at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.
Near the shore we found “Cook’s Monument”–only a cocoanut stump, four
feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders
piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was
entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets
of copper, such as ships’ bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet had a
rude inscription scratched upon it–with a nail, apparently–and in every
case the execution was wretched. Most of these merely recorded the
visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this
legend:
“Near this spot fell
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,
The Distinguished Circumnavigator, who Discovered these Islands
A. D. 1778.
After Cook’s murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened
fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls
cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing.
It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight.
But there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountain
side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of
lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook’s flesh was stripped from
his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was
erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the
circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.
A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole,
and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable
occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long
ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.
Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked
herself into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came ashore for us, and
in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone. The moon was
beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon
the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that
are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.
CHAPTER LXXII.
In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the
last god Lono. The high chief cook of this temple–the priest who
presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices–was uncle to Obookia,
and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him. Obookia
was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native
boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the
reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the
attention of the religious world to their country. This resulted in the
sending of missionaries there. And this Obookia was the very same
sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his
people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elaborately
painted in many a charming Sunday School book–aye, and told so
plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School
myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know
much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands
needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a
Bible at all.
Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his
native land with the first missionaries, had he lived. The other native
youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third,
William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold
excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to
mining, although he was fifty years old. He succeeded pretty well, but
the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars,
and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age
and he resumed service in the pulpit again. He died in Honolulu in 1864.