me. Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on mats
on the hard floor–she’d fired out of the room the great, royal,
canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by
Lord Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here
in the frigate Blonde in 1825.
“She went back to all native, at the last, and I can see her yet,
biting a bite out of the raw fish ere she tossed them to her women
to eat. And she made them finish her poi, or whatever else she did
not finish of herself. She–”
But he broke off abruptly, and by the sensitive dilation of his
nostrils and by the expression of his mobile features I saw that he
had read in the air and identified the odour that offended him.
“Deuce take it!” he cried to me. “It stinks to heaven. And I
shall be doomed to wear it until we’re rescued.”
There was no mistaking the object of his abhorrence. The ancient
crone was making a dearest-loved lei (wreath) of the fruit of the
hala which is the screw-pine or pandanus of the South Pacific. She
was cutting the many sections or nut-envelopes of the fruit into
fluted bell-shapes preparatory to stringing them on the twisted and
tough inner bark of the hau tree. It certainly smelled to heaven,
but, to me, a malahini (new-comer), the smell was wine-woody and
fruit-juicy and not unpleasant.
Prince Akuli’s limousine had broken an axle a quarter of a mile
away, and he and I had sought shelter from the sun in this
veritable bowery of a mountain home. Humble and grass-thatched was
the house, but it stood in a treasure-garden of begonias that
sprayed their delicate blooms a score of feet above our heads, that
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
55
were like trees, with willowy trunks of trees as thick as a man’s
arm. Here we refreshed ourselves with drinking-coconuts, while a
cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest telephone and summoned a
machine from town. The town itself we could see, the Lakanaii
metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the shore-line, as we
looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the billow-wreathed
reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the island of Oahu
shimmered like a dim opal on the horizon.
Maui is the Valley Isle of Hawaii, and Kauai the Garden Isle; but
Lakanaii, lying abreast of Oahu, is recognized in the present, and
was known of old and always, as the Jewel Isle of the group. Not
the largest, nor merely the smallest, Lakanaii is conceded by all
to be the wildest, the most wildly beautiful, and, in its size, the
richest of all the islands. Its sugar tonnage per acre is the
highest, its mountain beef-cattle the fattest, its rainfall the
most generous without ever being disastrous. It resembles Kauai in
that it is the first-formed and therefore the oldest island, so
that it had had time sufficient to break down its lava rock into
the richest soil, and to erode the canyons between the ancient
craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the Colorado, with
numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the sheer or
dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to
descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so
much dew or gentle shower, upon the abyss-floors.
Yet Lakanaii is easy to describe. But how can one describe Prince
Akuli? To know him is to know all Lakanaii most thoroughly. In
addition, one must know thoroughly a great deal of the rest of the
world. In the first place, Prince Akuli has no recognized nor
legal right to be called “Prince.” Furthermore, “Akuli” means the
“squid.” So that Prince Squid could scarcely be the dignified
title of the straight descendant of the oldest and highest aliis
(high chiefs) of Hawaii–an old and exclusive stock, wherein, in
the ancient way of the Egyptian Pharaohs, brothers and sisters had
even wed on the throne for the reason that they could not marry
beneath rank, that in all their known world there was none of
higher rank, and that, at every hazard, the dynasty must be
perpetuated.
I have heard Prince Akuli’s singing historians (inherited from his
father) chanting their interminable genealogies, by which they
demonstrated that he was the highest alii in all Hawaii. Beginning
with Wakea, who is their Adam, and with Papa, their Eve, through as
many generations as there are letters in our alphabet they trace
down to Nanakaoko, the first ancestor born in Hawaii and whose wife
was Kahihiokalani. Later, but always highest, their generations
split from the generations of Ua, who was the founder of the two
distinct lines of the Kauai and Oahu kings.
In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the
time brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them,
their rank received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
56
heaven’s door. One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the
ancient traditions, arrived in a great double-canoe from Samoa. He
married a lesser alii of Lakanaii, and when his three sons were
grown, returned with them to Samoa to bring back his own youngest
brother. But with him he brought back Kumi, the son of Tui Manua,
which latter’s rank was highest in all Polynesia, and barely second
to that of the demigods and gods. So the estimable seed of Kumi,
eight centuries before, had entered into the aliis of Lakanaii, and
been passed down by them in the undeviating line to reposit in
Prince Akuli.
Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers’
mess of the Black Watch in South Africa. This was just before that
famous regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein. He had as much
right to be in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was
Oxford-educated and held the Queen’s Commission. With him, as his
guest, taking a look at the war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed,
but the true prince of all Hawaii, including Lakanaii, whose real
and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, and who might
have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had it not been for the
haole (white man) Revolution and Annexation–this, despite the fact
that Prince Cupid’s alii genealogy was lesser to the heaven-boosted
genealogy of Prince Akuli. For Prince Akuli might have been King
of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his grandfather
been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the Kamehamehas.
This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the
sandalwood trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came
in, and was good, and ate out of Kamehameha’s hand. Prince Akuli’s
grandfather, in that year, had received his trouncing and
subjugating because he was “old school.” He had not imaged island
empire in terms of gunpowder and haole gunners. Kamehameha,
farther-visioned, had annexed the service of haoles, including such
men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of the massacred crew of
the schooner Fair American, and John Young, captured boatswain of
the snow Eleanor. And Isaac Davis, and John Young, and others of
their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder brass carronades
from the captured Iphigenia and Fair American, had destroyed the
war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of Lakanaii’s land-
fighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha, according to
agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs; John
Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was
split.
And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and
beast-man’s gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red
murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers
of the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century
to the tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-
veined Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries,
comrade, friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-
thousand-dollar limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise
fourteen hundred feet above the sea, and his island metropolis of
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
57
Olokona, to tell me of his mother, who reverted in her old age to
ancientness of religious concept and ancestor worship, and
collected and surrounded herself with the charnel bones of those
who had been her forerunners back in the darkness of time.
“King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu,” Prince
Akuli continued. “And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from
him. They collected everything–old makaloa mats, old tapas, old
calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had
saved from the general destruction in 1819. I haven’t seen a
pearl-shell fish-hook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua
accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing of human jaw-bone
fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone