forth and sought her far and wide, but found no trace of her. At night he set his beacon-fire again, and kept Lone watch, but still she came not. And a new day found him a despairing, broken-hearted god. His misery could no longer brook suspense and solitude, and he set out to look for her. He told his sympathizing people he was going to search through all the island-world for the lost light of his household, and he would never come back any more till he found her. The natives always implicitly believed that he was still pursuing his patient quest and that he would find his peerless spouse again some day and come back, and so for ages they waited and watched in trusting simplicity for his return. They gazed out wistfully over the sea at any strange appearance on its waters, thinking it might be their loved and lost protector. But Lono was to them as the rainbow-tinted future seen in happy visions of youth, for he never came. Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death, but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he was a god. The field of the vanquished gods. Only a mile or so from Kealakukua Bay is a spot of historic interest, the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. Of course we visited it and came away as wise as most people do, who go and gaze upon such mementos of the past, when in an unreflective mood. While the first missionaries were on their way around the horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the islands as far back as tradition reached were suddenly broken up. Old Kamehameha I was dead, and his son, Liholiho the new king, was a free liver, a roistering, disillet fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient taboo. His assistant in the government, Kaahumanu, the Queen Dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated the taboo because it restricted the privilege of her sex, and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes. So the case stood. Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down, Kaahumanu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and Whiskey did the rest. It was probably the first time Whiskey ever prominently figured as an aide to civilization. Liholiho came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast. The determined queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved deliberately forward and sat down with the women. They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled. Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the king ate, still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld. Then conviction came like a revelation. The superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up, The taboo is broken! The taboo is broken! Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful Whiskey preach the first sermon, and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic. The taboo broken, and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that Captain Cook was no god merely because he groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as a man if it suited his pleasure to do it, and satisfied that the idols were powerless to protect themselves, they went to work at once, and pulled them down, hacked them to pieces, applied the torch, annihilated them. The pagan priests were furious, and while they might be, they had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared, they had been great, they had stood above the chiefs, and now they were vagabonds. They raised a revolt, they scared a number of people into joining their standard, and Kekua Kulani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily persuaded to become their leader. In the first skirmish, the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua. The king sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation. The savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill him. So the king sent his men forth under Major General Kailaimoku, and the two hosts met at Kuamu. The battle was long and fierce, men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom, and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the taboo were dead in the land. The royalists marched gaily home to Kailua, glorifying the new dispensation. There is no power in the gods, said they. They are a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak, the army without idols was strong and victorious. The nation was without a religion. The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, termed by a providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the gospel was planted as in a virgin soil. Canoe voyage. At noon we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at Huanao Nao in his canoe, price, two dollars, reasonable enough for a sea voyage of eight miles counting both ways. The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance. I cannot think of anything to liken it to, but a boy's sled-runner hollowed out, and that does not quite convey the correct idea. It is about fifteen feet long, high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out again. It seems to sit right upon top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger and does not upset easily if you keep still. This outrigger is formed of two long bent sticks like plough handles, which project from one side, and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly feared. Still until one gets used to sitting perched upon this knife-blade he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also. Sleepy scenery. I had the bow-seat and brown-sad image-ships and faced the Kanaka who occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling. With a first stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow. There was not much to see. While we were on the shallow water of the reef it was past time to look down into the limpid depths at the large bunches of branching coral, the unique shrubbery of the sea. We lost that though when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep. But we had the picture of the surf then, dashing angrily against the crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air. There was interest in this beatling border, too, for it was honeycombed with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the restless sea. When this novelty ceased to be a novelty we had to turn our eyes shoreward and gaze at the long mountain with its rich green forests stretching into the curtaining clouds and at the specks of houses in rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at anchor. And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of a school of huge beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again, and keeping it up, all was circling over in that way like so many well-submerged wheels. But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we were thrown upon our own resources. It did not take many minutes to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather was of a melting temperature. It had a drowsing effect, too, and when Brown attempted to open a conversation I let him close it again for lack of encouragement. I expected he would begin on the Kanaka, and he did. Fine day, John! Aola icky! I took that to mean I don't know, and I was equivalent to I don't understand you. Sort of sultry, though. Aola icky! You're right, at least I'll let it go at that, anyway. It makes you sweat considerable, don't it? Aola icky! Right again, likely. You'd better take a bath when you get down here to ho-nau-nau. You don't smell good, anyhow, and you can't sweat that way long without smelling worse. Aola icky! Oh, this thing they use. This engine don't seem to know anything but auri icky, and the interest of that begins to let down after it's been said sixteen or seventeen times. I reckon I'll bail out a while for a change. I expected he would upset the canoe, and he did. It was well enough to take the chances, though, because the sea had flung the blossom of a wave into the boat every now and then, until, as Brown said, in a happy spirit of exaggeration, there was about as much water inside as there was outside. There was no peril about the upset, but there was a great deal of discomfort. The author of the mischief thought there was compensation for it, however, in that there was a marked improvement in the Kanaka's smell afterwards. The Ruined City of Refuge At the end of an hour we had made the four miles and landed on a level point of land upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a tall coconut tree growing among them. Here was the ancient city of refuge—a vast enclosure whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the base, and fifteen or twenty feet high, an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet one way, and a fraction under seven hundred the other. Within this enclosure, in early times, have been three rude temples, each was two hundred and ten feet long by one hundred wide and thirteen high. In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island, the relatives of the deceased were privileged to take the murderer's life. And then a chase for life and liberty began, the outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountains and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the protecting walls of the city of refuge, and the Avenger of Blood following hotly after him. Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the panting pair sped through long files of excited natives who watched the contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted refugee with sharp and spirited ejaculations, and sending up a ringing shout of exaltation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated pursuers sank exhausted at the threshold. But sometimes the flying criminal fell under the hand of the Avenger at the very door, when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm. Where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a city of refuge, this ancient Jewish custom? This old sanctuary was sacred to all, even to rebels in arms and invading armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price on his head could go forth without fear or without danger. He was taboo, and to harm him was death. The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved. THE PLACE OF EXECUTION Close to a corner of the great enclosure is a round structure of stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve feet in diameter. This was the place of execution. A high palisade of coconut piles shut out its cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. Here criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. If the man had been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned. A STUDY FOR THE CURIOUS The walls of the temple are a study, the same food for speculation that is offered the visitor to the pyramids of Egypt he will find here, the mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with science and mechanics. The natives have no invention of their own for hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lover. Yet some of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground and built into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size and would weigh tons. How did they transport and how raise them? Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and are very creditable specimens of masonry. The blocks are of all manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest exactness. The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is accurately preserved. No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of resisting storm and decay for centuries. Who built this temple? And how was it built? And when are mysteries that may never be unraveled? There were giants in those days. Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end. It would weigh a few thousand pounds, which the High Chief, who held sway over this district many centuries ago, brought hither on his shoulder one day to use as a lounge. This circumstance is established by the most reliable traditions. He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no soldiering done, and no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee. He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead. These facts are all attested by a irrefutable tradition. Browne said, I don't say anything against this engine's inches, but I copper his judgment. He didn't know his own size. Because if he did, why didn't he fetch a rock that was long enough while he was at it? Kahu Manu's Rock On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the mountain merely for fun. He had his own notions about fun, and they were marked by acquaint originality as well, and propped it up as we find it now, and as others may find it at a century hence, for it would take a score of horses to budget from its position. They say that fifty or sixty years ago the proud queen Kahu Manu used to fly to this rock for safety whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. But these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest efforts, for Kahu Manu was six feet high, she was bulky, she was built like an ox, and she could no more have squeezed under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by her savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that rock wood. Science Among Barbarians We walked a mile over a raised, macadamized road of uniform width, a road paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable degree of engineering skill. Some say that wise old Pagan Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out of the traditions. In either case, however, as the handiwork of an untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest. The stones are worn and smooth and pushed apart in places, so that the road has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of Rome which one sees in pictures. A Petrified Niagara The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the base of the foothills, a congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten volcanic eruptions sent its broad river of fire down the mountainside here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff some fifty feet high to the ground below. The flaming torrent cooled in the winds from the sea and remains there to-day all seemed and frost and tippled, a petrified Niagara. It is very picturesque, and with all so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. A smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty feet high which has the resemblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together. Nature's Mining Achievements We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed about fifty feet, but with no notable result, save that we made a discovery that may be of high interest to men of science. We discovered that the darkness in there was singularly like the darkness observable in other particularly dark places, exactly like it, I thought. I am borne out in this opinion by my comrade who said he did not believe there was any difference but if there was, he judged it was in favour of this darkness here. Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's Mining Abilities. Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched. Their height is not uniform, however. We passed through one, a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the waves of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are occasionally places in it where one must stoop to pass under. The roof is lava, of course, and is thickly studied with little lava-pointed icicles an inch long which hardened as they dripped. They project as closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of charge. Brown tried to hurry me away from this vicinity by saying that if the expected land breeze sprang up while we were absent, the boomerang would be obliged to put to sea without waiting for us. But I did not care. I knew she would land our saddles and shirt-collars at cow, and we could sail in the superior schooner Emmeline. Emmeline. Captain Crane. Which would be entirely to my liking. Wherefore, we proceeded to ransack the country for further notable curiosities. End of Section 63. This is Section 64 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 64, The Sacramento Daily Union, September 1866, Part 3. The Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1866. Honolulu, September 10, 1866. The High Chief of Sugardum. I have visited Haleakala, Kilauea, Wailuku Valley, the Petrified Cataracts, the pathway of the Great Hog-God, in a word, I have visited all the principal wonders of the island, and now I come to speak of one which, in its importance to America, surpasses them all, a land which produces six, eight, ten, twelve, yea, even thirteen thousand pounds of sugar to the acre on unmanured soil. There are precious few acres of unmanured ground in Louisiana, none at all, perhaps, which will yield two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar. There is not an unmanured acre under cultivation in the Sandwich Islands which yields less. This country is the king of the sugar world, as far as astonishing productiveness is concerned. Here to fore, the Mauritius has held this high place. Commodore Perry in his report on the Mauritius says, Before the introduction of Guano into Mauritius the product of sugar on that island was from two thousand to two thousand five hundred pounds to the acre. But the increase since the application of this fertilizer has been so extraordinary as to be scarcely credible. In ordinary seasons the product has been from six thousand to seven thousand pounds, and under peculiarly favourable circumstances it has even reached eight thousand pounds to the acre. It was scarcely credible. Guano has not been used in the Sandwich Islands at all, yet the sugar crop of Maui averages over six thousand pounds straight through all the time for every acre cultivated. Last year the average was seven thousand pounds per acre on the Ulupalakua plantation. This year the plant crop on the Wailuku plantation averages eight thousand. Portions of Waikapu, Wailuku, Waihi, Ulupalakua, and many other plantations have yielded over eleven thousand pounds to the acre, and twenty acres on the fourth named average the enormous yield of thirteen thousand pounds per acre one season. These things are scarcely credible, but they are true nevertheless. By late Patent Office reports it appears that the average sugar yield per acre throughout the world ranges from five hundred to one thousand pounds. The average in the Sandwich Islands, lumping good, bad, and indifferent, is five thousand pounds per acre. Progress of the Islands Production The cultivation of sugar in the islands dates back fourteen years. Its cultivation as an actual business dates back only four years. This year the aggregate yield is twenty-seven million pounds. The cultivation of sugar in Louisiana dates back one hundred and fifteen years. Its cultivation as an actual business dates back just one hundred years, when it had been a business forty years. There were a hundred plantations in Louisiana. Ten years later there were one hundred and fifty on the Mississippi, and the aggregate yield was only ten million pounds. A few years later it reached twenty-five million. Compare that with the twenty-seven million yield of twenty-nine small plantations in the Sandwich Islands. The sugar history of the islands may be compressed into a very small table. Aggregate yield of pounds for 1852, 730,000, 1856, 554,805, 1857, 700,556, 1858, 1,204,061, 1859, 1,826,620, 1860, 1,400,000, 1,000,000, 1,000,000, 1,000,000, 1,000,000, 1,000,000, 1,0404,271, 1861, 2,567,498, 1862, 3,056,003, 1863, 5,292,121, 1864,104,144,441, 1865, 15,318,097, 1862. 3,05,603. 1863. 5,292,121. 1864. 10,414,441. 1865. 15,318,097. 1866. 27,050,000. The exports of molasses during the entire year of 1865 amounted to half a million gallons, only a little more than was exported during the first six months of the present year. The following table gives the yield in pounds of the twenty-nine principal plantations for the present year. Island of Hawaii. Hartle. 150,000. Kohala. 2,000,000. Onamea. 1,200,000. Metcalfes. 1,200,000. Kauiki. 1,600,000. Hunsing. 600,000. Paokau. 600,000. Island of Maui. Maki. 1,800,000. Haua. 600,000. Waikapu. 1,000,000. Wailuku. 2,400,000. Bailean Sun. 400,000. Lures. 2,000,000. Holbroon. 1,200,000. Haiku. 800,000. East Maui. 800,000. Sea and Turton. 1,000,000. Lahaina. Sugar Company. 1,200,000. Ball and Adams. 700,000. Island of Kauai. Princeville. 2,000,000. Lihue. 700,000. Koloa. 700,000. Waipoa. 300,000. Island of Oahu. Kauai. 200,000. Wilder. 600,000. Kahalia. 200,000. Story and Company. 200,000. Halawa. 400,000. Wailua. 300,000. Total. 27,050,000. When all the cane lands in the islands are under full cultivation, they will produce over 250 million pounds of sugar annually. Comparative. In Louisiana, sugar planters paid from $20 to $200 an acre for land, $500 to $1,000 apiece for negroes, $50,000 to $100,000 for stock, mills, etc., raised $1,000 to $1,500 pounds of sugar to the acre, sold it for five and six cents, and got rich. In the islands, wild sugar land is worth from $1 to $20 an acre. Mills and stock cost about the same as in Louisiana. The higher of each laborer is $100 a year, just about what it used to cost to board and clothes and doctor a negro. But there is no original outlay of $500 to $1,000 for the purchase of the laborer, or $50 to $100 annual interest to be paid on the sum so laid out. The price of sugar is double what it was in Louisiana, and the actual net profit to the planter, not withstanding high freight and high duties, is also double. In Louisiana it cost not less than $180,000 to purchase and stock with negroes, mills, animals, etc., a plantation of 300 acres, and its crop would yield $30,000, allowing each acre to produce 2,000 pounds to the acre, which it wouldn't do. Deduct $60,000 outlay for the negroes and half the cost of the land, $10,000, and the same plantation in the islands would cost $110,000 and be ready for business. Its crop would yield 6,000 pounds to the acre and sell for $180,000 in San Francisco. If the planters of Louisiana have done well, surely those of the islands ought. When the production of a staple steadily increases and capital sticks to it and shows confidence in it, it is fair to presume that investments in it are considered secure and profitable. In 1839, 40, and 41, the yield in Louisiana ranged along in the neighborhood of 100 million pounds annually, price four, five, and six cents a pound. In 1852, 53, 54, her yearly yield fluctuated between 350 million and 500 million pounds. Market price three-and-a-half to five cents. Thus 1,000 to 1,500 pounds to the acre at three-and-a-half to six cents was so encouraging as to more than quadruple Louisiana's sugar production in less than thirty years. Six or eight thousand pounds to the acre at ten to fifteen cents a pound has encouraged the extravagant advance in the islands from three million pounds to twenty-seven million annual yield in four years. Against this argument in favor of the security and productiveness of capital invested there, no logic can prevail. More figures. They have a bad system in the Sandwich Islands whereby the planter has to ship twice and pay brokers' commissions as often. This must change some day. The sugar pays a duty of three cents a pound when it enters San Francisco, and of course this comes out of the planter's pocket also. This year the lures, or Waihi, Wailuku, Ulupalakua, Princeville, and Kohala plantations will each pay the United States about sixty thousand dollars in coin for duties alone, and for Waikapu, Onomea, Metcalfs, and several other plantations whose names I could mention, will each pay about half as much. The following bill of expenses will show the processes by which the planter's profits are diminished. The estimate was made in the island of Maui in June when sugar had been falling and had got down to two hundred and ten dollars to two hundred and twenty dollars a ton in San Francisco. On a ton of sugar, barreling sixteen dollars, drage from mill one dollar, shipping to Honolulu three dollars, brokerage in Honolulu two dollars fifty cents, freight to San Francisco six dollars, United States duty sixty dollars, drage in San Francisco one dollar, brokerage in San Francisco eleven dollars, total one hundred dollars and fifty cents, gross sale two hundred and ten dollars, remainder one hundred and nine dollars and fifty cents, and out of that one hundred and nine dollars and fifty cents must come about sixty percent for plantation expenses and interest on the original outlay for land, mill, stock, etc. The following estimate was made when sugar was worth a cent a pound more. It shows the business done the present year with three hundred acres on a plantation which cost considerably under ninety thousand dollars for its stock, mill, lands, and everything complete. The land was purchased unimproved at an insignificant price. The present year's crop was one thousand tons of sugar, gross yield two hundred and forty thousand dollars, plantation expenses sixty thousand dollars, freight, duties, etc., etc., one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, interest on original outlay ten thousand dollars, total disbursement one hundred and ninety thousand dollars, net profit fifty thousand dollars. There is more than one plantation in the islands which is worth with all its appurtenances two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and will produce a two hundred and sixty thousand dollar crop next year, perhaps this, and yield a profit of seventy thousand after deducting all expenses of cultivating, shipping, and disposal in San Francisco, and interest. One of the best plantations in the islands, though not one of the largest by any means, cost, with its appurtenances, one hundred thousand dollars. All bills were promptly paid and no debts allowed to accrue and breed interest. The consequence was that three years after the first plow disturbed its virgin soil it had paid for itself and added a dividend of twenty thousand dollars. Advantages In Louisiana they take off one plant and two crops, usually before replanting, and so they do in the islands, as a general thing, though some think the ratoons would run several years longer without disadvantage. The sugar crop in Louisiana is never sure. In the islands, when favorably situated for irrigation, it never fails. In the former it must be immediately cut upon the first suspicion of a frost whether it is mature or not. In the latter there is no frost, and the planter may cut it when it suits his convenience. It will stand several months after ripening without deteriorating. Not much of the cane of the species that tassel is cultivated, but even tassel cane can remain in the field four months after maturing without deteriorating. In Louisiana the cane must always be cut before the frost comes, but in the islands it may be cut whenever it is ripe, any day in the year. Consequently the mills can take their time and grind comfortably along in all seasons whereby the putting on of large extra forces and the employment of mills of immense capacity on small plantations to rush off a threatened crop and grind it is avoided. Louisiana has only five or six weeks to get off her crop in, and so the juice is generally green and the sugar necessarily inferior to that of the islands. The fuel chiefly used to make steam is the dry crushed cane which has passed through the mill. It is called trash. It is mixed with hard wood, and the two combined make a very hot fire. On the low ground of West Maui plant cane matures in from eighteen to twenty months, and ratoons ripen in from fifteen to eighteen months. At Ulu Palakua, whose lowest canelands are two thousand feet, and its highest three thousand five hundred feet above sea level, plant cane requires all the way from twenty-two months to three years to ripen according to elevation. One may see there plant cane that is just sprouting, cane that is half grown, cane that is full grown, and first, second, and third ratoons, all on the same plantation. At all seasons of the year there is cane ready for the mill, and labor in no department of sugar cultivation and manufacture need ever stop. A thousand acres are in cane, and from two hundred to three hundred of it are taken off yearly, yielding from eight hundred to one thousand tons of sugar. This plantation being high up in the neighborhood of the clouds depends upon the frequent rains for irrigation, but forty thousand barrels of water are kept in cisterns for mill purposes, use of stock, et cetera, to be ready for emergencies. The West Maui plantations are all liberally irrigated from unfailing mountain streams. In the hot neighborhood of Lahaina cane matures in nine or ten months, and a year is the average for the islands of Hawaii, Oahu, and Kaohai. Specimen of a Hawaiian mill. The sugar works of the lures plantation, formerly known as the Waahi plantation, are considered the model in the islands in the matter of cost, extent, completeness, and efficiency. They make as fine an appearance as any between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and are doubtless as perfect in their appliances. The main building is some two hundred feet long and about forty wide, perhaps more, and proportionally high. Its walls are of stone masonry and very thick. It has a stately chimney that might answer for a shot tower. Being painted snow-white, the mill building and the tall chimney stand out in strong contrast with the surrounding bright green cane fields. A long elevated flume in front and a laboring overshot wheel of large diameter, at one side abroad, peopled with coolies spreading trash to dry. Half a dozen kanakas feeding cane to the whirling cylinders of the mill, and a noisy procession of their countrymen driving cartloads of the material to their vicinity and dumping it. These things give the place a business-like aspect which is novel in the slumbering sandwich islands. The neighboring offices of the proprietor, the dwelling of the superintendent, the store, black Smith's shop, quarters for white employees, native huts, and a row of frame quarters for Chinese coolies, make Waahi, a village of very respectable pretensions. The employees of the mill and plantation with their families number three hundred and fifty persons perhaps. Within the commodious mill building I have described are four long rows of iron vats, coolers, about twenty-five in a row, occupying almost the whole of the great floor, and with railways between the rows which are traversed by cars, which convey the cooked sugar in a liquid state to the vats to be cooled. Each vat is about six feet long, three-and-a-half or four feet wide, and about two feet deep, and is able to contain an amount of sweetness equivalent to thirteen young women. In unpoetical figures one thousand four hundred pounds. In the center is a small machine called a grinder, an exceedingly useful contrivance, and the only one I have seen in the islands. When the sugar in the coolers becomes grained and hardened it has many hard lumps in it which it is difficult to reduce in the centrifugals, and this service the grinder performs. It is simply two swiftly revolving iron cylinders placed close together, and after the grained sugar has passed between them, lumps before are lumps no longer. Close to the grinder are six centrifugals, small metallic tubs whose sides are pierced with a few thousand pinholes to the square inch. The nasty looking grained sugar, it is about half black molasses, and looks like an inferior quality of mud, is dumped in to the amount of a bushel. The tub is set to spinning around at the rate of ten or twelve hundred revolutions a minute. The mud begins to retreat from the center and cling to the sides, and in about three minutes the bottom is as clean as a dinner plate. The sides are packed with a coating two or three inches thick of beautiful light straw-colored sugar ready for the table, and all the disagreeable molasses has been expressed through the innumerable pinholes by the frightful velocity of the machine. At the upper end of the apartment are several five hundred gallon steam clarifiers which receive the raw juice from the mill, which is a large machine on the same principle as the grinder between whose cylinders the canes are squeezed dry of their juice, and cleanse it of its impurities. Then it passes through pipes to the train, a row of great iron kettles where it is well-boiled and kept in constant motion. The white-sull pan receives the cane juice next and completes the evaporation of the water from it. A revolving wheel paddles it into ceaseless motion here. This pan is heated by steam. The persecuted juice goes hence to the vacuum pan, a very costly contrivance which is little used in the islands. It is a huge iron globe capable of containing several hundred gallons. The virtues claimed for it are that it will boil the juice at half the temperature required by the ordinary open concentrator, and that consequently the sugar will cool and grain quicker, that the sugar can even be grained in the pan if necessary, and transferred at once to the centrifugals, instead of lingering in the coolers for four to seven days, as is the case in other mills. And lastly that it will make almost first quality sugar out of first molasses. The vacuum pan boils at a temperature of 140 to 160 degrees, the common open concentrator at 230 to 260. The juice is soon cooked and ready for the coolers, where it remains the best part of a day. Then it passes through the grinder and from thence through the centrifugals. The perfected sugar is discharged through chutes into bins in the basement, and the expressed molasses sent back to be wrought into sugar or barreled for market. A cooper shop on the premises prepares the kegs to receive the sugar, and an ingenious affair alongside the bins packs the article in them. It is a large auger set in a framework and worked by a screw. Its blades resemble those of a propeller, and after being lowered into the empty barrel it works upward as the sugar is shoveled in, packing it smoothly as it comes. Three canakas are required to tend it, and it does the work of six or seven. It packs four hundred kegs in a day. A man's full day's work, by the customary pounding process with a maul, is sixty. This is the only machine for packing I have heard of in the islands. I have seen the cane cut in the fields, hauled to the works, squeezed through the mill, transferred to the clarifiers, thence to the train, thence to the wightsail-pan, thence to the vacuum-pan, thence to the coolers, thence to the grinder, thence to the centrifugals, thence as sugar to the bins below, thence to the packer, thence to the artist who branded the quality and weight and the plantation's name upon the kegs, and thence to the schooner riding at anchor a mile and a half away. I have frequently seen this whole process gone through within two days, and yet I do not consider myself competent to make sugar. Steam is used for half the machinery and water-power for the other half. The proprietor has just completed, at a cost of less than seven thousand dollars, a broad and deep ditch, four miles long, which carries an abundant stream of clear water along the base of the rear hills and full length of his plantation. It can be used to irrigate not only the five hundred and thirty acres now in cane, but will add two hundred and ten more that were never susceptible of cultivation before, which addition is equivalent to adding a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to the gross yield of the concern. That much, at any rate. The land produces the ordinary average three tons to the acre. I have described the Lure's Mill as well as I could, and the same description will answer in the main for the Wailuku, Waikapu, Ulupalakua, and all the other mills I have visited. No two mills are just alike, and yet no two are sufficiently unlike to render it worthwhile for a man to describe both. The plantations I have named are all situated on the island of Maui. Perhaps a few acres of plant cane on either of them have fallen short of three tons this year, or any year, and choice pieces of ground on the Ulupalakua, Waikapu, and Wailuku have yielded double that amount per acre. This plant cane averages about equally clear through, say, three to three and a half tons per acre, except in the case of the Wailuku, which reached an average of four tons this year. One twenty acre lot on this plantation produced ten thousand pounds of sugar to the acre, and one eleven acre lot eleven thousand pounds per acre. I take the figures from the official account books of the superintendent. The mill was turning out two hundred thousand pounds of excellent sugar a month when I was there. Molasses. I have said nothing about molasses. They work some of it over and reduce it to sugar, and each planter ships a few thousand dollars' worth of it, and, as at Ulupalakua, feeds the third quality to his hogs, if he has any. Formerly inferior molasses was always thrown away, but here, lately, an enlightened spirit of progress has moved the government to allow the erection of three distilleries, I am told, and hereafter it will be made into whisky. That remark will be shuttered at in some quarters, but I don't care. Ever since I have been a missionary to these islands I have been snubbed and kept down by the other missionaries, and so I will just bring our calling into disrepute occasionally by that sort of dreadful remarks. It makes me feel better. Monopoly. A San Francisco refinery company once contracted for all the sugar-crop of the islands for a year to be taken directly from the coolers by its agent and paid for at the rate of about seven or seven-and-a-half cents a pound, I think it was. This saved the planters a great deal of trouble and some expense, but they lost confidence and broke up the arrangement. It would have been a profitable thing for all parties if it could have been continued, and I think the planters would like to give some responsible man the soul control of the sugar market of the Pacific Coast on similar terms. Labour. The principle Labour used on the plantations is that of Kanaka men and women, six dollars to eight dollars a month, and find them, or eight to ten dollars and let them find themselves. The contract with the labourer is in writing, and the law rigidly compels compliance with it. If the man shirks the day's work and absents himself, he has to work two days for it when his time is out. If he gets unmanageable and disobedient he is condemned to work on the reef for a season at twenty-five cents a day. If he is in debt to the planter for such purchases as clothing and provisions, however, when his time expires, the obligation is cancelled, the planter has no recourse at law. The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labour had to be procured by some means or other, and so the government sends to China for coolies and farms them out to the planters at five dollars a month each for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb couly samples, and then loaded his ships with the scurvious lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases, and nearly all were intractable, full of fight, and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down, and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched. If the Hawaiian agent had been possessed of a reasonable amount of business tact, he could have got experienced rice and sugar cultivators, peaceable, obedient men and women, for the same salaries that must be paid to these villains, and done them a real service by giving them good homes and kind treatment in place of the wretchedness and brutality they experience in their native land. Some of the women are being educated as house servants, and I observe that they do not put on heirs, and sass their masters and mistresses, and give daily notice to quit, and try to boss the whole concern, as the tribe do in California. Coulies for California You will have couly labor in California some day. It is already forcing its superior claims upon the attention of your great mining, manufacturing, and public improvement corporations. You will not always go on paying eighty dollars and a hundred dollars a month for labor which you can hire for five dollars. The sooner California adopts couly labor, the better it will be for her. It cheapens no labor of men's hands, save the hardest and most exhausting drudgery. Drudgery, which neither intelligence nor education are required to fit a man for, drudgery which all white men abhor, and are glad to escape from. You may take note of the fact that to adopt couly labor could work small hardship to the men who now do the drudgery, for every shipload of coulies received there and put to work would so create labor, would permit men to open so many mines they cannot afford to work now, and begin so many improvements they dare not think of at present, that all the best class of the working population who might be emancipated from the pick and shovel by that shipload would find easier and more profitable employment in superintending and overseeing the coulies. It would be more profitable, as you will readily admit, to the great mining companies of California and Nevada, to pay three hundred China men an aggregate of one thousand five hundred dollars a month, or five times the amount if you think it more just, than to pay three hundred white men thirty thousand dollars a month. Especially when the white men would desert in a body every time a new mining region was discovered, but the China men would have to stay until their contracts were worked out. People are always hatching fine schemes for inducing Eastern capital to the Pacific coast. Yonder in China are the capitalists you want, and under your own soil is a bank that will not dishonor their checks. The mine purchased for a song by Eastern capital would pour its stream of wealth past your door and empty it in New York. You would be little the richer for that. There are hundreds of men in California who are sitting on their quartz lads, watching them year after year, and hoping for the day when they will pay, and growing gray all the time, hoping for a cheapening of labor that will enable them to work the mine or warrant another man in buying it, who would soon be capitalists if couly labor were adopted. The Mission Woolen Mill Company take California Wool and weave from it fabrics of all descriptions, which they challenge all America to surpass, and sell at prices which defy all foreign competition. The secret is in their cheap Chinese labor. With white labor substituted the mills would have to stop. The Pacific Railroad Company employ a few thousand China men at about thirty dollars a month and have white men to oversee them. They pronounce it the cheapest, the best, and the most quiet, peaceable, and faithful labor they have tried. Some of the heaviest mining corporations in the state have it in contemplation to employ Chinese labor, give this labor to California for a few years, and she would have fifty mines opened where she has one now. A dozen factories in operation where there is one now, a thousand tons of farm produce raised where there are a hundred now, leagues of railroad where she has miles to-day, and a population commensurate with her high and advancing prosperity. With the Pacific Railroad creeping slowly but surely towards her over mountain and desert, and preparing to link her with the east, and with the China mail steamer is about to throw open to her the vast trade of our opulent coastline stretching from the Amur River to the Equator, what state in the Union has so splendid a future before her as California? Not one, perhaps. She should awake and be ready to join her home prosperity to these tides of commerce that are so soon to sweep toward her from the east and the west. To America it has been vouchsafe to materialize the vision and realize the dream of centuries of the enthusiasts of the old world. We have found the true northwest passage. We have found the true and only direct route to the bursting coffers of Ormus and of Inde. To the enchanted land whose mere drippings in the ages that are gone enriched an aggrandized ancient Venice first, then Portugal, Holland, and in our time England, and each in succession they longed and sought for the fountain-head of this vast oriental wealth and sought in vain. The path was hidden to them, but we have founded over the waves of the Pacific and American Enterprise will penetrate to the heart and center of its hoarded treasures, its imperial affluence. The gateway of this path is the Golden Gate of San Francisco. Its depot, its distributing house, is California. Her customers are the nations of the earth. Her transportation wagons will be the freight cars of the Pacific Railroad, and they will take up these Indian treasures at San Francisco and flash them across the continent and the vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company will deliver them in Europe fifteen days sooner than Europe could convey them thither by any route of her own she could devise. California has got the world where it must pay tribute to her. She is about to be appointed to preside over almost the exclusive trade of 450 million people, the almost exclusive trade of the most opulent land on earth. It is the land where the fabled Aladdin's lamp lies buried, and she is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the genie and command him to crown her with power and greatness and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth. I may have wandered away from my original subject a little, but it is no matter. I keep thinking about the new subject, and I must have wandered into it eventually, anyhow. Mark Twain. End of Section 64 This is Section 65 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 65, The Sacramento Daily Union, October 25th, 1866. Kill-a-thou, June 1866. A notable discovery. During the caves and tunnels we returned to the road and started in a general direction towards Honou-Nau, but were presently attracted by a number of holes in a bluff not more than three or four hundred yards from the place we had just left. We concluded to go up and examine them. Our native boatman, who had faithfully followed us thus far, and who must have been bearing the chief part of the heat and burden of the day from the amount of perspiring he was doing, looked a little discouraged, I thought, and therefore we signified to him, in elaborate pantomime, that he might sit down and wait till we came back. We scrambled through a tangle of weeds which concealed great beds of black and wrinkled lava, and finally reached the low bluff, but the holes were just high enough to be out of reach. I bent a little below the lower one and ordered Brown to mount my shoulders and enter it. He said he could hold me easier than I could hold him, and I said I was afraid to go in that dark cavern alone. He used some seditious language of small consequence and then climbed up and crawled in. I suppose the fellow felt a little nervous, for he paused up there on his hands and knees and peered into the darkness for some minutes with nothing of him visible in the face of the precipice, but his broad boot-soles and a portion of his person which a casual acquaintance might not have recognized at a cursory glance. Then he and his boot-soles slowly disappeared. I waited a minute in a state of lively curiosity, another minute with flagging curiosity, as regarded the cave, but with a new born attention to the pelting sun, another long minute with no curiosity at all. I leaned drowsily against the wall. And about this time the investigator backed suddenly out of the hole and crushed me to the earth. We rolled down the slight declivity and brought up in a sitting posture face to face. I looked astonished, maybe, but he looked terrified. It's one of them infernal old ancient graveyards, he said. No? This is why the superstitious Kanaka stayed behind, then? Yes, likely. I suppose you didn't know that boneyard was there, else you'd have gone in yourself instead of me. Certainly you would. Oh, of course! Yes, you are right. But how is it in there, Brown? Compose yourself, lad. What did you find? Oh, it's easy enough to talk, but I'm not going to prospect any more of them-holes, not if I know myself I ain't. And I think I do. It ain't right, anyway, to be stirring up a dead man that's done his work and earned his rest and besides it ain't comfortable. But what did you see, Brown? What did you see? I didn't see anything at first. I only felt. It was dark as the inside of a whale in there, and I crawled about fifteen feet and then fetched up against something that was wood with my nose and skin the end of it a little where you notice it's bloody. And I felt of it with my hand and judged it to be a canoe, and I reached in and took out something and backed out till it was light enough, and then I found it was a withered hand of one of them rusty old kings, and so I laid it down and come out. Yes, you did come out, and you come out in something of a hurry, too. Give me a light. I climbed in and put the relic back into the canoe with its fellows, and I trust the spirit of the deceased, if it was hovering near, was satisfied with this mute apology for our unintentional sacrilege. And thus another item of patiently acquired knowledge grew shaky. We had learned early that the bones of great chiefs were hidden, like those of Kamehameha the great. The information was accepted until we learned that it was etiquette to convey them to the volcano and cast them into the lakes of fire. That was relied on till we discovered that the legitimate receptacle for them was the holes in the precipice of Kerelechakua. But now found that the walls of the city of refuge contain orifices in which the bones of the great chiefs are deposited, and lo, here were more in this distant bluff, and bones of great chiefs, too. All bones of great chiefs. The fact is, there is a lie out somewhere. Free and easy fashions of native women. Tired and overheated, we plotted back to the ruined temple. We were blistered on face and hands. Our clothes were saturated with perspiration, and we were burning with thirst. Brown ran the last hundred yards, and without waiting to take off anything but his coat and boots, jumped into the sea, bringing up in the midst of a party of native girls who were bathing. They scampered out, with a modesty which was not altogether genuine, I suspect, and ran, seizing their clothes as they went. He said they were very handsomely formed girls. I did not notice, particularly. These creatures are bathing about half their time, I think. If a man were to see a nude woman bathing at noonday in the States, he would be apt to think she was very little better than she ought to be, and proceed to favour her with an impudent stare. But the case is somewhat different here. The thing is so common that the white residents pass carelessly by, and pay no more attention to it, than if the rollicking wenches were so many cattle. Within the confines of even so populous a place as Honolulu, and in the very centre of the sultry city of Lahaina, the women bathe in the brooks at all hours of the day. They are only particular about getting undressed safely, and in this science they all follow the same fashion. They stoop down, snatch the single garment over the head, and spring in. They will do this with great confidence within thirty steps of a man. Finnacle high-flyers wear bathing-dresses, but of course that is an effectation of modesty born of the high civilization to which the natives have attained, and is confined to a limited number. Many of the native women are pritally formed, but they have a noticeable peculiarity as to shape. They are almost as narrow through the hips as men are. Exit Bumarang. As we expected there was no schooner kangaroo at Keala Kukua when we got back there, but the emeline—emeline—was riding quietly at anchor in the same spot, so lately occupied by our vessel, and that suited us much better. We waited until the land breeze served and then put to sea. The land breeze begins to blow soon after the sun sets and the earth has commenced cooling. The sea breeze rushes inland in the morning as soon as the sun has begun to heat the earth again. Tranquil scenery. All day we sailed along within three to six miles of the shore. The view in that direction was very fine. We were running parallel with a long mountain that apparently had neither beginning nor end. It rose with a regular swell from the sea till its forest diminished to velvety shrubbery and were lost in the clouds. If there were any peaks we could not see them. The white mists hung their fringe banners down and hid everything above a certain well-defined altitude. The mountain side, with its sharply marked patches of trees, the smooth green spaces and avenues between them, a little white habitation nestling here and there, a tapering church-spire or two thrust upward through the dense foliage, and a bright and cheerful sunlight overall, slanted up a breast of us like a vast picture framed in between ocean and clouds. It was marked and lined and tinted like a map. So distinctly visible was every door and window in one of the white dwellings that it was hard to believe it was two or three miles from our ship and two thousand feet above the level of the sea. Yet it was, and it was several thousand feet below the top of the mountain also. Inherent unselfishness of the natives. The night closed down dark and stormy. The sea ran tolerably high, and the little vessel tossed about like a cork. About nine or ten o'clock we saw a torch glimmering on the distant shore, and presently we saw another coming toward us from the same spot. Every moment or so we could see it flash from the top of a wave and then sink out of sight again. From the speed it made I knew it must be one of those fleet-native canoes. I watched it with some anxiety, because I wondered what desperate extremity could drive a man out on such a night and on such a sea to play with his life, for I did not believe a canoe could live long in such rough water. I was on the folk-soul. Pretty soon I began to think maybe the fellow stood some chance. Shortly I almost believed he would make the trip, though his light was shooting up and down dangerously. In another minute he darted across our bow, and I caught the glare from his torch in my face. I sprang aft then to get out of him his dire and dreadful news. It was a swindle. It was one of those simple natives risking his life to bring the captain a present of half a dozen chickens. He has got an axe to grind. I spoke in that unchartable spirit of the civilized world which suspects all men's motives, which cannot conceive of an unselfish thought wrought into an unselfish deed by any man whatsoever, be he pagan or Christian. Not at all, said the captain. He expects nothing in return. Wouldn't take a cent if I offered it. Wouldn't thank me for it, anyway. It's the same instinct that made them load Captain Cook's ships with task provisions. They think it is all right. They don't want any return. They will bring us plenty of such presents before we get to cow. I saw that the Kanaka was starting over the side again. I said, Call him back and give him a drink anyhow. He is wet and dry also maybe. Pison him with that Jamaica rum down below! said Brown. It can't be done. Five hundred dollars fine to give or sell liquor to a native. The captain walked forward, then, to give some orders, and Brown took the Kanaka downstairs and pisoned him. He was delighted with a species of rum which Brown had tried by mistake for Claret during the day, and had afterwards made his will, under the conviction that he could not survive it. They are a strange race, anyhow, these natives. They are amazingly unselfish and hospitable. To the wayfarer who visits them they freely offer their houses, food, beds, and often their wives and daughters. If a Kanaka who has starved two days gets hold of a dollar he will spend it for poi, and then bring in his friends to help him devour it. When a Kanaka lights his pipe he only takes one or two whiffs and then passes it around from one neighbor to another until it is exhausted. The example of white selfishness does not affect their native unselfishness any more than the example of white virtue does their native licentiousness. Both traits are born in them, are in their blood and bones and cannot be educated out. In distress. By midnight we had got to within four miles of the place we were to stop at, Kau, but to reach it we must weather a point which was always hard to get around on account of contrary winds. The ship was put about and we were soon standing far out to sea. I went to bed. The vessel was pitching so fearfully an hour afterward that it woke me up. Directly the captain came down, looking greatly distressed, and said, Slip on your clothes quick and go up and see to your friend. It has been storming like everything for fifteen or twenty minutes, and I thought at first he was only seasick and could not throw up, but now he appears to be out of his head. He lies there on the deck and moans and says, Poetry! Poetry! Oh, me! It is all he says. What the devil should he say that for? Hurry! Before the speech was half over I was plunging about the cabin with the rolling of the ship and struggling frantically to get into my clothes. But the last sentence or two banished my fears and soothed me. I understood the case. I was soon on deck in the midst of the darkness and the whistling winds, and with assistance groped my way to the sufferer. I told him I had nothing but some verses built out of alternate lines from the burial of Sir John Moore and the destruction of the Sennacherib, and proceeded to recite them. The Burial of Sir John Moore. And other parties, subsequently to the destruction of the Sennacherib. The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, the turf with our bayonets turning, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold and our lanterns dimly burning. And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, when the clock told the hour for retiring. The lances uplifted, the trumpet unblown, though the foe were sullenly firing. And the might of the Gentile, unsmoked by the sword, as his course to the ramparts we hurried, hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord, or the grave when our hero we buried. For the angel of death spread his wings on the blast and smoothed down his lonely pillow, and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed, and we far away on the billow. And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, as we bitterly thought on the morrow, and their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still, but we spake not a word of sorrow. And there lay the steed, with his nostril all wide, in the grave where a Briton hath laid him, and the widows of Asher are loud in their wail, and o'er his cold ashes up braid him. And there lay the rider, distorted in pale, from the field of his fame fresh and gory, with the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail. So we left him alone in his glory. It is enough! God bless you!" said Brown, and threw up everything he had eaten for three days. Kau and Waiohino. All day the next day we fought that treacherous point, always in sight of it, but never able to get around it. At night we tacked out forty or fifty miles, and the following day at noon we made it, and came in and anchored. We went ashore in the first boat, and landed in the midst of a black, rough, lava solitude, and got horses, and started to Waiohino six miles distant. The road was good, and our surroundings fast improved. We were soon among green groves and flowers, and occasional plains of grass. There are a dozen houses at Waiohino, and they have got sound roofs, which is well, because the place is tolerably high upon the mountainside, and it rains there pretty much all the time. The name means sparkling water, and it refers to a beautiful mountain stream there, but they ought to divide up and let it refer to the rain also. A sugar plantation has been started at Waiohino, and a hundred and fifty acres planted a year ago, but the altitude ranges from one thousand eight hundred to two thousand five hundred feet above sea level, and it is thought it will take another year for the cane to mature. We had an abundance of mangoes, papayas, and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp like a papaw, and is eaten with a spoon. The papai looks like a small squash, and tastes like a papaw. In this rainy spot, trees and flowers flourish luxuriously, and three of those trees, two mangoes and an orange, will live in my memory as the greenest, freshest, and most beautiful I ever saw, and with all the stateliest and most graceful. One of those mangoes stood in the middle of a large grassy yard, lord of the domain, an incorruptible sentinel against the sunshine. When one passed within the compass of its broad arms and its impenetrable foliage, he was safe from the pitiless glare of the sun. The protecting shade fell everywhere like a somber darkness. In some places on the islands, where the mango refused to bear fruit, a remedy suggested by the scientific American has been tried with success. It consists in boring a hole in the trunk of the tree, filling the same with gunpowder and plugging it up. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to try it on other fruit trees. The cistern tree, speaking of trees, reminds me that a species of large bodied tree grows along the road below Waiohinu, whose crotch is said to contain tanks of fresh water at all times. The natives suck it out through a hollow weed, which always grows near. As no other water exists in that wild neighborhood within a space of some miles in circumference, it is considered to be a special invention of providence for the behoof of the natives. I would rather accept the story than the deduction, because the latter is so manifestly but hastily conceived and erroneous. If the happiness of the natives had been the object, the tanks would have been filled with whisky. Kau independence, judicial sagacity. The natives of the district of Kau have always dwelt apart from their fellow islanders, cut off from them by a desolate stretch of lava on one side and a mountain on the other, and they have ever shown a spirit and an independence not elsewhere to be found in Hawaii Nei. They are not thoroughly tamed yet, nor civilized or Christianized. Kau was the last district on the island that submitted to Kamehameha I. Two heaps of stones near the roadside mark where they killed two of the early kings of Hawaii. On both occasions these monarchs were trying to put down rebellion. They used to make their local chiefs very uncomfortable sometimes, and ten years ago, in playful mood, they made two tax collectors flee for their lives. Most natives lie some, but these lie a good deal. They still believe in the ancient superstitions of the race and believe in the great shark god and pray each other to death. When sworn by the great shark god they are afraid to speak anything but the truth. But when sworn on the Bible in court they proceed to soar into flights of fancy lying that make the inventions of munch-housing seem poor and trifling in comparison. They worship idols in secret and swindle the wafering stranger. Some of the native judges and justices of the peace of the Kau district have been rare specimens of judicial sagacity. One of them considered that all the fines for adultery—thirty dollars for each offense—properly belonged to himself. He also considered himself a part of the government, and that if he committed that crime himself it was the same as if the government committed it, and, of course, it was the duty of the government to pay the fine. Consequently, whenever he had collected a good deal of money from other court revenues, he used to set to work and keep on convicting himself of adultery until he had absorbed all the money on hand in paying the fines. The adultery law has been so amended that each party to the offense is now fined thirty dollars, and I would remark, in passing, that if the crime were invariably detected and the fines collected the revenues of the Hawaiian government would probably exceed those of the United States. I trust the observation will not be considered in the light of an insinuation, however. An old native judge at Hilo once acquitted all the parties to a suit and then discovering, as he supposed, that he had no further hold on them and thus was out of pocket, he condemned the witnesses to pay the costs. A cow-judge, whose two years' commission had expired, redated it himself and went on doing business as complacently as ever. He said it didn't make any difference. He could write as good a hand as the king could. The procession moveth again. Brown bought a horse from a native at Waiohenu for twelve dollars. But, happening to think of the horse jockeying propensities of the race, he removed the saddle and found that the creature needed half-soling, as he expressed it. Recent hard writing had polished most of the hide off his back. He bought another, and the animal went dead lame before he got to the great volcano forty miles away. I bought a reckless little mule for fifteen dollars and I wish I had him yet. One mule is worth a dozen horses for a mountain journey in the islands. The first eighteen miles of the road lay mostly down by the sea and was pretty well sprinkled with native houses. The animals stopped at all of them, a habit they had early acquired. Natives stop a few minutes at every shanty they come to, to swap gossip, and we were forced to do likewise, but we did it under protest. Brown's horse jogged along well enough for sixteen or seventeen miles, but then he came down to a walk and refused to improve on it. We had to stop and intrude upon a gentleman who was not expecting us, and who I thought did not want us either, but he entertained us handsomely, nevertheless, and has my hearty thanks for his kindness. We looked at the ruddy glow cast upon the clouds above the volcano, only twenty miles away now, the fires had become unusually active a few days before, for a while after supper, and then went to bed and to sleep without rocking. We stopped a few miles further on the next morning to hire a guide, but happily were saved the nuisance of travelling with a savage we could not talk with. The proprietor and another gentleman intended to go to the volcano the next day, and they said they would go at once if we would stop and take lunch. We signed the contract, of course, it was the usual style. We had found none but pleasant people on the island from the time we landed at. To get through the last twenty miles guides are indispensable. The whole country is given up to cattle ranching, and is crossed and recrossed by a riddle of bull paths, which is hopelessly beyond solution by a stranger. Ferry land. Portions of that little journey bloomed with beauty. Occasionally we entered small basins walled in with low cliffs, carpeted with greenest grass, and studded with shrubs and small trees whose foliage shone with an emerald brilliancy. One species called the Mamona, Mamani, with its bright colour, its delicate locust leaf, so free from decay or blemish of any kind, and its graceful shape chained the eye with a sort of fascination. The rich, verdant hue of these fairy parks was relieved and varied by the splendid carmine tassels of the Ohio tree. Nothing was lacking but the fairies themselves. The Kingdom of Desolation. As we trotted up the almost imperceptible ascent and neared the volcano, the features of the country changed. We came upon a long dreary desert of black, swollen, twisted, corrugated billows of lava, blank and dismal desolation. Stony hillocks heaved up, all seemed with cracked wrinkles, and broken open from centre to circumference in a dozen places, as if from an explosion beneath. There had been terrible commotion here once, when these dead waves were seething fire, but now all was motionless and silent. It was a petrified sea. The narrow spaces between the upheavals were partly filled with volcanic sand, and through it we plotted laboriously. The invisible Ohio struggled for footing even in this desert waste, and achieved it, towering above the billows here and there, with trunks flattened like spears of grass in the crevices from which they sprang. We came at last to torn and ragged deserts of scorched and blistered lava, to plains and patches of dull gray ashes, to the summit of the mountain, and these tokens warned us that we were nearing the place of the dread goddess Pele, the crater of Kilauea. Mark Twain. End of Section 65. This is Section 66 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 66, the Sacramento Daily Union, November 16, 1866. Volcano House, June 3, Midnight. The Great Volcano of Kilauea. I suppose no man ever saw Niagara for the first time without feeling disappointed. I suppose no man ever saw it the fifth time without wondering how he could ever have been so blind and stupid as to find any excuse for disappointment in the first place. I suppose that any one of nature's most celebrated wonders will always look rather insignificant to a visitor at first, but on a better acquaintance will swell and stretch out and spread abroad until it finally grows clear beyond his grasp, becomes too stupendous for his comprehension. I know that a large house will seem to grow larger the longer one lives in it, and I also know that a woman who looks criminally homely at a first glance will often so improve upon acquaintance as to become really beautiful before the month is out. I was disappointed when I saw the Great Volcano of Kilauea—Kilauea—today, for the first time. It is a comfort to me to know that I fully expected to be disappointed, however, and so, in one sense at least, I was not disappointed. As we raised the summit of the mountain and began to canter along the edge of the crater, I heard Brown exclaim, There, smoke by George—poor infant, as if it were the most surprising thing in the world to see smoke issuing from a volcano, and I turned my head in the opposite direction and began to crowd my imagination down. When I thought I had got it reduced to about the proper degree, I resolutely faced about and came to a dead halt. Disappointed anyhow, I said to myself, only a considerable hole in the ground, nothing to Alia Kala, a wide, level black plane in the bottom of it, and a few little sputtering jets of fire occupying a place about as large as an ordinary potato patch up in one corner. No smoke to amount to anything, and these tremendous perpendicular walls they talk about that enclose the crater, they don't amount to a great deal either. It is a large cellar, nothing more, and precious little fire in it too. So I soliloquized, but as I gazed, the cellar insensibly grew. I was glad of that, albeit I expected it. I am possibly good at judging of heights and distances, and I fell to measuring the diameter of the crater. After considerable deliberation I was obliged to confess that it was rather over three miles, though it was hard to believe it at first. It was growing on me, and tolerably fast. And when I came to guess at the clean, solid, perpendicular walls that fenced in the basin I had to acknowledge that they were from six hundred to eight hundred feet high, and in one or two places even a thousand, though at a careless glance they did not seem more than two or three hundred. The reason the walls looked so low is because the basin enclosed is so large. The place looked a little larger and a little deeper every five minutes by the watch. And still it was unquestionably small. There was no getting around that. About this time I saw an object which helped to increase the size of the crater. It was a house perched on the extreme edge of the wall at the far end of the basin two miles and a half away. It looked like a martin box under the eaves of a cathedral. That wall appeared immensely higher after that than it did before. I reflected that night was the proper time to view a volcano, and Brown, with one of those eruptions of homely wisdom which roused the admiration of strangers, but which custom has enabled me to contemplate calmly, said five o'clock was the proper time for dinner, and therefore we spurred up the animals and trotted along the brink of the crater for about the distance it is from the Lick House in San Francisco to the Mission, and then found ourselves at the Volcano House. On the way we passed close to Fisher's several feet wide and about as deep as the sea, no doubt, and out of some of them steam was issuing it would be suicidal to attempt to travel about there at night. As we approached the Lick House, I have before spoken of as being perched on the wall, we saw some objects ahead which I took for the brilliant white plant called the Silver Sword, but they proved to be buoys, pyramids of stones painted white so as to be visible at night, and set up at intervals to mark the path to the Lick Out House and guard unaccustomed feet from wandering into the abundant chasms that lie in the way. By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the Lick Out House. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater, and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps, and, if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings, all on fire at once, reflected strongly against overhanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like. The vision of hell and its angels. Arrived at the little thatched Lick Out House, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron. Every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity. The place below looked like the infernal regions, and these men like half-cool devils just come up on the furlough. I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The cellar was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us, and a half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated. Beyond these limits, the mists hung down their gauzy curtains, and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed. Made them seem like the campfires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work. You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away, and that, hidden under the intervening darkness, were hills and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert, and even then the tremendous vista stretched on and on and on, to the fires and far beyond. You could not compass it. It was the idea of eternity made tangible, and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye. The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level, but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire. It looked like a colossal railroad map of the state of Massachusetts, done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it! Imagine a cold black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire. Here and there were gleaming holes twenty feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava, the color of dazzling white just tinged with yellow, was boiling and surging furiously, and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a lady's fan, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp, worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating-ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing, and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills, and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then, masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams, like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the super-incumbent crust broke through, split a dazzling streak from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then, acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the thaw maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a thaw every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inwards by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment, and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she had just taken in sail and dropped anchor, provided one can imagine those ropes on fire. Through the glasses the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled and coughed and spluttered and discharged sprays of stringy red fire, of about the consistency of mush, for instance, from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks, a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snowflakes. We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square. That amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly square, and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display, since any visitor had seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant North and South Lakes in action. We had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the record book at the volcano house, and were posted. I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a school-house on fire. True it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from us. We heard a week ago that the volcano was getting on a heavier spree than it had indulged in for many years, and I am glad we arrived just at the right moment to see it under full blast. I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great. Heard as we heard it from our lofty perch, it makes three distinct sounds—a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or a puffing sound. And if you stand on the brink and close your eyes, it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large, low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape pipes, and the churning rush of the water abaffed her wheels. The smell of sulfur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner. The pillar of fire. We left the lookout-house at ten o'clock, in a half-cooked condition, because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, returned to the hotel. After we got out in the dark we had another fine spectacle. A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose-tint in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled torch, and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious pillar of fire, and I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic pillar of fire was like, which almost amounted to a revelation. Accommodations for a man and beast. It is only at very long intervals that I mention in a letter matters which properly pertain to the advertising columns, but in this case it seems to me that to leave out the fact that there is a neat, roomy, well furnished and well kept hotel at the volcano would be to remain silent upon a point of the very highest importance to anyone who may desire to visit the place. The surprise of finding a good hotel in such an outlandish spot startled me considerably more than the volcano did. The house is new, built three or four months ago, and the table is good. One could not easily starve here even if the meats and groceries were to give out for large tracts of land in the vicinity are well paved with excellent strawberries. One can have as abundant a supply as he chooses to call for. There has never here before been anything in this locality for the accommodation of travelers but a crazy old native grass hut, scanty fare, hard beds of matting, and a Chinese cook. Mark Twain. End of Section 66