Awakening Juan and the crew, Olmedo pointed to the clouds, which, driving before them, seemed to beckon to some unknown haven beyond. “Our deliverance has come,” exclaimed he; “let us lose no time in welcoming the breeze.”
“We cannot reach Mexico with this wind,” said Juan glancing aloft; then, as his spirits revived with the brightening prospect, he gaily added, “Let us follow whither it blows; new fields of adventure may repay us for those we have lost.”
“My son,” solemnly replied Olmedo, “we are a feeble band, but trusting in Him who ordereth all things, we may accept with gratitude the auspicious breeze; not to carry us to new scenes of slaughter, but in the hope that He who has preserved us alike from the storm and calm, reserves us for a more noble mission.”
“What say you, Beatriz, is father Olmedo right?” asked Juan, more to hear her voice than as desiring her opinion, which he knew would conform to her confessor’s.
“Dear brother, our father is right. Orphans that we are, let us abandon ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Virgin and the saints. They will lead us to the work they have for us to do.”
To the followers of Alvirez, any course which promised a new excitement or conquest was welcome. They therefore bestirred themselves with such alacrity as their famished condition permitted. In a short time the caravel was going before the wind with all the speed she was capable of, while the crew, excepting the necessary watch, again betook themselves to the repose they so greatly needed, and which, sustained as it now was by hope, did much to revive their strength.
CHAPTER III.
“My dream is of an island place
Which distant seas keep lonely;
A noble island, in whose face
The stars are watchers only.
Those bright still stars! they need not seem
Brighter or stiller in my dream.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In the nineteenth degree of north latitude, and one hundred and fifty-five degrees west, lies a large and important island, one of a group stretching for several hundred miles in a north-westerly direction. At the date of this tale, it was wholly unknown, except to its aborigines. Situated in the centre of the vast North Pacific, not another inhabitable land within thousands of miles, it was quietly biding its destiny, when in the circumnavigating advance of civilization westward to its original seat in the Orient, it should become a new centre of commerce and Christianity; and, as it were, an Inn of nature’s own building on the great highway of nations.
Up to this time, however, not a sail had ever been seen from its shores. Nothing had ever reached them within the memories of its population, to disprove to them that their horizon was not the limits of the world, and that they were not its sole possessors. It is true, that in the songs of their bards, there were faint traces of a more extended knowledge, but so faint as to have lost all meaning to the masses, who in themselves saw the entire human race.
Hawaii, for such was the aboriginal name of the largest and easternmost island, was a fitting ocean-beacon to guide the mariner to hospitable shores. Rising as it does fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, snow-capped in places, in others shooting up thick masses of fire and smoke from active volcanoes, it could be seen for a great distance on the water, except, as was often the case, it was shrouded in dense clouds. Generally, either the gigantic dome of Mauna Loa, which embosomed an active crater of twenty-seven miles in circumference on its summit, which was more than two and a half miles high, or the still loftier, craggy and frost-clad peaks of Mauna Kea, met the sight long before its picturesque coast-line came into view. As usually seen at a long distance, these two mountain summits, so nigh each other and yet so unlike in outline, seemingly repose on a bed of clouds, like celestial islands floating in ether. This illusion is the more complete from their great elevation, and coming as they do with their lower drapery of vapor, so suddenly upon the sight of the voyager, after weeks, and, as it often happens, months of ocean solitude.
Nowhere does nature display a more active laboratory or on a grander scale. At her bidding, fire and water here meet, and, amid throes, explosions, upheavings and submergings, the outpourings of liquid rock, the roars of a burning ocean, hissing, recoiling and steaming at the base of fiery mountains, which amid quakings and thunders shoot up high into air, not only flame and smoke, but give birth to other mountains, which run in fluid masses to the shore forming new coast-lines, she gradually creates to herself fresh domains out of the fathomless sea, destined by a slower and more peaceful process to be finally fitted for the abode of man. For ages before the human race appeared, this fierce labor had been going on. Slowly decreasing in violence as the solid fabric arose from the sea, the vegetable and animal kingdom at last successively claimed their right to colonize the land thus prepared for them. Nature, however, had not yet finished the substructure; for although she had extinguished a portion of her fires and allowed the forests to grow in some spots in undisturbed luxuriance, yet there were others still active and on a scale to be seen nowhere else on the globe. At intervals, rarer as they became older, they belched forth ruin, to add in time greater stability and more fertility to the new-formed earth.
Even to this day, Hawaii continues in a transition state. The vast agencies to which the island owes its origin, not unfrequently shake it to its centre, giving a new impetus to its geological growth. Sometimes it rocks, so it seems, on its centre, and alternately rising and falling, the ocean invades the land, sweeping from the coast by its fast rushing tide—piled up by its velocity into such a wall of water as in its recoil overwhelmed Pharaoh’s host in the Red Sea—whole villages, and carrying off numbers of their struggling population to perish in its vortex. So rapid is its reflux and over so vast a space, that it often leaves bare its own bed, with the finny tribes stranded amid its coral forests, or flapping helplessly on its sandy bottom. When this phenomenon occurs it is generally in quick successive waves, without previous warning, and so rapidly, that were it not for the amphibious habits of the islanders, the destruction of life would be great.
The sister islands further to the west have long since ceased to fear earthquake or volcanic eruption. Their surfaces are covered with extinct craters, lined in general with verdure and melodious with the notes of birds. Around each of the group, by the labors of the tiniest of her creatures, as if to show how the feeblest agencies at her bidding can control the strongest, Nature is slowly but surely constructing a coral frame, a fit setting to her sunny picture. The busy little zoöphyte, by its minute industry sets that bound to the ocean, which Canute in all his power was unable to do. Over its barriers and through its vegetable-like forms, trees and shrubs, blossoms and flowers, rich in every hue which gives beauty to the land, the rushing wave can pass only by giving toll to these water bees. They have not to seek their food, but they make the everlasting waters bring it to their door, and pour over them, in their struggle to reach the shore, a glad symphony of power and praise.
On the northeast of Hawaii lies a deep bay, fringed with coral reefs, but in many places presenting high cliffs, precipitous masses of volcanic rock, rent by deep chasms, or forming valleys through which pour streams of fresh water along banks of surpassing fertility. Everywhere the soil is good and the vegetation profuse. Numerous cascades tumble from the hills in all directions, giving life and music to the scene. Some are mere threads of water lost in spray amid rainbow arches, before reaching the rocky basins underneath. Others shoot from precipices, waving, foaming torrents, which thunder over stream-worn rocks, far away beneath in sunless and almost inaccessible dells. Emerging from these into placid rivers, they flow quietly on till meeting the incoming surges of the ocean, which, as they struggle over the coral bars at their mouths, whiten their surfaces with foam and break into eddies and uncertain currents, creating trying navigation for the frail canoes of the islanders.