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 Kalaimoku and the two host met
a Kuamoo. 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 tabu
were dead in the land!
The royalists marched gayly 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,
timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency,
and the Gospel was planted as in a virgin soil.
At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the
ancient ruins at Honaunan 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 sits on 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 plow 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 knifeblade, 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. I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amidships
and faced the Kanaka, who occupied the stern of the
craft and did the paddling. With the 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 pastime
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.
