HIWA A TALE OF ANCIENT HAWAII

EDMUND P. DOLE

HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCM

Copyright, 1900, by Edmund P. Dole. ——— All rights reserved.

TO SANFORD BALLARD DOLE

CHAPTER I KU IS AVENGED

THE first glimmering of dawn rested on Waipio Valley. The moi kane, his great nobles and chief officers of state, his personal attendants, his guards, heralds, priests, diviners, bards, story-tellers, dancers, and buffoons, the whole aialo, even to the lowest menials of the court, slept the deep sleep that follows a night of heavy eating and heavier drinking. All slept except Aa, the terrible high-priest, and a few score men [Pg 2] of his personal following. The royal city was silent.

It lay among surroundings both lovely and grand. The valley itself, only a few feet above sea-level and flat as a Western prairie, was, then as now, rich almost beyond exaggeration, and green with all edible products of the lowlands. It was thickly dotted with grass huts, for in those times, before the great wars and centuries before the white strangers came with their loathsome diseases that consumed flesh and bone, the population was dense.

The valley fronted on the open ocean, unobstructed by land for thousands of miles. On every other side it was shut in by rock walls from two to three thousand feet high. At the southwest extremity the Waipio River, cold from the mountain-side, clear and sparkling, fell six hundred feet to a narrow shelf of rock, and then, dropping a thousand feet more at a single plunge, suddenly became a sluggish stream, with a current hardly perceptible, winding its tortuous way to the sea. To the northwest were the Saw-Teeth of the Gods, wild and picturesque [Pg 3] verdure-clad mountains that to this day form impenetrable barriers between the plantations of Hamakua and North Kohala. To the southeast, stretching along the coast for a hundred miles, were the rich highlands of Hamakua, Hilo and Puna, rising, ever rising, as they recede from the sea until they reach the dizzy heights of Mauna Kea, and of Mauna Loa, where eternal winter wages intermittent war with rock fires from the bowels of the earth.

In the gray twilight of that morning, centuries ago, Eaeakai paddled his fishing-canoe down the Waipio River and up the coast, straight to the Saw-Teeth of the Gods. In the early morning there was good fishing opposite those stupendous cliffs, and Eaeakai had taken to himself a buxom wahine, who could not live on love alone any more than if she were a haole bride, but had to have her fish and poi. He was also in daily expectation of another responsibility. Thus far there had always been fish and poi in his hut, for he was industrious and thrifty, rich for a landless freeman, kanaka-wale, as his kaukehi or single dug-out was the trimmest [Pg 4] and swiftest on all the Windward Coast. Best of all, he was a happy man, for he was very much in love with his own wife. So he chanted a love mele as he bent to his work.

He had scarcely reached his fishing-ground and baited his turtle-shell hook when he heard a rustling sound overhead. As he looked up he caught glimpses through the dense foliage of a woman, in the garb of Eve, rapidly making her way down the steep declivity, regardless of the sharp thorns and terrible lava that cut and tore her hands and feet and body. Yet, in spite of her desperate haste, and at the peril of her life, she firmly clutched and carefully guarded from rock and thorn the mamo which royalty alone might wear and live.

Eaeakai gazed for a moment, dumb and motionless with amazement. Then he flung himself upon his face, crying, “E moe o! E moe o! Hiwa, Moi Wahine!”

Hiwa gave command before she reached the bottom of the cliff—“Fisherman, bring me the boat! Wiki wiki! Quick!”

Kneeling in his canoe, Eaeakai paddled [Pg 5] to the shore and prostrated himself with his face to the ground, for well he knew that by Hawaiian law it was death for a common man like him to stand in the presence or in the shadow of Hiwa, alii-niaupio, tabu moi wahine, goddess-queen.

She sprang into the canoe, seized the paddle, and sped up the coast.

Eaeakai lay grovelling on the ground until she was a goodly distance from him. Then he sat up and began to realize that probably he was ruined. His boat, which made him the envy of fishermen for fifty miles around, and upon which he had spent months of patient toil, was gone. It was his pride, his wealth, his livelihood. Hiwa was fleeing from enemies. He could expect no reward if she should escape and return in triumph, for he was beneath her notice; but, if she should be overtaken and slain, the service he had rendered her would not be forgiven. The boat would tell the story, and he would be hunted down and killed or offered a sacrifice to the gods.

Presently, as he turned his eyes in the direction of his home, he saw a great war [Pg 6] canoe approaching. He hid behind a rock and watched it. He counted twenty-six warriors at the paddles, and recognized Aa, the high-priest, commanding them. They had caught sight of Hiwa, and were doing their utmost to overtake her.

Eaeakai knew that an heir to the throne was expected. Who in all the land did not? “If it were not for her condition,” he said to himself, “she might give them a long chase; but the end would be the same.”

Her enemies rapidly gained on her, although she handled the paddle with marvelous strength and skill, and she seemed to have no chance of escape. Suddenly she plunged into the water and disappeared.

Her pursuers hastened to the spot. One of them reached out to save the boat, a chattel of great value to a Hawaiian; but the fanatical high-priest interposed. “Let it dash itself to pieces on the rocks!” he exclaimed. “It is accursed! Tabu!”

The shore at that point was a traverse section of one of the huge Saw-Teeth, rising from deep water nearly perpendicularly two thousand feet into the air. No living creature, [Pg 7] save some insect or reptile that clings to the bare face of a rock, could obtain a foothold there. Hiwa was not a lizard to cling to that cliff, and if she were, she would be in plain sight. Neither was she a bird to soar above and beyond it. She was not a fish; if still alive, she must come to the surface. After watching for her long and anxiously, they discovered a few drops of blood. A sharp fin above the waves, slowly moving seaward, afforded a ready explanation.

The high-priest’s face lighted with savage triumph as he cried: “Ukanipo, the Shark-God, hath her! Ku is avenged!”

So thought Eaeakai. “Black death hangs over me!” he wailed. “Lilii will have no kane to bring her fish and poi and the little keike will be fatherless from its birth!”

The story of the death of Hiwa and of the unborn heir to the throne spread from lip to lip through the nation, and all men believed it and said, “Ukanipo, the Shark-God, hath her! Ku is avenged!” And a great fear fell upon them, the fear of Aa, the terrible high-priest of Ku.

[Pg 8]

CHAPTER II THE VOW

A WOMAN lay on the ground. She was about twenty years of age, of regal stature; for among ancient Hawaiians men and women of kingly stock were gigantic, fully six feet in height, with broad shoulders, deep, full bust, and huge hips and limbs that indicated great vitality and enormous strength. Yet her figure, from the mighty neck to the delicately shaped feet, was so graceful in its outlines, so perfect a type of beauty in a giantess, that it would have been a joy to Phydias. Her face was full of intelligence, of firmness, of daring, and of pride; full also of passion, of tenderness, and of love. It was both strong and beautiful. Her head was massive and noble, like her [Pg 9] body, and was crowned with a glory of jet-black hair reaching to her hips.

There was no clothing, not even an ornament, on her person. Her soft, delicate, satiny skin told of luxurious living. Exposure and pain and hardship were plainly new to her, and the mamo, which lay beside her, wet with the brine of the sea, was evidence that her rank among her people was like that of the immortal gods. Her hands and feet and arms and legs and thighs and body were bleeding, terribly cut and torn.

She endured her wounds and the pangs of maternity without a groan, her eyes resting meanwhile on the wall of rock, two thousand feet high, that encircled her. A rivulet, flowing from the mountain above, fell over the stupendous precipice, and the wind, eddying round and round in the enormous pit, the crater of an extinct volcano, spread out the water into a sheet of silvery spray like a vast bridal veil. The sun was now approaching meridian, and its rays, falling upon the spray, formed a brilliant rainbow, spanning the birth-scene.

As soon as the child was born the mother [Pg 10] clasped it in her arms and exultantly cried, “He shall sit on the throne of his fathers, for the rainbow covered him! Thus mois are born!”

Then she kneeled upon the ground and stretched forth her arms in prayer—“Eternal Ku, thou who bearest sway over gods and mois as over common men, hear this my vow! I have sinned, and my life is forfeit; but the child is sinless, and if I die now he will perish. Spare me to him till he can hurl the spears and lead the chiefs in battle for his throne, and I will offer thee such priceless sacrifice as never yet was slain before a god, for I, the goddess-queen, with my own royal hand will shed my sacred blood to thee.”

As she ceased a peal of thunder came from the mountains.

“Eternal Ku,” she exclaimed, “thou hast heard and answered, and although I die, my child shall yet be moi, the mightiest of his line! His name is Aelani, The Pledge from Heaven.”

[Pg 11]

CHAPTER III A ROYAL MARRIAGE

“HIWA,” said Papaakahi, The Mighty, not long before his death and about two years prior to the events already narrated, “you have grown to be a woman. It is time for you to marry.”

“Yes, father,” Hiwa replied, “it is time for me to marry.”

“Traditions have come down to us from the beginning,” continued Papaakahi, “that beyond the great ocean are many and strange lands, kahiki, and men with white skins, who are wise and powerful as gods. There may be a man in these foreign lands worthy to marry you; but, if there is, he cannot come to you, neither can you go to him. Our god, Lono, dwells there, and [Pg 12] some time, ages hence perhaps, he will return and tell us of these things; but now we know nothing of them. There are only three men in the world we know about whose blood is fit to mate with yours. I am too old to marry you. Your uncle, Aa, shall not. There is no one else but your brother, Ii.”

“But, father,” pleaded Hiwa, “I do not love Ii.”

“That is a small matter,” said Papaakahi.

“But, father, I love Kaanaana, and he loves me. Why cannot I marry him?”

“He is not of the blood of Wakea, and Papa, my child, he is not descended from the gods.”

“Yet he is a mighty konohiki, father, a great noble, the greatest of your vassals, and of all the men in the land his blood is next to our own. Besides, he is young and handsome and strong, first in the games and bravest in war, and his spearmen won the bloody battle that made you The Mighty.”

“Yes, Hiwa, he is all you say, and I love [Pg 13] him better than I love your drunken brother; but he is not of the blood of the gods. You must marry Ii.”

Then, because Papaakahi’s word was the law of the land, which not even Hiwa could question, and because she loathed marriage to her brother, and loved Kaanaana more than her own life, she went away by herself and wept bitterly. She spent many days in solitary places, weeping and longing to die.

Papaakahi cared little for his drunken son Ii, and loved Hiwa as the apple of his eye, and when he saw how she grieved, his heart was heavy; but his purpose remained fixed. So he went to her and spoke gently and said, “If you marry Kaanaana it will bring civil war and your death.”

“Father, why civil war?”

“Because I am old and must soon be hidden in a cave, and your first-born son would come before any child of your brother’s as heir to the kingdom. You know our law; the child takes the rank of its mother, instead of the rank of its father, for all men know its mother and no man knows its father. [Pg 14] You yourself take divine rank from your mother, who was my sister.”

Hiwa shuddered, and made no reply.

“Your brother,” continued Papaakahi, “spends his nights drinking awa, and his days in sleep. He will rule in name only. Your uncle will be the real moi. He hates Kaanaana, and, if you marry him and have an heir, he will raise the standard of revolt as soon as I am dead.”

“Then let spears settle it!” cried Hiwa, with flashing eyes. “I do not fear death, and I love Kaanaana. I will fight by his side, and we will slay Aa and his army, for the spearmen of Kohala will follow where Kaanaana leads, and he is greatest of the warriors, and I am daughter of the gods.”

“Ae keike!” exclaimed the old man. “But I fear the great high-priest would prevail, and I will not have my people butchered and my kingdom destroyed and my daughter slain. Yet I would reason with you rather than command. I married my sister because the ancient custom of our race put that duty upon me, she being the only woman of birth equal to mine; but we were [Pg 15] not lolo, fools, to be unhappy about it, for I loved other women, and she loved other men. You can be a good girl and marry your brother without being cold to your lover, can’t you, keike?”

But Hiwa refused to be comforted.

The next day Papaakahi went to her again and asked her, “My daughter, have you considered well?”

Hiwa’s eyes were hard and dry, as she answered: “I have no choice. Thy word is as the word of Ku.”

“It is well said!” exclaimed the old moi. “You are a good girl, wise and discreet. Ii shall be your husband, and Kaanaana your lover. I have always loved you above all others, and next to you I love Kaanaana, and would choose him for your husband if he were of the blood of the gods.”

“Then, father,” Hiwa cried, “if you love him and love me, let me marry him! I loathe the custom of our race! I want one man as both husband and lover! I had rather be Kaanaana’s wife one hour and then die body and soul than to marry Ii and be goddess-queen forever!”

[Pg 16] “Hiwa, pau! It is not fitting that a daughter of the gods should marry a man of mortal blood. It has been done and, out of my great love for you, I might consent to it even now if I could not foresee war and death. Nothing could save you but Aa’s death. The gods, our ancestors, tell me to kill him. It is my unquestioned right, for I am moi, Lord of Life and Death; yet I cannot kill him—he is my only brother. Therefore, and that you may have a place to hide till he is dead, I will reveal to you the secret of the hidden crater and of the passage to it beneath the sea.”

Then Papaakahi told Hiwa of the crater in the mountain and how to find the passage to it, a secret which no other person living knew.

So Hiwa married Ii, and not many months afterwards Papaakahi’s bones were hidden in a cave. And so, too, when she fled for her life, she dived into the sea, and of all who watched her not one saw her rise again, and the whole nation believed that Ukanipo, the Shark-God, had taken her to himself.

[Pg 17]

CHAPTER IV THE RESCUE OF THE BOAT

THE Hawaiian Islands, as all the world knows, are entirely of volcanic origin. The soil, whether red or black, that produces a hundred tons of sugar-cane and fourteen tons of sugar to the acre, is lava pulverized by the suns and rains of thousands of years. The coffee lands are lava, rotten, honey-combed, porous, to a degree still unpulverized, but far on the way to becoming so. And the recent flows show what every part of every island has been—first, an overflowing sea of boiling rock; then, when the rock-currents froze, weird, fantastic, utter desolation. In the mighty crater of Haleakala (The House of the Sun) are rock-billows as they stiffened unknown [Pg 18] ages ago, rock-billows five hundred feet high. And smaller volcanoes, once active, now extinct, are almost numberless.

Hiwa’s refuge was the crater of one of these small, extinct volcanoes. At some time a lake of boiling rock, perhaps a mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, forcing a subterranean exit to the sea, had disappeared, leaving a huge puka, a hole in the mountain, some two thousand feet deep. As the centuries came and went the surface rock gradually became soil of marvellous fertility. Birds, flying across, dropped seeds of vegetables, fruits, shrubs, and trees. The place became a wilderness of luxuriant vegetation. In moist, eternal summer food for a hundred mouths ripened every day in the year. Nor was Hiwa denied her accustomed food from the sea, as well as from the land. The makai or sea entrance to the passage was some three or four fathoms below the ebb and flow of the tide, but after a few rods its roof rose abruptly to a height of several hundred feet, and the passage itself broadened into a large cavern, its bottom [Pg 19] being a salt-water pool swarming with fish. And the mountain rivulet, after its wild leap of two thousand feet, lazily crawled

along the bottom of the crater till it reached the pool.

So Hiwa and Aelani were safe from hunger and thirst. Nature provided a varied and abundant diet. They had no need of clothes, for the days were not hot nor the nights cold. They had no enemies to fear. No other human being knew of their refuge or dreamed of their existence. There were no wild beasts to attack them, no poisonous serpents, no snakes of any kind, no reptiles or insects that could seriously injure or annoy them. In that age even mosquitoes were unknown.

But Hiwa did not look to a safe and easy existence. She had devoted her life to a great purpose. She had become more than a woman, more than a mother. Her son was Aelani, The Pledge from Heaven. The rainbow had covered him at his birth, and Ku had answered her irrevocable vow with thunder from the mountains. Separated from her lover, exiled from the human race, [Pg 20] consecrated to death on the altar of Ku, yet still moi wahine, believing herself goddess-born, and as far above mere mortals as we think ourselves above the brutes, her sole remaining object in life was to care for her child, to teach him the accomplishments, duties and prerogatives of a moi, to prepare the way for his return to his people, and then send him forth to battle for his throne.

Her first task was to secure the fisherman’s boat.

It is said that a native woman on Kahlooawe kept appointments with her lover on Lanai, swimming to meet him one night and returning the next, the round trip being nearly six miles. Such stories are accepted without hesitation by people familiar with a race which still spends much of its time in the sea, and was practically amphibious until civilization changed its habits.

Although in swimming and diving Hiwa had proved herself a match for Kaanaana, the champion athlete of the nation, she knew she was undertaking a task dangerous even for her, if not impossible. Yet she felt that the boat was worth risking everything.

[Pg 21] At break of the day following the birth of her child, having nursed him and tenderly laid him on a soft bed of ferns, in the shade of a big koa tree, she swam forth, armed with a sharp stick to protect herself from sharks. Sharks, however, were a matter of small concern; the danger lay in the fierce waves and terrible cliff.